Queers and Theory

My Queers and Theory Final Project

2006-12-21T18:19:00.000-05:00

I started a new blog for my project.

You can find it at :

http://pervertclassspace.blogspot.com/

I am so sorry I had to miss the last class and the dinner afterwards, but trust me... you are glad I wasn't there. I really enjoyed meeting you all and getting to know so many wonderful people with big beautiful brains. please stop in over at Queering the Apparatus and say hello occasionally.

2nd Try

2006-12-16T17:49:00.000-05:00

In case the other link does not work, or that the link only works for 72 hours, thanks to Julie, it is also somewhere else.
Hope this works
Gen

http://members.aol.com/julierenszer/GenFinal.pdf

The link must have the capital G and capital F for it to work -

Translations and Glocalizations of Queer Theory Across Cultures

2006-12-16T16:58:00.000-05:00

Finally, after two days of trying, this should be working.
Here is the url address where you can find my work.
I think, however, that this link is only good for 72 hours. so if anyone wants me to send it directly to them, let me know.
Thanks to Rebecca and Julie for their help.
I wish everyone an amazing break, see you in January.
Gen
Translations and Glocalizations of

Queer Theory Across Cultures
https://createpdf.adobe.com/cgi-pickup.pl?LOC=en_US&CDS=45846B94-2EC2-08D88E&LID=GENEVIEVEPAGE%40YAHOO.COM

Laura's Final Project: Syllabus

2006-12-14T23:09:00.000-05:00

Final Project Contents:

1. Syllabus
2. Syllabus Rationale
3. One-Term CORE Approval Form
4. CORE Human Cultural Diversity (D) Proposal
5. Vice President's Advisory Committee (VPAC) Add a Course Proposal

You may view my final project's contents on the blog that I created for my hypothetical course:

From Silence to Song (http://silence2song.blogspot.com/)

Sara Jaye's Project

2006-12-14T14:09:00.000-05:00

Hi guys,

I'm trying to figure out a way to post my powerpoint, but until I do, I will copy the text of my script as a comment to this.

Rebecca's Project

2006-12-14T13:46:00.000-05:00

Hello All,

Here is the link to my project: https://createpdf.adobe.com/cgi-pickup.pl/nightsweat2.pdf?BP=IE&LOC=en_US&CUS=3fed6a2c78a61c98e2a2b2b3e983fe7f&CDS=45819A76-131D-28262C

Please let me know if anyone has trouble accessing the file.

Kelly's project

2006-12-14T13:37:00.000-05:00

Hi all-

My conference paper is here.

See you soon!

Professional Project: Journal Article by Julie R. Enszer

2006-12-13T13:11:00.000-05:00

My professional project, a journal article titled, “Uncoupling Lesbians: Kinship, Community, Society, and Liberation,” is available in two downloadable PDF files.

The first contains:

1. Sample Cover Letter
2. List of Potential Journals
3. Abstract
4. Research on Each Journal

It is available here:

http://members.aol.com/jrenszer/WS698SuppMat.pdf

The second contains the article.

http://members.aol.com/jrenszer/UncouplingLesbians.pdf

See everyone in class today!

Samantha's Resturant

2006-12-12T20:32:00.000-05:00

I called Samantha's Resturant. We do not need a "formal reservation" even for a large group - I gave them an FYI for 6ish on Thursday, thats all we will need.

Samantha's Resturant
Mexican
631 E. University Boulevard @ Piney Branch
Silver Spring, MD 20901
(301) 445-7300

GOOGLE MAP

http://www.google.com/maps?hl=en&lr=&q=samantha%27s&near=Hyattsville,+MD&radius=0.0&latlng=38955833,-76945833,17341596869193865348&sa=X&oi=local&ct=authority

-Mel

presentation day organization: UPDATED

2006-12-12T11:59:00.000-05:00

Hi all-

Let's all do our best to NOT go over 15 minutes. Which means we all should practice (as if this were for a "real" conference presentation) and time ourselves. We'll all retain your presentation more readily if it's read clearly and at a reasonable pace. I, for example, know that I can read no more than 8.5 pages in 15 minutes, and that's only if I've practiced enough so that it "flows" comfortably off my tongue.

It seems that, for the moment at least, Blogger's willing to let me post and comment here. Anyone who is having trouble with Blogger can email me-- we can do some of our organizing off the blog and list so Katie doesn't have to keep forwarding stuff. My email is my last name [at] the school email. If you're planning to present, please email me. Maybe we could organize according to readings we're referring to, so tell me who you're examining, too.

Officially at this point, these are the people who I know are presenting:
Sara Jaye
Damion
Gen
Kelly
Mel
Rebecca
Anyone else?

(Laura has opted to do a syllabus instead)

Swap?

2006-12-10T18:39:00.000-05:00

If anyone is interested in swapping papers on Wednesday evening for final proofreading purposes (catch all of those nasty missing "r"s in your and other pesky problems), I would love to do that in whatever form might suit someone. I'm planning to be done with my article by 2 p.m. on Wednesday - I'm in class from 3 until 7 p.m. or so, but have the evening to proofread for someone if that would be helpful (and you would do me while I'm doing you, so to speak.)

Julie

Thoughts on Irony

2006-12-09T10:33:00.000-05:00

Hi all! Here something I wrote after the class where we discussed the use of irony and its problems in class. I wrote a little about it to clear my mind, but I forgot to post it. In case some of you are interested, here it is.

I remember being introduced first to irony as a political tool in a class I took in my undergraduate degree at the Simone De Beauvoir Institute, where we were discussing the use of Irony as a political tool. More than answers, this topic stimulated a range of questions. In trying to find a definition to irony, I realize that even scholars who use irony as a central concept have a hard time defining it (Diner, 2001; Ferguson, 1993; Hutcheon, 1994). Donna Haraway suggests that : “Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically about the tensions of hording incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humor and serious play.”(1991, 149) Similarly, Ferguson posits that it makes its entrance in the gap between what is said and what is meant; what is indicated and what is implied, and in the dynamic space between stability and motion (1993, 30-32). The contrast between the treatment of irony in these earlier texts (drawn from my old coursepack) and the offensive nature of irony in the wrong place at the wrong time^¹ as we discussed in class (Halberstam, Perez) only raise more questions: What is the subversive power of irony? Does it depends on the time and place it is activated? How can it link post-colonialism and the bending of boundaries and norms? Does it have to be performed by 'the Other' to be an effective criticism? What happens when privileged bodies perform irony? How can irony account for the material reality of 'Others'? Although Diner (2001, 2002) suggest that it can be an interesting political tool to question the discursive formation of identity since it can play on both positions: “they also inevitably trouble the foundations upon which an imperialist and colonialist sense of self stands firmly in relationship to, and differentiation from, a pure and untouched "Other." In other words, they refuse to play "Other" to a white "Self." Rather, they make a promising mockery out of both positions even as and especially as they refuse to fully give up their own.” (2001, 7 pars) The discussion on irony remains for me an unresolved issue, although I feel that the class discussion has allowed me to reflect more closely on the double edge of this potential political process. I think, as Damien wisely pointed out in class, an important element is the fact that the audience has the right to call the performer on the problematic issues they see, regardless of the intent of the performer.

Work Cited:

Allen, Judith A. and Sally L. Kitch, “Disciplined by Disciplines?: The Need for an Interdisciplinary Research Mission in Women's Studies” Feminist Studies, 24, 2 (Summer 1998):275-300.

Wendy Brown, “The Impossibility of Women's Studies”, Differences 9 (Fall 1997).

Diner, Robyn. “Things to Do with the ‘F-Word’: The Ironic and Unruly Adventures of Liz Phair and Courtney Love.” Canadian Women’s Studies/cahiers de la Femmes 20-21, no. 4 (winter/spring 2002), 76-81.

Diner, Robyn.“Not-So-Exotic Indians: Irony, Identity and Memory in Spiderwoman’s Spectacles.” thirdspace 1 (October), 2002, http://www.thirdspace.ca/articles/diner.thm.

Ferguson, Kathy. The Man Question: Visions of Subjectivity in Feminist Theory. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Friedman, Susan Stanford, “(Inter)Disciplinarity and the Question of the Women=s Studies Ph.D.” Feminist Studies 24, 2 (Summer 1998): 301-325.

Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: the Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Hutcheon, Linda. Irony's Edge: The theory and politics of irony. London: Routledge, 1994

King, Katie, “Theorizing Structures of Women's Studies.” Unpublished ms.

May, Vivian, “Disciplinary Desires and Undisciplined Daughters: Negotiating the Politics of a

Women’s Studies Doctoral Education,” NWSA Journal, 14, 1 (2002): 134-59.

Pryse, Marjorie, “Trans/Feminist Methodology: Bridges to Interdisciplinary Thinking”, NWSA Journal 12, 2 (Summer 2000): 105-118.

1It should be said that it is unclear if the event described by both Halberstam and Perez was in fact a display of intentional irony and because of a lack of response on the part of the performer, one can only stipulates on the intent of the performer. Regardless, the discussion in class lead to us to address the mentioned performance as an ironic display of colonial discourse on gay sexuality.

After Class Celebrations

2006-12-07T20:08:00.000-05:00

I called the golf course but was unable to speak to anyone about reservations and looking at their website it seems that they charge an hourly rate to use their conference/banquet rooms. I would suggest going ahead and making reservations for Samantha's where the margarita's will flow and the conversation will be stimulating!

the disembodied transexual/transgendered subject

2006-12-07T15:42:00.000-05:00

I think what would be interesting, if the book had been published in time for this course of course, to pair this book with T.V. Reed's Art of Protest as well as taking a look at the art of catherine Opie.

I am particularly interested in the relationship with sex change and social change to embodiment and social change.

I am also interested in what the class thinks of the ways in which Vivian Namaste's resistance to autobiography in her public/advocate/social change oriented work. Because Namaste discusses transexuality in resistance to medicalization as well, I wonder if she does run the risk of disemboding the transexual/transgender subject. (???)

2006-12-07T13:16:00.000-05:00

The Institute where Viviane Namaste teaches:

http://artsandscience1.concordia.ca/wsdb/

Namaste’s homepage:

http://artsandscience1.concordia.ca/wsdb/Profiles/Viviane.html

Link to her first book:
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/14037.ctl

Link to her second book (in French):
http://mqup.mcgill.ca/francais/index.php?page=title&id=1831

Link to Sex Change/Social Change:
http://www.cspi.org/womenspress/books/s/sexchange.htm

I’d posit that the first book, Invisible LIves, is the book that is her “tenure book”. There are two reviews which I will email to Katie to forward to people.

Translations and Political Projects

2006-12-07T11:38:00.000-05:00

I am sorry for posting this late. I had a final due yesterday and it took a lot longer than I thought it would. Anyways, can wait to discuss this in class!

I want to address the discussion opened up by Namaste's use of the concepts of communities of practice, contact zones, translation, cultural specificity and political project. In her daring critique of Halberstam, Feinberg and Butler, she questions the relevance of transgender/transsexual theory for making sense of transexual lives.

First, she positions herself in a specific community of practice: transsexual communities in Montreal. Although she is also a university professor at the Simone De Beauvoir Institut at Concordia University, her point of departure lies in her relation with transsexuals and transsexual prostitutes.

Her first criticisms of transgender/transexual theory suggest that the theory cannot relate to “real” transexuals for many reasons. First, she suggests that transexuals are not always interested in challenging the gender boundaries, but rather are interested in being able to live their lives as the gender they choose. Hence, she contests the value judgment of Halberstam when she says that alternate masculinities must challenged the status quo. In her words : “Like Butler and Feinberg in their work, Halberstam invokes a discourse that is first and foremost about feminism and lesbian/gay politics”(20). I would like to contrast Namaste's analysis of transexual with Rodriguez' Queer Latinidad. In contrast to Namaste's account, Rodriguez discusses a location where Queer and transgender politics meet in a specific contact zone of the Proyecta center the lives of transexuals and transgenders (prostitutes or not). What makes it different? How is Queer and transgender theory made relevant to these transexual/transgender (non)prostitutes in one case and not in another?

Another interesting point that Namaste talks about is the linguistic and cultural assumptions and the (lack of ) potential for translation of Queer/transgender terminology. “The impossibility of translating these words speaks to the cultural bias of the frameworks: if you live, work or think outside of the English-speaking lesbian/gay politics, you cannot make sense of transgender theory or activism”. Although I think she is pointing to something quite real – as my personal negotiation of English-grounded theory and the French activist community in which I was involved testify – I want to put this comment in relation to Mobile Cultures and Queer Latinidad. Just like Mullaly points out that “meaning production often depends on larger units of speech: narratives, groups of images, whole discourses,” Namaste speaks to the difficulty of making these concept intelligible and meaningful in French communities. I wonder how to put Mullaly's text in full conversation with Namaste's issues of translations. I want to interrogate how the concept of “dubbing” (as used by Boellstorff) can help us address these issues. Alternatively, I think we could also reflect on how spanish-speaking communities of San Francisco were able to appropriate, transform and make relevant to their lives Queer and transgender/transexual politics while French-speaking transexual prostitutes where not. Here again, these issues involve differential contact zones as well as cultural translation through layers of global and locals.

Finally, I want to suggest that Namaste's book should be read in light of the political project intended. Her concerns are drawn by an attempt to highlight a discrepancy between theory and the lives of transexuals but also to redirect the focus of transgender/transexual politics to issues she claims are more relevant to transexual lives. Health care, criminalization and post-colonialization are a few themes she suggests demand more attention. I think she rightly interrogates the material reality of certain bodies and the inclusion/exclusion process implied in the theory. It should also be noted that all the royalties from the sale of the book are directed towards the “Prisoners Living with HIV/AIDS Fund of PASAN (Prisoners' HIV/AIDS Support Action Nertwork).

Thoughts on Namaste

2006-12-04T22:35:00.000-05:00

I'd like to juxtapose two passages, that dealt with similar material in very different ways. I think they may help us think through some of the differences between Rodriguez' and Namaste's approaches.

First, from Rodriguez: "It [Proyecta's mission statement] articulates these multiple enactments of identities through naming: 'you joto, you macha, you vestida, you queer, you femme, you girls and boys and boygirls and girlboys de ambiente.' ... Through the process of interpellation, the text validates the existence of a subject that had previously been constituted through degradation. Bracho's statements echo Butler's reworking of Althusser to suggest the way interpellation resents the paradox of offering both a promise of an already constituted identity (submission to law and language) and mastery through resignification or the claim to misrecognition." (p. 51-2)

Second, from Namaste: "The call for papers for this very conference, for instance, articulates a conference for us TS/TG people, then goes on to name this 'us': two-spirited, transsexual, transgender, intersexed, FTM, MTF, boyz, grrrls, women, men, tranny, gender-fluid, gender-fucking, androgynous folk, cross-dressers, drag kings, drag queens, gender queers, gender blenders, butches, femmes, sofas, activists, supporters, allies, tranny boys/girls/dykes/bis/fags, questioning, trans bears, and curious folk. Whew! ... identity is privileged in this site. And while I appreciate the attempt to include differences between and across these different identities, this gesture to account for diversity can only be achieved in and through the naming of identity." (p.18)

Two very different approaches to identity! A note on Namaste: this passage is in the context of her argument that focusing on identity undermines the possibility of working towards actual social change and "pre-empts any kind of institutional analysis" (19); she admits that she "does not respect all the different identities mentioned," (20).

I can't lie - it was a challenge for me to read her arguments against what I had previously understood to be productive coalitions. I realized that, coming from both my activist and academic backgrounds, I am very invested in approaches that she implicitly rejects. Namely, much of her project is, in my reading, marks the distinct history and needs of transsexual women of color prostitutes not only from those of LGB people, but from almost all other trans people (see page 97). Whereas I have been trained to be attentive to possible commonalities, coalitions, and intersections, Namaste boldly challenges the status quo of trans politics that includes a range of trans identities and welcomes allies from feminist and LGB movements. Therefore, my reading of this book was an much-needed opportunity for me to become more aware of and to evaluate these kind of institutional biases that I have absorbed.

Many of her points are well-taken: Transsexual prostitutes, overwhelmingly women of color, do make up a significant population of trans people whose needs are often totally neglected by LGB and even T activism. Her discussion of transsexual access to media was clear and powerful. Her general arguments serve as a reprimand to movements based on gender and sexuality for not prioritizing issues of race, class, and colonialism.

Ultimately, however, I do not agree with the entirety of Namaste's analysis. In her final chapter, "Against Transgender Rights," she seems to conflate celebrating trans inclusion in San Francisco's city health care with advocating the continuation of private insurance. It seems to me to be entirely possible to work both ends, as it were, and enjoy the baby steps while continuing towards a goal of universal public health care. In the same chapter, she discusses inclusion of "gender identity and expression" in human rights legislation. Unlike Canada, the U.S. case law does NOT support the inclusion of trans people within provisions for "sex," which gives some exigence, in my view, to efforts to include gender identity and discrimination in nondiscrimination policies. I would also like to note that the vast majority of times she uses the word "transsexual," she means by it only transsexual women (as in, "most transsexual youth work as prostitutes," 50); she lumps FTMs with transgender people, queers, and feminists who undermine transsexual (women's) activists efforts, except on the rare occasions in which the existence of FTM transsexuals suits her arguments. While she highlights some disparities between FTM and MTF experiences, I question whether she has the absolute right to draw the definitive boundaries around the term "transsexual," which she seems very eager to do. I also think she engages in some of the very theoretical moves she decries. Almost immediately after criticizing queer theorists' selective mobilization of trans identities when they are useful to their theory without an accompanying committment to understanding the realities of transsexual lives, she dismisses transgender identities as not "very useful for intervening in the world," as if transgender identities were not equally deeply and sincerely felt, embodied, and lived identities, but rather a political trend that transgender people play with; she ignores the realities of transgender lives in service of promoting a more exlusively transsexual (MTF) activist agenda.

Finally, however, to bring in some outside material, I'd like to suggest the organization Sylvia Rivera Transgender Law Project as an example of community organizing that does not fit into the of dichotomy Namaste suggests between the activism of transssexual women of color prostitutes, which accounts for racial and class issues, and what Namaste characterizes as imperialist transgender activism that is inclusive of a broader spectrum of gender identities. They have a lot of material on their website at www.srlp.org.

2006-12-01T19:09:00.000-05:00

At the risk of revealing what I am doing on a Friday night, I want to just draw everyone attention to these workshops presented by the Office of Graduate Recruitment, Retention and Diversity. I went to the one below today and it was really good. In addition to the good information presented, it was well paced, and informative. For our class purposes, it was also insightful about the presentation of negotiating academic capitalism by two professors and the dean of the Graduate School. I highly recommend these and am going to attend the ones I missed next year; they are all part of the Graduate School courses, listed here.

WORKSHOP ON PRESENTING AT PROFESSIONAL MEETINGS IN THE ARTS AND
HUMANITIES: FRIDAY, DEC. 1, 4:30-6:30PM
The Graduate School invites you to a Ph.D. Completion Project Workshop on
Presenting at Professional Meetings in the Arts and Humanities in Lecture
Hall 0200, Skinner Hall. Professional presentations in the arts and
humanities require the speaker to know how to convey complex ideas simply
and accessibly; how to correlate length of written paper to time of oral
presentation; how to engage the audience by using principles of effective
communication; and how to leave the audience understanding the significance
of the research and the intended "take home" message. Register online now at
www.training.umd.edu under the category of Graduate School Workshops. Please
contact the Office of Graduate Recruitment, Retention and Diversity at
301-405-4183 or retention@gradschool.umd.edu with questions.

Gay LA and op-ed

2006-12-01T08:14:00.000-05:00

When we were talking about histories of locations of queer communities yesterday and LA was mentioned as a place without a history something struck me as wrong. In fact, Lillian Faderman has a new book out, Gay LA: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians. It was just reviewed in the Washington Post here. Faderman is an interesting person to consider through the lens of academic capitalism as well. She tells her story as an autobiography in Naked in the Promised Land.

As I mentioned in class yesterday, I am thrilled to have an op-ed in the Baltimore Sun today. You can read it here.

Have a great weekend.

KITH

2006-11-30T16:00:00.000-05:00

Rodriguez' Dissertation

2006-11-30T15:46:00.000-05:00

Here's the info on Rodriguez' dissertation. For more details or to take a look at the whole thing, go to research port (at www.lib.umd.edu) and select the database "Digital Dissertations." Enter her name "Rodriguez, Juana Maria" - when I didn't do last name first, it didn't come up.

Divas, atrevidas y entendidas: Navigating dimensions of queer latinidad within the discursive terrains of San Francisco
by Rodriguez, Juana Maria, Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 1998, 208 pages; AAT 9923029
» More Like This - Find similar documents
Advisor: Alarcon, Norma
School: University of California, Berkeley
School Location: United States -- California
Index terms(keywords): Latino, Activism, Law, Cyberspace, California, Queer, San Francisco
Source: DAI-A 60/03, p. 783, Sep 1999
Source type: Dissertation
Subjects: American studies, Womens studies, Minority & ethnic groups, Sociology
Publication Number: AAT 9923029
ISBN: 9780599225992
Document URL: http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=734425461&sid=2&Fmt=2&clientId=41143&RQT=309&VName=PQD
ProQuest document ID: 734425461

Abstract (Document Summary)
This dissertation explores the relationship between identity practices and discursive spaces by analyzing the ways queer Latinas and Latinos navigate discourses of identity within the landscape of contemporary San Francisco. I examine three spheres of knowledge where questions of identity are centrally operative and where the contradictions revealed by their articulation emerge and are negotiated: activism, law and cyberspace. Within each of these sites, subjects use the tools of language, image-making, and representation to express, interrogate, contest and reimagine a myriad of competing discourses on identity: strategic essentialism, structuralism, cultural nationalism, postmodernism and queer theory. The chapter on activism reflects on the creative cultural production of Proyecto ContraSIDA Por Vida , an HIV prevention agency targeting lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Latinos/as. The chapter on law, uses the written transcript of the case of a gay Brazilian man seeking political asylum in the US, In re : Tenorio , to analyze how discourses on colonialism, human rights, and competing nationalisms are represented through legal discourse. The chapter on cyberspace deploys performative writing to represent the virtual worlds of my own engagement of queer latinidad on the net.

Hailing Images of Queer Latinidad

2006-11-29T19:31:00.000-05:00

In Juana Maria Rodriguez’s Queer Latinidad, she travels through the rhizomatic and permeable fluidity of discursive space--each site with its own interpretative identity practices and multiple meaning shifts between “queer” and “Latina/o.” Moving from the post-modernist activisms of Proyecto Contra SIDA Por Vida to the courtroom trial of a Brazilian man seeking asylum for sexual difference, and lastly to Rodriguez’s own performative writings on virtual representation in cyberspace, she posits, “this project has been an exercise in kaleidoscopic image-making where figures of queer ‘latinidad’ have been shattered, brought together, and pulled apart through a twisting of the lens of discourse” (156).

A critical tenet within Rodriguez’s argument also includes a time-space relationality. For identity practices to forebear different interpretations, we must situate her investigative localized sites within a discontinuous and frayed temporality (32). This intellectual manuever has productive implications for activism and an organization like Proyecto. Rodriguez attempts to re-imagine a postmodern activist practice through the organization’s “talking back” and self-representation. By evidencing Proyecto’s “strategies for survival and resistance” in promotional brochures and visual images, she discusses both the organization’s manifesto and “y que” publicity as a performative hailing. “[It] offers ‘jotos and machas’ not only a linguistic space to occupy, but a physical site as well: the space of Proyecto.” She elucidates that to be hailed as a 'joto' may evoke a trauma or in Cvetkovich’s words “an archive of feelings” but for others it is also a rallying point and “deflects the power of naming away from the singularity of the hailed subject.”

However, given Rodriguez’s attention to the art and media projects of Proyecto, I think it is important to examine her own investment of this particular site within her own intellectual project. On 170n.7 she discloses her long-time involvement with the organization and according to her disclosure on 173n13 earlier drafts of this chapter were available to clients, staff and participants of Proyecto for criticism, feedback, etc. This practice is not unusual in auto-ethnographic feminist scholarly work and it is not to say that her examination is anyway intellectually suspicious. It does, however, raise questions about how ethnographic methods are conducted and indirectly suggests a look at the different layers of academic, cultural and political investment. What might be the vested interests of the organization? Clientele? Executive Director? Given her role as a member of the Board of Directors, what are the conditions and boundaries informing this analysis and her description of former instructors, staff members, friends, etc.? These are questions that should be asked of an ethnographic record.

Lastly, I am also moved by the use of images in this section as a cultural project in Proyecto’s colegio. She writes, “[M]any of these courses have been focused on or resulted in creative manifestations of self-representation through autobiography and self-portraiture” and “foster[ed] the deployment of agency as a tool for individual and collective empowerment.” I am wondering how these images perform and inform “queer latinidad” at Proyecto? The Mission District? San Francisco? Is this crafting “collective empowerment?” Again, might this “exercise in kaleidoscopic image-making” create a particular latinidad in time/space? How might the organization’s visuality enjoin the textuality of a manifesto’s “hailing” and what are the political consequences for subject formation and self-naming?

“Terms that Matter” - the culturally specific languages of subaltern spaces

2006-11-28T18:14:00.000-05:00

I am taken with Rodriguez’s discussion of the culturally specific languages of subaltern spaces. The section Divas, Atrevidas, Y Entendidas is rich with discussions of the “deployment of language as an identity practice.” Rodriguez argues that this identity practice “only becomes accentuated when it steps across linguistic and cultural boundaries.” (24-25) I want to interrogate the intra lingual and intra cultural accentuations. Lets further discuss naming as a “marker of political/ individual identity.” (26)

Some of the mentioned “terms that matter” (a nod to Butler) are:

TERM - Queer – Butler’s discussion of how queer plays – or fails to play- within non white communities appears here.

TERM - Chicano, Pocho, and Nuyorican – terms entering the vernacular with decidedly negative connotations which were appropriated and transformed within these communities “as a part of the rituals of survival.”

TERM - Entender – to understand, a code word to define those who are “in the know.” Rodriguez notes Bergman and Smith’s Entiendes?: Queer Readings, Hispanic Texts.

Book Review - Entiendes? Queer Readings/Hispanic Writings

http://muse.jhu.edu/cgi-bin/access.cgi?uri=/journals/modern_fiction_studies/v042/42.4br_bergmann.html

Treacy, Mary Jane "Book Review: Entiendes? Queer Readings/Hispanic Writings"_MFS Modern Fiction Studies - Volume 42, Number 4, Winter 1996, pp. 902-903

Excerpt
In their introduction to ¿Entiendes?, Bergmann and Smith explain why they have given this title to a compilation of critical essays on Spanish, Latin American, and U.S. Latino/a literatures and cultures; "¿entiendes?" asks if you understand, if you are in the know about same-sex desire. Yet the editors are careful not to assume that this desire fits comfortably into Anglo-American beliefs about homosexual identity or that it necessarily follows a trajectory from the closet to public space. Indeed, they point out that the multiplicity of cultures and peoples that comprise the Spanish-speaking world does not permit any easy generalization about nationality or sexuality, so they have put together a book which emphasizes the fluidity of categories, suggesting that the reader approach the essays not to uncover some truth of same-sex desire but rather to discover new ways to see.

TERM - De ambiente – of an ambience or environment. I like this term which includes the element of subaltern “queer” spaces. Rodriguez notes this term is similar to “in the life” used by queer black folk.

TERM - In the life – living and loving queer sexualities. This is used by black queer organizations and entertainment groups to foster a sense of community and cultural specificity.
This is a DC Black Lesbian Organization - http://www.womeninthelife.com/home.html

A Brief Dictionary of Queer Slang and Culture
http://www.geocities.com/WestHollywood/Stonewall/4219/

Favorite culturally spesfic identity deploying terms from this site include:

butchilinity
--the quality of being butch
byke
--a contraction of bisexual dyke
clones
--any group of gay men or lesbians who dress alike and do similar things.

( I would love to add that butch/femme balack lesbians call white women in a relationship that look alike and are both butch “Twinkies” like 2 in a pack!)

glamour butch
--a butch who likes to wear fancy suits, tuxedos, etc, frequently. Think kd lang.
gold-star lesbian
--a lesbian who never has had and never intends to have sex with a man. Sometimes they also get points for never sleeping with bisexuals. Entirely too many of them get terribly self-righteous about it, and look down on bisexuals and lesbians who have had sex with men.
low femme
--a femme lesbian who is, pershaps, not quite so stereotypically feminine as a high femme, usually preferring jeans and a blouse or t-shirt to skirts for everyday. Also known as a blue jeans femme.
quaggot
--abr. a queer faggot (Yes, I know it's redundant.)
tryke
--a contraction of transsexual dyke, meaning a male to female transsexual who is a lesbian.
tween
--one who is in between butch and femme, and can take on either role; a switch

Here is a fun Wiki link to “British Gay Slang - Polari”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_slang

early connections to Namaste

2006-11-27T13:35:00.000-05:00

Hi all-

I'm having trouble finding a way to start the first post to this blog since Robb posted the link to the UCLA student. I just rewatched the video and find myself at a loss for words-- I hope to find some before Thursday's class.

I did want to share this link with you. Apparently, the soap opera All My Children plans to feature a transgender character. Perhaps we can use this article to get a head start on our thoughts about the Namaste reading for next week. It looks like the storyline repeats much of the same white MTF autobiographical identity politics Namaste wants to move past. On the other hand, I wonder what we might make of the class and national politics of the character in relation to the soap opera's audience. Just some food for thought.

UCLA Student Violently Attacked

2006-11-17T01:17:00.001-05:00

Queers and Theory

Dear Queers and Theory Community:

Although this is a bit off topic from discussions of "Social Text" and "What's Queer About Queer Studies Now?" I felt that this incident deserved a location on this blog. At my former university, UCLA, an Iranian American student was violently tasered by campus police for failing to show sufficient ID at the campus library last night. His screams for help are disturbing, the spectacle of police brutality, the tortured Brown body, his helpless cries and the trauma of viewing his vile apprehension resonated loudly within me. Apparently, the students that attempted to intervene were threatened with stun guns by the officers and had students not utilized their camera phones and online distribution web sites (like 'youtube.com'), we may have never known that this event happened on a prestigious college campus. I've added the tag and the url just in case one or the other doesn't work. -Robb

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyvrqcxNIFs

Info on Social Text

2006-11-16T12:58:00.000-05:00

I did some research on Social Text. Here are few things:

The first issue available online is from Winter 1979, Series 1, though other records show the journal began in 1978. Then, it was called "Social Text: Theory/Culture/Ideology" and has an Edward Said article called "Zionism from the Standpoint of its Victims" front and center, followed by Bruce Boone on "Gay Language as Political Praxix: The Poetry of Frank O'Hare," followed by a "Special Section on Mass Culture." The journal was founded at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

The journal's prospectus begins as follows:
This is to announce the publication of a new journal devoted to problems in theory, particularly in the area of culture and ideological practices. These are areas shared by the social sciences, philosophy, and the humanities; Social text is designed to offer a place in which theories developed in the various specialized disciplines can be made available for wider discussion.
The framework of the journal is Marxist inteh broadest sense of the term. ... Social Text considers that the 1970s and 80s constitute a political situation in which the antitheses between Old Left and new Left need no longer be meaningful. ... the bankruptcy of liberalism as the dominant ideology of the Western countries has been accompanied by crises in all of the more specialized academic disciplines--from sociology and anthropology to literature and philosophy--in which traditional methods and presuppositions have broken down. Social Text believes that the dialectical framework of the Marxian tradition is the only one in which these issues can be adequately raised and discussed.
This is not, however a claim that Marxism has all the answers. On the contrary, ours has been a period rich in the development of all kinds of theoretical work bearing on culture, sign systems, social relations, power structures, and epistemology--theories which range from semiotics and Lacanian psychoanalysis to information and systems of theory, Habermas's critical pragmatics, Foucault's political technology of the Body, Derrida's deconstruction, Althusserian structuralism, and Chomskian linguistics.
[Note that in 1979, only the first volume of Foucault's History of Sexuality had been published (in 1976, trans. to English in 1977)].

JSTOR describes it thus: Social Text covers a broad spectrum of social and cultural phenomena, applying the latest interpretive methods to the world at large. A daring and controversial leader in the field of cultural studies, the journal consistently focuses attention on questions of gender, sexuality, race, and the environment, publishing key works by the most influential social and cultural theorists. As a journal at the forefront of cultural theory, Social Text invites provocative interviews and challenging articles from emerging critical voices. Each issue breaks new ground in the debates about postcolonialism, postmodernism, and popular culture.

From the MLA Directory of Periodicals:
Publication Name:Social Text
Acronym:SText
Scope:Publishes scholarly studies and creative works on major social issues. Including interdisciplinary articles on global literature, culture, politics, education, language, technology and the complex interrelationships between them.
Subjects:Cultural studies; Interdisciplinary studies; Social studies; American studies; Media studies
Languages:English
Publisher:Duke University Press
Publication Details:ISSN: 0164-2472 Type: Journal
Year Began: 1978
Frequency: 4 times/yr.
Circulation: 2,000
Pagination Across Issues: Separate
Alternate Media: Available in print and electronically.
Electronic Publication Frequency: 4 times/yr..
Also available at http://www.dukeupress.edu/socialtext/ Tables of contents, submission, and subscription information.
Peer Reviewed:Yes
Journal Status:Actively Indexed
Editorial:Editors: McCarthy, Anna; Edwards, Brent; Tenzer, Livia
Address: CCA, Rutgers University, 8 Bishop Place, New Brunswick, NJ, 08903, United States
Phone: 732 932-1503 Fax: 732 932-8683 Email: ltenzer@rci.rutgers.edu
Sponsoring Organization: Center for Cultural Analysis, Rutgers UniversityAdvertising:
Accepts Advertising?: Yes
Rates: E-mail the managing editor for rates
Subscription:
Address: Duke University Press, Journals Division, Box 90660, Durham, NC, 27708-0660, United States
Phone: 919 687-3617 Fax: 919 684-8644
Rates: (as of 2006) USD 143.00/yr. institutions; USD 33.00/yr. individuals
Submission Details:
Restrictions on Contributors: None
Submission Charges: No
Charges for Pages: No
Articles: Suggested Length: 7,500 words; Number Submitted Per Year: 200; Published Per Year: 30
Book Reviews: Published: Yes; Number Submitted Per Year: 15; Published Per Year: 4
Short Notes: Published: No
Abstracts: Published: No
Copyright Holder of Accepted Material: Duke University Press or author by request
Disposition of Rejected Manuscripts: Not returned
Time Between Submission and Publication Decision: 3 months
Time Between Decision and Publication: 3 months minimum
Number of Readers Prior to Publication Decision: 6
Submission Requirements:
Preferred Editorial Style: Chicago
Number of Copies Required: 3
Special Submission Requirements: E-mail submission is preferred.
Blind Submission Policy: NoUpdate Date:20060510Record Number:05594Persistent link to this record:http://search.ebscohost.com.proxy-um.researchport.umd.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=kah&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;AN=05594&site=ehost-liveDatabaseMLA Directory of Periodicals

Parody: A physicist named Alan Sokal publised a "parody" article called "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" in Social Text #46/47, pp. 217-252 (spring/summer 1996). He explains,
"So, to test the prevailing intellectual standards, I decided to try a modest (though admittedly uncontrolled) experiment: Would a leading North American journal of cultural studies -- whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross -- publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions?
The answer, unfortunately, is yes."
For more from Sokal, click here.

The Wikipedia entry is here.

The Official Site at Duke University Press is here.

The Editorial Board is here.

The Editors' University Profiles are:
Brent Edwards

Anna McCarthy

The Undead: Living (Or Just Dying) to Tell Another Tale

2006-11-16T01:47:00.000-05:00

The Undead: Living (Or Just Dying) to Tell Another Tale

As I read the introduction of Social Text, I was “haunted,” (in a good way) by the requests of my classmates to acknowledge and discuss the political project of the anthology. As explained by the editorial collective, this special double issue of Social Text was enabled and “assembled,” in order to give literary and critical communal space to a “younger generation” (1) of queer theorists who question, problematize, utilize, and disidentify (to use Munoz's term) with queer theories past. Through the terminology of Queer Epistemology, notions of queer genealogies of knowledge are enacted, genealogies that are rooted in shifting historicities and uncertain futures. I specifically reference the continuous and contiguous impetus to challenge the status quos that Queer Studies as a discipline itself creates:

“The reinvention of the term is contingent on its potential obsolescence, one necessarily at odds with any fortification of its critical reach in advance or any static notion of its presumed audience an participants. That queerness remains open to a continuing critique of its exclusionary operations has always been one of the field's key theoretical and political promises.”(3)

The political project of continuous “self” -evaluation and “self”- redefinition as a mutually constructed discipline seems to extend the life of Queer Studies infinitely. Rather than being a static (dead) discipline, Queer Studies can be seen as an immortal and undead interdiscipline, since it is continuously regenerated. I am tempted to ask, in following with both Halberstam and Freeman's conceptions of lifecycles, “What is the “normalized” life cycle of a theory? A discipline? An interdiscipline? - and how does Queer Studies' intentional reconstitution alter patterns of creation, critique, ideological methodology, and reinscriptions of meaning? In descending from somewhat abstract constructions of disciplines and interdisciplines to the content of the interdiscipline of Queer Studies, I remain drawn to notions of death, life, undead, immortal, and nonliving both by particular works, such as that of Puar, Freeman, Halberstam, Cvetkovich and Gopinath, but I am also drawn to these notions by my own self-contested historical site of disciplinarity- philosophy, and its subculture of zombie studies- yes, you read that right... zombie studies.
Puar's article on Queer Assemblages presented an interesting strategic use of perpetual Queer identity formation juxtaposed against a somewhat “straw person” description of intersectionality, but in this provocation of thought I would like to focus on her engagement with Achille Mbembe's concept of “necropolitics.” Summarized by Puar, “necropolitics” is “the subjugation of life to the power of death,” (128). I engage with Puar in this discussion by using the frame of life, death and its alternatives to explore other writings within the Queer Studies interdiscipline. I specifically focused on Elizabeth Freeman's article, “Time Binds, or Erotohistoriography,” because it seemed to be in conversation with Cvetkovich's conceptions of trauma as well as Halberstam's conceptions of space/time and alternative life cycles.
Freeman's article explores the creation of deviant lifecycles, or “chronopolitics” (57) as Freeman calls them, through founding the struggle of survival of queers in the ability to create or manipulate “pleasurable relations between bodies,” (58). Freeman queers what “human experiences officially count as life or one of its parts,” differently from Halberstam. Instead of examining pop cultural references, Freeman situates her examination of differing conceptions of lifecycles in an affectuality, like Cvetkovich. Freeman's concept of “erotohistoriography” is grounded in the “politics of the unpredictable,” surprise and seemingly “inappropriate” pleasurable interruptions, and “deeply embodie pleasures that counter the logic of development,” (59-60). Whereas Cvetkovich grounded her work in reinscribing the notion of trauma with new and colloquial meanings, Freeman averts the examination of Queer melancholic pain in order to examine the validity of pleasure as a source of cultural reproduction.
I am particularly interested in Freeman's reappropriation of one interpretation of Frankenstein as a queer incorporation. By examining transitions from pleasurable melancholia to incorporation and introjection, Freeman is able to arguably transgress the hierarchical dichotomy of male history and female reproduction (62). Similar to Freeman's use of Frankenstein as a “queer alternative to heterogendered bodies of progress,” (61) I venture into my disciplinary past to conjure up the image of zombies as representations of the regenerative processes of Queer Studies as an interdiscipline. This analogy is more than a desperate throwback to Halloween, but rather it can serve as an interesting mode of mobilizing questions of the conceivability and possibility of the futures of Queer Studies. Philosophically, zombies extract a closer reading of the distinctions between conceivability and possibility, as I feel Gopinath does in her preentation of Queer South Asian lesbians as inconceivable. Physically, zombies represent the undead- the living body, but the indescribable, and often assumed, dead mind. Similar to Hiram Perez's conception of the use of brown bodies in white intellectual spaces, zombies have a reputation for being the stereotype of violently hyper-regenerative threats in the near (although not very plausible) future. Zombies' placement in ambiguous temporal (science fictions' ever distant horizon of the future) and existential zones ironically highlight their incessant conceivability as well as the dire circumstances of their possibility. In this same sense, I refer back to the simultaneous self-destruction and regeneration of Queer Studies, layering construction with deconstruction and living with undead, and hope to instigate (in a good way), discussions on the corporalizations of concepts, and assemblages of affects (and any other crazy alliterations that you all can think of :)

PS: No, I could not find any pictures of non- white male queer zombies.

Halberstam & Perez

2006-11-16T00:21:00.000-05:00

Social Text opens with a question that guides the essays within: what’s queer about queer studies now? The discourse that follows comes at an opportune time for our class—incorporating several of the issues we have addressed in previous texts but also problematizing the very field of queer studies. Post-colonialism, feminism, Diaspora, mediatization, gender tension, space/time all appear within Social Text essays but I would like to focus this discussion on two essays: Hiram Perez’s You Can Have My Brown Body and Eat It Too! and Judith Halberstam’s Shame and White Gay Masculinity. I choose these essays not only because they concern the 2003 Gay Shame Conference at University of Michigan (a factor to be discussed when interrogating the political project of this text) but they trouble a major issue within queer studies: the role of identity politics.
Perez states:
“a great deal of queer theorizing has sought to displace identity politics with an alternative anti-identitarian model, often—and perhaps disingenuously—christened the ‘politics of difference.’” This model accommodates familiar habits of the university’s ideal bourgeois subject, among them, his imperial gaze, his universalism, and his claims to a race- neutral objectivity. It is not surprising then to find buried underneath the boot of this establishmentarian anti-identity all sorts of dissident bodies.”(172)
This is a bold statement and it comes quite early within his essay—upon reading this essay I understood why Damion became feisty while reading! When we consider Perez’s experiences at the Gay Shame Conference, the dismissal of his concerns, the offense at his critique, and his tokenism as the only brown body within the scholarly apparatus—his blunt insights into the continued racism of queer academia seems not only justified but a call to arms for young scholars to question always—even within “minority” studies the issues of the ivory tower are still present.
Perez invites us to re-examine issues we have encountered and he provides a lens that is highly critical but does not engage in the de-bunking critique we are trying to avoid. He tells us as much on page 179: “Everything I am about to say in this essay has already been said.” In many ways this assertion is depressing: how long does the revolution take? Several of the issues he engages with in his essay are the notion of gays being interpellated into gayness, particularly non-Western brown bodies; this idea is prominent within Mobile Cultures and their critique of “the global gay.” There is also the issue of trauma, particularly the social dimension of trauma, which Perez articulates in his re-telling of the Conference and his treatment by scholars he critiqued. Unlike Cvetkovich he re-creates the trauma on the pages of Social Text—his recounting of the fetishization of brown bodies by white men, none of whom understood or seemed to care about the implications their words had on men and women who identified with the brown bodies they articulated as objects of desire.
Some questions to consider for class: 1) Do we agree with Perez that identity politics should still be a part of queer studies, or should we move on and discuss the universal? 2) Perez’s trauma at the Gay Shame Conference—how does he articulate the problems he had with presentations and fellow scholars? Is he fair or de-bunking examinations he does not agree with? 3) In thinking about Social Text as a political project how does Perez’s essay fit? Is it a wake-up call for queer scholars to explore the state of their field?
Judith Halberstam’s essay and Hiram Perez’s essay talk to each other—and it is interesting to consider their places within the academy in terms of both publishing and university position. Halberstam is directly critical of the control that, she feels, white gay men still hold within the field of queer studies. She not only critiques the majority voice these men are given but states that: “the future of queer studies, I claim, depends absolutely on moving away from white gay male identity politics and learning from the radical critiques offered by a younger generation of queer scholars who draw their intellectual inspiration from feminism and ethnic studies rather than white queer studies.”(220) Do we agree with this assertion? Is Halberstam asking us to, or is she “merely” ( I do not use this word to dismiss the importance of her words but rather to consider what her goals were with this essay) articulating her displeasure about the treatment of scholars who critique white gay male identity politics? I would like to think about shame, and what form of the word is she using in this essay:
Shame (noun): a painful emotion caused by consciousness of guilt, shortcoming, or impropriety.
Shame (verb): to bring shame to
Both of these definitions, provided by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, are at play within Halberstam’s essay. She articulates the shame that white gay male scholars inflicted upon brown bodies attending the Conference, whether consciously or not, as well as shaming the scholars who have continued to privilege their identity politics, regardless of race/gender/class considerations, by virtue of their status within the field of queer studies.
Some questions: 1) Halberstam does not address transgender issues within her essay; where does transgender discrimination fit into this issue of identity politics? 2) Does Halberstam embrace the gay humility approach encouraged by Gayle Rubin? 3) Where does Halberstam’s critique leave young queer scholars who either identify with white gay male identity politics, or whose scholarly work engages white gay male identity?

Social Text as Political Project

2006-11-12T17:24:00.000-05:00

As I have been exploring our reading for this week I have also been googling. Here is the link for the 2003 Gay Shame Conference which features prominently in the Halberstam and Perez articles.
http://www.umich.edu/~lgqri/gayshame.html

Unfortunately the site does not include any of the keynote addresses, I would love to know what Rubin's discourse on gay humility included, but does include the conference schedule and a links page to relevant news stories and websites of interest.
If y'all come across any points of interest while reading please post them!

2006-11-11T12:40:00.000-05:00

MY FIRST ENCOUNTER WITH THE WORD PROPINQUITY

The word propinquity was volleyed about in class on Thursday as if it were and ordinary word and not a word with great and special meaning, which it is. So I wanted to share how I learned the word propinquity. It is in a sonnet by Edna St. Vincent Millay and ironically it’s context is similar to that in which we discussed propinquity on Thursday: the conditions in which one might find or take a lover. Here it is:

I, being born a woman and distressed
By all the needs and notions of my kind,
Am urged by your propinquity to find
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
To bear your body’s weight upon my breast:
So subtly is the fume of life designed,
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,
And leave me once again undone, possessed.
Think not for this, however, the poor treason
Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,
I shall remember you with love, or season
My scorn with pity,--let me make it plain:
I find this frenzy insufficient reason
For conversation when we meet again.

The occasion of this post may also be a propitious moment to mention that the best time to arrive at class is 2:55 p.m., which gives you a moment to remove any outer coverings, fix your hair, get a glass of water, fire up a computer, and still be ready to begin discussion at precisely 3 p.m. See you on Thursday.

Truths, Facts, and Queers

2006-11-09T13:43:00.000-05:00

Cvetkovich cites Toni Morrison's assertion in Beloved that "truth and facts are not the same thing." (276) This idea marinated in my mind as I was reviewing the book this afternoon. It seems that this disjunction is very present in this book and in other texts we have explored. The facts of S/M, and how those have been problematized, are very different from the truths found in S/M--Cvetkovich explores this in her chapter on the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival and the concern over having these expressions of sexuality present. I found Cvetkovich's exploration of this disjunction particularly fascinating when discussing incest, sexual abuse, and lesbian. In the tension over whether abuse "makes" lesbians she seems to posit that factually no, it does not...but that there is truth to the connections between lesbianism and incest. When reading this I could only imagine the outrage these queries may have caused but I found her refusal to "play it safe" refreshing. She is not engaging in essentialist discourse but rather re-opening a dialogue that is fraught with problems and potential.
Her quote from Morrison comes within her final chapter centering on Boy's Don't Cry and applies not only to the film's issues, which we have encountered in Halberstam's analysis, but also the essence of queer trauma. "I want to place moments of extreme trauma alongside moments of everyday emotional distress that are often the only sign that trauma's effects are still being felt." (3) For queers, and other Othered peoples, trauma is often only recognized when it concludes with a bullet to the head or being dragged to death behind a truck. Yet queers encounter trauma within everyday life, whether it is the lack of civil rights, crude jokes, or the absence of themselves within "mainstream" culture. These are the facts of trauma--verbal, emotional, psychological, and physical harm--but are they the truth(s)?

Archives of AIDS, and the Trauma of Identity Politics

2006-11-09T10:44:00.000-05:00

Like most of you, I am sure, I was overcome with powerful emotions while reading Ann Cvetkovich’s An Archive of Feeling. And writing this post has proven to be a very difficult process. At first, all I could come up with was a flooding of my own experiences with the traumas associated with HIV/AIDS. This became burdensome during this process, as I continually had to remind myself to “stick to the text. “This post has to engage the text on an intellectual/ academic level solely.” “Keep your emotions out of it.” “Avoid any confrontation with the text.” “Avoid the identity politics at play here.”

And then I began to see a problem with this logic… a problem rooted in the very text we are reading. These archives of feelings within us… based in trauma, cannot help but to surface when reading this book, because that is one of the main projects of the text. This is especially true of Chapter 5, “AIDS Activism and Public Feelings: Documenting ACT UP’s Lesbians.” In this chapter, Cvetkovich emphasizes the importance of oral histories, not only in examining the trauma of AIDS, but with any exploration of trauma at all.

The identity politics at play in this chapter are appropriately overwhelming, as are the identity politics associated with AIDS and AIDS activism. And Cvetkovich’s work here draws our collective attention to the sometimes overtly hostile and always homophobic responses to AIDS activism that continue to this day.

Most recently, we can see this with the awareness campaign designed by the L.A. Gay & Lesbian Center, “Own it. End it.” Which is also known as “HIV Is a Gay Disease.” This ad campaign has stirred up a great deal of controversy in the gay male community and in the larger HIV/AIDS community because of the history of trauma that is firmly rooted in gay male communities. As we know, 25 years ago, when this disease came to the attention of the medical community and the media, it was initially labeled “gay cancer,” and “GRID – Gay Related Immunodeficiency Disease.” Gay men were blamed for the origin of the disease and for the spreading of it, and it was gay men… generations of them… who were dying by the thousands. Of course, we all know that HIV/ AIDS is not just a gay male disease. Women and people of color with HIV/AIDS are eclipsing gay men in numbers, and there are now generations of people who are dead or dying in the “third-world” nations. So then why this new campaign? Why bring the center of this trauma back to gay men?

Because the trauma is rooted and continues to be located in homophobia towards gay men. Because gay men are still blamed for the disease. If a straight woman gets AIDS from her male partner… it is because he was “creeping” around on the “DL.” (the racial identity politics here are very important, and should not be overlooked, but the locus of the trauma here is still rooted in male homosexual behavior). The fear and shame attached to this disease are still based in the fear of being labeled “gay.” When Cvetkovich writes of the identity politics of lesbians in ACT UP, and the risk of lesbian transmission of HIV/AIDS to other lesbians, it is based in “queer sexual relationships between lesbians and gay men” (197).
In the ad for the “HIV is a gay disease” campaign, it says, “We are grateful to those outside our community who have come to our assistance – who have supported us and fought with us. But HIV has been, and continues to be, our disease. And it continues after 25 years because we haven’t stopped it.” This campaign seeks to relocate the center of trauma in the gay male community, because, since the trauma has been nationalized and internationalized, and partially erased by the pharmaceutical companies over the past 16 years, gay men have, by and large, become complacent. And this goes to the rest of Cvetkovich’s argument in this book, that locations of trauma are specific, and while they can be shared, the location/ the root cannot be erased. And this campaign seeks to remind gay men of this fact.

The trauma of AIDS has numbed the gay male community, especially the generations of gay men who have grown up knowing nothing but a world with AIDS, and a world with Protease Inhibitors. For gay men coming of sexual age in the mid 90s or later, AIDS has not equaled death. Many young people today do not know people who have died of AIDS. But as someone who came of sexual age in the mid 1980s, I remember the death. I remember the correlation between and HIV+ diagnosis with a death sentence. I remember losing loved ones, and roommates, and co-workers.

And now, because he says it so much better than I ever could, because he is one of the gay male poets of color (of the generation we lost), and because he is going out of print, I offer this section of a poem by Essex Hemphill…

When my brother fell

When my brother fell
I picked up his weapons
and never once questioned
whether I could carry
the weight and grief,
the responsibility
he shouldered.
I never questioned whether I could aim
or be as precise as he.
I only knew he had fallen
and the passing ceremonies
marking his death
did not stop the war.

Hemphill, Essex. "When my brother fell." Brother to Brother: Collected Writings by Black Gay Men. Ed. Essex Hemphill. Los Angeles: Alyson, 1991. 110-12.

Trauma, bodies and penetration

2006-11-09T01:08:00.000-05:00

Wow, Julie, what a thorough post! I’m hoping to complement some of your questions by first working through what I think Cvetkovich means by “trauma” and then interrogating her project in Chapter 2, the chapter that has stuck with me the most.

I spent some time thinking through Cvetkovich’s definitions of trauma and thought I would spin some out here. She claims that “trauma can be a foundation for creating counterpublic spheres rather than evacuating them” (15). (I wonder what gets evacuated when we focus making trauma foundational?) Trauma can be something that continues to have effects over generations: Cvetkovich traces how the lesbian daughter of a Holocaust survivor has her own story about the Holocaust, for example. This relates to Marianne Hirsch’s phenomenon of “postmemory” which can apply “to the children of survivors, who have an uncanny relation to their parents’ experience, which continues to mark subsequent generations” (29). Trauma is part of our everyday lives, not just death camps. I wonder about the cumulative effect of all this trauma: not only do we have the after effects of our, say, great-grandparents’ generation’s trauma to deal with, but also a layer of our parents’ generation and then our own. Does this marking dissipate at some point?

Trauma can be from an external event that magnifies affect or the result of incessant repetition (caused by the workings of capitalism) that leads to numbness. So trauma is part of the “affective language that describes life under capitalism” (19). Trauma isn’t something we can just excavate or just go to visit—think of Koon’s visit to Auschwitz with her survivor father, which is a different kind of trauma than that of the Holocaust. Emotional life is queer—it can’t be contained in visits, but (like sexuality) permeates all of life. Koon expands the “emotional archives of trauma” to include humor, boredom, and resistance (23). Traumas can consolidate nations, but “only through cultural and political work” (37). I think that Cvetkovich puts forward her example of certain cultural Jewish comedic traditions in the diaspora as being one a response to traumas. What would be others that we might think of? How can we use Cvetkovich’s notions regarding trauma to understand other events, say, for example, the aftereffects of the Irish Famine (which has recently witnessed its 150th anniversary)? 9/11? The everyday trauma of sitting in traffic?

A trauma archive “offers new approaches to national history and requires acknowledgment of affective experience as a mode of participation in public life” (39). But how does this mode exclude those who aren’t (weren’t?) effected/affected but who are also seeking to participate in the life of that same public?

“When serving as a point of entry into understanding the affective life of social systems, trauma must be seen to inhabit both intense sensation and numbness, both everyday and extreme circumstances” (43). Cvetkovich stresses that there’s a need “for sensational stories AS AN ALTERNATIVE form of knowledge to the abstractions of systemic analysis” (45) if we’re going to “search for innovative ways of mapping global histories in terms of lived experiences and capturing the disjunctions between the two” (45). Is trauma working/being worked out differently in late capital than in other economic modes?

Chapter 2 Trauma and Touch: Butch-Femme Sexualities

How are butch/femme, especially the butch untouchability Cvetkovich discusses historical constructions? How would Kath Weston respond to Cvetkovich’s discussion about butches (page 67)? She spends some time thinking how Butch untouchability is in part constructed by a butch’s “refusal to be made emotionally vulnerable or to display feelings publicly or openly” (67) in the face of the social dangers experienced in, for example, the pre-Stonewall bar cultures. Is contemporary butch untouchability a “postmemory”?

I found Cvetkovich’s summary of Freud’s understanding of the body through trauma fascinating. According to Cvetkovich, Freud describes trauma as “the breach or penetration of a protective shield” (49); he models consciousness as “a living organism in its most simplified possible form as an undifferentiated vesicle of a substance that is susceptible to stimulation” (qtd. 52-3). Stimulation can be external, which causes it to grow a “protective carapace/shield” or it can be internally produced (54). So, “trauma’s causes are both internal and external, psychic and social, biological and cultural, and often indistinguishably so” (55). Touch can breach or penetrate this shield; it also “brings the past forward into the present” (49). Cvetkovich interrogates how touch “as a breach of bodily boundaries” “creates a continuum between the physical and psychic, between the sexual and emotional” (51). How do we respond to this notion? Are all touches breaches of bodily boundaries? What about reciprocal touching? Responsive touching? Causal touching? Invasions of personal space? When is touch penetrative? How does it become that way? When does it become that way? Cvetkovich claims that “touching and being touched, both sexually and emotionally, are means by which somatic and psychic experience [i.e. trauma] is negotiated” (81). What about people with nerve damage? How might certain neuro-disabilities complicate psychic experiences?

She notes that the connection between trauma and touch are constructed and seeks to “ask how penetration comes to mean domination or trauma without presuming that these are natural connections, and how it can materialize not just gendered and sexualized forms of power but hierarchies of race and nation as well” (51-2). She claims that butch-femme, in “its visceral and emotional qualities [that] transform theory’s abstractions,” offers “new possibilities for bodies and their meanings, which have implications not only for queer sexual lives but for others, too” (52). Butch-femmes make penetration meaningful as “a significant vehicle for working through traumatic histories… they use the body as a ground for negotiating social relations, finding, for instance, within the sexual intimacy of the couple practices that address experiences of homophobia, shame, and abjection in the public world” (56). Cvetkovich sees Femmes as making receptivity active, as pointing out how the binary “language of sexual power” (59) is improverished by living sexualities where emotional and bodily experiences are interrelated. I’m not sure that I understand how Cvetkovich’s notion that penetration=domination or trauma and hope that we can spend some time in class thinking through the distinction she makes between male homosexuality and lesbian conceptions of penetration. Is she letting a hierarchical binary stand that we could productively dismantle? Why is she content to simply wonder how Bersani’s “’radical disintegration’ and ‘humiliation of the self’” might be how “a specifically masculine self is humiliated, and hence threatened with disintegration, by anal penetration” (62)? Would it be helpful to deconstruct penetration=domination or trauma? To offer alternative models or modes?

"Trauma" In Graduate School

2006-11-08T10:38:00.000-05:00

"TRAUMA" IN GRADUATE SCHOOL

I can't get Cvetkovich out of my mind! Late last night and now early this morning. It must be the euphoria of winning the House, and I believe the Senate, too!

2006-11-08T01:11:00.000-05:00

In An Archive of Feelings, Ann Cvetkovich has written a thoughtful, insightful, and intellectually and theoretically rigorous book. To help our discussion on Thursday, I am going to do three things. First, I will create a brief outline of the book and highlight some points that I felt were significant in each chapter and raise some questions. Second, I’m interested in exploring a few ideas in depth for our discussion on Thursday. Finally, there are some overarching questions that I’ll pose for our discussion based on this text and the other two in this section (as well as some of the other books we’ve read to date.)

First, an outline of the book. My intention here is not to provide a crib for those who are pressed for time, but rather to look at how the book was assembled because it feels like an astonishing piece of scholarship to me.

In An Archive of Feelings, Cvetkovich is inserting her analysis into a variety of conversations that are happening. First, she is intervening in the study of trauma to change the clinical definitions, in which trauma is “an overwhelming event that produces certain kinds of symptoms in the patient,” (p. 19) and poststructuralist theory, in which trauma is “an event that is unrepresentable,” to a new notion of trauma “as part of the affective lanugage that describes life under capitalism.” (p. 19.) Second, Cvetkovich is intervening in the notion off an archive to posit not something that is contained in a library of whatever construction, to an “affective experience” that “can form the basis for public culture.” (p. 17.)

Cvetkovich builds the books with these chapters:

Introduction

1. The Everyday Life of Queer Trauma

It is in this opening chapter that Cvetkovich reviews the world of trauma studies and provides her theoretical foundations for the book - feminism, critical race theory, Marxism, and queer theory. There are a few things that I admire about Cvetkovich’s writing that I want to emulate and many are grounded here in the first chapter. First, Cvetkovich is explicit about her theoretical underpinnings; not only is she explicit, she gives us a nice explication of what each of her theoretical allegiances mean to her. She is not reliant on short-hand terms or assumptions about the reader’s knowledge; rather she calmly and carefully explains what she believes, where she grounds her beliefs textually, and how she is trying to move the theoretical work forward through her work. It is elegant. i harbor such similar aspirations for care and elegance. Second, Cvetkovich grounds her work in texts that are based in the lesbian work and that speak to lesbians but also reach out from the lesbian community to a broader community. She does this in the first chapter with the film 2.5 Minute Ride and it’s connection with Little Women. It is a deft analysis. Third, Cvetkovich is extraordinary in her generous capacity to explain differences and respect those that she disagrees with while still holding to her own beliefs. She does this on page 31 in her explication of where she agrees with Judith Herman and where she departs. Fourth, she is unafraid of taking up things that are, or seem to be to me, “sacred cows” and engaging with them thoughtfully and transformatively. For example, in this first chapter, her discussions of trauma in Holocaust studies and in the history of slavery, both made me think “uh-oh” I wonder if she is going to make me uncomfortable? Will she tread on the things that I believe? Will she challenge my core beliefs and assumptions? She did - and I was comfortable with that - even thankful because I appreciated the thinking at the other side. Here’s the key though: she didn’t make me feel uncomfortable or weary throughout the process. So one of the learnings that I take from this text is how Cvetkovich thinks and writes because I find it generous and elegant as well as rigorous. These are all attributes to which I aspire and I’m appreciative of Cvetkovich for helping me to understand how to put them into practice.

This first chapter concludes with Cvetkovich’s statement, “Trauma, then, serves as a site for exploring the convergence of affect and sexuality as categories of analysis for queer theory.” (p. 48.) This foregrounds the second chapter and demonstrates how Cvetkovich is changing the nature of trauma studies through this book.

2. Trauma and Touch: Butch-Femme Sexualities

This chapter is a sensitive reading of sexuality as experienced in both a physical way and in an emotional way. Drawing on both the foundations of writing about butch-femme and trauma, Cvetkovich examines both carefully and with a new eye. I’m interested in looking at how Cvetkovich writes about sexuality in this chapter in addition to how she builds her arguments about reading trauma theory alongside butch-femme identities.

3. Sexual Trauma/Queer Memory: Incest, Lesbianism, and Therapeutic Culture

In this chapter, Cvetkovich problematizes traditional configurations of trauma and therapy cultures by reading them in conjunction with lesbian music. The elements that Cvetkovich introduces in this chapter are diverse and an important mix of sources. We may want to look at this chapter in particular as it feels like one of the most critical chapters in the book.

For folks unfamiliar with the music, here are two links.
LeTigre site:
http://www.letigreworld.com/sweepstakes/html_site/fact/fact.html

Tribe 8 site:
http://www.tribe8.com/
I believe that Katie will bring in some of the music mentioned in the chapter.

4. Transnational Trauma and Queer Diasporic Publics

Initially, I thought that this was the weakest chapter of Cvetkovich’s book. That was a result of reading Gopinath last week, I think. Gopinath’s analysis of the queer female diasporic subjectivity is so sharp and clearly delineated that to come to this chapter a week later, it feels like it is missing something, which in retrospect it is: Gopinath’s work. In a second reading of it, however, I find this chapter a critical part of Cvetkovich’s project first because it ties to her central thesis about understanding trauma as a part of living with capitalism and second because it demonstrates further her willingness as an intellectual to write thoughtfully and respectfully across differences. Cvetkovich knows how significant the work of Gopinath and other academics is to her project; she writes about it quite compellingly on pages 120-121. Rather thank thinking of this chapter as lacking something, I’ve come to think of it as foregrounding something.

The substance of this chapter is Cvetkovich’s analysis of Frances Negron-Muntaner’s Brincando el Charco, Prathiba Parmar’s Khush, and Shani Moo-too’s Cereus Blooms at Night. Katie wrote a long blog entry about how citation practices serve to highlight and efface work. She raises the issue of how are we to know what we don’t know and how are we to know what is not mentioned. It is in this chapter that I thought about what is not said and what is said and the power of that in Cvetkovich’s book. Prathiba Parmar’s film, Warrior Marks, with Alice Walker has been the site of a great deal of contestation in Women’s Studies. Cvetkovich alludes to this when she writes, “One might even say that the controversies provoked by Warrior Marks’s criticism of female genital mutilation could be clarified by paying attention to this unusual collaboration between two lesbians ”of color“ whose common ground is as unpredictable as the difference between Walker’s ”womanism“ and Parmar’s theoretically informed cultural studies background.” (p. 134). Again, Cvetkovich demonstrates the care with which she writes and thinks using language that is not inflammatory or blaming but works to suss out clear-thinking meaning. I raise the point, however, to also note that by including Parmar’s work in this chapter, Cvetkovich is making a statement. I read the inclusion of Parmar’s Khush as a way to validate the work of Parmar despite the many criticisms she has faced.

5. AIDS Activism and Public Feelings: Documenting ACT UP’s Lesbians

This chapter begins Cvetkovich’s project of oral histories with lesbians from ACT UP. I found this chapter and the next one incredibly profound. I heard my own voice in the voices of the women Cvetkovich interviewed. Ultimately, in this chapter Cvetkovich problematizes the traditional formula in which from trauma activism emerges and posits that in addition to this from activism trauma emerges. She writes about a collective trauma that people can experience working together.

6. Legacies of Trauma, Legacies of Activism: Mourning and Militancy Revisited

This chapter includes more of the data from the oral histories and also takes up three memoirs of caretaking. Cvetkovich writes, “I was drawn to the idea that activism is not only a response to trauma but can itself be traumatic because of its emotional intensities and disappointments.” (p. 230.) Later, she writes, “I’d like to open up space in which exploring the emotional ambiguities and complexities of activism doesn’t compromise or undermine its significance.” (p. 231). This project and its conclusion feels so urgent to me, I have difficulty writing about it other than to say, yes.

7. In the Archive of Lesbian Feelings

In the final chapter, Cvetkovich explores archives and their constructs. Drawing on the two independent queer archives and contrasting them with the library-based archives, Cvetkovich explores what is included and what is excluded in archival construction while arguing for an archive that is more than “bibs and bobs” and includes that affective experiences of people. The entire notion of an archive is something that we may want to discuss; both the practicality of it and the meta-analysis of archives that Cvetkovich deploys by example in the text. This chapter also opens with a brief discussion of The Watermelon Woman; we may wish to consider that in light of the treatment of The Watermelon Woman in Black Queer Studies.

Epilogue

Cvetkovich chimes in on Boys Don’t Cry, consciously responding to other queer and cultural critics who have written about it. This is another locus for discussion as we have Halberstam’s analysis of the film in our common bank of knowledge now.

Reflections on Cvetkovich

I might describe this book as “all that and a bag of chips.” In addition to the many admirable things that I think that Cvetkovich does as a writer and an intellectual, what I like about this book is that way that Cvetkovich works through so many communities that I care about. Perhaps it is because she deals with communities that I have a vested interested in - lesbians, queers, survivors, readers of good books, lesbian films. I’d like to think though that my interest extends beyond my own personal feelings.

The other thing I admire about this book is the methodology that Cvetkovich employs in this book. Cvetkovich utilizes methodologies from a variety of communities of practice. She examines literature with tools of English; she examines film with tools from film; she examines oral histories with tools of history. Throughout it all she weaves tools and theories of feminism, Women’s Studies, and queer studies. Cvetkovich is expansive in the book and she is intensive. She uses a variety of tools to speak about issues that are important to her personally and to us politically and intellectually.

I think that Cvetkovich provides in An Archive of Feeling is a new paradigm for handling the personal content. Personal content, either as testimony or experience has been significant always to Women’s Studies and to LGBT Studies. (The entire notion of the closet and leaving the closet creates a central metaphoric experience related to personal experience that is central to queer constructions.) While Cvetkovich gathers and privileges personal experience in ways that we might expect it to in a Women’s Studies context, she isn’t stymied by personal experience. Rather she interrogates it with the same intellectual rigor as she interrogates other sources of knowledge in the text. Cvetkovich’s interrogation is done, of course, with the same deft hand that she handles other material. Cvetkovich writes with respect and positive regard for all of her subjects. As I have said before, It’s a paradigm I admire.

Some questions to think about for our class

How do the three books in this cycle work together? All are engaged in a dialogue about public cultures although their engagement with that term differs. Cvetkovich is engaged in a notion of public cultures that are material and grounded in many ways in a lesbian community; Gopinath is engaged in understanding the diaspora of southeast Asians and how to create a subjectivity for queer women; the Mobile Cultures collection is engaged in how gay-ness is being understood in southeast Asia through technology. While the easy connection for me is the content of looking at questions about southeast Asian queers, there is a deeper connection that these books share in writing about queer subjectivity.

How is Cvetkovich engaging in discussions of “queer” and “lesbian”? I think that she is drawing some lines here, but I haven’t mapped it out thoroughly and would love to talk about it in class.

How is Cvetkovich working with notions of public and private? How does that relate to the other texts in this section and in the course? Again, I think that there are some important insights here, but I haven’t wrapped my head around them all.

How does Cvetkovich chose the texts that she does to build this book? Is it different from some of the other authors that we have read? I think in particular about Cvetkovich’s work with lesbian music and Halberstam’s work with lesbian music. Are they doing similar things? Are there differences? What does that tell us for selection texts and content for our own work?

*****
Article about Anne Cvetkovich
http://www.austinchronicle.com/gyrobase/Issue/story?oid=oid%3A158090

Finally, it seems that Cvetkovich’s parter is Gretchen Phillips, an awesome singer-songerwriter of 2 Nice Girls fame, among other lesbian music constellations. Phillips’ website is here:
http://www.gretchen-phillips.com/

Home and the Taboo

2006-11-02T13:04:00.000-05:00

Thanks, Laura, for starting the conversation on Gopinath’s Impossible Desires. The heart of this book is an analysis of the film Fire by Deepa Mehta. (Mehta’s most recent film, Water, also received a highly contested reception in India when it was released.) Rather than directly addresses this material, however, what captivated me for the past two weeks about this book and Mobile Cultures was the construction of public and private.

This interest of mine in reading these two books comes from an unabashed political position in which I think that the past twenty-five years in the United States have been characterized by a lessening of public space available for people living her and an increasing privatization of space, broadly defined. That is, privatization is affecting more and more of our lives in a variety of facets, e.g. health care, retirement funding, education, libraries, parks. The private sector increasingly takes up the work of what was at one time in a recent past the work of the public sector.

This has profound implications for me as a feminist as well because of the dichotomized private/public division overlaid on woman/man. Moreover, this dichotomy has been mapped in interesting ways onto queer people. I rooted around in my very disorganized library for my copy of Jean Bethke Elstain’s Public Man, Private Woman. Elstain’s book, which was relatively new when I read it in 1988, (the first edition was in 1981), has really been an intellectual foundation for right-wing women to think about public and private and create rhetoric and policies that reinforce a gendered reading of those spaces.

So when I read Gopinath’s definition of home as “a vexed location where queer subjects whose very desires and subjectivities are formed by its logic simultaneously labor to transform it” (15), I’m curious about how our sexual desires and subjectivities are located in the home. Why are they not created in public spaces?

I connect this with Samuel Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. Are queer identities built not necessary in the home but in the space outside the home? In the space where we can be queer? Where we can see queer bodies and queer acts? Delany explains a public space that is a sexualized space and also a democratized space. He mourns the loss of it through the redevelopment of Times Square. More than that specific space, however, he writes about the overall loss of public space in our lives.

I wonder, however, if what Mobile Cultures is pointing us to is really the contemporary replacement of the space that Delany mourns. Has the internet, the web, and mobile communications strategies replaced the public theatres? And how is public space conceptualized virtually? We are in a virtual “public commons” but we experience in the “privacy” of our own homes.

Then also it feels to me that this debate between public and private, between what is constructed as the world of home and the world of public is critical to queer sexuality. A part of queer liberation strategy has been to move things from the private world into the public world. Though I think inadequate attention is paid to contesting the notion that queer sexuality generates from the private. Delany would argue that public sexuality is an important component of queer sexuality. If we begin at that point, we are not moving something private into the public realm. We are making something public more visible.

It’s these words and concepts that are interesting me now in regard to home. I think that they are also critical to constructions of taboo. If public and private, home and community are reconstructed and queer sexuality is mapped onto them differently, the formation of taboo changes. I wonder if part of the marketing of the film Fire is about the desire to return in the US to a taboo of lesbian sexuality in such a way that it can again be titillating.

Queering the Diaspora

2006-11-02T12:56:00.000-05:00

Queers and Theory

Gayatri Gopinath puts forward a project of queering the diaspora, particulary the cultural production of South Asian female diasporic subjects. In thinking about this piece, I was forced to think about my own "assumptions" of the term diaspora and as Katie King demonstrated last class, the "extensive" and "intensive" definitions of the term. Gopinath, puts forward an intensive definition of the term moving away from the more recognized or intensive usage. Pushing to challenge my previous assumptions of the term "diaspora" enabled me to grasp the scope of Gopinath's project. My starting point for a discussion on diasporic subject/ivity will usually begin with a discussion on forced migration and displacement. Hence, a disapora relies on my intrepretation of the populations national origin, reason for migration and displacement from "home" country, and level of agency the people have. Gopinath's book allows me to expand my definition of diaspora to place it within a transnational context to tease out the ways that advanced capitalism produces, reifies, and sustains contradictory and alternative subject postions. So, a concept that comes out of this book that I have been thinking about for some time is the idea of "emergent modernities". This idea helps us move away from the West/rest, modern/traditional, and authentic/inauthentic binaries that are extremely persisitent in our assumptions about modernity and progress. Gopinath's notes that diaporic subjects are perceived as inauthenitic and non-traditional South Asians (which was one of the reasons the director of Fire was critiqued). This lead me to think about the ways that the nation-state is invested in preserving ideas about authenticity and tradition. The nation-state and its institutions benefit in the creation of an ideology that places woman at the center of the "home" and heteronormative ideas of the diaspora as its foundation. Gopinath queers the diapsora by reading diasporic cultural texts against "original" national texts. Here she finds that a translation is needed, however she is not looking for an "original" or authentic cultural expression. She finds that the "original is brought into existence through translation"(13). Here I am reminded of Tom Boellstorrf's idea of "dubbing" culture, and a "new authenticity not dependend on tradition" (42). These observations lead to an exploration of new and emergent modernities and cultural expression that are not wedged between old paradigms.

Panjabi Hit Squad

2006-11-02T12:50:00.000-05:00

For those interested in the music that Gopinath discusses, my co-worker recommended checking out BBC.com's 1Xtra section where the djs -Panjabi Hit Squad - spin.

Here's a list of what they've recently played:

Artist - Track (Label)

BBC News: Lesbian film sets India on Fire Challenging taboos: A scene from Fire

2006-11-02T12:04:00.000-05:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/213417.stm

BBC News
World: South Asia

Lesbian film sets India on Fire Challenging taboos: A scene from Fire

By South Asia Correspondent Daniel Lak
When the film Fire opens in Indian cinemas it will undoubtedly cause outrage, enlightenment and confusion.

Fire has already been shown in many other countries, but the Indian censor board wanted to give it a thorough examination.

Daniel Lak asks if India is ready for Fire
It passed, and this powerful story of two sisters-in-law who fall in love, is being shown uncut in English and India's national language, Hindi.

When the film was shown last year at two Indian film festivals, there were strong reactions, including negative ones from the influential social conservatives in India.

But one group of people in the country is awaiting this film eagerly - the Indian lesbian community, which for years has maintained a silent, almost secret existence.

Breaking new ground

The film's protagonists are sisters-in-law, trapped in emotionally bleak marriages, who turn to each other for comfort, love and eventually, sex.

Deepa Mehta: "It has caused outrage, love and confusion"
Despite its vast output and long history, Indian cinema has rarely ventured into such a realm.

Fire is not meant to be about gay life, but after world-wide release, as it makes its debut in India, it is sure to be provocative and challenging.

Director Deepa Mehta aims to be provocative and challenging: "Some people are outraged by it, some people love it and some people are confused by it. I think it's not going to be any different in India - at least I hope not."

Many of India's gay women are glad that Fire is showing in their country.

The couple I spoke to, on condition they remain anonymous, have been together for more than six years.

They make no secret of their relationship, but neither do they openly proclaim their sexuality.

A lesbian character in the film is allowed to burn by her shamed husband
India, they say, has yet to come to terms with the very existence of female homosexuality. Finding a stable partner can be tough when society doesn't even acknowledge that women can be attracted to women.

One said: "We live in the same neighbourhood - so I've known her over the years. We belong to the same group of friends. She had been away in Africa and I heard about her relationship there. Much later when I went up to her we became friends - and one day it just happened - it just took over."

Acceptance not easy to find

Now, they live together and have a wide circle of friends, some gay, most not. And they are beginning to find the confidence that is necessary to assert themselves and their identity. Some changes are tough though.

"With our families we could not interact with each other as a normal couple. That did bother us. It was not a proper kind of acceptance - it was more like 'yes, you're doing it - but we don't recognise it - yet we're not saying anything bad about it,'" one said.

The public in India is getting its first challenge from the painted billboards and hoardings up in major cities to advertise the film Fire.

Their vivid depictions of scenes from the movie are in keeping with the Indian cinema tradition of promising more in the advertising than is delivered in the film - more sex, violence or titillation.

The fact that Fire passed the tough Indian censorship process without a single cut could be seen as recognition that this is a serious film that has chosen its scenes and story line carefully.

Or it could be taken as an indication that society remains ignorant or unaware of the sexual options before women.

Breaking through ignorance

Telephone counselling is now available in major cities, like Delhi.

Until a helpline was set up, there was literally nobody for women to talk to. Cath Slugget, of the Sangini support group, says those who call are often confused and unaware.

So Indian cinema-goers will be seeing a film that challenges taboos, and has some vivid portrayals of passion and violence.

But Fire also makes it clear that overturning tradition can be dangerous. whatever comfort gay women might take from a sympathetic story line Fire is not a film that is likely to leave anyone here indifferent.

Fire Film Poster in India

2006-11-02T11:06:00.000-05:00

Note that this film poster is much more open about the film's subject matter than the American DVD packaging, and with no reference to the "Taboo," or "Banned" terminology used to sell the film in the States.

Home is Where Desire Starts (?)

2006-10-31T17:44:00.000-05:00

Gayatri Gopinath's Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures provides us with valuable tools for imagining the unthinkable as theorists of sexuality. I want to take a moment to set down what I think are the key definitions and concepts in her book. If you disagree or would like to add an important component, please, feel free. I want to get the groundwork laid for our discussion on Thursday when we attempt to work with all the components she gives us.

Queer: "I use 'queer' to refer to a range of dissident and non-heteronormative practices and desires that may very well be incommensurate with the identity categories of 'gay' and 'lesbian.' A queer diasporic formation works in contradistinction to the globalization of 'gay' identity that replicates a colonial narrative of development and progress that judges all 'other' sexual cultures, communities, and practices against a model of Euro-American sexual identity" (11).

Diaspora: "This tradition of cultural studies, to which my project is deeply indebted, embraces diaspora as a concept for its potential to foreground notions of impurity and inauthenticity that resoundingly reject the ethnic and religious absolutism at the center of nationalist projects. Viewing the (home) nation through the analytical frame of diaspora allows for a reconsideration of the traditionally hierarchical relation between nation and diaspora, where the former is seen as merely an impoverished imitation of an originary national culture" (7).

Translation: Gopinath uses Tejaswini Niranjana's words when discussing how "the 'original' [text] is actually brought into being through translation" (13). Which leads Gopinath to her sense that "Translation here cannot be seen as a mimetic reflection of a prior text but rather as a productive activity that instantiates new regimes of sexual subjectivity even as it effaces earlier erotic arrangements" (14).

Home: “is a vexed location where queer subjects whose very desires and subjectivities are formed by its logic simultaneously labor to transform it” (15).

Impossibility: "I use the notion of 'impossibility' as a way of signaling the unthinkability of a queer female subject position within various mappings of nation and diaspora" (15).

Public Cultures: "My understanding of the term builds on Arjun Appadurai and Carole Breckenridge’s definition of 'public culture' as a 'zone of cultural debate' where 'tensions and contradictions between national sites and transnational cultural processes' play out. It is within the realm of diasporic public culture that competing notions of community, belonging, and authenticity are brought into stark relief" (20-21).

Besides focusing on the fifth chapter of Gopinath's book "Local Sites / Global Contexts: The Transnational Trajectories of Fire and 'The Quilt,'" I am also interested (if time permits) in discussing Fire's presence, presentation, and project in the United States. As can be seen from the above picture of the dvd cover, the film's advertisers and distributors are trying to "sell" the film by using the controversy it caused in India. The dvd even includes two featurettes on the controversy as well as a note from Deepa Mehta explaining why she chose to write the script for Fire in "Hinglish" and not Hindi (she explains that it is to challenge and disrupt Westerners' notions of what constitutes a "foreign" film). I am wondering, who is this dvd cover actually talking to? Who is it enticing? The diasporic Indians in America or the non-Indian audience? What do the choices of the advertisers disclose about globalization? Nationalism? And how do those choices relate back to the list of terms/concepts I started compiling above?

Gopinath, Gayatri. Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. Durham: Duke UP, 2005.

Some Relevant Links for "Mobile Cultures"

2006-10-25T19:16:00.001-04:00

I hope everyone's week is going well and y'all are as excited by this book as I have been. I was doing some searching and have found several sites that are interesting to look at alongside chapters, sites that are mentioned in essays, and also the trailer for I.K.U.

Here is the trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfKarAxbf9M

Here is the website of Anwar Ibrahim, the Malay politician removed from office and imprisoned:
http://www.anwaribrahim.com/ver2nd/enter.html

Here is a website that documents world sodomy laws and also provides news articles, editorials, and advocate information:
http://www.sodomylaws.org/world/world.htm

Sawnet is a link resource page for South Asia. Several of the sites mentioned in the text are not easy to find or navigate but this gives you a good idea about organization and content for these sites:
http://www.sawnet.org/khush/

Finally, this is the site Yawning Bread which is discussed in depth in one of the essays about Singapore:
http://www.yawningbread.org/

And I have finally included some wiki articles about forms of Japanes fanfiction/erotic works as well articles about slash fiction, and an interesting article about Harry Potter, fanfiction, and sexuality-- a subject that interests me academically and personally:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hentai

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shotacon

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slash_fiction

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1837941,00.html

Enjoy! Post the results of your exploration and I look forward to our discussions tomorrow!

Images on Bodies, Balls, and "Flipping the Script"

2006-10-19T11:06:00.000-04:00

All of these images are by Frank Mizrahi. So is the linked article, "THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE 'HOME': A HISTORY OF BUTCH QUEENS, FEMME QUEENS AND HOUSE BALL CULTURE"

Aberrations ON display/ Aberrations THAT display

2006-10-19T02:09:00.000-04:00

"Bodies: The Exhibition," Dr. vonHagens Body World’s, and Ferguson's Black Queer Bodies that Exhibit

How might we apply some of Ferguson’s conceptual framework relating to queer black bodies to the ‘bodies’ on display in scientific/artistic exhibits? The controversies surrounding the display and manipulation of these bodies on display parallel some of Ferguson’s discussions of anxieties relating to African American nonheteronormative sexualities, difference, and deviance. "Bodies: The Exhibition" and von Hagens “Body World’s” push the boundaries of anatomical science, national borders, and query queer themes such as polymorphous perversity (154n27) and corporeal difference (95) as discussed by Ferguson.

*How are bodies perverse?*

Ferguson discusses whiteness as the “horizon of racial and sexual purity;” defined against whiteness, Blackness becomes an origin and outcome for polymorphous perversity. (39) Ferguson’s notes indicate that his use here diverges from Foucault in the emphasis placed on ‘the perverse’ as radicalized and gendered categories. I extend these categories to the controversial “perversity” of preserved bodies, actively posed, yet no longer living, and on display. Thus, animation (life), gender, and race (nationality in the case of the Bodies exhibit) become relevant in the use of the perverse.

Both exhibits include “exhibition starring real, skinned human corpses arranged in poses” according to one Tampa newspaper. The corpses do not have skin tone, skin, or other obvious features that racialize their remains. Although the exhibit “Bodies” does indicate that the corpses are unclaimed individuals from China, Dr. von Hagens’ exhibit only identifies each corpse as an individual who donated their body to science for the purpose of education. The controversy surrounding the corpses ranges from ‘consent’ in the case of the unclaimed cadavers from China in “Bodies” to the limited use of female bodies in von Hagens’ exhibit in order to limit voyeurism. This gendered sexualization of female corpses, and the resulting gendered and sexual regulation of female cadavers is very similar to Ferguson’s discussion on the gendered and sexual regulation of African American nonheteronormative formations. (Here I am assuming the sexualization of female cadavers is nonheteronormative – some may disagree)

*Bodies as Aberrations*

vonHagens Body World’s website provides the following information on the limited use of female corpses:

Sensitive to perceived community concerns, Dr. von Hagens did not want to appear voyeuristic in revealing too many female bodies. Further, he sees himself in the tradition of Renaissance anatomists, whose works traditionally included far more masculine than feminine bodies, since all but the reproductive systems are essentially the same. The musculature of male bodies is generally more pronounced and illustrates more aspects of the muscle system. The organs on display come primarily from the female body donors.

The concept of corporeal difference (95) can be used to describe the construction of female bodies and the inherent sexuality. Ferguson uses corporeal difference to discuss assimilation and the obstructions Black and Japanese bodies present to the undertaking assimilation. Even posthumously, the female cadaver is restricted by corporeal difference.

Thus, vonHagens Body World’s has constructed female bodies/ corpses as perverse in the external form; however, their perversity does not extend to their internal organs, which are displayed. This regulation of gender and sexuality, due to the exposed sexual organs that would be displayed on a female cadaver, and the resulting possibility for voyeurism has heightened my curiosity: what if the bodies were raced and gender was made relevant? What might the resulting perversities be?

Finally, I am interested in Ferguson’s concept of “abstract labor,” (139) are educational corpses performing abstract labor? Are the obscured intersecting relations of gender, sexuality, class, race, historical materialism, and even, in the instance of unclaimed Asian bodies as subject in the exhibit ‘Bodies,” imperialism relevant to the “labor” of these lifeless cadavers? Are cadavers in animated positions, with educational responsibilities “dead”?

von Hagens BODY WORLDS exhibition

2006-10-19T00:12:00.000-04:00

http://www.bodyworlds.com/index.html

What is BODY WORLDS? Created by anatomist and licensed physician Dr. Gunther von Hagens, the BODY WORLDS exhibition is the world's first public anatomical presentation using Plastination, Dr. von Hagens’ groundbreaking method of specimen preservation. The display of approximately 200 authentic organs, organ configurations, and a broad collection of whole-body plastinates offers an unprecedented view of the human body. Visitors will be able to observe the body’s functions, including locomotive, digestive, nervous and vascular systems, and compare healthy and diseased organs such as a healthy lung with that of a smoker’s lung.   Approximately 25 whole-body plastinates are fixed in dramatic poses – playing basketball, soccer, pondering a chess move or running – revealing the true-to-life spatial relationships among organs. These dramatic poses inspire wonder and awe in visitors of all ages, allowing them to better understand the interconnectedness of the muscle, organ and vascular systems.  To date, the series of three BODY WORLDS exhibitions have opened to public acclaim in 35 cities across Europe, Asia and North America, drawing nearly 20 million worldwide. Previous North America stops include Los Angeles (attendance: 930,106), Chicago (attendance: 799,394), Philadelphia (attendance: 602,932) and Denver (attendance: 687,022).

BODY WORLDS is the only anatomical exhibition that relies on the generosity of body donors, individuals who willed that, upon their death, their bodies could be used for educational purposes in the exhibition. The specimens on display, excluding a small number of acquisitions from anatomical collections and anatomy programs, stem from a body donation program that was begun in 1983 by Dr. von Hagens. The body donation program is now managed by the Institute for Plastination, established in Heidelberg, Germany, in 1993. Currently, the Institute’s roster is comprised of more than 7,000 donors, including nearly 300 Americans.  The Museum of Nature & Science is in conversations with leaders in the fields of anatomy, medicine, bioethics, education and religion to ensure that BODY WORLDS is presented in a respectful manner in keeping with the Museum’s and the exhibition’s high standards of ethical and scientific integrity.  “I am really impressed with the tremendous responses in every community where the exhibition has been and the overwhelming consensus that it is powerfully educational about the body and its function. I intend to see the exhibition in Dallas,” said Dr. Daniel Foster, Professor of Internal Medicine at UT Southwestern and a member of the President's Council on Bioethics.

Bodies the Exhibition

2006-10-18T14:49:00.000-04:00

http://www.bodiestheexhibition.com/bodies.html

Cadaver Exhibition Draws Crowds, Controversy in Florida
John Roach
for National Geographic News

August 29, 2005
An exhibition starring real, skinned human corpses arranged in poses—a soccer player in mid-kick, for example—is drawing record- breaking crowds and controversy to a Florida museum.

Fetuses and a cigarette smoker's tarred lungs are among the 20 corpses and 260 body parts on display.

"Bodies: The Exhibition" opened August 18 at the Museum of Science and Industry in Tampa. The bodies in question are unclaimed or unidentified individuals from China. As such, neither the deceased nor their families consented to the use of the corpses in the exhibit.

On August 17, three days before the exhibit was scheduled to open, Florida's Anatomical Board voted four to two against allowing the exhibition to open.

The board regulates the transportation of human corpses and body parts into and out of the state for medical education and for research purposes. It is not clear, however, whether their authority extends to museum exhibitions.

"The bottom-line issue is informed consent. Where is the informed consent?" said Lynn Romrell, chair of the Anatomical Board and an associate dean at the University of Florida's College of Medicine in Gainesville. Romrell voted against the exhibition.

The Museum of Science and Industry opened "Bodies" two days early, on August 18, the day after the board's vote. The museum and Atlanta, Georgia-based Premier Exhibitions, the show's promoter, cited faster-than-expected exhibit construction and high advance ticket sales as reasons for the early opening.

"We did not want the people of Tampa to be denied this unique opportunity," Roy Glover, the chief medical advisor and spokesperson for the exhibition, wrote in an e-mail to National Geographic News.

The Anatomy Board announced on the show's opening day that they would not to pursue legal action against the museum. Instead, the board is seeking clarification of their authority from the Florida Legislature.

"Bodies: The Exhibition" is slated to run through February 26, 2006, in Tampa. More than 12,000 attended the show in its first four days, breaking a museum record set in 2003 by a Titanic exhibition. The first week as a whole saw 21,000-plus visitors. More than a quarter of a million are expected in the months ahead.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/08/0829_050829_human_bodies.html

Where do Queers Come From? - Flipping the Script on Disciplines

2006-10-18T00:50:00.000-04:00

Historical materialism and genetic biology have certainly taken on complex roles when put in conversation through Ferguson’s and Roughgarden’s texts. The authors take on a critical but humble role when discussing the issue of Black queer subjectivity and gender and sex diversity respectively. What is important for both of these texts is the origin of things: historical materialism which describes the source of capitalism, and genetic biology which takes on questions of evolutionary progress and the biological origin of "man."

Ferguson begins his introduction of Aberrations in Black with an image from Marlon Riggs' Tongue's Untied. This image of a black drag-queen prostitute embodies for "canonical sociology" in the form of Marx, the dysfunction of society. As Ferguson goes on to describe this historical assumption-- what is revealed is that white, morally restrained heteronormativity is the epitome of a well functioning society, and non-corrupt civilization. In his "queer of color critique" Ferguson flips the script on this assumption. Although he utilizes the central focus of historical materialism--to describe how social relations form, he "disassociates" with the term in order to liberate its meaning from heteronormative and white supremacist assumptions.

It could be because "Creation" is coming up--(well probably not because I am not Roman Catholic) but while reading this along side Roughgarden's Evolutions's Rainbow I noticed a clear interest in flipping the script on dominant origin myths (we can call them myths now right?) that presume heteronormativity, white supremacy, and possibly male dominance over humankind. Although we can get into the circular discussion of how they both create new "myths" (the flip side reversed) I do not wish to go there here--instead I wonder, how we can discuss origin as a process of making meaning, rather than a definitive point and how that can be helpful to a queer of color critique. While Darwinian assumptions about evolution appear to do this, as Roughgarden illustrates in her chapter on sex determination, early (and in some instances) current associations with evolution assume male dominance (198). They are also dependent on assumptions about what is "more evolved," which translated, has the potential be akin to what Ferguson observes in Marxist uses of the term "tribe" as a racialized word which describes what is considered premodern and primitive (6).

Although Ferguson utilizes some principles of Historical materialism, he seems to be more interested in how it the black queer subject is a subject upon which liberal ideologies of social formation are built in antithesis than how the black queer subject evolved. Thus, the question of the Black queer subject is no longer an interrogation of the black queer as a problem, but questions a disciplines' non self reflective heteronormative and white supremacist assumptions about the ways in which societies form. Making the problem to be solved, or the thing which needs to be contextualized within an origin--the idea of social formation, and historical materialism.

This new set of assumptions give an interesting reading into Roughgarden's work which takes on early assumptions within biology and more specifically Darwin's take on sex selection. Roughgarden is revisiting multiple cites of origin myth making all which have particular stakes in what constitutes the beginning of man. Being the consipiracy theorist that I can be, I wonder how much of these heteronormative, patriarchal, and white supremacist assumptions come from the same source and thus interest in how things originate are rooted in what is "natural" (a term used in both texts) and "natural" meaning white and heteronormative. Overall I am interested in the investment in the origin of things, and I believe Ferguson and Roughgarden show how that inquiry is not what queers should be asking.

Implicitly I would also inquire as to how have the texts we have read "flipped the script" in terms of their discipline? Is this necessary in order to do queer studies? What are some of the tools they use in order to do this (i.e. Ferguson's complex take on "dissasociation" from "canonical sociology" and its historical materialism.)

NOTE: This peice makes use of the terms "flip the script" and "the flip side reversed", which are terms associated with "urban" life and "hip hop culture", in order to discuss the main points of inquiry. I refuse to use the urban dictionary as reference because of its racist overtones.

"Flip the script" is a term which describes a switch in direction and power in a given interaction, usually utilizing a shared icon of power (the script) as a tool and symbol of this change.

"The flip side reversed" when power is "flipped" and the icon of power is proven unstable, and therefore creates circular exchanges of that power. Or in more clever situations, when power is shifted by simply utilizing the same icon of power same way, but in a different context which only appears to differ.

NEW BOOK: Cast Out: Queer Lives in Theater

2006-10-15T09:55:00.000-04:00

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Mary Bisbee-Beek
(734) 764-4330
bisbeeb@umich.edu

Cast Out
Queer Lives in Theater
Edited by Robin Bernstein

Memoirs that explore the intertwined connections between theater and queer culture, sexuality, and history

This collection by leading theater performers, practitioners, critics, and passionate spectators offers a backstage pass to the personal and creative lives of some of the most important and influential theater artists of the past fifty years: Edward Albee discusses the homophobic critical attacks he endured in the 50s and 60s; Cherry Jones talks about the first time she accepted a Tony Award—and her decision, in that moment, to come out; Peggy Shaw speaks of the drag queen who first inspired her stage career; Craig Lucas issues an impassioned call for theater practitioners and other artists to unite for the sake of art, creativity, and social change. Also included are memoirs by and interviews with Diyaa T., the artist formerly known as DRED, Kate Bornstein, Lisa Kron, Tim Miller, and George C. Wolfe, among others. These diverse voices dispel forever the cliché of theater as a “safe haven” and replace the stereotype with a nuanced group portrait of the ways in which
theater and queerness intersect in our lives.

Robin Bernstein is Assistant Director of the Committee on Degrees in Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University . She is co-editor, with Seth Clark Silberman, of Generation Q: Gays, Lesbians, and Bisexuals Born Around 1969’s Stonewall Riots Tell Their Stories of Growing Up in the Age of Information; and is author of the children’s book, Terrible, Terrible!

Publication Date: July 2006
Cloth: 0-472-09933-7 $60.00
Paper: 0-472-06933-0 $22.95 – note these are available simultaneously
6 x 9, ca. 233 pages
Distribution: CDS, Jackson , TN

Sister Diyaa T., the artist formerly known as Dred
kundalini yoga, reiki, healing performing arts, masculine/feminine polarities integration, yoga for youth, creator
cell 646-342-5660
goldenhealingtouch@yahoo.com
www.sonicbids.com/diyaadred

SPREAD YOUR SELF-LOVE WINGS AND TAKE FLIGHT!!!

2006-10-12T12:28:00.000-04:00

I was working on this as a part of my own process of mulling the material for the week and thought it might be of use for our conversation today.

In Aberrations In Black, Ferguson project is to construct a critique of sociology from a black queer perspective and by doing so open the possibilities for a practice of sociology that is inclusive of black queers and others living in lives of intersection that have been excluded from the discipline.

Ferguson enters this project by pairing iconic text from sociology that have been both significant in shaping the discipline and that have been contested for their reflection of the entrenched racism of the time with nearly simultaneously published literary texts by African-American authors that are equally iconic. The four chapters that are the substance of Ferguson’s comparison are:

1. The Chicago School, which “observed the modernizing processes in the United States during The New Deal,” and Native Son
2. Invisible Man and Ellison and Wright’s relationship to sociology and their uses of sociological theory, primarily the prevailing notions of the Chicago School in their respective texts
3. Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma and Go Tell It On the Mountain
4. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 Report, The Negro Family: A Case for National Action, and Sula

Anthony Lemelle in reviewing the book for Contemporary Sociology writes, “The substantive concern for his book is to contribute to American Studies, and it involves the critique of literature and sociology. The author examines sociology as though it is a discursive narrative rather than a science. And sociology is read as complicit in joining with state forces to discipline traditionally excluded groups.” (Contemporary Sociology 34, vol 1, p. 80.)

First, Ferguson’s reading of these combinations of texts together is one of the innovative things of this book; it is Ferguson’s eccentric mode of being in the world of sociology. As a discipline sociology utilizes tools of both what we consider the sciences and the humanities. Some sociology focuses on analysis of numbers and data to arrive at trends within culture; others focus on discursive strategies. Ferguson brings these two together – the sociology text that are shaped by analysis and description of how people live in the world and the literary texts that are narrative fiction written by people who live in a world that is attempted to be described by these sociological text even though they exclude their bodies and experiences. I find this strategy fascinating because of the assumptions that it makes and breaks about texts.

The first assumption that I bring to literary texts, that is, to fiction, is that it is not true. It is made up. It is imaginative. Indeed, all of the works which Ferguson reads are imaginative texts. Certainly, they are grounded in the experience of the author at a particular historical moment, but the notion of literature is that it is not sociology, it is not biology, it is not even poetry, it is made up. So to have Ferguson read those texts and then use them to inform a critique of sociology is bringing together different tools and using them in new ways.

The second assumption that I bring to this is that “truth” such as what is found in the sociological texts cannot be critiqued with “fiction.” That is, there is something arresting about having fictive characters speak to “real” historical actors such as Myrdal, Moynihan, and Park. One of the things that amazed me in reading the book is that Ferguson must be aware of this but he wrote it with authority as though this is a regular analytic practice revealing little anxiety about it.

The third assumption that I bring to literary texts is that the characters are speaking with the characters within the text and while they may be engaged with a broader conversation to the world, it is necessarily limited to a conversation within the pages of the book. Characters in books, have smaller lives than people in the world. They are limited by pages and by the narrative. Ferguson seems to reject this notion and breathes deeper life into them. In particular the character of Woodridge which he considers in the second chapter, Ferguson resurrects a quotation that was cut from Invisible Man and moves from there consider Woodridge as an active commentator.

While Ferguson is blending analytic strategies between sociology and literature, he is also engaged in a larger project in American Studies—to define American Studies in a post-nationalist fashion. One of the things that I am inconversant about is what is American Studies and what are the disciplinary interrelations of American Studies and sociology. What is really at stake in defining a post-nationalist American Studies? It seems to connect with Weston and Haraway’s reaching to reformulate our relationship to humanism, but I can’t tease out the details of it at this moment. This also seems to me one of the ways that Black Queer Studies connects to this text.

Some additional links:

Robert E. Park: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_E._Park

Chicago School of Sociology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_school_%28sociology%29

Gunnar Myrdal

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1974/myrdal-bio.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunnar_Myrdal

Daniel Patrick Moynihan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Patrick_Moynihan

The Moynihan Report

http://www.dol.gov/oasam/programs/history/webid-meynihan.htm

http://www.city-journal.org/html/15_3_black_family.html

Queer - Quare - Kweer

2006-10-12T11:02:00.000-04:00

Hi all -

Thanks for letting me crash your class blog, and to Katie for the invite to crash your actual class discussion (why I would *so* do if I didn't need to put in my hours at work).

In any case, Katie, knowing that I've been working with Johnson and Ferguson's texts for the past several years, encouraged me to join in discussion this week in particular. (It's actually so great to see Johnson's essay anthologized because I first ran across it by happenstance while browsing physical journals in the Art/Performance Library here on campus.)

Katie suggested that I post a little something from my field exam from years ago, which I've done here at the end...but warnings...not only have I just mercilessly gone into a much longer document and cut from it to paste here, but this is also where I began my thinkings on the subject--hardly the stuff of light bulbs now that I'm looking back at it all.

One thing that has been passing through my mind lately, however, are the words "queer" and "quare." I think one of the things that really drew me strongly to Johnson's idea of "quare" was not only about the power of re-writing "queer," but also just as equally as the fact that "quare" came from his grandmother.

In light of all the arguments about how queers of color often have to choose between being out and remaining part of their family and racial communities, it was refreshing to see Johnson reflect the reality I know--that "coming out" is different for queers of ALL colors, but also that there is a space to be a queer of color, and not just either of those identities separately.

The working title of my dissertation makes use of yet another permutation--"kweer." I saw it used by several Asian and API LGBTQ-identified folks on the web, and thought it was a cool/kewl twist on things, a specific asian/asian-american/asian pacific islander reinterpretation and reclaiming (perhaps even a type of counter-orientalization?). In any case, I was captivated by the term, but now I can't seem to find references to it anywhere!! (Although interestingly, many searches for "kweer" turn up references to Ireland and things Irish.)

I wonder if anyone else has run across "kweer" or other variations of "queer" and "quare" (I wish I could better phrase this in a way that didn't make it seem as if "queer" was the original and the others simply off-shoots, but do please take as my understanding that by no means "queer" is the "One")

Okay, now back to work I go...hope you all have a great class.

In particular, queer scholars of color writing from their experiences have been in the forefront of critiquing the limitations of existing scholarship and calling for attention to dimensions of difference beyond sex and sexuality. Jose Munoz, for example, makes a poetic critique of the overwhelming whiteness of queer theory in the introduction to his book, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. He writes, Âthe field of queer theoryÂisÂand I write from experienceÂa place where a scholar of color can easily be lost in an immersion of vanilla while her or his critical faculties can be frozen by an avalanche of snowÂ (Munoz 11). MunozÂs use of Âimmersion of vanillaÂ and Âavalanche of snowÂ metaphorically convey the large degree to which whiteness circumscribes and permeates throughout queer thought, while his use of ÂlostÂ and ÂfrozenÂ point to the danger of erasure for queer scholars of color due to the lack of engagement with race (as it pertains to non-whites). In addition, Munoz makes clear his indebtedness to feminist women of colorÂs writings, particularly Cherrie Moraga and Gloria AnzalduaÂs This Bridge Called My Back, for the model they provide in Âintegrating multiple sites of difference in their analytic approaches,Â suggesting that race as well as gender need to be attended to in sexuality studies (22). Similarly invested in paying attention to multiple dimensions of social differences, David L. Eng and Alice Y. Hom, in their introduction to Q&A: Queer in Asian America, make explicit their fear of Âthe unproblematic positing of the universal (white) subjectÂ in LGBTS (11). While Eng and Hom do not name their universal white subject as also male, they do make explicit that analyses of race, especially for Asian Americans, are always entangled with gender implications (1). Collectively, what Munoz, Eng, and Hom establish here is that despite the evidence of lived realities of male and female queer subjects of color, the imagined queer subject is a white male.

In the same way that Munoz, Eng, and Hom foreground the predominance of the imagined white male queer subject, Dwight A. McBride also acknowledges the tyranny of the imagined white male queer subject at the expense of ignoring the existence queers of color. However, whereas Munoz, Eng, and HomÂs critiques are largely contained to lesbian/gay studies, queer studies, and other historically, predominantly white academic disciplines, McBrideÂs focus is outside of academia. In particular, he focuses on the way in which queerness is imagined as Âa white thingÂ in black communities, whereby some (heterosexual) black community members disregard the existence of other (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, queer) black community members. In a commentary article in the Chicago Tribune, entitled ÂWho Draws the Line?: Racism Among Homosexuals and Homophobia Among Blacks,Â McBride calls for the recognition of gays and lesbians within black communities. He writes, Â[w]e need to keep it real in the black community. Black gays and lesbians have always been a part of usÂ (par. 17). As McBrideÂs work reminds us, alongside with WomenÂs Studies commitment to create positive social changes, it is not only queers of color within scholarly pursuits that we must recognize, but also queers of color in our communities and neighborhoods.

Munoz, Eng, Hom, and McBride are clear that it is insufficient to think of multiple dimensions of difference in merely some additive fashionÂwhat is needed is a fundamentally different approach. E. Patrick Johnson and Roderick A. Ferguson, respectively, offer such approaches as well as inspiration towards a Queer Asian American Critique. In his essay, ÂÂQuareÂ Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know About Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother,Â Johnson tells a story of how ÂqueerÂ was used in his family. In particular, he talks about his grandmother and how she, in a Âthick, black, southern dialectÂ would say, ÂÂThat shoÂll is a quare chileÂ (2). He latches onto Âquare,Â understanding it as a nuanced discursive tool grounded in African American cultural rituals and lived experiences, and proposes ÂQuare StudiesÂ as a Ârecapitulation and recuperationÂ of queer studiesÂ tendencies to erase racial and other differences that is more directly useful for gays and lesbians of color (3). More specifically, Johnson writes, ÂQuare studies would reinstate the subject and the identity around which the subject circulates that queer theory so easily dismisses. By refocusing our attention on the racialized bodies, experiences, and knowledges of transgendered people, lesbians, gays, and bisexuals of color, quare studies grounds the discursive process of mediated identification and subjectivity in a political praxis that speaks to the material existence of ÂcoloredÂ bodiesÂ (10). Similarly, in his recently published book Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique, Ferguson meticulously crafts and employs Âqueer of color analysis.Â According to Ferguson, a queer of color analysis Âinterrogates social formations as the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class, with particular interest in how those formations correspond with and diverge from nationalist ideals and practicesÂ (note #1, 149). Throughout Aberrations in Black Ferguson uses queer of color analysis to explore African American nonheteronormative subjects in contrast and resistance to canonical sociological formations. It is exactly such a refocusing on the material existence of ÂotheredÂ bodies within the specificity of the U.S. nation-state that forms the foundation of a Queer Asian American critique.

We need a study of racial formations that will not oblige heteropatriarchy, an analysis of sexuality not severed from race and material relations, an interrogation of African American culture that keeps company with other racial formations, and an American studies not beguiled by the United States. (Ferguson 29)

ItÂs not that I disagree with the argument Ferguson makes in the quotation above, but rather that I am not satiated by how his earlier postulations of queer of color analysis boil down here only to an African American cultural context. Johnson, Somerville, and FergusonÂs texts in particular, are texts that each compellingly undertakes an intersectional approach that successfully engages an integrated analysis of sexuality in conjunction with race and racial formation. The centrality of African American racial formations in these texts, however, must be taken into account.

Given the vastly different histories between African American and Asian American racial formations, including but not limited to the ways in which these racial groups have historically been pitted against one another (for the betterment of privileged whites), it is especially important that we consider how the specificities of African American subjects and subjectivities and of Asian American subjects and subjectivities might account for distinct queer of color critiques. In no way do I mean to elide the importance and value of FergusonÂs work. Rather, in moving toward a Queer Asian American Critique I mean to build from the base Ferguson provides and consider, as the subtitle of Frank H. WuÂs book Yellow states, Race in America Beyond Black and White. In Yellow, Wu writes, ÂIf the color line runs between whites and people of color, Asian Americans are on one side; if the color line runs between blacks and everyone else, Asian Americans are on the other sideÂ (18). What Wu points out here is that Asian Americans find themselves positioned on either one side of the color line or the other according to how specific contexts and situations are classified. Inhabiting such a variable racial position demands yet another fundamentally different approach.

Aberrations In Black and Black Queer Studies

2006-10-12T08:09:00.000-04:00

Black Queer Studies is a critical sensibility which places both race and sexuality, specifically homosexualities, at the center of analysis. E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson Have edited one of the most recent and extensive anthologies to date, Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology. This is not to suggest that this anthology satisfies all readers and criticisms of missing elements challenge the queer academic community to inatiate further scholarship in this vein.

Johnson and Henderson describe the text as a critical intervention in the discourses of Black studies and queer studies that provide critical insight into the various intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Black queer studies locates itself at the porous limits of both African American studies and queer studies; it is also an articulation of the complexity of racial identities.

This complexity is mirrored by Ferguson’s 2004 text Aberrations In Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique. This text seeks to highlight the social heterogeneity that characterizes African-American culture in order to make sense of that culture as a site of gender and sexual formations that historically have deviated from national ideals. Ferguson’s critique also approaches culture as a site that compels identifications with and antagonisms to the normative ideals promoted by state and capital.

Ferguson asks: What mode of analysis would be appropiate for interpreting the drag-queen prostitute as an image that allegorizes and symbolizes that social heterogeneity, a heterogeneity that associates African American culture with genderand sexual variation and critically locates the culture within the geneology of the west. (3) The queer of color critique within Black queer studies is responsible for a cultural critique of these intersectional oppressions.

The queer of color analysis is Ferguson’s mode of analysis; defined as: [A mode of analysis that] interrogates social formations as the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class, with particular interest in how those formations correspond with and diverge from nationalist ideals and practices Queer of color analysis is a heterogeneous enterprise made up of women of color feminism, materialist analysis, poststructuralist theory, and queer critique. (149)

I question why a connection to ‘women of color feminism,’ African American/ Black studies and queer studies is clearly articulated in this definition, while the relationship to Black feminist theory is not explicitly stated in discussions of interdisciplinarity and intersectional scholarship within these two Black queer studies texts.

Do we feel Abberations and Black Queer Studies are masculinist in their approach? Can we identify the feminisms and feminist modes of analysis within Black queer projects?

Still Working: Aberrations Post...

2006-10-11T23:02:00.000-04:00

Hello all,
Let me fall on my sword... I can't play the strong Black woman just now (hehe)
I am still working on the post. I have been completely incapacitated by the suspense of waiting for the comp exam committee to notify us of our status. Today I learned that I passed, yay! However, I am catching up on days of worry, sleeplessness, and a lack of appetite... Mu'deah' (motherdear, my grandmother) would say "Dat chile shoaldis actin' quare"!
OK, writing...
-Mel

The Art of Protest

2006-10-10T10:40:00.000-04:00

I just finished reading a new book that I'm teaching in my women's studies majors class. It is by a friend of mine, TV Reed, we were in HistCon together in the 80's. I'm very jazzed about this book, and I will bring you xeroxes of three chapters on Thursday, but you may want to read the whole thing, and you may want to get it now even. I ordered it for WMST 300 and it is at Vertigo Books, so you can see if they have copies to buy.

I even put up a review on Amazon for the book, although even before I finished it, I was so excited in medias res. Here is the link.

I'm thinking that I may start all my grad classes with this book nowadays. I wished I'd known about it for this class. The three chapters I want you to see are (at least) Chaps 6, 8 & 10. Six is about the global rock concerts of the 80s and demonstrates the importance of a debunking critique of them and then also shows how limited a debunking critique is, opening out to demonstrate how to do the next step of contextualizing on several fronts, intellectual and activist. It is a great model for analysis.

Eight is on how to analyze an "intellectual formation" and especially to evaluate its knowledge structures and their limits in terms of intersectional concerns. Thus it translates an intellectual formation -- environmental social justice ecocriticism -- into the terms of identity politics, using that as a meta-language for academic activisms. It has only one paragraph on what we were trying to do a bit of last time -- translating from languages of identity politics into an interest in and curiosity about so-called science, or evolutionary development in particular.

Ten is a highly compacted synthesis of research into social movements and who sees what where among a range of locations, mostly but not exclusively academic. It is also an interesting model for a kind of review of academic literatures, with a broad synthetic and analytic agenda of sorts.

So I will be asking you to read this and finish up our three books for the third class on Re-embodiments, following this Thursday. We will revisit all three and do some synthesis ourselves. This material should be useful in deciding on various approaches.

But if this sounds like a book you want go get it at Vertigo as soon as you can.

Haraway and Roughgarden

2006-10-04T14:22:00.000-04:00

As I read and compared these two texts, a guiding question I tried to keep in mind was: what "boxes" are each of them trying to keep open - or reopen - and how do they do it? Clearly, both seek a scientific knowledge that is compatible with and contributes to feminism/social justice; seen simplistically, Haraway makes an argument to feminist communities on the value of biology, "technoscience," and other scientific epistemologies. Roughgarden, on the other hand, wrote this book for a wider audience, but has devoted considerable effort to arguing to scientists that diversity, and especially sexual and gender diversity (feminist values? queer values?) should be seen as desirable and beneficial to species and communities. Thus, their projects share a basic interest in connecting feminist and scientific discourses; but they approach it from (and to) different ends. (Do they meet in the middle?)
Although Roughgarden makes some arguments that I'm sure many of us may have been eager to jump on, in an effort to avoid "deconstructing critique," I'd like to focus on some of the potentially fruitful points of connection I saw between the two. Haraway names a couple of concepts that Roughgarden engages in, although she doesn't use the same terms. First of all, I think Roughgarden gives scientific evidence for the idea of naturecultures when, in the introduciton, she acknowledges that both environment (social and physical) and genetic material play a role in who we - as people, as animals, become: "what we become arises more from our relationships than from our atomic genes" (7). Secondly, the idea of symbiogenesis thrives in Roughgarden's text; implicitly, Roughgarden does use the relationship as the smallest unit to examine - the relationships between species, between individuals of the same species.... Rather than seeing organic life as discrete, she writes that "organisms flow across the bounds of any category we construct. In biology, nature abhors a category" (14). (Would this statement accomodate Haraway's relationship with Cayenne, as she describes it?). Also, I was fascinated with the possibility that "every one of our cells is a symbiosis among formerly free-living bacterial elements" - even on the cellular level, relationships are, literally, fundamental (162).
A general issue that I think has been lurking around the corner of a lot of our discussions - and, to me, around the corner of most of the queer theory I've read - is: How can we reconcile acknowleding, maybe even celebrating, the nuances and complexities of our embodiments without restricting our thinking about them to an essentialism that is limiting? Roughgarden argues that we need to "take seriously" the limited and scientifically inconclusive evidence for biological bases for homosexuality and transsexuality. On the one hand, it may be very empowering for some trans people to have their identities -identities that they have probably had to struggle very hard to have accepted as legitimate - validated in their bodies, whether it is in gestational hormone levels or the size of a "rice-grain" part of their brains. Yet personally, I am very invested in believing that my sexual identity is NOT biologically determined by any of the fairly simplistic genetic mechanisms that Roughgarden discusses. Another example: while Roughgarden cheerfully points out the variety of sexes and genders between different species, she seems to implicitly accept specific and differentiated biologically determined roles for those plethora of creatures. Is this okay for animals but not people? Weston, in my reading, argued that simply enumerating more gender possibilities does not fundamentally challenge the restrictions of a gender system with limited and rigidly defined categories.
Finally, a couple of the many questions that I had after reading the two books - I'd be very interested if anybody had any thoughts, and in the interest of not being entirely self-serving, maybe they will help with posting comments;) : Does Roughgarden's text function as a successful "contact zone" between disciplines and communities, as Haraway would define it? Roughgarden argues that EVERY academic discipline has its own inherent form of bias against diversity - (how) has this played out in disciplines founded on difference, like women's/gender, LGBT/queer, racial, ethnic, and area studies? How can/do we connect arguments about biological diversity with some of the concepts we've been discussing relating to identity and performance thereof - are they fundamentally incompatible?
The following links may help give us some extra info on Joan Roughgarden: at www.joandistrict6.com is a resume and a link to a wide variety of reviews of "Evolution's Rainbow," many with summaries, which could help us compare how the book was received within different communities. And her bio on wiki is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Roughgarden (Could you guess from the introduction and dedication that she is Christian?).

Queers and Theory: Queers and Theory: Archives in a Queer Time and Place

2006-09-28T21:28:00.000-04:00

Sensorium and Vision with the tongue

Following our short but captivating conversation about sensorium, I remembered, having done an honors thesis in neurobiology of sensation and perception in my undergraduate degree, hearing about a device that could translate images captured by a camera into signals capturable by the tongue's microreceptors, so that a blind person could develop their brain to “see” through these signals transmitted by the tongue.

So I looked it up on the Internet – not trusting my memory entirely – and found a number of references to that experiment, that is actually being developed in Montreal.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/06/040603065225.htm

http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/node/2863

http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/20040504012045data_trunc_sys.shtml

http://abcnews.go.com/Primetime/story?id=2401551&page=1

For those of you who can read French, see also:

http://www.opto.umontreal.ca/recherche/axes/axe2.html

One of the interesting features of this experiment lies in the fact that so far, only people born blind participate for such and such reason. The concept of sensorium addresses this when it stipulates that “the world is explained and experienced differently depending on the specific 'ratios of sense' members of a culture share in the sensoria they learn to inhabit (Howes 1991, p. 8). More recent work has demonstrated that individuals may include in their unique sensoria perceptual proclivities that exceed their cultural norms; even when, as in the history of smell in the West, the sense in question is suppressed or mostly ignored (Classen, Howes and Synnott 1994).” (Wikipedia handout).

Therefore, a individual born blind can still activate his “seeing” and “reading” part of the brain through a sense of taste....or so to speak. This says a lot about the development of “unique sensoria in individual and culture”, a unique ration for each person. This also speaks to the 'normal' sensorium and the interplay and adaptability of the body.

I guess we don't really know the implications of this research for questioning the Western bias towards vision. Especially considering the way the research is presented, it seems that the researchers are trying to substitute the eyes by the mouth (receptor), but not necessarily vision by gestation (process). Apparently, the area of the brain that is being stimulated is the “vision” area, but through the stimulation of the tongue instead of the eye. But then again, this might represent a bias of the researchers, not the human body. And if stimulated from an early age, this technology might lead to the development of rather complex vision (right now they are only at the stage of recognizing a T) and it might challenge even the notion of vision. The stimuli here presented were meaningless (no social, cultural, emotional content or prior associations attached to it) especially for someone who was born blind. Therefore, the researchers are really reproducing the mechanism used by vision (detection of form by edge, contrast, hues etc.) which is only one way to explore how the tongue can stimulate the visual cortex. Therefore, the bias of “the primacy of vision” seem to influence how this development is happening. Although I have to say, I am not sure how else they could do it.

If sensorium is the ratio of senses being used to detect elements of the environment, then I guess it does fit the definition.

So, I thought I would share this piece of information with you, and we can continue this started conversation on the blog....

Side note: for those of you who enjoy (or just can't help it) seeing phallic imagery where no one else does, think about it that way: The camera (a small sphere positioned on the forehead) transmit through a wire a signal to a “device” placed in the mouth, on top of the “receptors”. If that is not a phallic image, what is?

Queers and Theory: Archives in a Queer Time and Place

2006-09-28T11:07:00.000-04:00

Queers and Theory: Archives in a Queer Time and Place

Because the website addresses of our post did not appear correctly, I am here trying to add them through this "create a link" feature. This is somewhat of an exploration for me. I hope it works!
Here are the two links we have in our conversations:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3581318558106747604

and

http://cbae.nmsu.edu/~dboje/teaching/503/sartre_links.htm

Archives in a Queer Time and Place

2006-09-27T16:41:00.000-04:00

In treatments by Halberstam and Weston, the archive surfaces as a heterotopic space with much at stake for a queer time, place and vision. Halberstam reconfigures the Brandon Archive as a body of materials harvested from unconventional ephemeral location (i.e. moving away from primary and secondary sources). In her sojourn to trace the rural and traumatic axioms within Brandon Teena’s biography, Halberstam contemplates how minority masculinities and gender variant subjects are conceptualized through the “constructed memorial” (23). She writes, “The Brandon Archive is simultaneously a resource, a productive narrative, a set of representations, a history, a memorial, and a time capsule. It literally records a moment in the history of twentieth-century struggles around the meaning of gender categories and it becomes a guide to future resolutions (23).” Furthermore, Halberstam argues for a notion of archive that goes beyond the material confines of a repository and proposes one that must implicitly reconfigure preservationist method--for the researcher or interpreter must “wade through” the untraditional “puzzle” of subcultural practice-as-evidence.

There appears to be a turn from the materiality of the archival site to the visuality of the archival sight undergirding Halberstam’s provocative proposition. In her analysis, ‘archive as floating signifier’ must account for queer subcultural lives existing not through a gallery’s deeds of sale or an art collective’s oral history transcript but through “new subterranean scenes, fly-by-night clubs, and fleeting trends” (161). For example, a subcultural phenomenon like the function of intergenerational “women’s music” performances, serve as records of culture and can be documented visually. Within the same register, lesbian houseparties, subway “runway walk offs” between Black queens or “dance offs” on street corners by queer “youth” are ‘fly by night’ occurrences imbued in timespace and archived through vision and memory. What is at stake for Halberstam, is the potential erasure of these stories and the decay of an archival trail for later queer historians and theorists to follow.

Similarly, Kath Weston also approaches an archival site/sight through the gay bar (as just one example). In her analysis, she discusses a commonly retold story of the “Old Butch at the Bar” who, in turn, surfaces as an embodied “living fossil” or living museum demarcating a modernist lesbian history, a lesbian past. Perhaps Weston’s “Old Butch” might also serve as an archive embodied under Halberstam’s guise —seen and functioning in ways that cannot be apprehended in a traditional repository. Drawing on the work of Franco Moretti, Weston argues that the Old Butch complicates gender theory through the assignment of historical meaning to those bodies “fashioned” in the past. She writes, “Whether these stories fetishize the Old Butch as an icon of pride and resistance or as a victim born into a less liberated era, her character remains frozen in time” (109). Although “Butch” iconicity certainly raises other critical issues on the politics of style (in terms of vision, time and space) for both Halberstam and Weston (and certainly deserving of much needed consideration), I was curious if we can affiliate the perception and reception of the frozen “Old Butch” within an queer subcultural archival project predicated on the functional, episodic and visual.

This is further troubled by Weston’s critique of performance theory. Whereas, Halberstam cites sights and sites of lesbian subcultural performance as counterpublics of temporal drag and lag (she does so through a long discussion of Butch lesbian musician Ferron), Weston is critical of performance theory. She suggests that despite the role of repetition and temporal logic within the theory, it fails to regard history as constitutive of gender (82) and “wields no explanatory power regarding historical change” (85). Performativity cannot “attend to the historical circumstances of its own production” (85). This is not to say Halberstam is not also critical of performance theorist scholar, Judith Butler’s premise that gender is merely a copy of a copy, but she submits queer subcultural performance’s ability to do away with the “then” and manipulate the “now” (183).

With this said, I wonder how we can establish an ‘archive as floating signifier’ given performance theory’s disregard for the primacy of historic circumstances? Is there a way that the “embodied historical memory” of the Old Butch-as-living-fossil be exhibited alongside or within Halberstam’s Brandon Archive? When Weston suggests the temporary temporality of Butches as worm holes, can we submit Halberstam’s temporal drag and lag of queer subcultures within “the Quantum foam”? Just as we engage in time travel with the shifting juxtaposition of generational bodies between “Old Butch” and “Super Femme,” can we embark on a new temporal journey in archival sites/sights? Lastly, if we do away with the repository as a spatial construct, what implications does this have for the materiality of the queer object and can we enjoin objects themselves within performative studies of the past?

BTW: If we have time this week, it would be nice to think more about butch/femme and the politics of style. It seems to resonate quite loudly within both scholars assessment of time, space and the visual.

Julie R. Enszer: Boys Don't Cry

2006-09-24T11:20:00.000-04:00

Julie R. Enszer: Boys Don't Cry

I've written a long entry about watching Boys Don't Cry and rereading Halberstam's analysis. I've also included three collateral sources on the film that capture some of the dialogue that occurred when the film was released. If you are interested, click over to read - and do feel free to comment.

Kath Weston

2006-09-22T21:51:00.000-04:00

I was interested in the book, Gender in Real Time, by Kath Weston because of her first book, Families We Choose. Families We Choose was published in 1991 by Columbia University Press as one of the initial books in their series "Between Men - Between Women." The book is a anthropological study of lesbians and gay men in the San Francisco area; Weston conducted interviews to document how lesbians and gay men were building their own kinship networks, even though they were assumed to be outside of "traditional families." When I read this book in 1991, this felt like such a radical and important contribution. At the time I was working at the gay and lesbian community center in metropolitan Detroit and the notions that Weston articulates in her book were ones that we were building our social-service programs on for the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered communities of the area. I remember in particular using passages from the book in conjunction with our groups, Women In Touch, Men In Touch, and Couples In Touch to aid people in being more explicit about building their network of kin.

Although now, fifteen years later, Weston's notions about kin and family seems more obvious, but at the time it was an exciting book to see lesbian and gay lives at the center of ethnography. While the book was incredibly stimulating, I also was distressed by everything that the book didn't include. I remember being fiercely interested in knowing that this work would continue and that other forms of kinship would be documented and analyzed. Also as a newly minted Women's Studies graduate, I am sure that I had a critical analysis of the book as well. (I remember having similar feelings about Alice Echols book, Daring To Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967-1975 when I first encountered it in 1989, but that is the subject of another blog as I have been revisiting that text as well through Katie King's book, Theory in Its Feminist Travels).

In looking into the book, one of the interesting citations that came forward is a 37 minute video produced and directed by Lisa Pontoppidan and Cheryl Qamar of Charis Video in 1985 titled, The Families We Choose. It "explores the diverse kinds of families lesbians have chosen to create." Although the genesis of this film seems to be in Brooklyn, NY, where Moonlight Products and Charis Video seem to be located, I would imagine that Weston was aware of this project, directly or tangentially. This is an example of what I mentioned in class about what conditions need to exist in the world in order for a particular piece to be produced at that moment. While Weston's book continues to be widely available and cited in academic and non-academic circles, this film has edged further into the ether, yet it was a foundation to allow Weston's work to be done.

Incidently, Cheryl Qamar worked on the fine, though short-lived, lesbian soap opera, Two in Twenty, in 1988, and Lisa Pontoppidan recently - in 1995 -has done a film, Funny, You Don't Look Sick.

Back to Kath Weston and Families We Choose. . . .The book was well-received in the academy earning reviews by Signs, the American Journal of Sociology and Contemporary Sociology. In Signs, the conclusion to the review states, "Weston's book represents a new direction in lesbian and gay studies and in the anthropology of American culture. Perhaps more successfully than other scholars working in this area of gender research, she overcomes the tendency to ghettoize and separate the lives of gay men and lesbians from the rest of the culture. . . . .We learn most powerfully how kinship remains the standard symbol of safety and solidarity, just as we all know that sustaining kin ties can be work. . . . Weston makes clear that our options are formulated within the same symbolic universe that the process of constructing creative responses to society's challenges will necessarily proceed in ways that tell us much about how all of us operate as cultural beings." (Lewin, Ellen. Lesbian and Gay Kinship: Kath Weston's Families We Choose and Cultural Anthropology. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 1993, vol 18, no. 4, p. 974-980.)

Families We Choose was awarded the Ruth Benedict Prize in 1990, apparently prior to formal publication. The Ruth Benedict Prize is an award from the American Anthropological Association "to acknowledge excellence in a scholarly book written from an anthropological perspective about a lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgendered topic." The award to Families We Choose appears to be the third time the award was given.

Hence, Families We Choose was a significant book both within Weston's field, but also in a broader emerging area of study that we might now label queer studies.

Weston was trained as a cultural anthropologist at Stanford University. She currently teaches at Harvard. Here is her biography from Harvard:

Kath Weston
Kath Weston is a sociocultural anthropologist who serves as Director of Studies for the Committee on Degrees in Women's Studies. She is a member of the National Writers Union and the author of several books, including Families We Choose, Render Me, Gender Me, Long Slow Burn, and the 2002 release Gender in Real Time. Among her forthcoming publications is an essay on the race/class politics of blood transfusion. Professor Weston's latest field research explores surveillance practices and what it means to live poor in a rich country. Her research interests include political economy; "intersections" of gender with race, class, and other aspects of identity; temporality; narrative; kinship; sexuality; methodology; and science metaphors in the social sciences.
One item missing from Weston's biography, I find quite interesting. Weston wrote the introduction to a book that was released in conjunction with a major photographic project in the late 1990s that was called Love Makes a Family. This project gathered hundreds of photos of queer families and put them on the road around the country. In addition, a book was published by the same title. It was a collaborative project of Gigi Kaeser, and Peggy Gillespie. From an activist perspective this project had great cultural significance during the 1990s in building a common language about family in the queer movement and in promoting the further embrace of the word family in the queer community. It also represents to me an interesting intersection of community cultural work and academic theory.

Finally, I turned up one other interesting link with an article from 1994 titled, The Cultural Necessity of Queer Families. It is part of a series called Bad Subjects, (link probably not working) which was an online journal from 1992-2005 with "political education for everyday life". The site spawned a book, but it seems like the original archives are no longer available. A brief review of the journal is here.

In the "Cultural Necessity" article, Jillian Sandell explores some broader implications of Weston's work and places it in a progressive political and economic analysis. She directly takes up Families We Choose about half way through the article - it is worth a quick read for those interested in this book and the issue.

Three Calls for Papers that may be of interest to class members

2006-09-21T22:38:00.000-04:00

Here are three CFPs that may be in the scholarly areas of some class members. If you haven't seen them previously, they may be interesting and useful.

Julie

Proposals are sought for a new edited collection on reading, writing and
Black culture

Black people don't read is a pervasive stereotype illuminating the
fiction that American Black culture maintains an anti-intellectual,
disinterested philosophy towards knowledge, exploration, and curiosity.
Seeking to explore possibilities outside of this stereotype, this
collection of essays will start a long overdue conversation by assembling
an array of articulate, critical, and thoughtful papers about reading,
writing, and the Black community. Contributions may seek to address (but
are by no means limited) to the following topics:

-- Literacy and Black Stardom (i.e. what is the impact of stars such as
Fantasia and R.Kelly's illiteracy)
-- Historical Analyses of Black Intellectualism, Writing, Reading and/or
Literature
-- Urban Fiction (i.e. Zane, Eric Jerome Dickey) and Black Publishers
who solely focus on urban fiction. What is its place in Black literature
if there is one? Is its widespread appeal and success a boon to the
perception of the Black community in literary circles?
-- Contemporary authors of the African diaspora who have widespread appeal
and their impact on Blackness and reading, etc. (i.e. Zadie Smith, Edward
P. Jones, etc.)
-- Oprah Winfrey's impact on literacy and reading
-- Cultural analyses exploring the stereotype of why Black people don't
read. The role reading plays in Black communities, contemporary Black
attitudes towards reading/writing, the role academics plays in Black families, etc.
-- Black Literary Circles and Book Clubs
-- Analyses of the role class plays in literacy, reading, and/or writing
in the Black community
-- LeVar Burton and Reading Rainbow
-- Contemporary Black attitudes to reading, writing, and/or literature
-- Libraries and their role in the Black community

While the vast preponderance of this collection will focus on analytical
essays, I am also looking for a few personal narratives about Black people
and their own experiences with reading, writing and/or literature. If
interested in submitting something to the collection, please send me the
following information to my e-mail (ccy215(at)nyu.edu or cocacy(at)gmail.com)
(replace (at) with @):
a resume or one-page biography, an abstract of your essay topic of no more
than 500 words and your complete contact information. I will be receiving
abstracts until October 31st as this project is moving forward quickly.
Please contact me if you have any additional questions. Thanks so much!

The Queer Collection: Prose and Poetry 2007
Submission Guidelines

What we're looking for: Creative original prose and poetry by and for a gay,
lesbian, bi, transgender, and queer audience. Fiction, nonfiction, and poetry
will be considered. Some previously published material will be considered
including stories, articles, and book excerpts. Author must hold reprint rights to
previously published material.

What we're not looking for: Pornography or graphic erotica.
Submission Deadline: December 31, 2006
Prose Word Count: up to 2000 words
Poetry Word Count: up to 40 lines
Authors may submit up to 2 pieces of prose or 5 poems for consideration.
Selection Process: Each submission will be reviewed and considered based on
creativity, originality, concept, and style. Reading will be continuous and
submissions will be considered as they arrive. Not all works will be accepted.
There is NO Entry Fee or Reading Fee.
MANUSCRIPTS WILL NOT BE RETURNED.
Selected Submissions: Authors will be notified by mail if their submission is
selected for publication. At that time, a contract will be issued along with
further instructions for providing an electronic copy of your work and
headshot
for publication.
Publication Date: The Queer Collection: Prose and Poetry 2007 will have a
publication date of May 2007.
Rights: Authors retain all rights to their work.
Contract: A contract will be issued upon acceptance of an authors work. Books
may be ordered at that time at a
discount, but it is NOT required that authors purchase books.
Payment: Authors whose submissions are selected for publication will receive
two (2) copies of The Queer Collection: Prose and Poetry 2007 as payment for
publication.
The Queer Collection: Prose and Poetry 2007

Submission Guidelines 2
Author Purchased Books Pre-Publication: Authors may purchase additional books
below cover price ($14.97).
These books may be resold at any price the author wishes with the author
retaining all profits from those personal
sales. Additional ordering instructions will arrive with the author contract.
Books ordered before January 31, 2006,
receive the following pre-publication discounts:
Up to 25 books at $10 each
50 books at $9 each ($450)
100 books at $8 each ($800)
200 or more books at $7 each ($1,400)
Author Purchased Books Post-Publication: Authors may purchase additional
books below cover price after
publication as long as supplies last. These books may be resold at any price
the author wishes with the author
retaining all profits from those personal sales. Books ordered after February
1, 2007, receive the following postpublication
discount:
$12 each
Pre- and Post-Publication prices include shipping charges.
Submission Guidelines:
HARD COPIES ON WHITE PAPER ONLY (NO EMAIL SUBMISSIONS).
Cover Page:
TITLE
BYLINE
WORD COUNT
FULL NAME
ADDRESS
PHONE
EMAIL ADDRESS
NOTE IF PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED INCLUDING DATE AND SOURCE.
Body Format:
Header with Last Name, Title, Page Number
1" margins
Double Spaced
12 point Times New Roman or Currier New font
Include your bio (up to 150 words) as the last page of your submission.
Include a Self-Addressed-Stamped Envelope (SASE).
Mail Submissions to:
Gregory A. Kompes, editor
The Queer Collection
Fabulist Flash Publishing
PO Box 570368
Las Vegas, NV 89157

CALL FOR PAPERS:

*Reflections on the N-Word: Black Female Anthology*
*Amie Breeze Harper (Editor)*
*
*URL: http://breezeharper.tripod.com/research/reflections_of_n_word.html

CALL FOR PAPERS:
Deadline: Until enough diverse perspectives are collected

*Purpose of Project*
Through writing and visual art, this project will help to give voice to the
Black identified females who navigate through racism, sexism and classism in
the world. Key topics addressed in this antholgoy will help to understand
the politics of institutionalized racism and the effects of the N-Word:
For MORE details, go to:
http://breezeharper.tripod.com/research/reflections_of_n_word.html
--
Amie Breeze Harper
TIE Masters Student
Harvard University EXT
harper@fas.harvard.edu
RESEARCH URL: http://breezeharper.tripod.com/research
617-877-2096

Chronicles of a Queer API: "Queers" as/is a Noun

2006-09-21T21:27:00.000-04:00

Here's a link to the post Chronicles of a Queer API: "Queers" as/is a noun.

Queering theory: revisiting historical narratives

2006-09-21T01:43:00.000-04:00

Hi All!
I am really sorry if this is late. I had some problems coming up with interesting ideas, so it is still very undigested and raw. Anyways, I hope this will be useful to some discussion.

Queering theory: revisiting historical narratives

In comparing Kath Weston's Gender in Real Time with the collection of texts in Black Queer Studies, one theme seemed to underline both works: the exclusionary processes at work in the construction and formation of identities, be them marginal or not.

In Gender in Real Time, Kath Weston discusses the construction of historical narratives as a process for identity formation which contain an idea of progress. Through the story of her godmother or through the stories of “the Old Butch at the bar”, she discusses how “modern” identities are constructed against temporally (but also spatially) different identities (as old, back then, others). This process of revisiting past identities to create a modern and progressed identity not only oversimplifies, de-complexify and reduces the past to a homogenized unity, but it also denies agency to the portrayed actors (“they did not know better”). This phenomenon is also “inscribed on the body” of older people.

Similarly, E. Patrick Johnson describes the process through which the Queer identity is constructed as white. Although the theorization of Queer is supposed to be based on an inclusive and fluid understanding of gender/sexuality, it nonetheless “failed to address the material realities of gays and lesbian of colors” and to recognized their intellectual, artistic and political contributions. Interestingly, however, Johnson relies precisely on the mechanism described by Weston to do so. He revisits his past and the construction of Queer as “Quare” by his grandmother, and situate it spatially as part of the pre-modern.

Through the specific example of the narrative of the closet, Marlon B. Ross describes similar processes of identity creation, exclusion, historical revision and timespace interactions. “Jeffrey Weeks exemplifies the more typically authoritative and axiomatic reliance on the closet as the vehicle for narrating homosexuality as a necessary progress from dark secrecy to open consciousness.” (p162). In this quotation, just like contemporary lesbians framed their progress against the bodies of other (older) lesbian in time, the narrative of the closet tells the story of the creation of one identity in contrast with other's (and their body). Furthermore, the author discusses the entering of modernity through the narrative of progress and its centrality in the formation of a certain (white, male, U.S., urban middle- to upper-middle-class) identity for homosexuals.

This leap into modernity, again using arguments that might have been inspired by (or might have inspired) Weston, is done by conflating “time onto space”. Citing Weeks, the reframing of the spacial differences (across countries/cultures) of gay/lesbian resistance/oppression in a progress narratives where a country's progress is defined in terms of its transformation into an industrial capitalist economy.

In fact, I though that the similarity of their arguments was striking. Looking at the dates of publication, I could not find certainty as to the chronological order of writings these arguments. Although Weston's book was published in 2002 and the Black Queer Studies anthology was only published in 2005, I could not determine if Ross had presented a paper containing these arguments at the Millennium conference in 2000. Regardless, neither of the authors reference the author, suggesting they might have developed these arguments simultaneously, or were inspired from a third author unknown to me.

The similarity even extend to the use by both authors, Weston and Ross, of the zero symbolism, the former in her “zeroing” or “unsexing” gender (defined as the time of puzzlement in front of ambiguity, before the body is assigned a category), the latter as “ground zero” incorporating the notion of destruction, reducing to nothing

Works cited

Weston, K. (2002). Gender in real time: Power and transience in a visual age. Routledge.

Johnson, E. P. (2005) “ 'Quare' Studies, or (almost) Everything I learned from my grandmother” In E.P. Johnson and M. Henderson Black queer studies: A critical anthology. Duke. 124-157.

Ross, Marlon B. (2005) “ Beyond the Closet as a raceless paradigm” In E.P. Johnson and M. Henderson Black queer studies: A critical anthology. Duke. 161-189.

Queering Queer Representations in Film = The Death of Humanism?

2006-09-20T10:39:00.000-04:00

humanism:

Belief in the mere humanity of Christ
The character or quality of being human; devotion to human interests.
Any system of thought or action which is concerned with merely human interests (as distinguished from divine), or with those of the human race in general (as distinguished from individual); the ‘Religion of Humanity’.
Devotion to those studies which promote human culture; literary culture; esp. the system of the Humanists, the study of the Roman and Greek classics which came into vogue at the Renascence.
Philos. A pragmatic system of thought introduced by F. C. S. Schiller and William James which emphasizes that man can only comprehend and investigate what is with the resources of the human mind, and discounts abstract theorizing; so, more generally, implying that technological advance must be guided by awareness of widely understood human needs.

-Oxford English Dictionary (http://www.dictionary.oed.com)

Also....

term freely applied to a variety of beliefs, methods, and philosophies that place central emphasis on the human realm. Most frequently, however, the term is used with reference to a system of education and mode of inquiry that developed in northern Italy during the 14th century and later spread through Europe and England. Alternately known as “Renaissance humanism,” this program was so broadly and profoundly influential that it is one of the chief reasons why the Renaissance is viewed as a distinct historical period. Indeed, though the word Renaissance is of more recent coinage, the fundamental idea of that period as one of renewal and reawakening is humanistic in origin. But humanism sought its own philosophical bases in far earlier times and, moreover, continued to exert some of its power long after the end of the Renaissance.

-Encyclopædia Britannica Online. (http://www.search.eb.com)

Within Judith Halberstam’s chapter “The Transgender Look” from In a Queer Time and Place, Halberstam discusses the strategies (and creates a mini-timeline) of transgender representation in the films The Crying Game, Boys Don’t Cry, and By Hook or by Crook. She reads The Crying Game as creating “the illusion of alternatives, but return[s] time and again to the stable political format of white patriarchy” (81). Thus, The Crying Game is a disappointment and is located at the beginning of the mini-timeline that Halberstam constructs as the narrative evolution of transgender representation in film. Halberstam follows with an examination of Boys Don’t Cry where she cites the development of a “transgender look” that serves to illuminate “the ideological content of the male and female gazes, and it disarms, temporarily, the compulsory heterosexuality of the romance genre” (86). However, Halberstam feels the “transgender look” is abandoned before the brutal murder of the transgender character Brandon Teena. Halberstam believes that the film’s director, Kimberly Peirce, “suddenly and catastrophically divests her character of his transgender look and converts it to a lesbian and therefore female gaze” (89). What Halberstam reads as “catastrophic,” Peirce considers a groundbreaking character moment where the rape that Brandon’s character experienced places Brandon in a position where he “could not be either Brandon Teena or Teena Brandon and so he becomes truly ‘himself,’ and in that interaction with Lana, Brandon ‘receives love’ for the first time as a human being” (90). The supposition that through an extremely traumatic experience (violent rape) one can become “truly ‘himself’” is problematic and why (among other reasons) Halberstam refers with annoyance (and possibly stronger emotions) to Peirce’s reading of the transition as a reversion “to a tired humanist narrative” (90). Halberstam’s frustration with humanism is later echoed when championing By Hook or by Crook’s decision to be “a beautifully fragmented tale of queer encounter set almost entirely in a queer universe” which she prefers over “a humanist story about gay heroes struggling to be accepted” (94). The film’s directors, Silas Howard and Harry Dodge, sidestep “engaging their viewers at the level of sympathy, pity, or even empathy, and instead they ‘hook’ them with the basic tools of the cinematic apparatus: desire and identification” (Halberstam 93). Halberstam finds Howard and Dodge’s “hook” a whole lot more gratifying than an attempt to explain “why” the transgender characters are the way they are to a mainstream audience. Her gratification is largely due to Howard and Dodge’s avoidance of what she terms “the trap of liberal humanism (making a film about gays who are, in the end, just like everyone else)” since she appears to consider “everyone else” to be the mainstream heterosexual audience and the “human” in humanism to be a heterosexist concept (94).

Kara Keeling’s essay “‘Joining the Lesbians’: Cinematic Regimes of Black Lesbian Visibility” within Johnson and Henderson’s Black Queer Studies anthology similarly combats and interrogates liberal humanism (in the sense that everyone is essentially the same) by its painstaking focus and attention to the problematic construction of the category “black lesbian and gay film” (213). Keeling notes that “both the creation and the scholarly analysis of ‘black lesbian and gay’ film and video have emerged out of an encounter between black cultural politics and the discourses and practices of a visibly white ‘lesbian and gay’ (and, later, ‘queer’) social and political movement that now includes as one of its tentacles the theoretical innovations known as ‘queer theory’” (214). Keeling’s awareness of the ever present heterosexist normative influence that desires to “whiten” and “middle class” narratives in addition to “the violence with which the separation of ‘black’ from ‘gay’ is enacted” draws her into an analysis of the film within a film The Watermelon Woman (217). The Watermelon Woman’s project to self-reflexively construct a documentary within a fictional film that interrogates the composition, construction, and depiction of a “true life” and how that documentary complements the project and needs of its filmmaker drives quite a few nails into the coffin of humanism. That is not to say that The Watermelon Woman completely escapes the “normative” forces at work in advertising. Keeling discusses how the film “the first ‘black lesbian feature film’ to be picked up for distribution” is advertised within the promotional materials “via the logic of an interracial ‘lesbian’ relationship’” (223). Keeling also notes that a similar construction is mirrored within the film which “begins with a shot of ‘Martha Page’ and ‘Faith Richardson’” the film’s historic interracial relationship (223). Keeling notices that the film’s “documentary” uses “a rhetorical move that un-self-consciously reproduces the homophobic discourse through which same-sex erotic attachments are obscured and rendered illegitimate within dominant conceptions of the world” as it discusses its subject Faith Richardson’s and her relationship with her “special friend” June Walker (224). While the film’s “documentary” reinforces homophobia, Keeling reads the “making of the documentary” portion of the film as redemptive since it brings forward the varied components of Faith Richardson’s “life” including the stone butches, special friends, studs, femmes, woman-lovers, and queers that are left out of the film within a film. By “seeing” the invisible people, The Watermelon Woman and Keeling find a space to celebrate what Keeling terms the “multifarious ‘we’” - the variance in the queer community (224).

The failure of humanism concerning queer representations in film appears to be its need to essentialize and reduce the human subject to a concept of “normality” that works against embodying diverse visions of the queer (including but not limited to a queer way of performing masculinities and femininities as well as sexual acts). Should we agree with Halberstam that liberal humanism is a "trap" and with my exaggerated notion that it is dead (at least within the context of being useful to queer theorizing of representation)? Considering Katie's caution concerning the closing of boxes, when and how do we know if a tool has lost its usefulness?

queers and theory chronology in process

2006-09-18T13:35:00.000-04:00

Well, let's work on a chronology that puts our materials and others in chronological perspective. So that when we read Cathy's Cohen's 1997 essay we can see what "queer" meant then and up to then from that perspective, and do some comparisons of various histories, partial, perspectival, layered among locals and globals.

So we begin with some bare minimal markers, taken from bits in Black Queer Studies, to be continuously revised over the semester. This is no wikki (and do check out everything), but contributors can edit posts, so go ahead and edit this one as you see something to go on it.

CHRONOLOGY

1905 -- Freud's term "polymorphous perversity" (cf. gayhistory.com)

1950s--Weston's dating of "Old Butch" (p. 114)

1959 -- Norman O. Brown's Life Against Death (called for return to polymorphous perversity)

1970s--Westons dating of androgynous or fluid identities (p. 114)

1980s and 1990s--Weston's dating of distinction between "new" and "classic" butch/femme (p. 114)

1989 -- Two Nice Girls rhyme beer and queer in their iconic song I spent my last $10.00 on birth control and beer.

March 1990 -- Queer Nation founded in New York City

1990 -- de Lauretis conference "Queer Theory" UCSC ( cf. Halperin)

1997 -- publication of book Feminism Meets Queer Theory (concerned that the feminism of queer theory is unrecognizable to feminists)

1997 -- Cohen's "Punks" in GLQ (calls for intersectional analysis of Queer, not describing herself with this term)

2000 -- Apr. 7-9 -- Black Queer Studies in the Millennium conference at Chapel Hill

2003--GLQ special issue "Queer Theory Meets Disability Studies"

2005 -- publication of book Black Queer Studies

the flexible knowledge of it

2006-09-12T10:40:00.000-04:00

Queer theory is some kind of flexible knowledge I think. But the very point of calling such knowledges "flexible" is to acknowledge that these in process new globalizing knowledges are shaped by contemporary politics in mixtures of the neoliberal and the possibly liberatory. The negative edge is what Duggan calls "homonormativity." Well, there are more possible negatives than that, and some mixtures that we can't figure out, and which, while perhaps dangerous, may also be sites of new liberatory possibilities too. But how do we know these when we see them?

Maybe that's one of my concerns in this class: how do we know a liberatory possibility when we see one? Or, maybe even better, do we know for sure what we should debunk and exclude on the first go round? Might we mistakenly foreclose something liberatory in our zeal to show how good we are, that we have the right kind of allies, that we know the right catch phrases and formulas for this and that anti-sexist, or anti-racist or anti-phobic practice?

Might we mistake real allies for enemies? This is the problem of all movements who swing into sectarianism: you start making enemies out of your friends.

And it is the problem of bad critique: assuming that denaturalizing requires deauthorizing, or to put it another way, that a good critique means throwing the thing critiqued out the window, and the folks critiqued too.

No room for mistakes there! No room for something new that you don't recognize there!

Here is a link to my own blog's discussion of why I'm worrying about "interdisciplines" now. Notice how much I wanted once to consider them benign, am now wondering about throwing them out, and how laden these possibilities are for me. What to do when you denaturalize something?

Here's the blog link:

flexible knowledges: interdisciplines and the anti-disciplinary

My Response: Why Queers and Theory rather than Queer Theory?

2006-09-11T20:57:00.000-04:00

Perhaps because the ampersand is essential to any endeavor that is feminist. As essential, perhaps, as the hyphen. Or perhaps I should say that the ampersand and the hyphen have been constructed into a central position in feminist discourse. Where would we be without hyphenated identities? Without identities that are multiplicitous? Without identities that are intensive in thought, definitions, labels, and language? How could we speak as feminists, as queers, as subversives without the shifty characters of the keyboard? How could we speak without identities and ideas that require grammatical parsing and detailed explanation?

I don’t believe, though, that “Queers and Theory” as a title is an homage to how we construct our language—as much as I might like it to be from the perspective of my disciple. Rather, I think that the two words are unhinged, in part, for the epistemological reasons—so that we can understand and access the origin of each and then explore how they are and can be correlated. “Queer Theory” is unhinged into queers and theory not only to express and contain a multiplicity of both, but also to emphasize that there are different things with which each can be coupled, or tripled, or multiply partnered. “Queer Theory” suggests a point, a location of a particular way of thinking, or perhaps a line that connects two points, “queer” and “theory,” but the class, “Queers and Theory” is about more than points or lines; it is about planes or more accurately systems of thinking – a move from base ten to base six or base nine.

Let me begin with theory. I was struck by the definition of theory as “a place to sit” and consulted American Heritage. After the scientific definition, I learn that theory is “the branch of a science or art consisting of its explanatory statements, accepted principles, and methods of analysis, as opposed to practice.” It is that binary that trips me; perhaps because for the past fifteen years as I’ve been embroiled not in theory but in practice, I’ve thought of them not oppositionally but in a corollary relationship. Practice, or praxis, the “practical application or exercise of a branch of learning” (American Heritage.) Perhaps in daily use there is no difference between a corollary and an antonym, but it feels urgently important to me despite that the dictionary seems to indicate that theory and praxis are the antithesis of one another, that they are antonyms, but I don’t experience them that way. I think that there is theory and praxis is the necessary corollary, the natural consequence or result, although the equation would be punctuated by an equal sign and therefore could work exactly in reverse: praxis exists with its necessary corollary, theory. This explanation illuminates, in part, the significance of this decoupling of “Queer Theory” into “Queers and Theory.” There is something important in understanding the language with certain precision, which I think has a role in illuminating both elements of the course – queer and theory.

I was struck by Weston’s careful attention to using the words, space and time and her melding of the two into spacetime. Her construction in conjunction with the course title seems to be a window into the attention to language and constructs that we use to talk about knowledge and human experience in the creation and communication of theory. That for me is an essential element of why the words are decoupled for the course—to bring attention to the two words individually and then explore how and why and where they work together.

Let me think about queer or Queer. One of the areas that I am interested in exploring further is the relationship between Queers, as a group of people who have a set of behaviors, practices, and personal identity that are gay, lesbian, bisexual, and/or transgender, and queering, as a verb, to make different from the norm. I’m interested in both parts of speech and I think that the distinction is one of the areas that the title, “Queers and Theory” opens. “Queer Theory” seems to obscure the distinction – as though an act of queering can be done without relation or regard to the group of people who created and identify with the word, Queer. My investment in praxis, from either way the equation is read – theory informing practice or practice informed by theory – is probably what interests me intensely in that question.

The unhinging of the two words also opens the possibilities of understanding theory from a variety of disciplines with a queer lens. “Queer Theory” suggests that there is an independent discipline of, say Queer Studies, and that this is the theoretical basis for it, whereas “Queers and Theory,” implies that there are a variety of disciplines that have queer engagement. This cross-disciplinary engagement is evident not only in the description of the course, but also in the selection of the texts for the course. “Queers and Theory” even opens the possibilities for anti-disciplinary or post-disciplinary dialogue which “Queer Theory” seems to eschew.

What am I most likely to use? I am most likely to use the language formulation that I understand and makes sense to me; I am most likely to use the combination that describes what I believe and how I understand things at the time. I want to use language with accuracy and precision, and also language that is accessible to people outside of the academy; language that honors my commitment to use and create knowledge that has meaning and applications to people in the world concerned about queer liberation and justice.

Queer fish in the Potomac River

2006-09-07T10:19:00.000-04:00

Potomac 'intersex' fish worry scientists

Scientists say abnormal "intersex" fish, with both male and female characteristics, have been discovered in the Potomac River and its tributaries across the Capitol Region, raising questions about how contaminants are affecting millions of people who drink tap water there.

"I don't know, and I don't think anybody knows, the answer to that question right now: Is the effect in the fish transferable to humans?" said Thomas Jacobus, general manager of the Washington Aqueduct, which filters river water for residents to drink in the District of Columbia, Arlington, Va., and Falls Church, Va.

So far, there is no evidence that tap water from the Potomac is unsafe to drink, according to Jacobus and officials at other area utilities.

Humans should be less susceptible to pollutants than fish because of their larger bodies and different hormone systems. And unlike fish, their bodies are not constantly exposed to the water.

The worrisome fish were first found in a West Virginia stream in 2003. Now, scientists are finding male smallmouth and largemouth bass with immature eggs in their sex organs at testing sites dotting the region.

Last month's testing at three tributaries emptying into the Potomac revealed that more than 80 percent of all male smallmouth bass found were growing eggs, according to Vicki S. Blazer, a fish pathologist with the U.S. Geological Survey.

At a testing site in Washington, seven of 13 male largemouth bass showed some kind of unusual feminine characteristic, Blazer told The Washington Post. Six of the seven tested positive for a protein used to produce eggs and three actually carried eggs.

Although scientists have not identified the source or sources of the problem, the results appear to suggest that the Potomac River and its tributaries have a problem with so-called "endocrine disrupters," which can tamper with natural chemical signals.

In the past 10 years, pollutants mimicking hormones have raised alarms around the world as alligators, frogs, polar bears and other animals have developed abnormalities.

Scientists have identified a large number of pollutants that could be to blame — including human estrogen from processed sewage, animal estrogen from farm manure, certain pesticides and soap additives.

The discovery in Minnesota over a decade ago of frogs with extra legs, ovaries in males and other deformities was considered an early warning sign of environmental distress linked to farm chemicals.

Congress in 1996 required the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to study how the pollutants may affect human health. A decade later, however, officials said the agency hasn't tested any chemical, the Post reported.

"I would have hoped it would have been faster, but this is a very difficult program," said Clifford Gabriel, director of the EPA's Office of Science Coordination and Policy.

Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.

Why Queers and Theory rather than Queer Theory?

2006-09-01T09:39:00.000-04:00

What work does the phrase "Queers and Theory" do that "Queer Theory" can't?

Do they refer to the same thing? or many different things? how can you tell? where do you find them?

Which are you more likely to use and why?

What do you think is the most important difference between them? or is there any?

Read the syllabus carefully: why do you think I chose one rather than the other? How do my reasons compare to yours?

Your thoughts and speculations are requested over the next two weeks, posted before our next class meeting.

You can comment on this post, or create your own post, or comment on those other posts. Use this as an opportunity to become familiar with our class blog.

And maybe, to create your own!

You can post comments from the blog display, links at the end of each post.

Or you can post yourself from the Dashboard. You get there by going to http://www.blogger.com and logging in.

Maybe try one of each. Or begin your own blog and play around with settings and templates and checking out Bloggers various kinds of help.

See you! Katie

willfully eccentric modes of being

2006-08-27T12:40:00.000-04:00

Women's Studies 698B / Katie King / Fall 2006 / class Th 3-5:30 pm in WMST conf. rm.
Katie's office and tel.: 2101F Woods Hall; 301.405.7294 (voice mail)
Katie’s office hours TTh 10-Noon & some Weds 10-Noon by apt.
Katie's email: katking AT umd DOT edu (the best way to contact me)
Katie's home page (messages, syllabi, etc.): http://www.womensstudies.umd.edu/wmstfac/kking/
Class Blog at: http://theoryqueers.blogspot.com/
Post to class blog from dashboard at: http://www.blogger.com/
send class coursemail to: wmst698b-0101-fall06@coursemail.umd.edu
syllabus online at: http://www.womensstudies.umd.edu/wmstfac/kking/teaching/698B/698Bsyl.html

Queers and Theory:
willfully eccentric modes of being

It was Halberstam's phrase, "willfully eccentric modes of being," that inspired me to uncouple queer theory. Trying to alter and recombine knowledges – as flexible knowledges, trans knowledges, reenactments, academic capitalism, transnational feminisms, multiple cultural anti-racisms, generational interests – assemblages of each and all these together, this is the context of interests that motivates me to offer this class now.

Why Queers and Theory rather than Queer Theory? What do Queers have to do with queering knowledge today? Transnational, transgenic, trans specific, transdisciplinary, transing Queer: what happens when the default is transformation? Multicultural, anti-racist, identity politics, racialization, black queer, queer latin, transfeminist, anti-foundational, naturecultures: what happens when we seek the contact zones?

What sorts of contrasts and interactions can we perceive among interdisciplines in academic capitalism and emergent, self-organizing flexible knowledges under globalization? What roles do generational knowledges, practices and interests have with and against each other, especially in the academy? Where do academic texts, persons, publication, pedagogy, professionalization figure in how you read, use, and create queer knowledges?

In a world where flexible knowledges challenge the territory of the academy as well as territories within the academy, encountering, reading and queering the unfamiliar matters. Queer flexible knowledges respond to changing conditions of knowledge production, to increasingly distributed locations and elements of knowledge production, and to a variety of new technologies, instrumental, cognitive, comparative.

Blogging is one writing technology we will mobilize in this class, engaging one contact zone in new media activisms. We will have a class blog as well as use course mail, so be sure you have access to internet resources, perhaps in labs across campus. Come and talk to me if you are having difficulties getting access to these resources. Plan on visiting our bog and reading email at the very least twice a week, and then not just a few minutes before class.

Folks with disabilities or who need time from class to observe religious holidays, please contact Katie ASAP to make any arrangements necessary. All students, please do come to office hours to just talk. I want to get to know you all personally!

Required Readings Ordered (or online):
These are required READINGS. You do have to read them. You do not have to BUY them. I will put them on reserve at McKeldin. Borrow. Share. Whatever. However, do not wait til the last minute (the night before) to discover one is not available on reserve, etc. Be sure you have secured access LONG before we are going to read it in class. In class we will discuss how to strategize completing such intensive reading requirements.

I have ordered all from Vertigo Books because I want to support the bookstore and help it to survive in College Park! It is on the corner between HW 1 and Knox Rd, across the street from the Cornerstone restaurant: 7346 Baltimore Avenue. The telephone number there is: 301.779.9300. But you need to note that Vertigo is a small independent bookstore and thus cannot issue refunds or accept returns in the same manner as the campus Barnes & Noble. Their small staff and limited resources simply will not allow them to do so. Supporting them, however, works to counter the large economic consolidations of the publishing industry. They do not buy back books or make refunds. Returns will receive store credit. Any returns must be made within 15 days of purchase. Returned books must be in saleable condition with proof of purchase.

Weston, K. (2002). Gender in real time: Power and transience in a visual age. Routledge.
Halberstam, J. (2005). In a queer time and place: Transgender bodies, subcultural lives. NYU.
Johnson, E. P., & Henderson, M. (2005). Black queer studies: A critical anthology. Duke.

Ferguson, R. A. (2004). Aberrations in black: Toward a queer of color critique. Minnesota.
Roughgarden, J. (2004). Evolution's rainbow: Diversity, gender, and sexuality in nature and people. California.
Haraway, D. (2003). The companion species manifesto: Dogs, people, and significant otherness. Prickly Paradigm.

Berry, C., Martin, F., & Yue, A. (Eds.). (2003). Mobile cultures: New media in queer Asia. Duke.
Cvetkovich, A. (2003). An archive of feelings: Trauma, sexuality, and lesbian public cultures. Duke.
Rodriguez, J. M. (2003). Queer Latinidad: Identity practices, discursive spaces. NYU.

Eng, D. L., Halberstam, J., & Muñoz, J. E. (2005). What's queer about queer studies now? Special issue of Social Text 84-85, 23(3-4).
Namaste, V. K. (2005). Sex change, social change : Reflections on identity, institutions, and imperialism. Women's.
Gopinath, G. (2005). Impossible desires: Queer diasporas and South Asian public cultures. Duke.

Optional additions:

Chauncey, G. (2004). Why marriage? The history shaping today's debate over gay equality. Basic.
Delany, S. R. (1999). Times square red, times square blue. NYU.

ADVICES AND QUERIES FOR THOSE IN (INTER)INTERDISCIPLINARY TRAVEL:
(adapted from my book manuscript Speaking with Things):

Please read/hear this in a jocular, joking mode! A little cajoling sarcasm goes a long way!

• Do not just skip the parts of any readings that are not about your field or detailed interests. Cultivate a curiosity in these "other" details, so that you can consider actively what analogues this material and these approaches have for your own fields and your own projects. (You can skim them quickly the first time if you truly will come back and reread them later. And of course, you can read books in any order you like.)

• When examples of larger points are illustrated by materials outside your experience and concerns, take your longing for examples from your own forms of expertise, and create them for the text yourself. Notice what conceptual changes you have to perform to create such examples. Use this very defamiliarization to explore the epistemologies you have noticed before and not noticed before.

• Do not allow the "boring" element of projects in which you have not yet cultivated an interest to stop your engagements here. If you find them "boring," figure out why. In whose interest is it that you find such things boring? Activate your curiosity. Create connections from your projects to these other projects. Consider which of your assumptions about these communities of practice are violated by this new information. Labor to build rich, appreciative understandings of alternate projects and practices. What does it take to get you to do this work? What new pleasures do you discover in it? What reciprocal work do you think you could ask others to do to value your projects?

• Notice which materials seem obvious and perhaps trivial to you. For whom are they not obvious and trivial? Which ideas have traveled from your communities of practice here, and how do they look now? How altered have they become? Do they seem "wrong" or too simple to you and why? What standards of evidence and argument do and do not mesh across these travels? How do your forms of expertise constrain the connections that matter to you? What would it take to enlarge them? What sociologies of knowledge could be created about the intellectual communities of practice you inhabit, and how does getting a taste of them as explained to outsiders reveal features of which you were unaware?

We take for granted that the materials we read (and we ourselves) imperfectly practice, understand and describe the ecologies of knowledge that feminists aspire to live within. So the central task of the course is not a critique of these efforts for, say, what they leave out, although we might indeed need to analyze this. Rather, we want to envision enlivening these ecologies of knowledge, recognizing but not being deterred by our and their limitations.

reading/writing engagements for the course:

You’ll be asked to do three kinds of engaged writing in addition to regular reading assignments:

• every few weeks as assigned you should bring to class to share 1-2 pgs. of crafted writing on that week’s readings, already posted to our class blog, in order to focus your investments in our shared class conversation.

Such "crafted" writing is not meant to be impressionistic freewriting, or journal style writing. It should be drafted at least twice and should make a very brief argument in an area of interest concerning the reading you would like to suggest the whole class engage. However, the amount of time you spend on it shouldn't be onerous either. Think of it as a quick turnaround: very limited and brief, but intended to share your professional acumen. You’ll be reading these with each other: bring hard copies to share in class, and be sure to post by class time to our blog.

• on all the weeks you are not assigned to post on the blog, you should instead comment on that week's posts. In other words, by the time of the following class you should have commented on posts from the previous class, making your own retrospective connections among the posts, class discussion and your own analysis.

Do make a commitment to both this writing / deliberation and to sharing work and comments. We are reflectingly creating a community in which the positions of writers, readers, interpreters move around freely and involve teaching ourselves and each other, in comparison and contrast with intellectual communities we shall be examining.

This means you need to make sure you regularly check our blog. You'll need to find a rhythm here that stimulates your critical imagination without pressing you down with too much work. Finding such balance is essential in professional life, and is always difficult to achieve. Consider this "practice" in the Buddhist sense: something you do in order to learn what doing it has to teach you. Let us make "practice" in this sense a continuing topic of conversation, tying it into our other class concerns.

• the professional project we shall all be collaborating to create will be a class anthology of original writings on queers and theory to be displayed on the web, in association with our blog.

This is both an individual and a collaborative project in which your own contributions are self-consciously interconnected with those of your classmates. Getting to know each other is both a result of doing this and a necessary condition of getting it done! Blog neophytes (of which I am myself one) and blog experts and addicts, we will all together produce something about our work in the class to share. Plans will begin around the middle of September. Until then, think about what is possible and what you'd like to do.

Reading & Discussion Schedule

REMEMBER each week either to bring to class 1-2 pg. of crafted writing to share already posted one to the blog by class time, or to have made your retrospective comments on the previous week's posts. As you prepare for our online class anthology, you can also share bits of what you are preparing to create.
IF YOU HAVE A LAPTOP WITH WIRELESS CAPACITY feel free to bring it to class. The building has a wireless connection, and reference to our blog and other internet resources might be useful during class.

Thursday, 31 August – Welcome to the class! Introduction to contact zones
• emailed before class: Haraway's "Training in the Contact Zone"
• to read in class: "Congenital Agenesis of Gender Ideation" (handout)
Queering of all kinds entails willful eccentricity. Putting species together that others don't think go together. Psyching out the unfamiliar. Training in the contact zone. Expanding modes of being. Estranging assemblages. And then always, somehow also longing to belong.

Our reading and writing schedules will be organized by contact zones: spacetime; re-embodiments; media, new media activisms; academic capitalism. We will train in each contact zone with the help of three texts, each time over the course of three weeks. Class discussion on the first week of each contact zone will psych out all three texts simultaneously. If you could read all three for that first class, great. But more likely, you will need to strategically read around in all three texts, and try to put them together in some interesting way. Reading bits, skimming, choosing what to read closely, and other strategies will make this possible. On the other two weeks you will choose two texts each time to connect. We will make agreements on the first week who will connect which texts for the next two weeks, such that the class as a whole will cover all three, even if individuals read more carefully in two out of three.

Thursday, 7 September – NO CLASS; Transition Day for WMST Exams

Spacetime:
• Weston, Gender in Real Time
• Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place
• Johnson, Black Queer Studies

Weston introduces the notion of spacetime. Halberstam trains us in the scales in which her queer times and places become particular. Johnson inhabits and creates a collaborative political project that animates an academic spacetime and offers a range of allies.

Thursday, 14 September –
Thursday, 21 September –
Thursday, 28 September –

Re-embodiments:
• Ferquson, Aberrations in Black
• Roughgarden, Evolution's Rainbow
• Haraway, Companion Species

All three of these books in their different, sometimes unfamiliar locations, share shifts in disciplined and politicized knowledges. Each is a conscious intervention in a specific set of local knowledges with implications intended globally.

Thursday, 5 October –
Thursday, 12 October –
Thursday, 19 October –

Media, new media activisms:
• Berry, New Media in Queer Asia
• Rodriquez, Queer Latinidad
• Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings

Media, new media, activisms intertwine in each of these books in unexpected ways. In venues of these intertwined media, transnationalisms, identity politics and gender studies are also rearranged and queered.

Thursday, 26 October –
Thursday, 2 November –
Thursday, 9 November –

Academic capitalisms:
• Social Text special issue, What's Queer about Queer Studies Now?
• Namaste, Sex Change, Social Change
• Gopinath, Impossible Desires

Apparatuses and assemblages within and around academic capitalism are subjected to scrutiny in each of these texts. Each is also itself an example of a different accommodation/intervention into academic capitalism. Transformation has to be taken for granted here, and stabilities are labored processes.

Thursday, 16 November –
Thursday, 23 November – NO CLASS, THANKSGIVING
Thursday, 30 November –
Thursday, 7 December –

transition day off

2006-08-26T11:35:00.000-04:00

Our class will not meet on 7 Sept. We will meet for the first day 31 Aug and we will pick up 14 Sept for regular meetings.

Our women's studies second year students are picking up their general exams (our comps) on 8 September, with four days to complete it. I'm sure they will be in shell shock on the 7th and the 14th both too, but I decided that I would call the day before they pick up their exams transition day for our class and give everyone the day "off." Whatever that means.

So, decide what you are going to do with that day. I suggest that if you are not taking your comps yourself, or other similar high intensity event, that you use this bit of the day to cool out, read, or check out the queer scene in the area. Feel free to blog about anything amazing that comes up as a result!

And good luck and great thoughts wmst gen examinees! I know you will be brilliant!

reflection cycles

2006-08-20T11:17:00.000-04:00

After talking to some other folks who use blogs in grad classes, I've decided to make all class members team members so that you can post to the blog.

Usually in grad classes I have everyone write every week on the readings. But I'm rethinking that for the blog use. I think I'll have 3 people each week write up their VERY BRIEF argument about the readings for the class (about 1 page) and post them to the blog. Everyone else should comment on those posts by the next class, probably connecting them to the discussion we've had in class. The blog posts should be up by class time, and posters should be prepared to talk about their posts.

Usually I have everyone post everything on WebCT. So, this is less work than I usually require I guess. We'll see how it works out. We can change things around if we need to.

Anyway, this means I'll be sending you an invitation to become a team member on blogger. You need to accept the invitation since you will need to post in order to participate in the class.

When you have accepted the invitation, I'd appreciate your adding a comment to this post, saying you are ready!

I think you will be automatically added, with your profile name, to a contributors list on the blog proper. I think the section About Me will then cease to be about me, and will be replaced by that list.

If you have another profile on Blogger you may wish to create a separate profile for this particular use. This is at your own discretion.

Hope this will be as fun as one can expect a grad course to be! Katie

how do queers do the personal? when is coming out queer? when isn't it?

2006-08-18T12:06:00.000-04:00

When did "the personal is political" become essentialist?

When did "coming out" become old gay?

Or are they? Or where are they? Or for whom are they?

Or do "the personal is political" and "coming out" stay vital, and with new meanings?

If so, how?

Or are there better ways to talk about this category of political issues?

Please weigh in.

-- Katie

are you already blogging?

2006-08-16T09:41:00.000-04:00

Let us know which blogs you are writing and reading, so we can start making connections.

I have a blog with a friend I went to graduate school with, called Flexible Knowledges.

There are links from that blog to other blogs I like to check out myself.

Another blog I belong to is trying to start itself up from folks who were at the Global Queeries conference in Canada last May.

I can add as team members anyone in the class who would like to post to this blog, rather than make comments. You can all make comments already.

Best wishes, Katie

how to blog?

2006-08-10T12:43:00.000-04:00

Suggestions about how to use this blog for the class are solicited here!

Let me know your experiences with class blogs and ideas about what we can do.

Caught between "learning management systems" -- webCT and blackboard -- I decided to try this instead. What do you think?

contact zones

2006-08-10T12:29:00.000-04:00

Queers and Theory: willfully eccentric modes of being.

Halberstam's phrase here inspired me to uncouple queer theory.

Trying to recombine knowledges -- flexible knowledges, trans knowledges, reenactments, academic capitalism, transnational feminisms, multiple cultural anti-racisms, generational interests -- this is the context of interests that motivates me to offer this class now.

This is the book list shaped by some contact zones:

Spacetime:
Weston, Gender in Real Time;
Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place;
Johnson, Black Queer Studies

Re-embodiments:
Ferquson, Aberrations in Black;
Roughgarden, Evolution's Rainbow;
Haraway, Companion Species

Media, new media activisms:
Berry, New Media in Queer Asia;
Rodriquez, Queer Latinidad;
Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings

Academic capitalisms:
Social Text special issue, What's Queer about Queer Studies Now?,
Namaste, Sex Change, Social Change;
Gopinath, Impossible Desires