SWMS560/Class Notes

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Contents

First class, 11 Jan 2010

Some survey

  • Emphasis on topics "animated the field right now"

Overview of the books

  • Alexander, dense written theory, centering spirituality w/in transnational framework
  • Berlant, question of "affect"
  • Butler, stakes out the territory to bring critique of psychoanalysis
  • Freud, using psychoanalysis for developing a symbolic language
    • Often replaced by theoretical models like Foucault "bio-power"
  • Haraway, "best of ... animal studies" debates, offers places to think human phenomena thru the culture of animals, arrogance of human-centricity
  • Hartman, a memoir of disappointment, loss, disconnections, an "anti-Roots", the memory of slavery, af-am subjectivity in africa, productive/provocative for feminist theory
  • Mahmood, changing thinking around ethnography/anthro
    • Read alongside Spivak
  • Povinelli, (might only read half), indiginaity, living and working with aboriginal people in Australia, investigates her queerness in this work (second half of the book compares the aboriginal community with the radical faeries in the US)
  • Serano, trans femininities, written in popular mode but with strong theoretical context, filling a gap in study of queer femininity - "resistant, conservative, and otherwise"

Assignments

  • 5pp paper before Week 13
    • Establishing a working relationship
    • Responding to one of the readings or a discussion
  • Presenting in a class
  • Met with prof to discuss seminar paper topic before Week 13
  • Seminar paper: ~15pp
  • Post something on Blackboard

Unbecoming

Halberstam, Notes on failure

  • Stupidity
  • Forgetfulness
  • Failure
  • Feminist theory of "unbecoming"
    • Resisting liberal tendency of "doing", "being"
    • What kind of feminism comes from unbeing, undoing?
    • (As opposed to the emphasis on "agency" in Western liberal feminist trad.)

To "break" w hegemony

  • Is it a shift?
  • Or an undoing?

Sexuality in the realm of "mastery"

  • disregards the "not being" of sexualities in the "death drive"
  • re: Tim Dean's work on barebacks
    • Foucalt, desire colonizes the forbidden
  • Sex / death drive, "woman" at the center

Past approaches to feminism in "doing", "becoming"

  • Have occasionally led to stable identities that do not "do the work" we hoped they would

Returning to core women's studies / Freud's question

  • Why would women want to be a woman in a socio-cultural context in which they are subordinate to men?
  • Asks for a theory of masocism
  • re: Yoko Ono, "Cut"
    • Anti-feminist act?
    • What kind of feminism is it?
    • Defies the productive logic of feminism

"Places where identities need to collapse"

Unknowing

Masocism

  • A will not to know
  • A will not to be

Epistomology of feminism

  • Invested in "unknowing"
  • Committed to form of unknowing (that women represent)
  • Anti-Enlightenment discourse

Transitivity

Versions of transitivity

  • Neither movement from two solid places
  • Nor transcendence
  • No "before/after", "here/there"
  • "Unmapping a route"

Not Deleuze-ian

  • Though they might seem as much
  • Rather collected from "women of color feminism"
  • Not taken up by the productive feminism of self-making, identity-construction

Week 3, Psychoanalysis via Freud/Lacan

Utility in talking about bodies, desire

  • Even in Deleuze mode, engagement w psychoanalysis

Why is Freud left out of so many syllabi?

  • Even in queer/gender studies?
  • Especially considering the presence of psychoanalysis in so much of the core theory
    • Even in opposition

Asking questions about why someone would want to take on the role of women, given their subordinate role...

If Freud successfully named, identified domination in the culture, why did he not join a struggle for liberation?

"People speak through them"

  • Marx
  • Freud
  • Cultural circulation as surname
  • Texts with which people create and communicate sense and meaning

Death drive in theory (and Lacan's insistence upon it)

  • Tendency to write affirmatively in a mode of "becoming"
  • Rather than write a negation of self, "unbecoming"
  • Lacan insists on the centrality of this type of Freud
    • Lacan model of Freud as anti-humanist discourse
    • Psychoanalysis indicates that one is always "in pieces"
  • Is this a (pathologically?) pessimistic approach?
    • Re: Bright Side, "sunny-ness in the face of apocalypse"
    • Endless optimism
  • Lacan responding to an "ideology of positivity"

Hot topics in these Freud essays

Infantile amnesia

  • No memory of socialization
  • You are not yet contributing back to the culture, social reality (in the Berger sense)
  • "Unconscious begins full; conscious begins empty"
  • Popular resonances
    • Component to the "memoir craze"
    • Fifty first data, account by others:brainwashing, account by self:remembering
    • Process of forgetting and remembering through the assertions of others

The "Big Other"

  • System of meaning that you did not create but which created you
  • Mother, culture
  • From which,
    • Needs, satisfiable
    • Transformed into desires, are not
      • Desire is to "always be wanting"
  • Fall into language
    • Sometimes twins create their own private languages
    • Are these imposed?
    • Or are they adopted, incorporated?
    • Language carries with it meanings, significance from years of acretion
  • Social pressures to pass through the conventional stages toward adulthood (discovery of pleasure zones)
    • Reproduces the pre-existing social realities
    • Nuclear family stays the same despite 20th century upsets
    • Nuclear/extended families descended of slave violence function differently

Neuroses(f) and perversion(m)

  • Gender-coded artifacts of the "rocky road" from baby to adult normativity
  • Gendered because of the gendered nature of socialization
    • Conventionally, masculine figures will pro-actively pursue their non-normative desires (perversions)
  • Beyond gender, what other structures encourage/discourage pursuit of "perverse" desires?
    • Special snowflake education

Mascochism as it relates to women (165)

Role of "love" in Lacan

Misrecognition

  • "Mirror stage", recognition as self apart from mom's body
    • Even phenomenology, subject realizes its isolation, alone, detachment
    • Euphoric: liberation, appear more organized than you feel
    • Tragic: mirror is a misrecognition of self as "whole"
  • Connect to neurological "mirror neurons"
    • Empathetic neurology
    • Identification

Use of Aristophanes myth in Freud and Lacan

Creatures with pairs of genitalia

  • Split in half
  • Searching for its others

Human sense of a "lack"

  • That joining with another person will fulfill a need, a lack

Sexual union (Leo Bersani)

  • Occasionally the moment when you feel most alone
  • Lost within one's own desires, sensation

The concept of "suture"

  • Patching, covering over wounds
  • Believing in unity

Significance of splitting (Spaltung)? (287)

  • Crying babies crying beyond the fulfillment of need
  • Satisfaction yields further desire
  • Persistent sense of wanting
  • Desire linked inextricable to the drive toward death
  • Distinction between emotional, physiological needs/desires

Freud's genital schema

Child looks at the world and sees two groups with different power

  • Only evident differences are anatomical
  • Freud suggests 'penis envy'
    • A "mistake" in bio-social causality
  • Freud and Lacan see this as a "lack"
    • Boy-child sees women as signifiers of castration
    • Butler rejects phallic power as male
      • Female embodiment of phallus demonstrates it as symbolic
      • To embody lack in male visualizes the "fear" and "work" at play in socialization, circulation of phallus, phallic power

Masochism

  • "Aggressively" taking pleasure in "being nothing"
  • "Making the most of it" rather than resisting and "becoming neurotic"

Freud / psychoanalysis cultural circulation

  • Aesthetic details: couch, accent, beard, spectacles
  • Slippage between surname, artifact, theory
  • Popular relevance, resonance
  • Audience? General readership.
    • Demand to legitimize his own project out of concern for "decency"
    • Strategy: write it into science
      • Objective, universal
  • Sense that adulthood is subordinant to the experiences of childhood
  • Anti-rational project?
    • Human scripted by irrationality as much as rational

Jump offs

  • Zizek documentary, "a Lacanian of the highest order"
    • Evidence the right-wing relevance of Lacan
  • Bright Side
  • No Future, "unreconstructed structuralism"
  • Giving an account of oneself, re: Butler's new book
  • Fifty-first date, scenario of amnesia and socialization
  • Is kinship always heterosexual, re: Butler, French society
    • Is there any reason that a woman can't be in the position of the father?
    • Mother figure has thornier tie to biology
  • David Ang on transnational adoption
    • Why doesn't kinship make a post-structural leap beyond the strict roles of Levi-Strauss?
  • Desires, Tim Dean, cruising, anonymous sex
  • Black skins, white masks

1 Feb, Butler, more on psychoanalysis, drag balls

Usefulness of psychoanalysis: following up on Freud

Why Freudian psychoanalysis?

  • Most complete (available) vocabulary/symbolic language for discussing desire, gender, sexuality
    • Within the state, the family
  • "Saturates the culture that we live in"
  • Sexuality as a map, result of, your "downloading" of the culture
    • Downloading through language (writ large)
    • "Downloading" seems a bad metaphor here, implies a location into which the data is stored
  • Guidebook to the internal landscape: "pattern of being that is you"
  • Despite projects to create alternatives (Deleuze), we seem to return to Freud's product
  • Non-judgemental, non-predictive
    • Especially important given the time frame, historical origin
    • Green, "Sissy at 5, homosexual at 20"
    • Freud reads backwards
  • Freud's point, rarely do people arrive "successfully" at adult norm sexuality
    • Everyone gets fucked up, develops some non-normative characteristics
    • Explanation for why you never arrive at norm despite a culture that demands you do

"Self from within the self"

  • If the values one is trying to resist emerge "volcanically" from within,
    • they are not simple to turn away
  • Self is in constant state of reflection with ideology, culture, narratives from others
  • Self is in fragments, decomposed
    • Riven by drives, instincts

Sexuality of "un-doing"

  • Grappling with "fact of mortality"
  • Forward momentum eventually meets the inevitable extinction
  • Freud asks how the human reconciles this destiny?
  • Masochism, self that desires self-destruction, unbecoming, unraveling
    • Bersani builds "antisocial theory of the self" from this idea
      • Anti-redemptive drive
      • Sex to isolate, facing death and mortality, discontrol, disorganization of the body, "flooding"
      • Aversion to community and interpersonal connections
  • Many feminists see masochism as evidence of Freudian misogyny

Asexual undoing

  • Does engaging in sexual practice exclude one from sexual doing and undoing?
  • How might asexual identity rely on sexual categories?

Fanon's resistance within and through psychoanalysis

  • Influenced by Lacan
  • Working in Martinique
  • Psychoanalysis of "the colonized"
    • (Was Freud doing the same with women?)
  • Why do the colonized/oppressed participate in their own subjugation?
    • Freud: Why don't women organize on behalf of one another (if men do)?
    • Fanon: Why do Black men dream of being white?
      • Dream produced out of the trauma of colonial contact
  • Psychic pain comes from the social order in which they exist
    • Butler, Fanon argue for systemic change (revolution)
    • Rather than individual change (therapy)
  • Fanon violently resists notion that Black people have internalized inferiority
    • Do not naturalize oppressive relationships
  • Ultimately, Fanon's study leads to participation in violent uprising in Algeria

Butler dragging out the psychoanalytic machinery

  • Approaching very big problems
  • Her own work is very dense, difficult to appropriate

Returning to earlier philosophical material

  • Challenging versions of a pre-social womanhood
  • Narrow definition of woman being used in 1st/2nd wave fem
    • Stable understanding of f body
    • Easier to map on a certain category of women-identified people

Queering psychoanalysis

  • What is kept, accepted?
  • Imaginary morphology
    • Durability of the phallus (in the Lesbian phallus chapter)

Questioning sameness as in "same-sex"

  • Cannot always take anatomy as the referent
  • Resignifying various anatomical and other tools for symbolic purposes

Confusion, tying up of signifier and signified

  • Sex, gender, phantasm, signifier are locked in, linked up, knotted

Althusser's interpellation

  • A call from no one in particular but the "culture at large"
  • To which one will answer or not answer
  • To what does one answer?
    • "Hey, faggot!", and who turns?

Structuralism as a call to revolt (Fanon)

  • If the system is setting upon you
    • Naming you
  • Your only resort is to "smash"

Post-structural response (Butler)

  • Resignification is possible
  • But is resignification inadequate?
    • Available and effective for only certain categories?
    • Sure the lesbian signifies the dildo as phallus
    • But what of the imaginary morphology of the queens?
      • When it subjects them to danger?

Kinship, community

  • Psychoanalysis preponderance on the individual
  • What of community? Commune? Separatist societies?
  • Collective pain, signification?

Paris is burning

Initial release targeted at gay & lesbian festivals

  • ~1991
  • Big splash
  • Picked up later for wider release
  • Julia Livingstone earned a lot of money
    • Was later sued by some queens in the film
    • Many did not survive the duration of the lawsuits

Is the documentary bound by the terms of its production?

  • "white liberal lesbian from Yale"

Physical, material, surface

    • Is this a reduction of personhood?
    • A shortcut to becoming?
  • Emphasis on genitalia
    • Reassignment surgery as a completion
  • Masochism in response, in resistance?

Resignification potential?

  • Performances in excess of Livingstone's limitations?
  • Continued currency of "Realness"?
  • Can the theories of the queens persist in and around the film's editing?
  • Power and agency in the reading
    • "gaps" and "fissures" (a la Butler)
    • But also Barthes? Hall? Fiske?

Butler in practice

Efficacy of the bumper sticker

  • Her resistance to it
  • How does she (do we) imagine popularizing these ideas?

"I want... and I'm going for it... "

  • How does that connect to gender + resignification?
  • American Dream discourse
    • Belief that intense wanting is bastante
  • "Unfairness"
    • Especially in connection to the economic factors
  • Daydreaming about economic stability
    • Non-viable subject/identity is also economically non-viable

Jump offs

  • Fanon, Frantz. () Black skin, white masks :
  • Bersani on antisocial theory of self
  • Beatrice Persiado, re: Contrasexual manifesto, diaries
  • Patricia Hill Collins, Black feminist thought
  • Irigary
  • House and homes
  • MTV drag king doc, is it True Life?

Beyond psychoanalysis, 8 February 2010

Coherence in the readings for this week

  • Spivak pushing back against the same theoretical assumptions in the Stoler
  • Spillers readining "on the other side" of psychoanalysis
  • What if Butler had drawn on Spillers in Bodies that matter?

Starting with Spivak

  • Spivak, G. C. (1988) Can the subaltern speak? In Nelson, C. and L. Grossberg (Eds.) Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (pp. 271-313). Basingstoke: Macmillan Education.

Terminology

  • Desire is a Freud term
    • Lust/"drives"
  • Interest is a Foucault term
    • Implies power, through a network or system

Spivak attempting to preserve Marxism

  • Sees that Foucault has lost some ways of speaking be losing Marx
  • Frustrated that Foucault and Deleuze make a critique of Marxism without providing a means to discuss the alienated

In Butler:Freud/Lacan and Spivak:Foucault/Deleuze

  • They successfully knock about the established theorists
  • But do they offer an alternative framework?
  • Or is she presenting herself? Not a systemic or structural alternative.

Measuring silence?

Choice of the term "measure"

  • In the context of a feminist theory that frequently discusses "silence"
    • e.g. "Silence speaks"
  • Can we literally measure?

Attention to the intellectual function

Deleuze and Foucault reach "back" to a totalized oppressed subject

  • Anonymous, oppressed, banal, unnamed
  • Only 1st world academic would think of speaking of another in this way
  • Spivak especially resists this practice as an academic coming from S. Asia

Sovereign subject "sneaks back in" through the intellectual text

  • Amid Deleuze / Foucault blurring it

Amid global power, attn needed for the "micrological"

Micro-logical, local

  • Not enough to be the individual standing up
  • Need a theoretical structure for the micro to enter into articulation
    • Not neccesarily speak

Local is erased by

  • Dismissing attempts to speak for it
  • e.g. David Harvey's macro, global Marxist view of production
    • Lacks specificity, data regarding individual, micro examples
  • Specific global discourse cannot be disrupted by the micro
    • Globalization is disseminated through the intellectual is producing a "master discourse"
    • Tendency for this intellectual to be European, white, male
  • Global is spoken through a "disinterested" (apparently) intellectual figure
    • Local speaks through the "interested", "invested"
    • A kind of colonial structure

Colonial logic

Persistence of colonial

  • Moving out of government, law
  • Into discourse
    • Norms around who speaks and what may be spoken
  • Colonial authority is not necessary killing, enslaving
    • But positioning itself as heroic savior
    • Discourse of US in Iraq

Subalterns speak in all kinds of ways

  • But readers embedded in the colonial logic can't hear it
  • Suicide examples of radical agency rather than submission
    • e.g. Widows jumping on the dead spouses' funeral pyre
  • Why does Western feminism collude in removing the meaning from these acts?
    • Because it is not in the desired "American grammar" of Spillers

Questions raised by this?

What would it look like to not be the hero?

  • Non-heroic intellectual activities, examples?
  • What would a non-heroic ethnography look like?
  • Collective authorship doesn't work with the professional structures of academia
  • How even is the project of a disseration contra?
  • What examples do we have?
    • Post-colonial narratives? Unraveling your own autobiography?

How does an outsider discern radical agency, subaltern speech?

  • How to differentiate bride-burning and witch-burning?
  • How do you identify a truly radical gesture?
  • Are we obsessed with agency?
    • A concern of the "sovereign subject"
    • What are other ways of understanding being and doing?
  • Are there other ways to speak politically than agency?
    • Not just "i'm here!!!!" in the streets
    • Coherent subject produces that politics
    • But split subject requires a different politics
  • What would "split agency" be like?

Is this compatible with activist impulse?

  • Broad-based problem across disciplines
  • Frankfurt frustration that Birmingham projects are not politicall satisfying


Spillers, Mama's baby, papa's maybe

  • Lack of records of enslaved women during the middle passage
  • Drawing on Marx to discuss the role of reproduction
    • Unpacking a system in which childbirth is a capital gain for the slave owner/ rapist/ father
    • Trading bodies as commodities
    • Marx asked, "if commodities could speak, what would they say?"
    • And this scenario offers a possible answer?
  • jb "Hard to use psychoanalysis against itself"
  • Ambition: using the one denied subjectivity to revise the subject

Split subject

Spillers self-identifies as such

  • A "marked woman", and all of those names
  • "Locus of confounded identities"

(Un)gendering amid domestic, adomestic

Domesticity (214)

  • Can the hull of the slave ship be a locus of domesticity?

Slave ship as a "machine"

  • People go into the machine: enslaved, enslaving, working, driving
  • It is suspended over the sea, no where
  • People are manipulated discursively, bodily

Naming act

  • Loss of proper name (noted in Spillers, Spivak)
  • Loss of subject position

Rubin's use of the Other

  • Could she substitute examples from SF lit for these decontextualized anthropological fieldnotes?
    • Is there an audience for whom this is inadequate?

Stoler and dependence on dialectic of colonization

  • Can't talk about Euro culture w/o talking about colonialism
  • Effects of contact with other peoples
  • Tools of difference, generalizable

Problematic binaries

  • Rubin: gender/ungender
  • Stoler: colonizer/colonized

Thinking through contradictions

  • Available language developed within colonial, hegemonic scenes
    • Difficult to articulate freedom in the language of slavery
    • "Fullness of topics; paucity of speech"
  • Can you interrogate your own work?
    • Disperse the power of the intellectual
  • Spivak critiques diasporic students who attempt to speak from the margin, from the subaltern
    • Despite recognition of inequality in privilege
    • No Columbia students can be subaltern, she insists
      • Not only the white people in the room
    • No "nostalgia" for otherness
    • Is this a new elitism?

Jump offs

  • Flag wars, film about gay gentrifiers in a predominantly AfAm neighborhood
  • Queer cyborgs, Mimi Nguyen?
  • Kara Walker, panoramic silhouettes

22 February 2010, Tom Boellstorff

Recap Feb 15:

  • Spivac, Stoler, Spillers
  • Intellectual, Subaltern
    • Researcher stand-in for ppl she is supposed to represent
    • Danger of erasing the real ppl

Today:

  • Challenges of ethnography
    • "Politics of translation"
    • How does ethnographer stand in place of translator?
    • What does it mean when you become a part of the scene you are studying?
  • Categorization, categories
    • Naming, self-naming
  • What are the stakes of these projects?
    • What is Povinelli after? What claim does she wish to make re: kinship?
    • What is "behind" Boellstorff's projects re: categories?
    • Dave's piece on "lesbian" in India as polemic? What is the intervention?

Boellstorff

  • Editor, American Anthropologist journal
  • Worked with JH at UC/I
  • Drawn to Indonesia
    • 4th largest
    • "Alternative U.S.",
      • Similar size, population
      • Different understandings of multi-culturalism

Notes on method

  • All questions of theory are questions of methodology
  • Challenge to "undiscipline", "unmethod" critiques of ethnography
    • Ethnography as "test case to think about these issues"
    • But same problems, challenges, stakes emerge in lit crit, history, etc.

Listening for theory

  • Talking to people is not merely "data collection"
    • But "theory collection"

Knowledge gathering

  • What are the ethics of data gathering?
  • How is discussion, listening, and "production of knowledge" deployed?
  • Doing work "on the side"?
    • TB doing HIV/AIDS activism
    • "Gives me something to do during the day"
    • Grant writing, starting new support orgs
    • Contributing English-speaking, tech support, White skin
    • "Opening doors", networking, language practice
  • But do you NEED to do "on the side" work?
    • Is knowledge production and circulation valued differently in different spaces, times?

Photos, pictures

  • No names, faces in publication
  • Privacy, safety
  • Protection from dangerous groups

Talking about, talking for someone

Is there a feminist ethnography?

Hybridity

  • Transnational scholar figuring out your identity
    • e.g. Taiwanese-American researcher doing ethnographic work in Taiwan
  • Scholar must be opened to being challenged, changed
    • Povinelli attempting to "bring home what she has learned" from Australia to Radical Faeries
    • An "instructive failure"?
Problems with this term
  • Biotechnical, heteronormative, dyadic
  • Replaced by bricolage, "dub", remix, art/music metaphors?
  • Emic v. etic uses of this term (and others)

Geographies

  • "East", "West" as relative terms
  • Connecting various area studies
    • "East Indies", "West Indies"
    • Around oceans: Indian Ocean
    • Aroudn poles, "circumpolar"

Categorization

Alternatives

  • Grouping is common across societies
  • Stakes are in "ontologizing" of classificatory regimes
    • They all categorize but what are the implications?

Nation-state

Nation-state, "default mode of identification"

  • Despite lots of new organizations, layers, global flows
  • Important locus of control, thinking
  • One approach is to compare nation-states

Area studies, esp. Southeast Asian Studies

  • "Logics of social scale", researchers "draw lines"
  • People don't understand how you can study "Indonesians"
    • Tradition in the field is to study "Javanese", "Balinese"
    • Contrast to studying "Californians" v. "Americans"
  • Agitates disciplinary issues: anthro studies local? poli sci studies global?

Sameness

  • Similitude
  • Contamination

Same-sex marriage

Queer v. straight temporalities

  • Is queer theory not often enough in a "question space"?
    • Virtual worlds conversations (in ASCJ) people are interested in "trending", where are things going?
    • Anthropologists can't research the future, only speculate
    • "Institute for the future" releases annual "trend map"

How is same-sex marriage connected to counter-hegemony projects?

  • Is gay/samesex marriage a crossroads?
    • A stand-in for many concerns?
    • Coalition that considers only one strange manifestation
    • Coalition or collusion?
  • Gramsci: War position / maneuver
  • DeCerteau: Strategy / tactics
  • Nothing particularly resistant about gay sex, nor marriage?
    • Trending toward accepting gays in marriage, military
  • Supposing barriers to gay marriage fall in this decade
    • Do the politics of marriage change?
    • Does it worsen the situation for people outside of the marriage category?
    • Anti-marriage activists identifying availability of rights via domestic partnership
      • Foregrounds politics of legibility, domesticity

De-americanizing, de-parochializing

Gay-identified people in non-"Western" places desiring same-sex marriage

  • Queer activists suggesting they not

Where, what is resistant?

  • What is agencial?

"On the ground", MA, CA

  • Power of symbolic
    • e.g. conversations with family
  • Radical, activist folks' sense of a hierarchy of issues
    • e.g. marriage less important than policing, housing
  • Racial blame, that people of color were responsible for Prop 8
    • Exclusion in permanance
    • CNN poll re: AfAm "sinking" Prop 8

Material pursuits / symbolic pursuits

  • Is this an opposition? (re: Descartes thru structuralism)
  • How to talk/think, thru/with?
  • Complicating base/superstructure from Marx (as have others)
  • Connecting usefulness to meaning
    • Re: programming "Solution" v. "workaround"/"kludge"/"patch"
    • "Elegance" v. "kludge", "dissolving" the problem

Funding implications

  • To access LGBT $, queer orgs need to address marriage
  • In LA, Prop 8 organizing has dominated the discourse, space, time

What is marriage anyway?

  • Widely varying manifestations of marriage?
    • Marriage for love
    • Marriage arranged
  • In older literature in Indonesia, love-marriage was anti-colonial, resistant practice

Dubbing culture

(from Gay archipelago)

  • Terms shift and move
  • Appropriation, adaptation
  • Political fight over subtitles
    • Result: Banned all dubbing because if people "saw Tom Cruise speaking Indonesian [languages]" they'd lose track of the borders of Indonesia
  • Moments of identification buried within Party of Five, Melissa Ethridge, other European, American artifacts
    • People recognized themselves in moments that "slipped" thru the censors
  • Dubs demosntrate that translation is always a failure
    • Voice does not match mouth movements
  • How were queer Indonesians "dubbing" queer culture?
    • Localization, internationalization

Low v High bandwidth interactions

  • Chatroulette, video, high bandwidth
  • SMS, text, low

Dave's categorization

  • Questioning categories of sexual acts by women
  • But little questioning of "women"
  • e.g. in the pair of married cops, one may not have identified as women
    • "Pre-Butlerian"?
  • Questions of gender identification could be brought into discussion of the category "Women loving women" but isn't
    • This or "lesbian" may not have fit with extant discourse
    • Perhaps there were passing men for whom lesbian and WLW would not fit
  • Generous reading: gender addressed elsewhere? Needed to be signposted more herein?

Role of a single person?

  • Can an individual play a foundational role?

Not all categories are lexicalized

  • Male partners of MTF TG
  • Identifiable category is not lexicalized, not named
  • Very important categories may be unnamed
    • Because they are "so obvious"
  • Other categories may be named but anachronism
    • e.g. out of date term like "sodomite"

Povinelli

Reception in anthropology

  • Not exactly po-mo anthro
    • Sometimes parodied as anthropologists who navel gaze, need to get out of the way!

On kinship

  • Many human cultures incorporate outsiders, strangers into kin via kinship terms
    • e.g., uncle, brother, etc.
    • Does this compare with "in-law" construction?
      • Also, families where marriage enables new dads, new children

On medicine

  • Movement of the sore around the world
  • Comparing to movement of queer bodies
    • Assumption of heterosexuality

On love

  • Sharing the sore
    • Could this connect to barebacking and HIV as a "gift"?
  • Emphasis on the sense of touch (45)
  • Isolation and intimacy, specifically around touch
    • Clear skin as much as sign of isolation
  • Certain types of intimate "leave a mark"
    • Pathologized in some circles
    • Simultaneously central to others
  • Intimacy via presence, lack
    • Rather than desire, touch
    • e.g. Smell, sounds

MSM

Evidence in personal ads, hookup sites

Practice rather than identity:

  • Print: "Man seeking man", "women seeking women"
  • Web: transition from gay.com to craigslist

Racialization

  • Connection to downlow
  • Adam4adam marketed to people of color, while Manhunt is predom white

Questions

  • Relationship from intellectual property to queer/straight temporalities, inheretance, marriage
  • From radical perspectives, many issues appear interrelated. Yet from other positions, they seem not only distinct but weakened by joining. From where does this political philosophy arise?

Jump offs

  • Scott, Jim. History of the surname
  • Boellstorff, T. Coming of age in second life
  • West Village gentrification, New Jersey 7
  • Friendship as a way of life
  • Gibbs and Graham on multivalent globalization
  • Mahmood, feminist embodiment, Egypt
  • Semiotic and social analysis of material things
  • Wittgenstein, pragmastis, use, meaning
  • Ahearn, Letters of love
  • Geertz, "terms don't stand still for their portraits"
  • Kush("cush"?), documentary film about Indian, Thadani pictured as 70s figure, Euro-American feminism
  • George Marcus, postmodern anthropologist
  • Povinelli, settler colonialism, contrasts among Dutch, Japanese, and other colonial projects
  • Deane, Tim. On barebacking.
  • Hoggan, Myth of continents and rethinking geographies
  • Tranvesti, account of trans people in Brazil

Poetics of piety, 1 Mar 2010

Follow ups on last week

  • Queer temporality, "strawman" re: queer theorists stuck within straight time?
  • Take-down academic style, interdisciplinary work tends not to need to knock down the early generation
  • "Global gay" v. "translocality"
    • "Global gay", there are gays and lesbians everywhere but some have not yet encountered lgbt
    • "Translocal", many similar local networks but you can't make the comparison at nation-state level

Opening questions re: Mahmood, Politics of piety

  • Butler, performativity, ch 5, (162)
  • Autonomy, agency, ch 1
  • Complicity
  • Labor of analysis v labor of political action
  • Humbleness, methodology and thematic
  • Knowing / unknowing, what does it mean to be an "unknowing" researcher?, (199)
  • (presented by Sriya)

Writing strategy

  • Who does this book address?
    • Post-structuralist feminist critique
  • Critique tends to return back to the author's milieu
  • What is noticed? What is included?
  • This project was the result of writing project, scrapping it, and writing this one

Performativity (162)

  • Reiterative character of bodily, speech performance makes structure suceptible to change (162)
  • Virtuous actions enact what they name: virtuous selves (163)
  • Differing relation to norms among drag queens (failure to realize norm ideal reveals its impossibility), mosque movement (163-4)
    • Theory operates differently, especially as regards contrasting disjunctures
      • Mosque performance concerns continuity between performance and ideal
    • How do various performances compare?
  • How does selection of various examples inform the development of theory?
    • Did the selection of drag queens lead us to seek subversive activities?
    • Easier to recognize agency in subversive examples?
    • Could a theory of performativity have arisen from elsewhere than studies of gender/feminism?
  • Turning critical tools toward those who wish to extend freedom
    • How might notions of agency/subjectivity from even the most radical critique (e.g. Hegel/Butler) contribute to the assumptions of liberal/liberation?
    • Not simple dismissal: Mahmood is thoroughly engaged with Butler, knowing it deeply enough to both respect and critique

Agency, autonomy

  • Agency implies desire for freedom
  • Structured by language?
  • Limitations of agency
  • Social limits, regulation: starting point for agency
  • Is agency the raison d'e for feminism?

What kind of anthropology is this?

  • Colonial: understanding other in anticipation of domination
  • Post-colonial: self-consciousness ad contrasting various cultures, e.g. diff sexual mores
  •  ???: being, ontology, may have different coordinates altogether.
    • Impossible to fully apprehend because of the author's own cultural grounding
    • "False consciousness" not helpful here

Materiality

  • /Exteriority works toward the interior/ rather than the inverse (exterior exposes the interior)
  • Status of the body within the sign system in which it appears
  • Body as a "medium for" rather than "sign of" the self/identity (166)
    • For Butler, the self subject emerges with a body as an effect of discursive matrices
    • But for the women in the mosque movement, the self is made through material practices (166)
  • "Teachability of the body"
    • Includes both compliance and rebellion
    • e.g. wearing v. not wearing the veil is not the question
    • People don't want to be liberated from the action because it is that action that creates a link to God
    • To suggest that not veiling is liberatory, you are "outside the architecture"
  • If the act of veiling is an act of self-making (in relation to God),
    • To "liberate" someone from veiling is to un-make them as selves
  • What is daily pious practice?
    • Rather than subordinating the self
    • They are "answering the call" to a different construction of the self
  • Subject positions may seem immobile, fixed, etc.
    • Transexual responding to Butler's notiong of radical performativity:
      • The transsexual self is made through the process of birth, transition, and realization

Contradiction, on its own terms

  • There may be people who wish to act outside of the mosque movement
    • Divorce, homosexuality
  • But it must be understood through the ontologies of the movement
    • Those people are not outside of the moque movement

Identity politics

  • There can be no identity politics in Mahmood's examples
  • Version of, models of self evident in the mosque movement
    • Not a suitable foundation on which to base a politics

Humbleness

  • Self-critique alongside critique
  • Need to suspend political commitments to be able to perform the humble scholarship
  • How does Mahmood attempt to enact "humbleness" in this context?
  • Various ways of recognizing legitimated modes of self:
    • Regulated, legislated, marketed to
  • Islam as practiced by women among the mosque movement:
    • Humility
    • Piety
  • There is no mastery in such a context

Humanist subject

Subject presumed by many dominant discourses

  • Desiring freedom
  • Driven by complex desires, not simply survival
  • Civilized, civilizable

Not anti-humanist but double disavowal (154)

  • Not a narrative recuperation, giving "voice" to people who are "written out of 'hegemonic feminist narratives'"
  • Also, not identifying people as a historical subaltern feminists
    • Light repudiation of Spivak

Fitting with, departing from Spivak (199)

  • Postcolonial project, "sensitive to the violence a hegemonic discourse commits when it tries to assimilate the Other to a language of translatability" (199)
  • Could this book have been stronger with an extended engagement with Spivak?
  • How does Mahmood face the challenge of speaking with and not speaking for?
    • Trying not to be "prescriptive"

Methodology, ethnography

Time in "the field"

  • Limiting expectations
  • Go into the field without knowing what is there to be written

"Reconciling your privilege"

  • TB as the one white man in the Indonesian room
  • Spivak crit those who try to work within their home communities
  • Do you work in a completely remote space or what that is familiar?
    • What are the challenges?

Signal of colonial approach

  • Knowing
  • Full account of the meanings of all the actions in a scene
"Status of a truth claim is different from discipline to discipline."

"When is an ethnography enabled or disabled"

  • Not good or bad
  • How do online spaces, internet-mediation enable differently?

Jump offs

  • Edelman (sp?), Deman(sp?) style structuralist
  • Zizek, contemporary voice of Lanan
    • M/F binary cannot be done
    • More that plasticity is sought, more it is undermined
  • Wendy Brown, separating intellectual inquiry and political action in feminist scholarship
  • Tim Deane, barebacking ethnography

Mar 8, Pedagogies

  • Carrying the Mahmood forward
  • Thinking in relationship to other contexts
  • "Subjectivity", "action", "belief"
    • Different from assumptions we made based on psychoanalysis, Butler
  • Anthropologist must be subordinate to the material, data
    • Challenging ones own apparatus for knowing
  • Unbeing, undoing, unknowing
    • Solidarity v. sisterhood

Questions for today

Pedagogy (in and out of the classroom)

    • Re: Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the oppressed, 1968
    • What is that training?
    • Presumably not disciplinary
    • Is it anti-disciplinary?
  • Connecting theory and practice
  • Critiquing bank-deposit-style pedagogy
    • Disciplinary training
  • People attached to notion of academic work as activism
    • How does pedagogy turn to action?
    • Encouraging, developing a "critical consciousness"
    • Mohanty, pedagogy of dissent
    • Alexander, open to other sorts of knowledge inaccessible through high theory

Love (Sandoval)

  • Different kinds of love
  • How does love help us decolonize the self?
  • Love outside of the loving, romantic relationship (142)
  • Love belonging to neither lover
    • the "middle voice"
  • Spectre haunting in between the two poles
  • Third reinforcing the primacy of 1 and 2
    • Oppositional consciousness emerging from this use of the third
    • Dimensionality, third brings layers, relief
    • First, second enable only linearity
  • Love as emotion connecting to Alexander's emphasis on the spiritual
    • Mode of being, knowing, seeing
    • Different from conventional knowledge production
  • Love in opposition to narrative (Carlos re: Neruda)

Love, pedagogy, narrative

  • Thinking network instead of narrative/text

What's at stake in a "free-fall"?

  • Letting go, undoing?
  • How is that happening in UCSD?
  • Argument for gay marriage is an argument for drifting...

Healing

  • Remembering as healing process

"Training"

  • Can one be trained into critical thinking?
  • Or must they be "given the tools"?

Dislocation

  • Bringing dislocation to the classroom

Thinking thru the UCSD events

  • Locus of intervention
    • Going after fraternities, sororities
      • National orgs
    • Looking private/public
      • UC system affects USC
    • Developing "safe spaces"
    • Opportunity to look at the everyday experience of Black students on campus
    • Accountability?
      • UC Chancellor
      • self-accountability

Resisting the narratives of the demands

  • Coalition
  • Pedagogical process
  • Development, debate regarding the demands
  • What are the habitual practices?
    • Meeting, seeing, talking, feeling
  • Developing artifacts, language
    • How do you make a "demand" legible to the institution without compromising the chaos?

How did the movement become legible?

  • Different kinds of opportunity
  • Accompanying, enabling
  • Building atop existing organizing for the day of action (mar 4)

Hard work

  • Labor
  • Taxing to the body
    • Sleeplessness

On USC

  • Connecting w teachers, students with high school walkouts of 1968
  • What would a public face for USC/UC solidarity look like?
  • Campus culture
    • USC not having a political/activist culture among undergraduates

Jump offs

Mar 22, Dispossession, loss

Hartman, Lose your mother

  • Subjugation, subjectivity
  • Agency
  • Themes of forgetting, forgetfulness
    • History tends to be a recovery project in our academic work
    • But forgetting is not so simple
  • Disappointment
    • Not soothed or satisfied
  • Dispossession
    • Unbelonging, strangeness
  • Refusal of humanist narrative (finding connections)

Disappointment and utopia

Etymology: temporal, spatial

  • A meeting that does not occur
  • Dis- appointment

Failure of the archive

  • Artifacts do not reveal or illuminate
  • Emptiness, disillusionment
  • There is nothing there with which to engage
    • Similar experience with the Elmina fort
    • Trauma of disappointment: there is nothing there
    • Absence, evidence of eradication

"Utopia" always disappoints (46)

  • "Long long enough" and you find hierarchies, subjugation
  • Lesson learned: utopia is a doomed dream?
    • What is the alternative?
  • How does this utopia compare with the cyber-utopia?
    • Tend to see anti-utopians using strawmen
    • Hartmen has historical figures to speak against (Garveyites)
  • What does anti-utopian argument say about the speaker's relationship to utopia?
    • Disappointment demands cynicism? criticism?

What is the utility of utopia?

  • Motivation to action
  • But its ultimate failure, disappointment looms

Competing utopias in religion:

  • Dissonance of Catholicism
    • Rebirth holds no redemption among people reborn into slavery
  • Success of the Pentacostal utopian is that it is realized in bodily death

Competing freedoms

Freedom unyoked from the dialectic of slavery

  • Is a dream of freedom possible without the necessary history of enslavement?
  • A freedom outside of emancipation?

In in the eyes of an owner:

  • Place
  • Property, ownership

Thus in the eyes of an emancipated person:

  • Movement
  • Transience
  • Moton: "fugitivity"
    • Existing in a state of flight
    • Treva, "unfixity"

Resisting positive slavery narratives

  • Emancipation seen as liberatory
  • Pride in survival, emancipation
    • Also apologizes? Requires, necesitates? the enslavement

History, how the secular world attends to the dead?

  • Disarticulating imagination, future from history
  • Free futures won't be connected to a coherent past
  • Finds out that she made up, invented a history of her grandmother

Anti-narcissistic narrative

  • Desperately trying not to be a heroic intellectual "I"
  • Depicts herself as rude, foolish

Forgetting, forgetfulness

"Love encourages forgetting" (87)

  • Love, possession, language of trade, the marketplace
  • Domesticating relations born of violence

Great-great-grandmother remembering "nothing" about slavery (87)

  • "Did [she] believe that forgetting provided the possibility of a new life?"
  • Hartman has forgotten her own notes, forgetting as writing history (16-17)

Writing is erasing

  • Derrida's definition of an archive
  • Any story told is a story untold/not told

Form, writing style

  • Popular audience
  • First person, memoir
  • Personal stake in the project
  • Non-linear
  • Jumping, unfixity
    • Moving between memoir and historical accounts

Owning her own challenges

  • Willing to accept, reveal that she could not succeed what she set out to accomplish
  • Perhaps she is not well-inclined or socially skilled enough to do this project
  • She gives a glimpse of herself in weakness, failure
  • Opens up an opportunity for another person to know

Dead book

  • Ventriloquism?
  • Strategic?
  • Abolitionist strategy
    • To remember, narrativize one or another particular individuals
  • "Discovery of undiscovering"

Dark days

  • Her life in Ghana retraces imperial/colonial activities
    • She meets with community leaders, officials
    • Lives in ex-pat housing
  • Uncomfortable for her and for the reader?
  • Humiliation, humility
    • Not knowing, acknowledged ignorance
    • Stubbornness
    • Mutual humiliation when she (literally) shines light on people around the town (shitting, bathing, etc)
    • Facing her own individual failure
      • Collected nothing, no stories

Themes

  • Contesting unified African identity
  • Effects of slavery on contemporary African society
  • Enumerating guardians of slavery history
    • Gendered, racialized (re: Ferguson)
  • Lack of visible scars of slavery

Audience? Purpose?

  • Tria, "Emphasize the starkness of [slavery's] devastation"
  • Recalling slavery's facts
  • Irony of Gates' quote on the back?
    • How does Hartman respond to Af-Am intellectual projects like his?
    • Responding to a "Black Studies canon"?
    • Layered violences of multiple canon
  • Reminding readers (and people in ethnic studies) that dissonance and forgetting are necessary parts of historiography
  • Speaking from and to American descendents of enslaved Africans
    • First generation of emancipated black people traveling to Ghana with the dungeons as destination (41-42)

Gates comparison

  • Gates, back to Africa, PBS specials
    • Putting artifacts back on shelf
    • Remembering, recalling, retelling stories
    • Giving voices to the forgotten

Spivak comparison

  • Spivak is dense, inaccessible
  • Hartman is less so
  • Could this be an Oprah book club selection?

Migration from USA to Ghana

  • 10,000 Black Americans move to Ghana
  • Afro-centric tourism industry

Family history, genealogy

  • Who tells which stories?
    • Repetition
  • People attempt to tidy their family histories
    • Scratch your own family history and you find shit

Jump offs

  • Luke Wilson Gilmore, "desacoda"
    • Elsewhere space, a space of political possibility
  • Orlando Patterson
    • Slavery and social death
    • Costs were not merely economic
    • Cost of slavery was not the loss of economic power but a loss of social connection, history, kinship
  • The slave ship, another book for a popular audience
    • Included many vignettes narrativizing individuals aboard a slaver
  • Who do you think you are?, TV series
    • Lisa Kudrow, Emmitt Smith
  • Rosen Von P??, documentary film, looking at Jewish person in Lithuania discovers that father was SS officer
  • Strange fruit, film, song made famous by Billie Holiday, adopted Rosenbloom children
  • Prodigal son, film, documentary about a transwoman's twin brother
  • Two or three things i know about him, film, (title references Jean-Luc Godard)
    • Finds out father was SS officer and shares info with his family
    • Sister creates alternate narrative in which he is a resistant, reluctant

Monday March 29 Sentimentality, affect, feelings

Affect

  • Jameson asserted that postmodernism represents the waning of affect
  • Affect studies responds that the claim is
    • Premature, unsupported/unsupportable
    • Factually wrong, that affect persists in different places

Berlant, The female complaint

Berlant, L. (2008) The female complaint. Durham: Duke University Press.

  • Queerness in relation to affect
  • "Most highly manipulative genres" of literature, film
    • Especially regarding femininity and race
    • Political, ideological content "buried" within sentimentality
  • Also constructing connections between sentimental and shopper interpellations
  • What happens to masculinity?

Leading questions

  • How do we define affect?
  • Difference between affect, emotion, feeling, passion?
    • Is affect a theoretical version of feeling?
    • Is feeling a prole version of affect?
  • Does affect mean different things across disciplinary locations?
  • Affect in historical terms, creates connections between different periods
    • A history that "touches", "feeling" something from the archive?
    • What kind of affect or feeling might be archived?
    • Challenges of queer archiving
  • Signs of affect on the body
    • How is it about the body?
    • Discussions of shame, "flooding mechanism", social conditioning to avoid
    • Social conditioning also to resist and not feel shame
      • Shame as "bounce-able", shame is generated and must find a landing place
    • Transferability of shame is rarely seen in queer theory
      • More often shame is written as temporal, lasting, fixed
      • See: book presentation "Gay shame" on Thursday
    • Physical response: rigidity, trembling
      • Nao Bustamente's "wobbly" performance
  • Terror, torture as a vector for thinking affect
    • Psychology used in war to manipulate enemies
  • Love (in Berlant, Hartman, Sandoval, Alexander)
    • And all of its problems
    • Constantly hijacked for countless purposes
    • How might love lead to/ link to disappointment?

"Love is the enemy of memory" (169)

  • "Forgive and forget"
  • Lovers forget feeling alone, uncomfortable, unsupported
  • Love as a suture for repairing pain
  • Love in repetition
    • Only as good as the step you're about to take
    • Need to forget past moments of love
  • Does love accummulate?
  • What did Hartman say about this?
    • "Love encourages forgetting"
  • Marriage maintenance, counseling
    • Hard to get married, harder to stay?
    • "The One", divorce: "he was not the one!"
    • Contradictory ideas about the great marriage
      • One version: enter the marriage in crush mode, try to sustain
      • Another version: people at odds with one another stay together because they don't fuse
      • Instantinaity ("chemistry") v. duration ("compatibility")
  • Love among the intellectuals
    • "Love" (and not desire) persists, populist notion
  • Labor, work
    • Working at the relationship
    • Putting in work
    • Willing to do the work
    • "Labor of love"
    • "Emotional work", paying for emotional support time
      • As opposed to "sex work", buying a sex act
      • Similar to the bars in Tokyo?

Disappointment (13-14)

  • "Disappointment is a partner of fulfillment" (13)
  • Promise of love is re-connection, making whole
    • Relief
    • Setup for disappointment
  • Repeat disappointment makes the promise of relief ever more compelling

Status of the female, feminine in Berlant?

  • Why is it a "female complaint"?
  • What is it about the social structure that requires it to run through the subject position named female?
    • From which a compaint issues?
  • Subject position of "woman" so disempowered as to undermine the avenue for complaint
    • Such that critique is rendered merely "complaint" or even a "whine"

Rom-com

  • Opportunity exists for a woman to make a "damning critique"
  • But the critique is folded into her character as the reason that she can't get a man in the first place
  • Complaint about the terms of eligibility explain her ineligibility
    • Compare with "the race card": the fact of having a complaint is a reason that one can't get ahead
    • "Neo-con tactic"

Trauma as everyday rather than event-based in Cvetkovich

  • Understanding "everyday"
    • Omnipresent?
    • Quotidian?

Life in/under capitalism in both Berlant and Cvetkovich

Trauma as by-product of capitalism

  • (Berlant, 31; Cvetkovich, 19)
  • Alienation? From lands and labor?
  • Capitalism requires dispossession as well as possession

"Intimate public", (Berlant, 13)

Canadian conservative government alters immigration curriculum

Discover Canada: The Rights and Responsibilities of Citizenship (2010)

  • Pedagogical
  • Removes references to gay rights
    • Among other issues
  • How might it compare with wht citizenship manual from Uncle Sam Needs a Wife in Berlant chp 4?

United States as a "postemotional society" (Meštrović as cited by Berlant, 165)

  • Diego thinking about casual use of the term "love" in the U.S.
    • "Using emotion as a tool without falling victim to synaesthesia"

Juxtapolitical (Berlant, 10)

  • Popularizing things can contribute to depoliticizing them
  • Visibility is not necessarily politically resistant
  • Can't escape the implications of the group identity
    • Even with the "achievement" of "equality" (?)

Identity as genre (Berlant, 4)

  • "People rely on [genre convention as] a structure of conventional expectation that people rely on to provide certain kinds of affective intensities and assurance." (4)
  • Radical breaks are impossible because failure may serve to support the genre convention
    • Negative affect, breaks, failures may also be seen as exceptions that prove the rule
  • Could Berlant have written this book using texts from a popular radical tradition?
    • e.g. Bikini Kill?
  • Is it possible that the most conventional, most genre-fied are most useful in a Fiskean way?

Vulnerability artists

  • Muñoz, J. E. (2006) "The vulnerability artist: Nao bustamente and the sad beauty of reparation." Women & Performance, 16:2, July, pp. 191-200.
  • Laughter, humor in the art moments
    • Both Bustamente and Mo'nique employ humor in context of cultural trauma
  • Domesticating laughter in a "postemotional society"
    • Responding "on cue"
  • Cultural specificity of humor
    • Expectations
    • Is this a performance art venue or a comedy club?
    • Laugh Factory or Apollo Theater?

Jump offs

  • Berlant has a blog, "supervalent" thoughts?
  • Sara Ahmed, books on emotions, phenomenology, and (newest) happiness
  • Ngai on "minor feelings", "minor suite of feelings": irritation, envy
    • Writing about the seemingly itty-bitty petty emotions
  • Edelman
  • Jose Muñoz, Feeling brown, Latino expressive range of emotionality
  • Ann ?, Mixed feelings, regarding 18th c sensation novels
    • Difficult social moments washed away by torrent of emotion, swooning, fainting
  • Berlant and Warner, distinguishing love and intimacy
  • De Certeau, tactics, strategies: tactics don't accummulate
  • Durational love experiments, special kind of escort service
  • Re: Andrea Frasier's indecent proposal artwork
  • The wedding complex
  • Nao Bustamente, "Sans Gravity", http://hidvl.nyu/edu/video/000980566.html
  • Nick Cave, "Sound suit", see "art in motion' on youtubes
  • Mo'nique live at apollo. On stage with pyramid. Calling forth all the "fat bitches"

5 April, Queer Assemblages

  • Moving away from gender studies derived from psychoanalysis
  • Toward Gramsci, Delueze
  • Keeling, looking at the black femme in film without resorting to identity
    • Avoiding the psychoanalytic frame
  • Puar,

JH on Keeling

  • "Black femme" is not an identity
    • Place (among many) where conventional Hollywood cinema cannot go, does not know
    • Cannot be seen nor imagined within the normative framework of Hollywood visuality
  • "To represent the un-representable"
  • "To figure the limits of the frame"
    • Hollywood films tend to have fairly narrow frame, easy to find limits
    • But even an "alternative" film will have a frame, useful to explort the limits
  • Using Gramsci + Deleuze, applying "common sense" to cinematic texts

"To represent the un-representable"

Why the black femme? By what logic?

Femme

  • Not visible as queer without the butch
  • Femme always relies on the butch/femme dichotomy
  • The black feminine woman is always being read around particular heterosexuality
  • Always "in the shadow" of another visibility

Black femme

  • Cast within femininity + whiteness
  • Cannot make sense of this figure within the normative frame
  • "Epistemological problem"
    • No means into representation

Ursula, femme "image" used to clarify Cleo as butch

  • "image works to make ... Cleo a viable character"
  • Hetero male viewer engaged via/through Cleo's desire and partnership w Ursula
  • Signifying chain
  • Cleo is desirable, desiring
    • Ursula sets up Cleo as identifiable
    • No one is asked to identify with Ursula

"Figures the limits of the frame"

  • Ursula "begs to be read" (critically) because she serves "no real purpose" (narratively) in the film
  • Reminds the critical reader that the film is edited, cropped, fragmentary
    • Mis en scene is incomplete, "woven" montage (a la Benjamin)
  • Where you find the excessive, you find the limits

Role of narrative?

  • Ursula image does little narrative labor, more descriptive
  • But how does it compare with Omar's boyfriend?
    • He propels a more traditional revenge narrative

JH on Puar

  • "Cliché" as subset of "common sense"
  • Common sense images available to memory during perception
    • That which "drives" or "pushes forward"
    • Normativizing
  • Deleuze understands a "motor-sensory schemata", memory images
    • Body and mind are not separate
    • No psychic mechanism driving everything else
    • No obvious relationship between conscious, unconscious
    • "Cinematic relationship to the world" (JH)
  • Does cinema change our relationship to the "real", the "world"?
    • What is meaningful, sensible?
    • 1920s cinema "chops up the world into manageable pieces"
      • A new way of seeing
  • Deleuze sees cinema as reorganizing the the motor-sensory schemata
    • A new kind of cinema could present a different schemata

Common sense

"Not just one common sense but many common senses" (21)
  • Common sense is essential component to hegemony
  • Consensus implied through common sense
    • Bush administration justification of Iraq/Afghanistan war ("Saving" women)
  • Role of history?
    • Common sense depends on an asserted shared history
    • Is the use of "common sense" in Palin/Bush a collapsing of history?
    • History being written in the present?
    • Reality-construction, positive preparation of history

JH questions re Puar

  • What is the political function of pessimism?
  • Terrorists being "forever queer"?
  • "World pride" (p. 16) w/r/t Palestinian / Israeli conflict?
    • Can we lump together Palestinian, Afghani, Pakistinian "terrorists"?
  • Critique of OUTrage and exceptionalism?
  • Critique of queer of color critique?
    • Why, in the middle of this project, would q-o-c critique present a project?
  • Critique of Heidi Nast, "market virility"
    • Connect to Alexander and (gay) tourism
  • Meaning of 'queer necro-politics'?

Political function of pessimism?

  • (Kaplan, A.) Neo-cons appropriate "coming out" metaphor in military pride
  • Critique concerns the implicit race of enlisted men and women
    • Not a critique of the neo-con
    • But a critique of the radical american studies scholar using a neo-con example
  • Urgency in the polemic
    • Responding to wartime theory-making
    • To what extent are the queer theorists implicated by empire?
    • Treva, "death count"

Terrorist being "forever queer"?

  • Homosocial terrorist communities
    • Lacking hetero sexual contact
    • Assuming pedophilia, sodomy, "perverse sexuality" among men
    • Also, oppressed among women
  • Is this overstated?
  • Confusing terminology
    • Puar writes of "foreclosed ... proper gay and lesbian Muslim subject"
    • Is this is an available subject position?
    • Is it "foreclosed" in the EU/US imaginary?
    • What about Islamic people who do identify as G or L?
      • Wish to be part of the global gay/lesbian "movement"?

Key terms

  • common sense
  • queer assemblage
  • Delueze's concept of assemblage as a method

Common sense

  • Is "common sense" opposed to "good sense"?
    • Distinct from "critical thought", or "complexity"?
  • Is "common sense" always suspicious?
  • Common sense as that which is unquestioned colloquially, locally?

Jump offs

Apr 5, Trans-feminism

Liberal bind

  • Agency
  • Resistance

Aizura, Aren

  • Dissertation looks at transgenderism in a global marketplace
  • Liberalism selling body services, surgeries
  • How do transsexuals fit into a transsexual consumerist market?

Manalansan

  • Disaffection
  • Relegates many of them peopl "minor issues

Serano

  • Conflation of misogyny and (trans) sexism

Clinics catering to trans women

  • Indication of globalization

Historical debate in queer theory

  • Butler, J.
    • No voluntaristic, agencial performance
  • Prosser, J.
    • Transsexual is removed from queer theoy that understands the body as a effect of discourse
    • Transsexual people believe that there is something fundamental, physiological that needs to be changed
    • What about people that feel the materiality of the body very deeply?
      • So much so that they must change their bodies...

The question of "the real"

  • Authenticity
  • Instantiations of the real
  • Recurring questions near transsexuality
  • Embodiment, materiality
    • Is there a 'wrong' or 'right' body?
    • Bodies circulating in the global marketplace
  • What kinds of contradictions arise?
  • How is our understanding of the transsexual person symptomatic of more fundamental modes of thinking?

Paper dolls

  • JH first encountered in Zurich as part of a queer film festival
  • Israeli director with Swiss money
    • Surprised to find the story about fabulous drag show turning to issues of citizenship, capital
  • New service workers in Tel Aviv
    • After Intifada, there is a new need for lower-income workers
  • Film has been received as "deeply problematic" in Israel
    • Though he shows his ignorance, he is not "off the hook"

Critique of family

  • Sally and Haim
    • Teaches Sally Hebrew
  • Family (in US, Israel) functions for nationalism
    • Caregivers do a good job, when the family fails
    • Men "abandoned"

Skills and labor

  • Highly skilled, trained professionals
  • Linguistic skills
  • Nursing skills

Jan and "resistance"

  • Not a grand refusal
  • Disaffection, appropriate
    • How can service workers be asked to love their charges?

Disloyalty, betrayal

  • Site for disrupting circuits that produce self-evident, seemingly-natural links
  • Manalansan bringing in poststructuralist rendering to create a new archive (4)
    • Citing Berlant
  • Composure is ambient disaffection
    • Affective orientation toward a managed refusal to reveal stakes publicly
  • Disloyalty, disaffection

Contrasting Jan and Sally's emotional labor

  • Sally is smiling, warm with Haim
    • Audinece drawn
  • Jan much less conventionally "feminine"
    • But Jan is not out in the workplace
    • Legal/not legal, employee, Out/in
    • She is paid for emotions but she refuses to play
    • Jan witholds femininity as well as emotional availability
  • If there is not love between the client, worker
    • Clients can see what's going on
  • Does the sympathetic viewer prefer the potential for joy in Sally to the disaffection of Jan?
    • Jan's refusal of affect slows everything down, no joy, no drama
  • Film only shows Jan doing boring, routine
    • Sally is seen in vibrant spaces

University as a site of care

  • Expectation of care between profs and students

Domesticity

  • Affect, love, sensitivity bundled together
  • Capital, labor can unravel these parts
  • Hartman, love is forgetting, love is forgetting how these things fit together

Mourning, melancholia

  • Different degrees of mourning, limits
  • Re: mothers in the Favela
  • Hughes, ?

Employer is not confused about Sally

  • He knows the score
  • Sally may give love and affection
  • But Haim is not bringing her into the will

Intervention, juxtaposition, juxta-political

  • Film puts Sally and Jan opposite one another
  • Private, public service is unclear - especially when you live with your clients

Mutliply emotive possibilities

  • Disaffection, affection at once

Philipines stake?

  • State wishes to create image of a Filipino/a caregiver discourse
  • Western-dominant groups don't care for their elderly
    • But Filipino/as do
  • Fetishization: Filipinas WANT to do this work
    • Thus, it is not exploitation?

TRANSform me

  • Trans women make over cis women

Free write exercise

"How do we think positively about femininity without tying it to consumerism and capitalism? Is there space for positive depictions of femininity in media? What would these look like? (e.g. femininity tied to thinness)"

What is meant by consumerism and capitalism? What is subsumed by these catch-all terms? What do they imply? They are meant to mark off certain undesirable, violent, oppressive, or alienating systems but in the contemporary moment -- what practices are included? Is it wrong that the trans women in TRANSform me emphasize the "warddrobe" and "cosmetics". That the woman's weight loss goal is not validated until her warddrobe is updated to reflect the new body?

Is there such a thing, an entity or object, as "capitalism" that does alienation? Or are the conditions, the list of which is beyond apprehension, too many and thus requiring an umbrella, shorthand term?

Consumerism feels like another tricky word. Is all consumption and consuming complicit in something called "consumerism"? What are its tenets? Who are its proponents (Lucky Magazine?) Are they suffering false consciousness? Are the problems associated with consumerism wrongly grouped, or poorly addressed by grouping?

Many of the trappings of femininity discussed by Serano and clearly displayed in the video are clearly tied to buying things: heels, dresses, lipstick, cars, surgery. They are not available to all people (or is simply desiring these objects, and the moment of their purchase, an expression of consumerism?)

What is exciting about working within the terms of whatever is called capitalism/consumerism? Buying the product that one is not supposed to buy (the man purchasing tampons.) Is the BUYcott a consumerist activism?

Criticism of Serano

  • Focusing on misogyny instead of gender binary / expectations
  • Is her understanding of masculinity/femininity "monolithic"?
  • Limited to a narrow class/race/national scene?

Can femininity stand alone?

  • Can it be discussed outside masculinity?

Contextualizing femininity?

  • Assumptions about power and agency?

Capitalism produces multiple discourses

  • Ferguson, R.
  • Multiple discourses of femininity, race, etc.
  • What is the "specific flavor" of femininity in capitalism?
  • Being more specific about the relationship
    • By simplifying the situation, Serano makes some "easily disputed" 1-to-1 connections
    • Essentializing and reduction

Writing challenges

  • How do you write for a broader audience?
  • More accessible?
  • How do you do that without essentializing, oversimplifying, short cuts?

Expanding feminism to encompass femininity in general

  • To expand beyond identity
  • To address feminine characteristics, behaviors, stereotypes

Signpost regarding discussion of trans, femininity

  • This text circulates through a wider network than academia
  • Serano provides some useful vocab, e.g. cissexual

Use of psychoanalysis terminology

  • Subconscious, conscious
  • Articulating her own experience of dissonance and grief
  • Hard to understand something "subconscious" that is fixed and unaffected by social phenomena
  • "Pop Freudianism?"

Feminine back in femininism

  • Why did it not satisfy?
  • How does femininity fit in with heteropatriarchy?
  • Critiquing "false consciousness" based on her own feeling
    • Arguments about "feeling right"
    • "What you feel is never just what you feel, right?"

Visibility

  • Drawing attention, being seen
  • Assumption of availability
    • Emotionally, sexually
  • How does burlesque fit in?
    • Is it disidentification?
    • Suicide Girls porn challenging normative ideals

Normative beauty

  • Chains of production

Jump offs

Apr 19, Animal studies

Intersection w queer studies

  • "Long time in coming"
  • Previous animal studies work has tended to be "puffy"
    • More about specific pets than species

When species meet

  • Haraway, D. J. () When species meet.
  • Very political
    • Pushing back on PETA, vegans, eco-feminism, anti-experimental
  • "Rapturous" relationship w her dog
  • Pointed critique of Derrida and Deleuze
    • "There is no animal in this text"
    • Animal is only a metaphor
  • "Brave" critiques
    • Because it is not "critique down"
    • It is a "swipe" on her level of fame/influence
    • "Ethical care" in not leaving these guys as "sacred cows"

Very "straight" book

  • Wrt to kin and family relationships
  • "Aggressively heterosexual"
  • "What is the work done by gender stability?"
  • Expanded vocabulary for talking about animals
  • Contracted in many other areas, kin, family, gender, etc
  • Is humanism "sneaking in the back door"?
  • Is it also a "highly Christian" book?
  • Eulogy of her father, interested in the incest/sexual dimension (163)

On breeding, purity, and authenticity

"People who desire simulacra deserve them."
  • re: Breeding, reproduction
  • Purebred
  • "a eugenic tale"

Missing discourse of race

  • Is there a missing discourse of race here?
  • She is interested in the history of colonialism
  • But there isn't a discussion of race in this history

De-centering the human

  • Does Haraway ever "de-center the human"?
    • Is this im/possible?
  • Humans embedded w/in a collection of companion species

Love (again)

  • Love of human for an animal
  • How does this compare with the Love in Alexander, Sandoval, Povinelli?
    • Is it different from love as amnesia (Hartman)?
  • "Surprising, unpredictable bond" between two species

Sexuality

  • Largely absent from this book
  • "What is the difference of loving your dog and bestiality?"
    • "Anti-porn"-style talk about "pornographic" exploitation of animals (via photos, clothes, etc.)
    • Sleeping in bed, slobbery kisses are not within the bounds of beastiality

Invisible contracts w animals

  • Is dog training humane?
  • Is this a violation of an implicit contract w animals?
  • Can these questions be asked without de-centering the human?

Pets and children

  • Duration
  • Buying a pet, one assumes they will outlive the pet
    • But its (inevitable) death is accompanied by grief
  • "Adopt" as the appropriate verb?
  • Child-replacement intimacy

Pets and grief

  • Social workers in animal hospitals
  • To handle the grief of families losing a "member"

Is pet love an autistic tendency?

  • Temple Grandin
  • Animals, non-verbal comm
  • Allow my humanity to be punctured by a non-human otherness

Observing the world differently through the animal

  • Surveilling the animal
    • Whether or not it sees you
  • Puppycams
  • "See through its eyes"

Entertainment and animals

  • Zoo
  • Aquarium
  • Webcam
  • Browsing the pet store
  • On film
  • Pleasure
    • Cute
    • Fear

Animal abuse politics

  • Animal exceptionalism
  • Human labor, exploitation disappears

Interpretation and dog behavior

  • Derrida saying you cannot know the cat or what they mean

Pet industry and reterritorialization of the city

  • Imperialist?
  • Dog parks, runs in rich parts of the cities
  • Demographic analysis (Heidi Nast)
    • Transfer of intimacy from humans to animals
    • Attempting to write that some people have dogs for protection, others have dogs for "pets"

Pets and space

  • Guarding the property
  • Exploring the house
  • Adding "life" to a room (like a plant)
  • Proximity to humans
  • Walking the streets with a dog
  • Herding sheep
  • A reason to build a fence
  • Dogs at work
    • Finding bombs, anthrax
    • Going into outer space

Jump offs

  • Companion species manifesto, shorter paper
    • Haraway "creates critical vocabularies out of nothing"
    • "Fusing ideas together" to allow people to move between science and the humanities
    • Provides "software" for humanities people to speak to science
  • White dog (film)
  • Where are we willing to draw the line (Gayle Rubin type of question)
  • Rabbit-proof fence (film), Australia, rabbits killed off by inserting a disease that would only affect them
  • Haraway, Teddy bear patriarchy
  • Nagl, What's it like to be a bat?
  • The Cove (film), Oscar-winner
    • Americans in Japan observing dolphin slaughter
  • Newton & Hughes, queer anthology on dogs
  • Muñoz has a blog post on bully bloggers about marrying yr pets
  • Sqwak that dare not speak his name
    • Albatrosses raising eggs together
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