Speculative Life
Posted by Alexis Lothian in Uncategorized on January 10, 2012
I’m excited to announce the publication of a new Social Text Periscope online dossier, edited by Jayna Brown and I, on Speculative Life.
Here’s part of our description of the theme and its relevance, from our introduction:
In our dystopian present, the term speculation is associated with an epistemology of greed, a sanctioned terrorism, and a neo-imperialism organized around the capture of abstract futures and the subjugation of transnational labor forces. Financial speculators gamble with everyone’s lives, and our times would seem to foreclose on any future at all for many.
But speculation means something else for those who refuse to give its logic over to power and profit. To speculate, the act of speculation, is also to play, to invent, to engage in the practice of imagining. And, as Ernst Bloch said, it may be in our imaginative worlds that we catch glimpses of utopian possibility beyond our present paradigm. At a moment when so many have been struggling to enact alternatives to the depressing world produced by Wall Street’s speculative failures, we need to practice imagining now more than ever.
And here are the wonderful, provocative essays.
Introduction: Speculative Life, by Jayna Brown and Alexis Lothian
A Wilder Sort of Empiricism: Madness, Visions and Speculative Life, by Jayna Brown
Vampires and Cyborgs: Transhuman Ability and Ableism in the work of Octavia Butler and Janelle Monáe, by Moya Bailey
Larissa Lai’s “New Cultural Politics of Intimacy”: Animal. Asian. Cyborg. by Tamara Ho
Speculating Queerer Worlds by Alexis Lothian
Socialist Irrealism: an interview with China Miéville, by Jayna Brown and Alexis Lothian
Race For Life, by Alex Weheliye
So Say We All, by Tavia Nyong’o
The Water Keeps Flowing, by Elizabeth Turgeon
Disappearing Natives: Notes for Future SF&F Stories, by Andrea Hairston
I’m developing a strong love and appreciation for the kind of accessible yet incisive intellectual work we can do in just-over-blog-length, carefully edited and thoughtfully presented crossover scholarly publications like these. I encourage you to read them, teach them, pass them on.
#transformDH and transformativity
Posted by Alexis Lothian in Uncategorized on January 9, 2012
At MLA, Jentery Sayers gave a paper that cited the TransformDH Tumblr, which I previously linked at my post on digital praxis as theory––which Jentery also cited in his MLA talk. (I’m honored.) I was travelling at the time and only caught up on Twitter, but it seems that some controversy has ensued in this post by Roger Whitson,
Does DH Really Need to be Transformed?. The short version of his post is that the digital humanities don’t need to be transformed, as #transformDH is demanding; they are already marvelously welcoming and collaborative.
I certainly don’t deny his experience. But, to me at least, it feels tangential to what #transformDH has actually been setting out to do.
The Tumblr linked above was started, not after MLA, but after our American Studies Association roundtable titled “Transformative Mediations? Queer and Ethnic Studies and the Politics of the Digital.” Since then, the six of us who were on the panel have been gathering other collaborators to think about these concerns, organizing under the hashtag #transformDH. At the ASA panel, we agonized over our hashtag. #criticalintersectionalqueerandethnicstudiesDH is, to say the least, a bit too long; but #queerDH erases race. #criticalDH implies that most DH is not critical, which seems a bit unfair to a discipline so rooted in textual analysis. We settled on #transformDH because it seemed memorable and provocative, and because it linked to the title of our panel.
I think the title “Transformative Mediations” was mine originally, though it’s difficult to remember who wrote what in our collaboratively created panel description. The phrase comes from my situatedness at the intersection of critical media studies and queer studies; I am interested in how our various engagements with media can be transformative, shaping identities and communities and politics and worlds. (I’m also interested in the production and consumption of transformative works of media, art, and fiction, and I liked the terminological resonance.) ‘The politics of the digital’ has tended to be a more important idea to me than ‘the digital humanities,’ but as I’ve spent more time with my HASTAC and #transformDH collaborators, I’ve come to believe there is a place in DH for the kind of critical work of simultaneous production and critique that I am interested in making.
As the phrase #transformDH proliferated, it began to be seen more as an imperative than as a description of present creations and future possibilities. It has become a site for critique of what Natalia Cecire has acutely diagnosed, in her Defense of Transforming DH, as the endemic liberalism of DH: the common, though far from ubiquitous, presumption that racialized and gendered experiences in and out of the academy won’t affect people’s experiences in the big welcoming tent. I agree with Natalia: I think such antagonisms have their uses. Though I am unsettled that the presence of queer and ethnic studies theories and critiques has become an interpretive claim that she makes about #transformDH; from where I’m standing, that has always been the central, crucial point.
I’m also happy to say that I’ve had many great experiences, at MLA and other conferences, since I started talking with the DH community and stopped assuming that my orientation toward critical cultural studies would exclude me from participation. I think that most of the #transformDH group have felt similarly welcomed. I think that most of us also felt that the majority of DH projects did not speak to our areas of queer, feminist, critical race studies, cultural studies (within which we study a wide range of literature, theory, media and culture between us). We started #transformDH to think about how those interests might intersect with DH–how, most importantly, they might already be intersecting. We were not, I think, trying to take away from the good experiences others have had in the DH community: just to add to them, in the specific ways that mattered to us, transformatively.
Happy New Year, MLA 2012, and a moment off the grid
Posted by Alexis Lothian in Uncategorized on January 4, 2012
Happy 2012, everyone. I hope this is a wonderful and relatively non-apocalyptic year for all.
I’m writing this from a wi-fi-enabled AmTrak train on my way from Portland to Seattle for the MLA Convention.
I will be one of the many harried job candidates at MLA this year, and so my schedule for actual conference events is fairly light. However, I will be attending the Digital Humanities Commons workshop tomorrow (Thursday 5) morning bright and early. I will also be trying not to miss the following panels:
135A. The Future of Learning
Thursday, 5 January, 7:00–8:15 p.m., Grand C, Sheraton
A linked session arranged in conjunction with the forum The Future of Higher Education
Presiding: Tara McPherson, Univ. of Southern California
Speakers: Cathy N. Davidson, Duke Univ.; Curtis Wong, Microsoft Research170. Queering Value
Friday, 6 January, 8:30–9:45 a.m., 619, WSCC
A special session
Presiding: Aren Aizura, Indiana Univ., Bloomington
1. “Queer Economies and Speculative Limits ,” Angela Mitropoulos, Univ. of Western Sydney, Penrith South
2. “Sovereign Debt, Queer Remainders,” Travis Sands, Univ. of Washington, Bothell
3. “Family Value(s),” Craig Willse, Coll. of Wooster
4. “Necrocapital: AIDS, Affective Accumulation, and Viral Labor,” Eric Stanley, Univ. of California, Santa Cruz378. Old Labor and New Media
Friday, 6 January, 5:15–6:30 p.m., 608, WSCC
A special session
Presiding: Alison Shonkwiler, Rhode Island Coll.
1. “America Needs Indians: Representations of Native Americans in Counterculture Narrative and the Roots of Digital Utopianism,” Lisa Nakamura, Univ of Illinois, Urbana
2. “The Eyes of Real Labor and the Illusions of Virtual Reality,” Matt Goodwin, Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst
3. “Digital Voices: Representations of Migrant Workers in Dubai and Los Angeles,” Anne Cong-Huyen, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara
Responding: Seth Perlow, Cornell Univ.467. The Future of Teaching
Saturday, 7 January, 12:00 noon–1:15 p.m., Grand C, Sheraton
A linked session arranged in conjunction with the forum The Future of Higher Education
Presiding: Priscilla B. Wald, Duke Univ.
1. “Gaming the Humanities Classroom,” Patrick Jagoda, Univ. of Chicago
2. “Intimacy in Three Acts,” Margaret Rhee, Univ. of California, Berkeley
3. “One Course, One Project,” Jentery Sayers, Univ. of Victoria
4. “The Meta Teacher,” Bulbul Tiwari, Stanford Univ.581. Digital Humanities versus New Media
Saturday, 7 January, 5:15–6:30 p.m., 611, WSCC
A special session
1. ” Everything Old Is New Again: The Digital Past and the Humanistic Future,” Alison Byerly, Middlebury Coll.
2. “As Study or as Paradigm? Humanities and the Uptake of Emerging Technologies,” Andrew Pilsch, Penn State Univ., University Park
3. “Digital Tunnel Vision: Defining a Rhetorical Situation,” David Robert Gruber, North Carolina State Univ.
4. “Digital Humanities Authorship as the Object of New Media Studies,” Victoria E. Szabo, Duke Univ.
For abstracts, visit www.duke.edu/~ves4/mla2012.635. Queer Anachronisms and the Question of History
Sunday, 8 January, 8:30–9:45 a.m., 303, WSCC
A special session
Presiding: Kathryn Bond Stockton, Univ. of Utah
1. “Anachronizing the Penitentiary, Queering History,” Kadji Amin, Columbia Coll., IL
2. “Spinster Time (‘U Can’t Touch This’),” Heather K. Love, Univ. of Pennsylvania
3. “Anachronicles; or, Steampunking Queer Theory,” Elizabeth Freeman, Univ. of California, Davis
Finally, I thought I’d share some moments from my year’s auspicious start: a holiday in beautiful coastal Oregon, where two close friends are staying at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. I alternated working on various academic projects with climbing up into hills filled with roaming elk and soaring hawks. The landscape is much like the west coast of Scotland, where I went often as a child, so it felt in many ways as if I were making the trip back home I didn’t manage this year. Although Scotland has fewer elk.
Reflections on HASTAC2011, politics, institutions
Posted by Alexis Lothian in Uncategorized on December 6, 2011
I’ve just come back from the 2011 HASTAC Conference. And if this blog leads you to think that I’ve been to an astonishing number of conferences recently, you’d be right. It’s a sign both of my having an open schedule this semester, since I have a final year fellowship, of my dissertation being in good enough shape for a projected March defense that I can raise my head and look around, and of my having begun to reach a point in my career where people invite me to speak or to be on panels (could it be time to make a tab on this site for travel plans and speaking engagements?). I was invited to HASTAC to tweet and blog, however: a marker of the organization’s focus on online connection and of the conference’s theme of digital scholarly communication. And so, in the spirit of open sharing that prevailed, I’d like to share some of my thoughts––even though they are still provisional, not fully formed.
When I first joined HASTAC, I wasn’t too sure what it was for, even after the excellent Queer and Feminist New Media Spaces online panel; attending the conference made me realize just how central the network’s intellectual community has become since I started to take a much more active part in it. Cathy Davidson has written a great summary of HASTAC’s history, if you’d like some larger context.
The conference was a real culmination of the excitement I’ve felt at being part of HASTAC in the past year. It felt so great to be surrounded by other scholarly geeks: to be sharing ideas on twitter and scarcely be able to tell who was following the conference in person and who was elsewhere. Karen Petruska did a great job of liveblogging the keynotes, which are also available to watch online. Fiona Barnett links her blogs and many others at her roundup post here.
I tweeted fervently from the conference––as I tend to do––and made a couple of liveblogs. One was from the opening workshop on “alternative academic” careers. I wasn’t wholly the expected audience for that, since I am a candidate on the non-’alternative’ academic job market and quite passionately in love with my life of research and teaching and writing––but I also think it’s incredibly important not to get tracked into a single path, to keep our options open. One of the advantages of living in a different culture than the one you were raised to is always having slightly more open eyes; the idea that a PhD opens only the door to a life lived in academia and closes all others is, in my experience, much more widely believed here in the US than the UK.
I learned a lot from the workshop, but felt that something was missing from its tone of purely professional advice. I tweeted it:
The missing piece in this conversation for me is the content of intellectual work; the excess to academe as industry.
In other words: what if people choose to pursue scholarly work not because they think it’s a good living, but because they are seeking a way to pursue an intellectual project they believe matters––and not just to themselves? I know I’ve linked to it many times, but Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The University and the Undercommons never stops being relevant. Critical content, radical content, is an excess in the university that we hope will slip the bounds of its commodified form.
#alt-ac in the workshop was largely about how to use your skills to become part of the machinery that shapes the university’s logistics and frames for delivering knowledge; there are plenty of creative and radical ways to do that work, but they didn’t come up a great deal. I don’t talk too much about subverting the neoliberal academy in my job market workshop either; but (largely because my job market workshop is led by one of its major critics) it comes up. As Micha Cárdenas said in her post #occupyHASTAC, the ailing tenure track job market is just one minor symptom of neoliberal education and shouldn’t be considered alone. If we think about #alt-ac in these terms, it seems to me, we ought to include not just the technological and organizational jobs in the structure of the university but also the category of the public intellectual, and how to do intellectual work that matters on the borders of the academic industrial complex or outside it.
In fact, the rest of the conference offered plenty of scope for thinking about public and politicized intellectual work in the context of the digital humanities. I am beginning to develop a sense that #transformDH is growing into a critical mass. I had so many conversations with scholars who’ve felt frustrated about the relative absence of discussions of race and other forms of critical structural analysis within the digital humanities, and met people who had felt––as I used to––that ‘digital humanities’ simply didn’t apply to them, until they realized they weren’t the only ones who felt that surely there must be a place within that big tent for critical cultural analysis in and of various digital forms, for work whose stakes are infinitely higher than tenure and promotion, for the possibilities of changing the ways we think about education and knowledge production altogether.
The second panel I liveblogged, From the Center: Facilitating Feminist Digital Theory and Praxis in a Digital Environment with Margaret Rhee, Isela Gonzalez and Alysse Gray, was exemplary of what that could be. They were talking about work they had done with the San Francisco-based Forensic AIDS Project and the Center for Digital Storytelling, working with incarcerated women in San Francisco; they screened some of the stories the women had created and they were moving, powerful, complex works. My blog is rough, but I want to share some fragments from Margaret’s talk that resonated powerfully for me, when she spoke about working simultaneously in the academy and outsde it.
Praxis, pedagogy, technology: meanings can be transformed. Utilizing your degree to bring resources back outside academy is one of the most fulfilling experiences you can have.
Approach the work humbly. There is much you cannot learn from a textbook; seeing and experiencing are very different from reading.
The academy fosters individuality, Collaboration is hard, but you can learn to support social change, Collaboration teaches us to imagine otherwise. Being reflexive and mindful is key.
The heart of this work is counterintuitive to the logics and rewards of the academy.
This is a very different perspective from the one suggested by the #alt-ac workshop, but it’s what we’ve been trying to emphasize with #transformDH; it’s the work that queer and ethnic and feminist and marxist-materialist studies can and must bring to the emergent ubiquity of the digital, and it ought to transform us and those we encounter.
I didn’t have the laptop battery to liveblog it, but there was another talk that also inspired me as an example of #transformDH in action. This was Maria Cotana’s Chicana por mi Raza archive of Chicana feminist documents; I tweeted the talk from my phone and gathered the tweets on Storify; the embed won’t work and I’m too tired to troubleshoot, so I’ve pasted them––in all their ephemeral glory––below. Some more information is here.
#hastac2011 laptop battery gone, tweeting from phone. Maria Cotera talking about Chicana por mi Raza project in process. cc @anneperez!
#hastac2011 Cotera’s mother Marthe P Cotera was Chicana activist; helped her digitize 70s histories of intersectional critique #transformDH
#hastac2011 Cotera collaborating with feminist filmmaker also daughter of activist. Creating online project w wiki for public collaboration
#hastac2011 I love the combination of activism, archive, pedagogy, personal in Cotera’s project #transformDH
#hastac2011 Cotera material lost bc not recognized by archivists. Democratizing the archive; open access vital for communities of color
#hastac2011 Cotera: goal is to reunify what was once a vibrant counterpublic; connecting regional narratives
#hastac2011 Cotera showing a scanned to do list from young woman involved in campaign: making histories of labor visible
#hastac2011 Cotera showing queer women of color anthology 2 years before Bridge Called My Back
#hastac2011 Cotera pedagogy: taking undergrad students on research trips, they meet agents in the histories they are learning
#hastac2011 2 of Cotera’s students got tattoos of images from archive material. Histories marking bodies, political commitments reactivated
It’s worth remarking that neither of these projects are well represented online; no shiny and easy-to-find websites. From The Center, run by overworked and underpaid activists, is working on getting their materials online, and I think Chicana por mi Raza is in the process of doing so –– but it does make me think that one common factor among #transformDH projects is that they are not easy to fund.
The last HASTAC keynote was from Chairman Jim Leach of the National Endowment for the Humanities and, like Micha, I was fairly taken aback by his discussion of the humanities as a “civilizing project” that would spread from a “new digital class” based in the US out to the rest of the world. Comments on twitter and to Micha’s post suggest that this unabashedly imperial notion of civilization is what we must accept if we want to be funded for our digital projects, and discussions I had informally at the conference reminded me that anything that seems overtly ‘political’ will (after so many years of the culture wars) be unlikely to appeal to US government bodies.
The hallmark of both the projects I described above is that they are absolutely *not* “civilizing projects.” They are committed to creating knowledge without creating hierarchies: to teaching as something that changes the teacher as well as the student, to the possibility that digital tools can let people in the worst situations narrate their lives and engage differently with the world by doing so; to not losing sight of radical, revolutionary activities from the past just because the transformations they produced were not large enough for them to be written into official history. They work with technology to create knowledge from below.
I don’t know enough about either project to really discuss them in depth, nor do I want to presume that they will never receive government funding. Anything is possible, after all. But I do think they offer us a possible throughline to consider the implications of #transformDH at an institutional level, and some reminders that we must continually look out for the ways our institutional locations get under our skin.
Mixed metaphors, marked bodies, and the question of “theory”
Posted by Alexis Lothian in Uncategorized on November 4, 2011
A ferment of planning is afoot in what I find it difficult not to think of as digital humanities fandom. After Natalia Cecire’s great blog post a couple of weeks ago, “When DH was in Vogue, or, THATCamp Theory” her joking proposal for a THATCamp (THAT=The Humanities And Technology; Camp=unconference) Theory has been taken up. She blogs about it in American Nerds go to THATCamp and there is now a planning Google Doc.
THATCamp Theory is a fascinating idea, and I am excited to be involved with it. I do have a difficult time imagining how it will look, but I think that connecting the ethic of making that is central to the digital humanities with a self-consciousness about the way everything is structured and its cultural politics can only be good.
However, I am unsettled by some of the ways that the term “theory” is trafficking in the conversations that Natalia’s post sparked. Ted Underwood critiques the idea of an intransitive theory; Jean Bauer asks “who are you calling untheoretical?”; Roger Whitson summarizes some of the conversations in “THATCamp Theory Bunnies”. I feel a little awkward about it, but I’m moved to make this post because of what those ones don’t mention. There are, I think, two sets (at least) of conversations intersecting here, and I’m not sure we’re hearing each other.
Genealogies of conversations don’t always matter much, of course; but Natalia’s inspirational THATCamp Theory post came, indirectly (um, via my blog) out of Micha Cardenas’s provocative “Digital Humanities: Hot Sellable Commodity or Place of Counter-Hegemonic Critique?”, in response to the Los Angeles Queer Studies conference, particularly the panel that Micha and I did there with Margaret Rhee and Amanda Phillips. It continued in person and on twitter around several panels at ASA, where the digital humanities were put into conversation with critical race studies, ethnic studies, queer critique, and feminism in a conversation we dubbed #TransformDH.
We weren’t using theory intransitively; we were talking about queer, trans, butch, femme, critical race, women of color, Asian American, Puerto Rican theory (with a slightly different group of scholars in the room, those adjectives would have changed). We were talking about marked bodies, systemic social hierarchies, and transformations in a very specific and material sense, not some vague revolutionary concept that can be written off with an image of graduate students sitting around talking about Foucault. We were talking about theory as making, about making objects that critique, that *are* critique, that are transformative reimaginings of the world. Micha’s art is a pretty fantastic example of this. Several of us who have been talking #transformDH, including me, are interested in where and how theory of this kind gets made outside the academy: what conversations and artforms and databases and archives do the work of a transformative digital humanities but don’t have the institutional status to be named as such.
When I look at the discussions now about theory and DH, I keep asking myself: where did we go? Where did our politics and our specificity go? Do we need, as Jentery Sayers suggested on Twitter yesterday, a different term? Radical critique, social justice, or––following Alan Liu––cultural criticism? That does make some sense.
But, as the title of this blog makes fairly clear, I’m attached to “theory” and to the possibility that it can be democratized. I want all these forms of critical making and the analysis that accompanies it to be part of the “theory” conversation, if there’s a “theory” conversation to be had. And I don’t want their specificities to be dismissed as irrelevant identity politics either, because they aren’t. They’re the heart of things, the center from which our digital work radiates. And these concerns are not exclusive to the digital. These are, as Natalia Cecire pointed out in the THATCamp Theory google doc yesterday, also questions that scholars of art and performance––even literature and film, I would argue, especially in the zones where scholarship and practice overlap, which are especially common in queer and ethnic studies––constantly confront.
Part of the conversation about how we make theory has to be a conversation about which forms of theory-rich making are recognized and institutionally supported and which are not; about whether there are clear cut lines between digital humanities scholarship, digital media art, and digital media everyday practice, other than the question of where the funding comes from. I think this question is closely connected to the issues of labor Miriam Posner has brought up: there are unstated hierarchies of labor in who does the work of making versus who conceptualizes or “theorizes” a project, just as there are in what counts as a “project” deserving of labor other than basic conceptualization. Marta S. Rivera Monclova’s struggles in making the necessary theory for her planned project on multilingual Puerto Rican poetry visible––how what she’s talking about isn’t ‘just’ translation––may be a case that connects the two.
The comments, made by many different people, about the effect of one’s experience of “theory” or “Theory” and one’s graduate-school training in academic knowledge production and knowledge-sharing, are crucial here. Theory can, as the rather delightful Twitter conversation linked by Roger Whitson demonstrates, be held like a weapon or like a bunny; it can lurk under the surface of everything or be something we constantly look for but never find, like the Loch Ness Monster. My conception of theory, which comes both from a graduate school experience in which theory was rarely weaponized and from a range of nonacademic locations, is probably somewhere in between: an awkwardly handcrafted pet monster, perhaps, but more efficient and dangerous than it looks. Nessie’s got teeth.
#transformDH
Posted by Alexis Lothian in Uncategorized on October 30, 2011
Since I came back from the American Studies Association conference in Baltimore, I’ve been struggling to find the time to post about it; since it’s currently the busiest moment in my academic job market calendar so far, that has been difficult. But it was a deeply energizing, exciting weekend that affirmed my joy in what I do, and sent me home with my fingers itching to write and create critical digital objects.
As with any large conference, I was heartbroken at how much I had to miss: so many panels on queer of color critique, so many intersections of the scholarly and the political, so many vital critiques of the institutions in which we are doing our work and connections to the #occupy upsurge that makes me feel so complicatedly hopeful and excited I haven’t yet been able to write about it.
But one of the intersections closest to my own heart, of the digital and the critically queer, felt as if it was reaching critical mass with the convergence of last week’s LA Queer Studies panel and this year’s ASA. Thankfully, I don’t have to write up the entire thing; Amanda Phillips, the other panelist on both, has made a great post at HASTAC.
ASA was a place for me finally to meet the people that I couldn’t find (for the most part) at MLA: digital ethnic studies scholars, digital feminists, digital queer theorists… maybe dhers with a lower case?
I know you are out there. And you are doing important work and I want to talk to all of you. I’ve met some of you on the Internet – you were the ones tweeting the occasional non-DH panels at MLA with me. You were all over the ASA backchannel. Being the backchannel jockeys that we are, a handful of us were able to advertise our collective goals and invent a hashtag that I’d like you all to use: #transformDH. Let’s build this critical mass and share projects that do the work we want to see in the field. I want more people to read the HASTAC forums on queer/gender/race/ability/etc issues and keep those conversations going. I want a Tumblr called I Am A Digital Humanist where we can show each other what a critical digital humanities looks like. I want more themed conference panels. I want a directory of these panels so we can keep finding each other.
Yes. I want these things too. I want a transformative digital humanities with space for all manner of transformations, including transformative works. And I’ve just submitted my first post–a vid, of course–to the TransformDH tumblr my co-conspirators have created.
I also want critiques and questions, like the ones Miriam Posner raised on Twitter about whether university staff would be excluded by a digital humanities that focused on theory and critique rather than the work of building. I don’t think so, but my own interests lie more with small-scale, grassroots, not-so-institutional digital practices and possibilities, so I may not see the full implications.
Conference Thoughts: Queer Studies and the Digital Humanities
Posted by Alexis Lothian in Uncategorized on October 18, 2011
This weekend, I attended the LA Queer Studies conference. I’ve been every year since I first moved to LA in 2006, and presented three times; it’s a wonderful, welcoming conference that always leaves me feeling inspired and excited by queer scholarship. This year was one of the best, even though I missed the second day’s fashion show. Amanda Phillips has blogged about it, including an encounter we shared with some beautiful merkins.
I took part in a panel with Amanda, Micha Cárdenas, and Margaret Rhee on “Techno-Queer Self Fashioning: Digital Theory by Digital Praxis.” Our talks, on the possibility of butchness for gaming avatars (Amanda), the process of documenting the first Asian drag king troupe (Margaret), wearable electronics and––a concept with which I am in love––femme science (Micha) and vidding as queer critical fandom (me) were incredibly well received. Though our topics were very different, their shared central concern with thinking theory through creative practice, and with the necessity of a deep understanding of the technologies through which our critical and creative works are mediated, gave them many cross-connections and mutual coherences. I even had someone come up to me afterward and tell me she was a fan of the Cylon Vidding Machine, which was rather amazing.
Micha Cárdenas has blogged about the conference and the panel, bringing together keynote speaker Karen Tongson’s insights with our work, and has brought up some questions that I think are incredibly important––and that follow on from previous discussions in which I’ve been involved.
Tongson was discussing how Queer Theory used to be seen as a “hip, trendy” field to be in, when people still thought it was ripe with possibility for disruption and that now it seemed more institutionally tamed. (It’s hard to convey here the combination of sarcasm and actual sense of dissolusionment) Similarly, she said, with a bit of irony perhaps, that the Digital Humanities is the new hot, sellable commodity. … At times I fear or I feel that CCS discussions, or Digital Humanities discussions, can run down a road that is very conservative, by trying to bring together technologists/coders with humanities people/critical theory people/artists, yet never really getting beyond the initial conflicts of interest. Perhaps my concern is that the lack of a shared commitment to feminist, anti-racist, queer critiques involved in such a broad grouping creates a situation in which a lot of ground work has to be laid, and all the time gets spent laying that ground work.
My questions are: Is queer new media really so rare? Or are queer/feminist/women of color analyses of new media really so rare? Do you think there is often something very conservative, even sellable, that is appealing to corporations or to university regents or investors, that is often present in discussions of the digital humanities? Do you think there is still some radical potential for queer theory or new media or the digital humanities to disturb hegemonic systems of power that facilitate violence against certain groups of people every day and protect the interests of others?
These are the questions that I’ve been wrestling with ever since I started engaging with digital humanities discourse. I don’t think queer/feminist/women of color analyses of new media are rare at all, but I do think that more of them happen outside the academy than within it; I feel like often within the digital humanities area, there can be something of a fetishization of methodology that doesn’t let critical ideas go all the way to their conclusions.
I think that maybe a lot of queer/critical ethnic studies/similar scholars also lack access to the resources that make it easier to combine digital and humanities work. That might not only mean physical access and training in technology, but also the time to add yet another interdisciplinary element to a project. This is also a self-perpetuating process, in that new scholars might not realize that it’s possible to combine those elements, or think it is more difficult to do so than it actually is, if they don’t have mentors or models. But, again, my experience suggests that many, many politicized queers and people of color engaged in scholarly work in and out of the academy do use digital tools and think critically about them and even create them; they just don’t necessarily do so under the sign of the digital humanities. Whether they should is a question I certainly don’t know the answer to.
These issues are in fact the very topic of a roundtable at another conference, the American Studies Association conference in Baltimore this weekend, where I will be participating along with my fellow Queer Studies panelist Amanda Phillips, our panel chair Anna Everett, and Anne Cong-Huyen, Tanner Higgin, Marta S. Rivera Monclova, and Melanie Kohnen. If you’re attending, we’re on Friday at 10am in Hilton Baltimore Ruth. If you’re not going to ASA, the description is copied below; conference internet access willing, we will be trying to have a public set of notes and to engage in conversation with those who can’t attend the conference via Twitter and Google Docs.
In an era of widespread budget cuts at universities across the United States, scholars in the digital humanities are gaining recognition in the institution through significant grants, awards, new departments and cluster hires. At the same time, ethnic studies departments are losing ground, facing deep cuts and even disbandment. Though the apparent rise of one and retrenchment of the other may be the result of anti-affirmative action, post-racial, and neoliberal rhetoric of recent decades and not related to any effect of one field on the other, digital humanities discussions do often elide the difficult and complex work of talking about racial, gendered, and economic materialities, which are at the forefront of ethnic and gender studies. Suddenly, the (raceless, sexless, genderless) technological seems the only aspect of the humanities that has a viable future.
The increasing precariousness of the job market, which results in an unprecedented increase in part-time, adjunct, and non tenure-track hires, makes it important to consider issues of labor and inequality based on difference – whether in terms of race, gender, sexuality, or disability. Even tenured faculty have difficulty justifying their ambitious, non-traditional digital projects to funding agencies; ethnic and queer studies faculty–so often dual appointments or contingent positions–face additional challenges when planning digital projects. We must also consider the impact of technology on labor beyond academia. How, for example, is this current discourse of digital humanities ill-equipped to deal with issues of production and consumption, such as the Asian American women workers who build computer parts or the disposal of e-waste in Ghana? Moreover, how can we build a digital humanities that creates better tools and forms of collaboration, but is also attentive to the gendering of hardware and software tools, or is sensitive to the exclusionary practices of collaboration?
This roundtable consists of a panel of graduate students and recent PhDs who work on gender, queerness, race, and additional forms of difference in digital culture, moderated by Anna Everett, senior digital humanities professor. Focused on issues affecting more junior scholars, it emerged out of critical conversations that began at the 2011 MLA convention and continued at the Southern California digital humanities unconference THATCamp. First, we ask how “digital humanities” has been defined; who benefits from that definition? How can digital humanities benefit from more diverse critical paradigms, including race/ethnic studies and gender/sexuality studies? And what can modes of digital scholarship and pedagogy offer to scholars and teachers in American Studies? Our panel will discuss various ways digital scholarly work can productively engage with these lenses of critical cultural studies and solicit new ones. What works of digital scholarship, art, activism and pedagogy enable new possibilities for activating transformations in contemporary US cultural politics?
The issues of scholarly fashion and impact, significance and marketability that both Micha and our ASA panel bring up are especially salient for me at the moment, because I am finishing my PhD and applying for academic jobs. My future is open and uncertain, and despite the anxiety that involves, I feel glad for all I’ve been able to explore during my PhD and for the range of opportunities open to me as an interdisciplinary, international scholar. Now I’m wondering how the department in which I end up will shape my future contributions to these conversations…
Digital scholarship, vidding, and risk
Posted by Alexis Lothian in Uncategorized on September 26, 2011
The current issue of Camera Obscura contains a short essay Kristina Busse and I wrote on “Scholarly Critiques and Critiques of Scholarship: the Uses of Remix Video.” We discussed the ways that the fannish form of vidding has begun to be recognized across different circuits of knowledge production, and what is gained and lost when that happens. One of our examples was the defiantly non-institutional Us, by Lim, which has nevertheless been shown in galleries and many classes (I’ve screened it multiple times). The other was my own work engaging with vidding as a way to do digital scholarship.
I spent this morning on Twitter discussing Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education, calling on emerging scholars to take on risky projects and on senior scholars to mentor them (and here I must remark that I have been the beneficiary of incredibly generous mentorship from senior scholars in queer studies, science fiction and fan studies). I was concerned that the “risk” in her piece talked only about the digital, not about other reasons we should take risks in our intellectual work––to stand up for marginalized voices, be accountable to our communities, hold fast to unpopular or dangerous ideas. As I said on Twitter, it bothers me when “risk” is conflated with form. There are risky books, and risky ways of writing, that badly need support. And supporting dangerous ideas, varied forms of writing, and digital scholarship should be mutually reinforcing, not either/or.
With all that said, I’ve decided today that it’s time for me to take a digital risk. I’m letting go of a barrier I’ve generally kept loosely raised between myself as academic and myself as not-terribly-prolific vidder––a barrier that has been wearing itself down on both sides for some time, if it ever existed. It was my academic interest in fandom that inspired me to make these vids, after all. You will now find a tab for “Vidding” at the top of this page, and you can go there and watch the vids I’ve made and shared within fannish networks that have the most to say to my academic project. I’ll keep it updated. As well as works in their own right, these are the beginnings of my project of scholarly vidding, of vidding with and as scholarship; I hope it will take me to further possibilities, and maybe even further risks, in future.
Acafan conversation
Posted by Alexis Lothian in Uncategorized on August 16, 2011
This week, my contribution to a set of debates about scholars’ personal relationships between academia and fandom (broadly defined) goes live at Henry Jenkins‘s blog. The whole set of conversations, which will be mirrored at Dreamwidth, is well worth a look.
For me, one of the best parts has been to see the different influences on my thinking come together. I’ve been mentored unofficially by fan studies scholars, particularly Kristina Busse, for years, and have learned so much from being part of that community. At the same time, I’ve been trained in queer studies by Jack Halberstam and Karen Tongson, and have had many conversations about fandom with them and with scholars like Christine Bacareza Balance and Jayna Brown. Since Henry Jenkins joined USC, I’ve started to have those worlds come together on my doorstep––and now they are all talking to each other online.
Roberta Pearson and I have very different experiences of both academia and fandom; she works on industry and looks at hierarchies of taste and value, while I am concerned with texts’ and cultures’ theoretical and political interventions around queerness, race, gender, and capitalism. I enjoyed corresponding with her very much, though, and learned a lot from her responses to my comments. It gave me the opportunity to articulate my relationship to fandom more concretely than I have before.
Roberta Pearson in conversation with Alexis Lothian, part one
I don’t want only to study fans or to use fans’ ideas to make sense of texts, although those are certainly dynamics that I engage in. I tend to prefer to think about fandom as a set of communities where people are engaging in cultural production, intellectual exchange and concrete worldmaking that participates in the same project as the one I’m working on.
Roberta Pearson in conversation with Alexis Lothian, part two
When I talk about acafandom, I’m talking at least partly about acknowledging and doing justice to my own thinking’s debt to fannish theorists and artists outside the academia machine who have given me terms and ideas that help me theorize just as much as the dense analyses and critical explorations of literary and cultural studies do.
politics, futures, uncertainty
Posted by Alexis Lothian in Uncategorized on August 9, 2011
I’ve been in London for most of the summer, working on the last full chapter of my dissertation and spending time with my family at a time of crisis. It turns out that I’m also here at a time of crisis for the city and the country I come from. (I grew up in Glasgow, where England tends to be seen very much as another country at times like these, but have spent enough formative time in London that it feels like home to me too.) All I’ve seen of the riots in person is one broken window from the bus today, and some discomfiting plumes of smoke from the window of the attic room I’m staying in. But I’ve been watching intensely via Twitter.
My first instinct is to draw connections across space and time: to riots incited by police violence in Oakland and LA, and to British unrest in the 80s of my childhood. Today is my last day in London; I fly back to LA tomorrow, in the uncomfortable certainty that I’m unlikely to be leaving any of this behind. I’ve often had an expat’s nostalgia for British politics, whose problems can seem less overwhelming than their US equivalents; that has thoroughly evaporated over the past year.
As the Conservative government insists that it’s all pure criminality, and tired, dehumanizing assumptions about the race, age, and relative humanity of the criminals get trotted out, it’s pretty crucial to understand the politics of the seemingly apolitical. From journalist Laurie Penny’s Laurie Penny’s powerful blog post Panic in the Streets of London:
In one NBC report, a young man in Tottenham was asked if rioting really achieved anything:
“Yes,” said the young man. “You wouldn’t be talking to me now if we didn’t riot, would you?”
The chapter I am writing is about dystopia, about––among other things––what it means to describe possible futures when your impetus is the feeling that there will be no future at all. Violence and looting from the excluded and disenfranchised is a way of expressing the inchoate rage that being denied a future creates, as former London Mayor Ken Livingston expressed to the BBC yesterday. It’s an odd feeling to be theorizing around queer theory’s calls to embrace the feeling of no future, to be turning to fictive social breakdowns, on a day like today. Yet making sense of the ways futures are constructed in fiction, history and politics has never felt more urgent to me. Or more complicated.