Archive for category Uncategorized
#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.
WisCon 35
Posted by Alexis Lothian in Uncategorized on May 24, 2011
I am on my way to WisCon 35 this weekend. WisCon is a feminist science fiction convention that combines critical analysis and celebration of feminist literature and media, fannish overexcitement, social justice activism around gender, race, class and sexuality, and lots of brainstorming about ideas of how to change the world for the better. It’s one of my favourite places to spend a weekend. This year I’m screening fan videos, talking about my experience as a Tiptree juror, and participating in a discussion about class in science fiction and fantasy.
I will also be editing the sixth volume of the WisCon Chronicles, published by Aqueduct Press. The Chronicles is a volume of reflections, transcripts, academic papers and other documents that emerge from WisCon. I will be soliciting for contributions at the convention, on the theme “Futures of Feminism and Fandom”; you can read more about the collection, and ask questions, here.
Gendered Futures, Katharine Burdekin and Reproductive Queer Negativity: No Future Conference post 2 of 2
Posted by Alexis Lothian in Uncategorized on April 9, 2011
Following on from my previous post discussing the No Future conference more generally, my panel was memorable enough for a post of its own. I’ve edited this post from the original as I’ve taken down the full text of my conference paper; I’m working on major revisions for a longer version I hope to publish, and I don’t feel too comfortable having the unfinished version available online, but I am happy to share it if you contact me.
***
I had great copanelists on my “Gendered Futures” panel. Elizabeth Russell gave a paper on ‘Gender Crime and Futures without Women,’ where she opened with this rather fascinating image encouraging Scottish men to donate sperm for the good of the future race (I confess, it makes me imagine Scotland as a nation of lesbian couples, a prospect I find not wholly unappealing). She then moved on from its connotations of virility and white supremacy to talk about two Indian futuristic fictions that, like Swastika Night though in a very different context, imagine women as an endangered species: Manjula Padmanabhan’s 2008 novel Escape and Manish Jhai’s 2004 film Matrubhoomi.
The other panelist was co-organizer Caitríona Ní Dhúill, whose paper on ‘Futures Desired, Future Desires’ discussed queer futurity and anti-futurity by exploring Bloch’s stereotypical and yet utopian representations of femininity.
And then there was me (actually I went first, but it was easiest to put this last), with my paper “The History of No Future: Reproductive Deviance and the Politics of Futurelessness in Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika Night.” I’m happy to share the paper with anyone who is interested, but I’ve taken it off the public internet for the moment. Here is an abstract:
The critique of normative futurity has been a powerful force in recent queer theory. Lee Edelman, Elizabeth Freeman and Judith Halberstam have variously contemplated the ways in which nonreproductive sexualities and life narratives alter straight understandings of time. But the contemporary discourse of queer temporality rarely pays close attention to the history of cultural meanings associated with reproductive futures. Seeking to trace a longer history for queer models of temporality than is often accounted for, I turn to Katharine Burdekin’s 1937 Swastika Night, a feminist and anti-fascist dystopia first published under the male name Murray Constantine. Imagined dystopian futures, where negative elements of historical materiality are projected as narrowing the range of possible futures, cast what it means to imagine a future––or a lack of one––into sharp relief.
Burdekin’s novel is most often read for its prescience in imagining the horrifying foreclosures of a Nazi victory before the beginning of World War II, but its merging of a disturbing vision of nonsentient femininity with a homoerotic representation of fascism prefigures many concerns of queer studies. In particular, it allows for a reconfiguration of Lee Edelman’s representation of queer anti-futurism as opposition to the conservative ‘reproductive futurism’ he identifies as “the fascism of the baby’s face.” In Swastika Night, futurity’s absence appears via the figures of women reduced to reproductivity, who resist their oppression by mutely failing to give birth to the male children who will render a future biologically possible. Burdekin’s gendered critique of fascist futurity offers a feminist model for futurelessness as a mode of concrete politics. It also makes a complex intervention into discourses around male homosexuality, fascism and nationalism, sympathetically portraying queer sexualities that nevertheless prop up a reproductive futurism aligned with fascism and imperialism.
My paper considers Burdekin’s work as a potential intervention into both historical and contemporary discussions of queerness and futurity. Confronting the rise of European fascism and the seductions as well as the horrors that it proffered, Swastika Night routes modernity’s futures through reproductive bodies in ways that can trouble oppositions that 21st century critical theory often wants to naturalize: between queer and straight time, futurity and negativity, deviant and normative pleasures.
And here are my presentation visuals––made in Prezi to help balance the visual monotony of a mostly text-based presentation. I am pleased with how it turned out.
No future––for who? (post 1 of 2 on Durham’s No Future conference)
Posted by Alexis Lothian in Uncategorized on April 9, 2011
Shortly after the Critical Ethnic Studies conference on Settler Colonialism and the Future of Genocide (liveblogs of which are in the posts preceding this one), I headed across the Atlantic for the No Future Conference at the University of Durham in the UK, part of a year-long series the Institute for Advanced Studies is organizing there on futures.
I had a wonderful time and heard many fascinating papers at both conferences, but looking back on them together, what I notice most is how rare it was for the two sets of conversations––no future and future of genocide, two phrases that have the potential to mean more or less the same thing––to overlap.
My experience felt very structured by the old and new world surroundings. I’m originally from Scotland, but five years in California have accustomed me to freeways, wide open spaces, and a certain newness to even buildings that grandly proclaim their history; to an often visibly manufactured landscape that the CESA conference reminded me to see as a product of settler colonialism and its histories of genocide. The No Future Conference was my first visit to the University of Durham, which is a kind of small, ancient university I’ve never attended. The wood-panelled debating chamber decorated with heraldic shields in the shadow of 900-year-old Durham Cathedral couldn’t have been more different from UC Riverside’s division between a campus gym and recently constructed student center.
And the questions about absent futures asked in Durham were often directly connected to the long history of British knowledge production our location (a stone’s throw from the tomb of the Venerable Bede) made tangible. The apocalyptic as a religious category was often addressed, something I was keen to hear about as it’s an area whose relationship to my own work I’m trying to figure out. Papers from Karen Edwards and Christopher Rowland on apocalypse in Milton and Blake served as reminders of the political ferment, the revolutionary hopes and resistant dreams that bubble up from the canon it’s easy to dismiss as dry, the landscape smoothed into ‘heritage’ by generations of well-heeled undergraduates and overawed tourists.
Highlights of the conference for me included Melanie Adley’s paper “There is a Future in Dying: Female Fragility and Passive Defiance,” about fin de siecle German melodramatic suicide fiction as antisocial feminist queer futurity; John Troyer on the cultural construction of death and unevenly distributed technological efforts to change its future; organizer Alastair Renfrew’s discussion of Lenin as a utopian cultural figure (particularly the allusion to “Lenin in a Jimmy hat”) followed by Sean Grattan’s reading of hipster liberalism in the light of this statue in Seattle; and Lucy Sargisson and Lisa Garforth’s explorations of possible futures for environmental politics through fiction. Internet was patchy in the old buildings (one more old world/new world element) and I missed the immediate archive that tweeting and/or liveblogging makes possible; I make far better notes when I am aware they will have an audience, it turns out.
I will make a separate post about my own paper and the panel I was on. I want to close this general one by going back to Critical Ethnic Studies. Comparisons between two conferences so totally different in scope and scale can’t be taken all that far. But, especially in comparison to CESA, it was impossible not to notice that all of the 50 or so attendees at No Future, all that I met from the EU or US, seemed to be white. I don’t want to make an argument based on demographics, but it’s also true that very few of the papers I heard made any mention of the connections between race and futurity, and though the uneven distribution of futures within global capitalism was mentioned often, we heard little from the perspective of those populations whose access to futurity has been most foreclosed.
I would have loved to bring over some of the speakers from CESA to add the perspectives of Black and Native futures and presents; many presentations I heard at CESA would have fit verbatim into the “no future” theme. Perhaps speakers on these areas were among those who had to cancel due to budget constraints, symptoms of the present crisis in higher education’s economic future. But if there are going to be interdisciplinary conversations about futures of institutions, worlds, socialities, and what we mean when we agonize about their apparent absence, they will be incomplete if they do not take into consideration the racializing pasts and presents of what CESA called “the future of genocide.”
CESA 2011 Social Movements plenary liveblog
Posted by Alexis Lothian in Uncategorized on March 12, 2011
I had hoped to liveblog more yesterday, but didn’t quite have the energy and sadly missed the beginning of the queer plenary; the #cesa11 Twitter feed has been amazing, though.
The Social Movements and Activism plenary is now beginning. Speakers are Scott Lyons, Andrea Smith, David Lloyd, João Costa Vargas, and Laura Pulido. As yesterday, this is liveblogging, which means I am typing very quickly and may mishear or misquote––please correct anything that seems wrong! I’m trying to capture as much as I can what is said, to archive (never an innocent act, of course) rather than to comment; I will try to make a more thoughtful post-conference blog entry.
CESA 2011 liveblog: White Supremacy and Settler Colonialism plenary
Posted by Alexis Lothian in Uncategorized on March 11, 2011
Liveblogging from the Critical Ethnic Studies Conference at UC Riverside; last edited on March 13 to clean up text. Please correct any misquotes or add attributions and references in comments! There may be noncomprehensiveness and occasional blips in attention; supplements would be great.
Consider this something akin to a collection of archived tweets rather than a full transcription, please… And bear in mind that I’m trying to archive what was said rather than to thoughtfully comment on it.
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