Posts Tagged announcement
queer love
Posted by Alexis Lothian in Uncategorized on February 14, 2012
On Valentine’s Day, that bastion of corporatized heteronormativity, I’d like to share this beautiful project of queer love poetry from many wonderful artists and scholars––several of whom I am lucky enough to call friends and collaborators.
It’s much more wonderful than a card; check it out.
***
Transformative critical fan creation is a kind of queer love that has nourished me both intellectually and in other ways. I’ll be presenting some of the ways I’ve incorporated queer fannish love into my theories of new media and temporality at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on February 25, as graduate student keynote at the Midwestern Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference on “Interdisciplinarity for the Future”.
There’s information about my talk (and a vid to watch, which the organizers added to my abstract––making me feel a lot of queer scholarly love) at the UWM website here: “Futures Without Closure: Queer Fandom and the Reconfiguration of Media Time”
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.
Critical Ethnic Studies Conference
Posted by Alexis Lothian in Uncategorized on March 9, 2011
This weekend at UC Riverside will be the inaugural conference of the Critical Ethnic Studies Association: Critical Ethnic Studies and the Future of Genocide.
It’s a seriously amazing lineup: just look at this list of plenary speakers.
Keith Camacho · Cathy Cohen · Glen Coulthard · Angela Davis · Gina Dent · Vicente Diaz · Roderick Ferguson · Ruth Wilson Gilmore · Gayatri Gopinath · Herman Gray · Judith Halberstam · Lisa Hajjar · Cheryl Harris · David Lloyd · Lisa Lowe · Fred Moten · José Muñoz · Nadine Naber · Hiram Pérez · Laura Pulido · Michelle Raheja · Dylan Rodríguez · Sarita See · Denise da Silva · Audra Simpson · Nikhil Singh · Andrea Smith · Dean Spade · Neferti Tadiar · João Costa Vargas · Waziyatawin
And that isn’t even counting all the other panels.
(If anyone reading this isn’t familiar with these scholars and activist-scholars and public intellectuals: you really, really won’t regret looking up their work. I plan to do that for those I don’t yet know, after seeing their names in such company)
A conference Tumblr has been set up for optionally-anonymous crowdsourced liveblogging. The first thing posted there is an announcement of a panel on Octavia Butler, with Alexis Pauline Gumbs who blew my mind when I saw her present the Queer Black Mobile Homecoming project recently; it definitely seems like a sign that this is going to be a productive and perhaps even transformative experience.
The conference hashtag on Twitter will be #cesa11. I’ve been an unofficial social media helper since I persuaded organizer Jayna Brown to join Twitter at the Eaton Conference a few weeks ago, so I will be tweeting lots at @alothian and possibly dipping my toes into Tumblr after all the liveblogging I did at DML last weekend.
I can’t make it Thursday, alas, but I will be attending on Friday and Saturday; see you there?
TWC Issue 3
Posted by Alexis Lothian in Uncategorized on September 16, 2009
I’m a little ashamed of how much radio silence I have to break here; life has been very busy. I have a backlog of blog entries to make, and hope to start producing them soon.
In the meantime, I want to announce the publication of the third issue of Transformative Works and Cultures, which you can find here. There are some great articles about everything from quilting to filk to lesbian fandom.
As well as editing on Symposium, my main contribution to this issue was transcribing and editing a multi-voiced piece Pattern Recognition: A Dialogue on Racism in Fan Communities. The piece emerged from some intense conversations at WisCon, and could easily have been many times its current length; I felt unspeakably honoured to be in a room with Deepa, Coffeeandink, Oyceter, Sparkymonster, Naamen, Jackie and Liz, listening to them talk about race, representation and fandom with such depth and complexity.
TWC issue 2: call for papers
Posted by Alexis Lothian in announcement, fandom on September 18, 2008
Now that we’ve put our first issue of Transformative Works and Cultures together, it’s time to start thinking about the second. The Spring 2009 issue will have a focus on games and gaming, and you can read the full call for papers here.
For Symposium in particular, we’re looking for your reflections on games and gaming culture––memories, manifestoes, analyses, complaints, celebrations. We’d like to hear about video games old and new, RPGs on and offline, fan art and fiction around games, gaming communities; anything at all. Speaking for myself, I’d particularly like some submissions that discuss race, gender, class, ability and how they play out in the social worlds of gaming.
Please contact symposium@transformativeworks.org if you have any enquiries, and please, please pass this on to anyone you know who might be interested in submitting.
The full CFP text, since my link goes to a .rtf file:
Read the rest of this entry »
Save Bitch
Posted by Alexis Lothian in Uncategorized on September 18, 2008
The first time I visited the USA, I was 19. Alice and I headed with great excitement to San Francisco, where we marvelled at the Pacific, the hills and the residents, made a lot of Sex and the City References, and were generally amazed at how the America of pop-cultural exports both did and did not appear to actually exist.
In a bookstore––I think it may have been on Haight Street–I picked up a copy of Bitch magazine. I had never seen anything like this before; a magazine that was all critical cultural analysis, that was outspokenly feminist, that took apart the gender and race and class politics of TV and film and all the rest. I was a latecomer to the world of the internet, and wouldn’t have regular access from home for another couple of years; I didn’t have any way of getting more. I took that issue home, and I read it to death. I was learning feminist theory at university, but I was only stumblingly beginning to understand the cultural politics of my own life; although the examples were foreign (that exoticism was, of course, part of the appeal), Bitch showed my how to do that. When I moved to the US to spend the following year as an exchange student at Berkeley, one of the first things I did was become a subscriber.
Now Bitch is in trouble, and needs a lot of money to get their next issue out. It’s true that there are plenty of online sources for the kind of critique that it offers, but I am horrified by the idea that this vital set of takes on popular culture might disappear from the newsstands where people like my former self could stumble across it. As a more advanced student of feminisms I am as likely to disagree with the articles there as I am to be inspired by them, but Bitch itself had a huge hand in educating me to a point where I can have that kind of nuanced analysis. I still find out new things from the magazine every quarter, and read articles on subjects about which I would probably never have clicked through to a blog entry.
(And consider checking out Make/shift too, while your mind is on feminist independent publications.)
Transformative Works and Cultures, Issue One!
Posted by Alexis Lothian in announcement, fandom on September 17, 2008
I’m very excited to announce that Transformative Works and Cultures has just published its first issue. It’s been a lot of work, and far less for me than for the heroic editors Kristina Busse and Karen Hellekson, but it all feels so worth it to see the great issue we’ve put together.
The image above links to the table of contents; you can also read the press release and the editors’ introduction. I think the journal has really achieved its aims of being both serious and rigorous enough for academic respect and accessible enough for a wider readership, and I’ve seen some postings by nonacademic fans who agree.
The peer reviewed entries include a marvellous piece by Francesca Coppa on the history of vidding, and Abigail De Kosnik extending fan theory beyond “fandom” per se by reading American electoral politics as a conflict of fandoms. There’s plenty queer sex from Catherine Tosenberger on incest, queer theory and Supernatural fic and Anne Kustritz on BDSM symbolism in Story of O and Star Wars fan fiction. Louisa Stein and Sam Ford discuss fan discursive practices around genre TV and soap opera respectively, and Madeline Ashby takes on posthuman anxieties in anime and their relationship to women writing in fandom. The “transformative” of the journal’s name is taken into unexpected ground by Michael Arnzen‘s piece on the transformative work of teaching.
The Symposium section, for which I was coeditor, is themed rather self-reflexively for this issue. From perspectives which all start in the personal and spread into wide-ranging reflections on communication structures and ways of producing knowledge, Dana Bode, Rebecca Lucy Busker and Cathy Cupitt write about how fannish, academic and other communities of practice write and interact. Symposium also contains a recording from a panel at the media conference Console-ing Passions, which was itself a reflection on the way fannish academics interact with one another and with different forms of fandom. You can hear my voice rambling on about queer gender in the first question of the discussion track.
Writing this, I realise how much I pop up in this issue, because I also interviewed the Audre Lorde of the Rings (online home base Oh!Industry). I loved what they had to say about work, love, racialized affect, queer collectivity and other clever things. We also have interviews with the illustrious Henry Jenkins and the Italian artistic collective Wu Ming.
And reviews, as if that weren’t enough! But I’m not going to describe them, or even explain why I disagree with the review of Sandvoss’s Fans. I have exhausted myself with all this summarizing––please click on some links and see what you think for yourself.
Enough
Posted by Alexis Lothian in Uncategorized on July 31, 2008
I’d like to share Dean Spade and Tyrone Boucher’s new website, Enough. Growing out of an intense series of coversations on Dean’s blog last year, it is a space to encourage reflection on class, privilege, intersectionality, social justice and most of all money.
They’re issues that are hard to think about without defensiveness, no matter what your background. Seeing the kind of open, honest, self-aware analysis in the essays on the website makes me hopeful that that’s possible.
Maybe I’ll even contribute one.
Transformative Works and Cultures call for meta: please link and share widely
Posted by Alexis Lothian in announcement on June 22, 2008
Transformative Works and Cultures, the online academic journal associated with the Organization for Transformative Works, is looking for your meta.
The Symposium section of the journal is a section of concise, thematically contained essays. These short pieces provide insight into current developments and debates surrounding any topic related to fandom or transformative media and cultures. These essays will not go through academic peer review but will be reviewed by the editorial team. We’re looking for 1500 to 2500-word essays on any aspect of fandom, transformative works, online culture.Images, music and video can be included.
Symposium pieces will be more polished than a meta post, less detailed than an academic paper: we’re imagining them as an archive of fannish and academic meta debates of issues relating to fan cultures, saved for posterity. We hope to continue and expand the work of Lucy Cereta’s Fanfic Symposium, which has been doing that for many years.
Here’s the full Journal call for papers for your information. Please note that although TWC is a part of OTW’s umbrella organization, we are not an organ of OTW. We have editorial independence and are happy to consider pieces that criticize the OTW organization. And we are very much looking for submissions from non-academics.
We are still accepting submissions for the September issue, and we need those by the end of the month. Our loose theme for this issue is online scholarship, the Organization for Transformative Works, and the relationship between criticism and theory from inside and outside the academy, but we’re open to more or less anything.
Email us on symposium@transformativeworks.org if you’d like to talk about your ideas.
Why I haven't been blogging much lately
Posted by Alexis Lothian in announcement on March 13, 2008
… Aside from all the regular graduate school time-consuming things such as term papers, reading, grading and teaching, I have been devoting an extraordinary amount of mental energy to co-chairing my department’s conference on obsession and excess. Follow the poster thumbnail link to see further information, including a schedule.
It’s on March 28 and 29 2008 and we have keynote speeches from Tavia Nyong’o and Stephen Elliott, as well as an evening of readings, a DJ set from Tavia Nyong’o, and critical karaoke — where a scholar of pop performs reflections on a song while the song plays in the background. It should be a pretty fun event.
Although I must admit I am looking forward to it being over so I can have my life back.