Posts Tagged queer
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.
#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.
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.
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…
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.
MLA 2011 and #mla11: on tweeting conventions
Posted by Alexis Lothian in Uncategorized on January 10, 2011
I’ve just spent quite an exhiliarating weekend attending the Modern Language Association in Los Angeles. MLA had previously been known to me by reputation as a terrifyingly large conference, a place to hear academic rock stars strut their stuff but, for grad students, a purgatory that mainly had to be endured because of the job interviews that take place there. With neither a presentation nor the job market to worry about, and with the luxury of being able to recharge at home whenever I wanted, that couldn’t have been further from my experience. I was able to engage with the conference in a stress-free way and to immerse myself in the new modes of participation Rosemary Feal has been encouraging. When I ran into colleagues and told them how much I was enjoying myself, they tended to look fairly astonished.
Those who followed my twitter stream may have been less surprised. I’ve livetweeted quite a few conferences now, first taking the plunge at DML 2010 after lurking in digital media studies twitter streams more or less for as long as they’ve existed. I love swimming through the datastream, documenting comments, thoughts and interactions as they occur; I find more and more that there is a particular zone of attention it is possible to enter, where I can synthesize and transmit as I hear and engage far more intensely with what’s being said than I ever would otherwise.
The capacity to do that depends immensely on the style and substance of what is being said, of course. MLA is the largest conference I’ve ever attended, with a range of topics of discussion that’s so large it’s difficult to contemplate. For what it’s worth (and I wish I knew a way to easily link to portions of a twitterstream, but I didn’t tag panel numbers consistently), these are the panels I attended. I’d have liked to see more, but the disadvantage of a conference where you can go home any time you want is that you also have all your usual home commitments.
12. Labor in the Digital Humanities
74. Queerness and Disability
86. Writing with Eve: the Legacy of Eve Sedgwick
230A. Speculative Fictions: ‘Near Future’ Visions of Race and Politics
309. The History and Future of the Digital Humanities (#309)
366. Sedgwick’s Endurance: Writing with Loss
580. The Traffic in Gender: New Directions in Trans Scholarship
I wish I had managed to attend more of the “academy in hard times” panels and more on critical race studies, but what I did attend probably gives a good overview of my interests. I attended some of the intensely tweeted digital humanities panels, but more where there were relatively few people attached to their computers. In a digital humanities panel, tweeting made me part of an active backchannel conversation. In other panels, where I was either the only person tweeting or one of just a few, I felt like a broadcasting device, charged with bringing the discussion to those who would have liked to be present but couldn’t, and fervently hoping I wouldn’t misrepresent a speaker. I had some anxiety about sharing people’s words without permission, but enough online acquaintances (many from fannish and activist communities outside the academy, who would never have known about MLA but for its twitter presence) expressed interest my microblogging that I decided to keep going.
Making notes and tweeting in all those panels made me think a lot about the way ideas get presented orally. I often see comments complaining about the way humanities scholars read their papers aloud in conferences, calling for more dynamic modes of presentation. I agree with that to a a degree; no one wants to listen to someone mumbling into a sheet of paper, and we ought to study and practice presentation skills as much as we do writing. But outside the digital humanities panels I attended, most of the presentations I saw were more or less read, and that didn’t stop them from being easy to follow and engaging. I’ve begun to think about tweetability as an index for conference papers’ intelligibility: if they’re easy to parse into 140-character chunks, I am able to feel that I have assimilated what the speakers had to say.
There were two panels in particular where I found the talks sufficiently tweetable that I felt I was able to share with my community of scholars, fans, and online activists, letting them know what was being said inside the academy. The first was a marvellous panel on race and speculative fiction with papers from Chris Cunningham on Phillip K Dick’s imaginings of black leadership, Curtis Marez talking about the United Farm Workers movement as a political undercurrent to Star Wars, Shelley Streeby on queer families and black vampires in Octavia Butler’s Fledgling, and Kara Keeling on District 9, globalized cinema and black futurity.
The second was Jack Halberstam, Dean Spade and Aren Aizura’s panel on new directions in trans scholarship, though I think my capacity to tweet there was aided by my prior familiarity with Jack and Dean’s ideas and speaking voices. One of the main points all the speakers made in that panel was that sometimes it is politically important to remain unintelligible, that much can be lost when what is marginal becomes comprehensible to dominant discourses. The best example is Dean Spade‘s work on the history of state-sponsored quantitative studies and what kinds of content they require in order to render citizens legible.
While it’s something of a twisted appropriation of the panel’s radical anti-assimilationist politics to say so, I think there is a similar value to difficult intelligibility when it comes to thinking about ideas. And that makes me want to resist my own desire to make every new idea condensable to a 140-character reduction. In the Sedgwick memorial panels, particularly the talks by Judith Butler, Lauren Berlant, and Lee Edelman, the theoretical content of presentations was of an intensity that I find difficult to parse until I have written it down. Deep theory is not tweetable, at least not for me, though attempting to synthesize it on the run is fascinating and engaging as an intellectual workout. Listening to talks of that kind is an experience of grasping the insight that runs away before you can type to the end of the sentence. I tried tweeting what I could catch hold of, but I’m not sure it was useful. Still, I’d hesitate to say that these scholars should begin to give tweetable papers, should package their thought for easier consumption; I think something would be lost then too.
blogs and blobs
Posted by Alexis Lothian in Uncategorized on July 4, 2010
I’d like to draw your attention to this ongoing series in the online version of the UK Guardian newspaper: A Transgender Journey by Juliet Jacques. It’s great to see a mainstream paper like the Guardian giving space to an account of nonheteronormative culture that is critical and thoughtful and informed by the marginal, conflicting worlds of LGBT culture – that acknowledges the familiar narratives without simplistically reproducing them.
I would be making this post regardless, I think, but I’m also a bit biased here. I met Juliet when we were both studying for MAs at Sussex, and have stayed in touch with her through many of the events she documents in her column. We’ve shared our discoveries of queer and trans theory and art, and I’ve learned a lot about modernism and football through our acquaintance. The last time we managed to meet up, which I think was a year ago, she mentioned that she really wanted to blog about her transition on the Guardian; so when I saw the first installment go up, I felt that little fizz of excitement and glee we have when we see a friend achieve one of their goals.
***
I’m in London at the moment, and this week I went to an event at the BFI for the new issue of the queer literary journal Chroma. The theme was “Future Sex,” so I knew I couldn’t stay away. I was completely charmed by Dr Rachel Armstrong‘s presentation, which reminded me of many works of science fiction. Armstrong showed a short film she has made, “Protocells,” and gave an explanation of her work over its silence. She has filmed very simple cells, which are not alive according to standard definitions, and is fascinated by the ways they interact –– changing shape as they reach out for one another, splitting apart, sliding inside one another and converging.
Her video uses text to comment on what might be taking place between these blobs, and the experience of watching it and listening to her describe the experiment was very moving. It’s not predictable or obvious why these interactions take place, and Armstrong was talking about the importance of sitting with that lack of knowledge, of the potential for changing the dominant narrative of science and moving away from biological determinism if the conclusion, the result, were to be decentered. The talk was followed by a rather inspiring discussion of blob interaction as a way of thinking our own affective interactions with objects and beings that reach out to us and/or penetrate our boundaries.
Digital Media and Learning
Posted by Alexis Lothian in Uncategorized on February 21, 2010
I spent the weekend in a state of gleeful intellectual overstimulation, at the Digital Media and Learning Conference at UC San Diego. The theme was ‘diversifying participation,’ and most of the presentations I attended focused intensely on the divisions, inequalities and conflicts that utopian or dystopian rhetorics about the digital future too often obscure.
I was part of a panel on fan video, which was slightly misrepresented in the program, as we had expected to feature some discussion of other kinds of participatory culture but ended up with five people (six including Francesca Coppa‘s Skype appearance) all steeped in the same fanvidding culture. It made for very complementary talks, but was perhaps a little opaque to outsiders. I dashed around frantically trying to make the recalcitrant technology speak to my computer and gave a short talk on how vidding can be a form of literacy that makes subjugated knowledge formations visible in mainstream media.
S. Craig Watkins’s keynote on black and Latino youth use of digital media was quite fascinating. Watkins talked about the different uses different social groups make of digital media, with particular reference to hip hop culture, and how poor and working class young people can be disadvantaged because the publicity of social networking profiles, twitter etc necessitates such complicated code switching. The news that young people of color spend more time online than young white people was greeted with much excitement on the twitter stream; I couldn’t help thinking that, rather than greater equality, this just marks a change the relationship between access and class. There are a fair few science fiction texts that feature an elite free from the surveillance and alienation of data connections through which working classes labor (two offhand examples: Alex Rivera’s film Sleep Dealer and L. Timmel DuChamp’s five-novel Marq’ssan cycle).
As the conference went on, may aspects of my concerns were mirrored in others’ comments. They are also taken up in Kristina Busse’s non-attending response post to the conference where she argues that, given the current industrial dynamics of the academy, we have to recognize the material privilege that being able to attend large events requires, and make them digitally available to those who lack those resources. DML was free and open to those who could make it, but didn’t have the tech set up for remote viewing.
Despite my presence in the flesh I didn’t get to attend as many panels as I would have liked, partly because I had to leave early. Other highlights of the conference for me included discussions of race in online avatar representations from Lisa Nakamura and Beth Coleman among others, talking about how we need to think about much more than the visual coding of avatars and its relationship to RL images of race: among other things, structures of kinship and belonging and global labor politics should be part of that discussion. I especially appreciated Nakamura’s remarks about how great value is placed on subverting the rules of games when they are remade in forms like machinima, but when capitalist practices like gold farming break the rules they are only seen as cheating.
Most relevant to my own work was the panel on Queer You(th)Tube, with Jonathan Alexander, Elizabeth Losh, and Alex Juhasz. Alexander and Losh laid out the context of online queerness and demonstrated the generic markers of YouTube coming-out videos, talking about the ways queer communities form online and move offline, the support networks that emerge, and how some queers get left off the map. I found the sincerity, diffidence, bravado and anxiety of the queer teenagers’ vlogs quite moving, and it made me quite nostalgic for the message-board-enabled digital development of my own queer self-understanding.
Juhasz punctured that bubble with her provocative YouTube presentation, which took up the parodies made by straight kids of these earnest online comings-out and connected them to what she understands as a pervasive, conservative miasma of irony that permeates all our online discourse. Her critique of the lack of critical distance was very reminiscent of Fredric Jameson’s 1980s analysis of postmodernism, but she emphasized one difference; as Juhasz’s recursive use of YouTube to make her attacks on YouTube underlines, her criticisms of irony are themselves ironic. The debate made me think about the multiple definitions of queer that I feel I am constantly trying to balance in my own work: community, sense of self, political identity, political anti-identity, disruption. Queer theory also offers many important interventions to the intense focus on ‘youth’ that tends to dominate discussions of digital pedagogy: learning is not exclusive to the young, and too often all people are assumed to share an overly normalizing life narrative. Similarly, queer and other radical pedagogies remind us that learning never flows only in one direction, from teacher to student.
Thanks to Twitter and HASTAC’s liveblogging, I was able to get a sense of the panels I missed on the last afternoon. It seems that the critical reflections crossing my mind were crossing many others’ too. As always, I am eager to see what may come of the questions raised about institutionalized vs unofficial knowledge production which are now being addressed in Busse’s blog comments.