Posts Tagged utopia
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.
LA Queer Studies
Posted by Alexis Lothian in queer on October 12, 2008
I spent most of this weekend at the LA Queer Studies Conference at UCLA. It was the third time I’ve been to the conference, the second time I’ve presented there, and as always it left me with lots to think about. The key theoretical presences seemed to be Jasbir Puar’s Terrorist Assemblages and/or Gayle Rubin’s “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality” (you can read parts of that here). The conjuncture of those texts’ concerns led on the one hand to analyses of art and practice attentive to the ties between gay/queer imaginaries, whiteness, the state and global hegemonies, and on the other to a focus on taxonomies and critiques of them and the continuing importance of rethinking and redrawing boundaries.
I’ve been reading Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety, and thinking a lot about how she criticizes queer theory and other forms of radical scholarship for narrowing their vision of agency to an either/or system of hegemony and resistance (to be wildly reductive about her complex argument). One of the points that seemed to be made over and over by papers at LAQS was that any automatic connection between nonstraight sexuality and ‘resistance’ doesn’t make much sense , but that it’s absolutely crucial to pay attention to the fissures where there exist alternatives to neoliberal regimes that want to incorporate everything: from the queer diasporic art Gayatri Gopinath showed to Juana Maria Rodriguez’s profoundly hot sexual utopianism and through a whole lot of other things besides.
All of this, particularly the threading of ideas about critical utopianism and the importance of not giving up analysis at failure, is absolutely central to the dissertation project I have percolating in my head, which I hope to translate from scattered notes into an actual proposal in order to take exams by the end of the academic year (and yes, that is why this blog has been so quiet). The paper I actually gave at LAQS is probably quite tangential to said project, but I’d like to share it so that more than the brave souls who came to the 9am panel (including the writers and artists I actually quote) can read it.
Since I’ve surprised myself by rambling on in great abstraction about the conference, I’ll post it in the next entry.