2012-13 Feminist Studies Colloquium Series.
Event details here.
]]>If all writing is fundamentally tied to the production of meanings and texts, then feminist research that blurs the borders of academia and activism is necessarily about the labor and politics of mobilizing experience for particular ends. Co-authoring stories is a chief tool by which feminists working in alliances across borders mobilize experience to write against relations of power that produce social violence, and to imagine and enact their own visions and ethics of social change. Such work demands a serious engagement with the complexities of identity, representation, and political imagination as well as a rethinking of the assumptions and possibilities associated with engagement and expertise. This presentation draws upon 16 years of partnership with activists in India and with academic co-authors in the US to reflect on how story telling across social, geographical, and institutional borders can enhance critical engagement with questions of violence and struggles for social change, while also troubling dominant discourses and methodologies inside and outside of the academy. In offering six "truths" of alliance work, this talk reflects on the labor process, assumptions, possibilities, and risks associated with co-authorship as a tool for mobilizing intellectual spaces in which stories from multiple locations in an alliance can speak with one another and evolve into more nuanced critical interventions.
Richa Nagar is Professor of Gender, Women's, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota and she has worked closely with Sangtin Kisaan Mazdoor Sangathan (Sangtin Peasants and Workers Organization) in Sitapur District of India. She has co-authored Sangtin Yatra (Sangtin, 2004), Playing with Fire (University of Minnesota Press and Zubaan, 2006), A World of Difference (Guilford, 2009), and Ek Aur Neemsaar (Rajkamal Prakashan, 2012) and she has co-edited Critical Transnational Feminist Studies (SUNY Press, 2010). She has been a residential fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) in Stanford and at the Jawaharlal Nehru Institute for Advanced Studies in New Delhi.
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]]>Mirta Kupferminc is a Jewish Argentine visual artist whose exuberant, often challenging work encodes complex stories of gender, diaspora, space, and the body. Kupferminc's images, set in the context of other visual representations that function as maps of desire, politics, and, often, women's bodies provide an insight into the metaphorical power of cartography.
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]]>Description:
How has human trafficking been described and made real through legal, political and cultural sites? What visual economies shape the consumption of certain kinds of images of trafficking and what is at stake in posing human rights through (neo)liberal terms? Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this presentation examines how human trafficking (and more specifically sex trafficking) has become a political and cultural reality for US audiences by mapping the ways government, media and scholarly research have framed and narrated trafficking. This presentation looks at the production of human trafficking as a contemporary human rights concern in order to draw attention to the historical and continuing ways knowledge of racialized sexualities shapes and polices US national belonging as well as notions of global, human rights citizenship.
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]]>Robles De León's essay: HHHRoblesDeLeon.pdf
Greenisen's essay: HHHGreenisen.pdf
Congratulations also on accepting the one-year renewable position as Humanities Korea Research Professor at the Research Institute of Comparative History and Culture in Hanyang University!
]]>The point I remember the most during her analysis of the films was the role that citizenship played in the stories developing narrative. For instance, in one of the films the ability of the two main characters to access goods or to participate in consumer culture became a major signifier of American citizenship. The fantasy of the American dream and the constant pursuit of inclusion became the basis of almost all the interactions that took place throughout the film.
A question that arose for me relates to the ways that representations of the American dream have shifted alongside the state of exceptions persecution of "bad" brown bodies. More specifically, how do these films disrupt the ideological particularities of the American dream? Why is that important to a parody film that aims to use humor to challenge and disrupt the idea of the "good" and "bad" brown body?
I am have always been particularly interested in the ways that the American dream continues to define, confine and legitimize certain ways of being in the world. I believe a closer examination of its role in tandem with your works established goals could open up your exploration of the role that citizenship plays in contemporary racial formation.
Good Luck!
]]>As someone considering media analysis as a potential aspect of my dissertation project, Jigna's work provided a great example of what feminist media scholarship can look like and its place in our department. During the question and answer portion of the colloquium I asked Jigna about larger audience reception to the Harold and Kumar films. Though in no way diminishing the intellect of the typical Harold and Kumar viewer/consumer, I wondered how Jigna's readings of the films compare to popular readings. Audience research is quite the contentious topic in critical media studies because of how impossible it is to ever quality how any given media is understood. Any given "text" can have any number of meanings to any number of audiences. The entire "death of the author" bit via Barthes right. However, I do find it an important question to consider. Jigna's work brilliantly outlined many of the larger current cultural negotiations being played out in the films themselves. I wonder how audiences of the films connect these parodies to such negotations, and what impact the films have on audience conceptions of the very poignant issues Jigna's talk raised: (in)security, global injury, recognizability, the racialized Other, "expendable" populations, citizenship, etc. I realize there is no answer or even easy way to find such an answer. Jigna's responded to my question noting that the films are and must be legible in various ways (genre for example) but are able to do so while still providing opportunity for subversive understandings of race, citizenships, and Post-9/11 anxieties. I agree with the necessity of legibility for popularity, but wonder more about these moments of subversion. Kumar marrying a bag of marijuana is surely saying something, but I am interested in more detail regarding other moments of subversion and if/how popular audiences seem them as such.
Overall, Jigna's talk and reading of the films was convincing, intriguing, brilliantly articulated, and quite fun. I will certainly be watching the Harold and Kumar films in the near future. ☺
In the first of the series, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, Desai argued that the film made a critique of white heteromasculinity, making it 'disgusting', while also attempting to show both Harold and Kumar as 'good' racial citizens, creating a queer American Dream that critiques American consumption-as-identity. In the second film, in which they escape from Guantanamo Bay, Kumar becomes the central character, and the two again must prove their 'goodness' as racial citizens.
While Desai argued that satirizing and parodying terrorism lead to a catharsis for the viewer - finally, we can laugh again, therefore we are secure - m y question is about such laughter and what it might do for the viewer. For me it seems that laughter can mean a great many things for an audience, and indeed not everyone will laugh at the same things and for the same reasons. But in this case laughter about prison rape, for example, is to me a de-ethicizing move. Does laughter de-ethicize or absolve the viewer of responsibility? What does it mean when a viewer laughs at a situation that cannot but call to mind the many abuses occurring in Guantanamo, not least the horrifying abuses of Abu Ghraib? I would have liked to hear more discussion about the work that laughter and satire of such terrible conditions does, and what laughter and satire do in relation to ethics.
]]>What I found most exciting about Gundula's work was that it aims to bridge a conversation between fields of thought that typically do not engage with one another. I am intrigued by the ways in which theory and scholarship travel and the ways in which they do not. Specifically how some "fields" regularly engage with work from other "fields" and some do not. Different scholarship is weighted differently in terms of intellectual exchange or currency. Gundula's project stages a conversation between political theory and queer scholarship, showing both what can be gained (and also what limitations still persist) by such engagement. While interdisciplinary scholarship often speak with other interdisciplinary scholarship, it seems as though conversations between interdisciplinary scholars and more traditional scholars are less frequent. Or rather, where interdisciplinary work might include strictly disciplinary scholarship, the engagement does not always happen the other direction. Gundula's talk was inspiring in that she poses that queer theory and political theory can both gain intellectual traction by engaging with the other. More conversations and projects like this need to take place.
My other lasting thought after Gundula's paper was in regard to Naomi Scheman's question during the question and answer portion of the talk. Naomi asked Gundula to comment on two different political responses to the state's investment in identities of gender/sex/desire. Pointing to gay men who claim to be "born this way" and trans-identified individuals who push for a fluid unrestrictive acknowledgement of their gender, Naomi wondered how Gundula accounted for such different responses state power. Although I won't provide an answer for the question, as I am far less versed in political theory than Gundula, I do think the general question speaks to GLBT negotiations with hegemony. This is perhaps obvious. However, I have been thinking about hegemony throughout the semester in Gundula's class and I think understanding these activist responses as two different approaches to hegemonic power helps to contextualize them. Some individuals (gay, white men as Naomi pointed out) benefit in many ways from the hegemonic power structures that are in place, and are perhaps thus more willing to negotiate with hegemony for inclusion. Others, (such as some queer/trans individuals - particularly those who are economically disadvantaged and queers of color) "have nothing [or little] left to loose" and so they are less invested in "sitting at the table" that has never, and will likely never value their presence anyway. Either way, it is significant to note that via Gramsci - and Gundula's talk - hegemony will inevitably find a way incorporate both responses into its larger power structure. Moves and changes within this structure happen incrementally as large changes are foreclosed by such refolding and in ways that also often simultaneously marginalize other bodies as they occur. Thinking about responses by marginalized groups/individuals as varied negotiations with hegemony, in direct correlation to their distance from the benefits of such power structures, allows us to deconstruct such responses in a way that avoids the "transgressive" or " assimilationist" binary that is in fact, not real, and never quite as simplistic as some would like to think.
I thoroughly enjoyed Gundula's talk and extremely grateful for the opportunity to work with her this semester!