Ann Cvetkovich

Bio: Ann Cvetkovich is an academic researcher from University of Texas at Austin. The author has contributed to research in topics: Queer & Feeling. The author has an hindex of 12, co-authored 25 publications receiving 1913 citations.

An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures

Abstract: In this bold new work of cultural criticism, Ann Cvetkovich develops a queer approach to trauma. She argues for the importance of recognizing - and archiving - accounts of trauma that belong as much to the ordinary and everyday as to the domain of catastrophe. Cvetkovich contends that the field of trauma studies, limited by too strict a division between the public and the private, has overlooked the experiences of women and queers. Rejecting the pathologizing understandings of trauma that permeate medical and clinical discourses on the subject, she develops instead a sex-positive approach missing even from most feminist work on trauma. An Archive of Feelings challenges the field to engage more fully with sexual trauma and the wide range of feelings in its vicinity, including those associated with butch-femme sex and aids activism and caretaking. An Archive of Feelings brings together oral histories from lesbian activists involved in act/up New York; readings of literature by Dorothy Allison, Leslie Feinberg, Cherrie Moraga, and Shani Mootoo; videos by Jean Carlomusto and Pratibha Parmar; and performances by Lisa Kron, Carmelita Tropicana, and the bands Le Tigre and Tribe 8. Cvetkovich reveals how these cultural formations-activism, performance, and literature - give rise to public cultures that both work through trauma and transform the conditions producing it. By looking closely at connections between sexuality, trauma, and the creation of lesbian public cultures, Cvetkovich makes those experiences that have been pushed to the peripheries of trauma culture the defining principles of a new construction of sexual trauma - one in which trauma catalyzes the creation of cultural archives and political communities.

Depression: A Public Feeling

Abstract: In Depression: A Public Feeling , Ann Cvetkovich combines memoir and critical essay in search of ways of writing about depression as a cultural and political phenomenon that offer alternatives to medical models. She describes her own experience of the professional pressures, creative anxiety, and political hopelessness that led to intellectual blockage while she was finishing her dissertation and writing her first book. Building on the insights of the memoir, in the critical essay she considers the idea that feeling bad constitutes the lived experience of neoliberal capitalism. Cvetkovich draws on an unusual archive, including accounts of early Christian acedia and spiritual despair, texts connecting the histories of slavery and colonialism with their violent present-day legacies, and utopian spaces created from lesbian feminist practices of crafting. She herself seeks to craft a queer cultural analysis that accounts for depression as a historical category, a felt experience, and a point of entry into discussions about theory, contemporary culture, and everyday life. Depression: A Public Feeling suggests that utopian visions can reside in daily habits and practices, such as writing and yoga, and it highlights the centrality of somatic and felt experience to political activism and social transformation.

Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism

Abstract: Arguing that affect has a history, Ann Cvetkovich challenges both nineteenth- and twentieth-century claims that the expression of feeling is naturally or intrinsically liberating or reactionary. The central focus of Mixed Feelings is the Victorian sensation novel, the fad genre of the 1860s, whose controversial popularity marks an important moment in the history of mass culture. Drawing on Marxist, feminist, and Foucauldian cultural theory, Cvetkovich investigates the sensation novel's power to produce emotional responses, its representation of social problems as affective ones, and the difficulties involved in assessing the genre as either reactionary or subversive. She is particularly concerned with the relation of gender and affect since many of the sensation novels were written by and for women, and women. By examining the powerful conjunction of ideologies of affect, gender, and mass culture, Cvetkovich reveals the powerful political effects of affective expression and sensational representations.

Drawing the Archive in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home

Abstract: Placing Alison Bechdel's Fun Home alongside other graphic narratives, most notably Art Spiegelman's Maus (1993) and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis (2003), that explore intergenerational trauma and the role of the child as witness, seems both obvious and potentially inappropriate, even presumptuous. In writing about the Holocaust and the Islamic Revolution in Iran, respectively, Spiegelman and Satrapi take on histories that have been formative for global politics in the past century. In Fun Home, by contrast, there is no mass genocide or the same obvious connection to political debate, and the single death, that of Bechdel's father, someone who might be categorized (however problematically) as a pedophile, suicide, or closet homosexual, raises the possibility that there are some lives that are not "grievable," certainly not in a public context (Butler 2004, 20). But a queer, even perverse, sensibility not unlike Bechdel's draws me to idiosyncratic or shameful family stories and their incommensurate relation to global politics and historical trauma. I want to risk inappropriate claims for the significance of Bechdel's story, to read it in the context not just of Maus and Persepolis but also efforts to redefine the connections between memory and history, private experience and public life, and individual loss and collective trauma. Fun Home confirms my commitment (in An Archive of Feelings [2003]) to queer perspectives on trauma that challenge the relation between the catastrophic and the everyday and that make public space for lives whose very ordinariness makes them historically meaningful. And although Fun Home's critical and popular success obviously provides many entry points for readers (and warrants its sustained attention in this issue of WSQ), Bechdel's narrative of family life with a father who is attracted to adolescent boys has particular meaning for me because it provides a welcome alternative to public discourses about LGBTQ politics that are increasingly homonormative and dedicated to family values. I write more as a specialist in queer studies than as one in graphic narrative, but I hope nonetheless to articulate how Bechdel uses this insurgent genre to provide a queer perspective that is missing from public discourse about both historical trauma and sexual politics. The recent success of graphic narrative, a hybrid or mixed-media genre, and also a relatively new and experimental one, within mainstream literary public spheres suggests that providing witness to intimate life puts pressure on standard genres and modes of public discourse. I seek to juxtapose Fun Home with other prominent graphic memoirs such as Maus and Persepolis to show how its queer sensibility extends their treatment of the relation between individual and historical experience, so central to secondgeneration witness, especially through a more pronounced focus on sexuality. But I also want to situate Fun Home as part of other insurgent genres of queer culture, such as memoir, solo performance, women's music, and autoethnographic documentary film and video, including the traditions of lesbian feminist culture within which Bechdel's long-running Dykes to Watch Out For comic strip circulates. Standing at the intersections of both contemporary LGBTQ culture and public discussions of historical trauma, Fun Home dares to claim historical significance and public space not only for a lesbian coming-out story but also for one that is tied to what some might see as shameful sexual histories. WITNESSING SEXUALITY Dori Laub's claim, in the context of Holocaust testimony, that trauma is an "event without a witness" (in part because the epistemic crisis of trauma is such that even the survivor is not fully present for the event) takes on a different resonance in Bechdel's story about her father, who was run over by a truck while crossing the highway outside the house he was restoring (Felman and Laub 1991, 8O).2 In a literal sense, his death is an event without a witness (other than the truck driver, who thinks that her father might have jumped back into the road); and Bechdel and her mother's hunch that it is a suicide, or somehow connected to his complex sexual history, is ultimately only speculation. …

Articulating The Global And The Local: Globalization And Cultural Studies

Abstract: * Introduction: Thinking Global and Local Ann Cvetkovich and Douglas Kellner. Theorizing The Global And The Local * Collective Identity and the Democratic Nation-State in the Age of Globalization Roland Axtmann. * Looking for Globality in Los Angeles Michael Peter Smith. * The (Trans)National Basketball Association: American Commodity-Sign Culture and Global-Local Conjuncturalism David L. Andrews. * The Politics of Corporate Ecological Restorations: Comparing Global and Local North American Contexts Andrew Light and Eric Higgs. Cultural Studies And The Locations Of Culture * Of Heccits and Ritournelles: Movement and Affect in the Cajun Dance Arena Charles J. Stivale. * Cosmopolitanism and Communion: Renegotiating Relations in Sara Suleris Meatless Days Mia Carter. * In the Name of Audre Lorde: The Location of Poetry in the United States Zofia Burr. Translocal Connections * Translating Resistance Amitava Kumar. * License to Feel: Teaching in the Context of War(s) Megan Boler. * Nationalism and Internationalism: Domestic Differences in a Postcolonial World Lora Romero.

The Queer Art of Failure

Abstract: Judith ‘Jack’ Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure sets itself the task of ‘dismantl[ing] the logics of success and failure with which we currently live’ (2011: 2). To do so it constructs what Halberstam calls a ‘silly archive’, which ranges from the animated cartoon SpongeBob SquarePants to Yoko Ono and Marina Abramović’s performance art to Elfride Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher. Failure, for Halberstam, is not to be avoided, as it offers insights, ways of being, forms of politics and paradigms of resistance to current hegemonies. Working within the realm of queer theory and cultural studies, the book strangely echoes the 1970s sentiments of punk refusal as well as the global gay liberationists’ call for the invention of revolutionary sexualities outside of familial relations. Its dismantling of failure aims to show how winning is currently predicated upon losers. The inequitable neo-liberal ideologies that constitute today’s winners and losers relies on a basic assumption: those who lose did not work hard enough and thus deserve their fate. Halberstam asks us to consider the justice in winning in a global economy whose winners – the 1 per cent – do take all, leave very little for the rest of us, and next to nothing for those at the bottom end of the economic hierarchy. With ‘low theory’, an approach adapted from Stuart Hall’s reading of Antonio Gramsci, Halberstam brings together an eccentric array of sources. Low theory, for Halberstam, aims broadly and looks to arrive at counter-hegemonic options that are widely accessible. He defines low theory as less beholden to a particular telos and, again citing Hall, sees it ‘not as an end onto itself but “a detour en route to something else”’ (Halberstam 2011: 15). In a book about failure, it follows that Halberstam envisions low theory as a means to eschew goal-oriented politics and social theories. It is ‘open’ to ‘unpredictable outcomes’ and is ‘adaptable, shifting, and flexible’ (2011: 16). Halberstam predicates his low theory on what Hall describes as Gramsci’s ‘open’ Marxism. According to Hall, Gramsci’s theories were derived from the application of Marxist ideas to the real political problems that he faced in life, not from a deterministic application of theory in service of a teleological political project. Halberstam inserts himself into this logic by envisioning an ‘open pedagogy’ that is similarly amenable to questioning, that is bottom-up in its perspective and that ‘detaches itself from prescriptive methods, fixed logics, and epistemes’; instead, it ‘orients us toward problem-solving knowledge or social visions of radical justice’ (2011: 16–17). A large part of Halberstam’s silly archive is animated and stopmotion movies of the past decade, designed, made and marketed for mass audiences, mainly comprising children. Halberstam calls these movies ‘Pixarvolt’, finding in the works of Pixar and DreamWorks recipes for collective rebellion against capitalist economies and power and, in short, a ‘revolt’ against the status quos of neo-liberal humanism. These films, Halberstam argues, are made for children, who he sees as kinds of failed subjects, people for whom the world is not designed, who are clumsy and frustrated with various forms of authority, who are ready and willing to view the world in new ways, and for whom a revolution is a promising option. In these films, Halberstam sees ‘a rich technological field for rethinking collectivities, transformation, identification, animality, and posthumanity’ (2011: 174). He notes that Pixarvolt’s plots usually revolve around a struggle between human and non-human creatures in relationships that ‘resemble what used to be called “class struggle,” and they offer numerous scenarios of revolt and alternatives to grim, mechanical, industrial cycles of production and consumption’ (Halberstam 2011: 29). Pixarvolt films also focus on escapes from captivity that culminate in utopian dreams of freedom, elements in which he finds neither childishness nor a trajectory towards adult freedom but the dreams and means of social transformation. Key to Halberstam’s analysis is the counter-intuitive connections he argues the films create between communitarian revolt and queer forms of embodiment. Pixarvolt films, Halberstam argues, can provide new modes of thinking and new models of family, parenting and sociality. ‘While many Marxist scholars have characterized and dismissed queer politics as “body politics,”’ Halberstam argues, ‘these films recognize that alternative forms of embodiment and desire are central to the struggle against corporate domination’ (2011: 29). Halberstam concedes that there are no guarantees that animated

Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America

Abstract: Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. By Saidiya V. Hartman. Race and American Culture. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp. x, 281. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-19-508984-7; cloth, $45.00, ISBN 0-19-508983-9.) Saidiya V. Hartman's Scenes of Subjection interrogates the apparent transformation from slavery to freedom in nineteenth-century America by paying particular attention to the antebellum and postbellum South. The author hopes to explicate the ambivalence of emancipation in order to address the issues raised by the continuing subjugation of blacks in a liberal nation. Hartman gives particular attention to the role of force and violence in constructing and perpetuating subjugation. She speaks importantly to such major historiographical debates as the question whether antebellum southern slavery was a paternalistic institution. Paternalism has been presented as recognizing the humanity of the enslaved, in part as a response to northern liberalism and abolitionism. In contrast to claims that the master/slave relationship was based upon reciprocal ties of mutual responsibilities and affection, however, Hartman supports those who argue that slavery was fundamentally based upon dehumanizing white physical force and violence. What Hartman's postmodernist analysis perhaps particularly contributes to such debates is her creative use of both traditional and nontraditional historical sources of evidence to interrogate and deconstruct the meaning of the ordinary "scenes of subjection." She thereby reinterprets such routine practices as slave dancing and singing, seemingly encouraged by paternalistic masters, as required demonstrations of white dominance that were epitomized by the forced performance of terrified slaves on the auction block. Hartman's deconstruction of the legal non-existence of the rape of a slave woman also emphasizes the dehumanizing violence of the law of slavery. But, at the same time, the personhood of the enslaved was recognized in the sense that they could be charged and found criminally responsible and blameworthy for wrongdoing. The argument that the association of black agency with blameworthiness comprised a lasting legacy of slavery leads on to the book's second section, in which Hartman focuses on the South after emancipation. Hartman's extended deconstruction of meanings, and her prose, can at times be so convoluted that the reader might at times wonder what she means to say; however, the book's second section helps to clarify her thesis that emphasizing the damaging legacies of slavery to emancipation is central to her critique of an American liberalism that defines "liberty" as the self-mastery of the man who--owning himself--could freely exercise reason, choice, and consent. …

Geography Lessons@@@Mappings: Feminism and the Cultural Geographies of Encounter

Abstract: List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Locational Feminism3Pt. IFeminism/Multiculturalism15Ch. 1\"Beyond\" Gender: The New Geography of Identity and the Future of Feminist Criticism17Ch. 2\"Beyond\" White and Other: Narratives of Race in Feminist Discourse36Ch. 3\"Beyond\" Difference: Migratory Feminism in the Borderlands67Pt. IIFeminism/Globalism105Ch. 4Geopolitical Literacy: Internationalizing Feminism at \"Home\" - The Case of Virginia Woolf107Ch. 5Telling Contacts: Intercultural Encounters and Narrative Poetics in the Borderlands between Literary Studies and Anthropology132Ch. 6\"Routes/Roots\": Boundaries, Borderlands, and Geopolitical Narratives of Identity151Pt. IIIFeminism/Poststructuralism179Ch. 7Negotiating the Transatlantic Divide: Feminism after Poststructuralism181Ch. 8Making History: Reflections on Feminism, Narrative, and Desire199Ch. 9Craving Stories: Narrative and Lyric in Feminist Theory and Poetic Practice228Notes243References281Index303

The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law Between the Global and the Local

Abstract: Introduction - locating rights, envisioning law between the global and the local Mark Goodale Part I. States of Violence: 1. Introduction Sally Engle Merry 2. The violence of rights - human rights as culprit, human rights as victim Daniel Goldstein 3. Double-binds of self and secularism in Nepal - religion, democracy, identity and rights Lauren Leve Part II. Registers of Power: 4. Introduction Laura Nader 5. The power of right(s) - tracking empires of law and new modes of social resistance in Bolivia (and elsewhere) Mark Goodale 6. Exercising rights and reconfiguring resistance in the the Zapatista Shannon Speed Part III. Conditions of Vulnerability: 7. Introduction Sally Engle Merry 8. Rights to indigenous culture in Colombia Jean Jackson 9. The 2000 UN Human Trafficking Protocol - rights, enforcement, vulnerabilities Kay Warren Part IV. Encountering Ambivalence: 10. Introduction Balakrishnan Rajagopal 11. Transnational legal conflict between peasants and corporations in Burma - human rights and discursive ambivalence under the US Alien Tort Claims Act John Dale 12. Being Swazi, Being Human - custom, constitutionalism and human rights in an African monarchy Sari Wastell 13. Conclusion - Tyrannosaurus Lex - The Anthropology of human rights and transnational law Richard Ashby Wilson.