Showing papers in "Social Text in 1991"

How to Bring Your Kids up Gay

Abstract: In the summer of 1989, the United States Department of Health and Human Services released a study entitled "Report of the Secretary's Task Force on Youth Suicide." Written in response to the apparently burgeoning epidemic of suicides and suicide attempts by children and adolescents in the United States, the 110-page report contained a section analyzing the situation of gay and lesbian youth. It concluded that, because "gay youth face a hostile and condemning environment, verbal and physical abuse, and rejection and isolation from families and peers," young gays and lesbians are two to three times more likely than other young people to attempt and to commit suicide. The report recommends, modestly enough, an "end [to] discrimination against youths on the basis of such characteristics as...sexual orientation."

Border Pedagogy and the Politics of Postmodernism

Abstract: In what follows, I want to advance the most useful and transformative aspects of border pedagogy by situating it within those broader cultural and political considerations that are beginning to redefine our traditional view of community, language, space, and possibility. Border pedagogy is attentive to developing a democratic public philosophy that respects the notion of difference as part of a common struggle to extend the quality of public life. The notion of border pedagogy presupposes not merely an acknowledgment of the shifting borders that both undermine and reterritorialize different configurations of culture, power and knowledge; it also links the notions of schooling and education to a more substantive struggle for a radical democratic society. It is a pedagogy that attempts to link an emancipatory notion of modernism with a postmodernism of resistance. What does this suggest for redefining radical educational theory and practice as a form of border pedagogy? There are a number of theoretical considerations that need to be unpacked in reference to this question. First, the category of border signals in the metaphorical and literal sense how power is inscribed differently on the body, culture, history, space, land, and psyche. Borders elicit a recognition of those epistemological, political, cultural, and social boundaries that define "the places that are safe and unsafe, [that] distinguish us from them"(Anzalduai, 1987, p. 3). Borders call into question the language of history, power, and difference. The category of border also prefigures cultural criticism and pedagogical processes as a form of border crossing. That is, it signals forms of transgression in which existing borders forged in domination can be challenged and redefined. Second, it also speaks to the need to create pedagogical conditions in which students become border crossers in order

Third-Worlding At Home

Abstract: As a student of the history of social formations located in what has come to be known as the "third world," I was intrigued by a recently published report recounting the experiences of a score of American Christian pilgrims who only five years earlier had established home and mission deep in the jungle. According to the report, these new missionaries had reasoned that, if their efforts were to have "authenticity," they would have to share the daily hardships, gloom, and fear that permeate a blighted and primitive environment. They knew it would not be easy to gain the trust of the local inhabitants. Indeed, many of the natives suspected that the pilgrims constituted the vanguard of a new wave of colonization. Only recently, similar colonizers had occupied a nearby community from the same language group, obliging the locals to flee deeper into the shadows of a jungle increasingly encroached upon by the implacable, moving frontier of civilization. But the pilgrims felt prepared for their task. One had been raised in Indonesia and thus was already acquainted with the "peace and joy" that comes from "living on little" while others had spent several months getting ready in Latin America, which often exhibited less extreme manifestations of "third world" life than they later encountered in the mission territory. Interestingly, the report tells us little about the natives themselves and the only positive reference comes in a pilgrim's exuberant reaction to a local wedding ceremony. They "really know how to celebrate life," he declares; "They know how to celebrate a moment." The collective "they"; ritual otherness; present tense. Where can we find this imperial frontier? A French traveller recently described it as "the only remaining primitive society" (Baudrillard 1988:7). It is located in the world's fifth largest Spanish-speaking nation; but it is also an important African country, and its Asian and Caribbean diasporas are increasingly significant as well. As you undoubtedly have guessed, it is here in the US of A. The particular frontier described in the report is a dilapidated, drug-infested, trash-strewn, grafitti-riddled, Puerto Rican barrio in the urban jungle of North Philadelphia. And the determined missionaries are non-denominational, charismatic Christian yuppies: young, white, highly-educated professionals, among them lawyers, physicians, an occupational therapist, a nurse, and last but not least, a theology student (Carvajal 1989). Most work in lucrative occupations outside the barrio where they purchased or rent homes - but of course

Ranciere and the Practice of Equality

Abstract: In the fall of 1986 a proposed law regarding the French university system caused over 300,000 students to take to the streets demanding equality. The law was a relatively lukewarm modification designed to adapt the university to pressing economic realities; according to government statistics, one in three graduates was unemployed. It proposed a modest increase in fees and what was called "selective orientation": a means of

Eloquence and Epitaph: Black Nationalism and the Homophobic Impulse in Responses to the Death of Max Robinson

Abstract: From June 1981 through February 1991, 167,803 people in the US were diagnosed as having Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. Of that number of total reported cases, 38,361 or roughly 23% occurred in males of African descent, although black males account for less than 6% of the total US population.' It is common enough knowledge that black men constitute a disproportionate number of people with AIDS in this country common in the sense that, whenever the AIDS epidemic achieves a new statistical milestone (as it did in the winter of 1991, when the number of AIDS-related deaths in the US reached 100,000), the major media generally provide a demographic breakdown of the figures. And yet, somehow the enormity of the morbidity and mortality rates for black men (like that for gay men of whatever racial identity) doesn't seem to register in the national consciousness as a cause for great concern. This is, no doubt, largely due to a general sense that the trajectory of the average African-American man's life must "naturally" be rather short, routinely subject to violent termination. And this sense, in turn, helps account for the fact that there has never been a case of AIDS that riveted public attention on the vulnerability of black men the way, for instance, the death of Rock Hudson shattered the myth of the invincible white male cultural hero. This is not to say that no nationally known black male figure has died of AIDS-related causes, but rather that numerous and complex cultural factors conspire to prevent such deaths from effectively galvanizing AIDS activism in African-American communities. This essay represents an attempt to explicate several such factors that were operative in the case of one particular black man's bout with AIDS, and thus to indicate what further cultural intervention needs to take place if we hope to stem the ravages of AIDS amongst the African-American population.

Is Global Culture Warming up

Abstract: During a brief appearance at the 1990 Earth Day rally on Capitol Hill, Paul Ehrlich, biologist and ecological futurist, urged the assembled crowd and the television audience to accept that "our problems are absolutely global": "a cow breaks wind in Indonesia, and your grandchildren could die in food riots in the United States." What kind of logic was at work in this remark? Lateral thinking? Instant karma? Weird science? Under any circumstances, it sounds like a strange claim to make, almost a lampoon, hyperbolically warping whatever causal logic might link these two sets of events. But Ehrlich judged his audience well enough; and he could count on his long experience in the ecology movement to know that most of them shared the "paradigm," scientific and political, that framed such a remark. A well-documented history of scientific research and recent scientific claims about the "greenhouse effect" filled out the picture; the politics encouraged by his speech were based on the globalist premises shared by his constituency. Given the media's widespread public airing of both the science and the politics in advance of Earth Day 1990, Ehrlich and others could hope that the remark sounded "logical enough" to pass for "common sense," or, at least, would come to resemble common sense at some point in the near future. As an attempt to give concrete, or even proverbial, form to a developed political philosophy, Ehrlich's remark wouldn't, of course, rank as a great success. It was a little too smart, and thus too much of a short cut for an argument that required many more causal connections to be made along the way. Perhaps its underlying meaning was still too obscure to the public mind. At any rate, the remark seemed to lack the sensuous immediacy that makes good "spontaneous philosophy" out of a mature body of political thought. This is not to say that the ecology movement hasn't produced its own effective behavioral slogans, like "Think Global, Act Local," or Arne Naess's "simple in means, rich in ends," or Barry Commoner's four laws of ecology: "Everything is connected to everything else"; "Everything has to go somewhere"; "There's no such thing as a free lunch"; and "Nature knows best." For the most part, however, they have been trite and touchy-feely, at least when compared, in terms of their

Reading the Rushdie Affair: An Essay on Islam and Politics'

Abstract: that a "mere reading" of the novel has become impossible.3 In this paper, I will examine the novel's "interception by" (and its intervention in) certain political contexts within the post-1979 Islamic world. (The "conversion," I will argue, does not represent as radical a break with the novel's initial mode of intervention in the politics of Islam as has generally been argued.) The paper is not meant to provide a complete "reading" of the text in traditional critical terms, nor will it attempt an analysis of the reception of the book in the West and of the western liberal representation of "Islam" during the controversy.4 Instead, it will focus on the "Rushdie affair" as a complex cultural (and political) event within the Islamic world, an event which brings together, highlights, and restructures some of the central elements of contemporary Muslim life. By focusing on three related issues - the role of the postcolonial intellectual as it figures in Rushdie's earlier novels, the present novel's transgressions with respect to contemporary "Islamic" culture, and the inter-relatedness of the questions of form and reception in the Rushdie affair - it will interpret the Islamic response to the book, and examine the novel's own anticipation of the form of that response. The two earlier novels of Rushdie's trilogy - that is, Midnight's Children (MC) and Shame (S) - have most often been read as wide-ranging examinations and critiques of the modern nation-space designated by

Unthinking Sex: Marx, Engels and the Scene of Writing

Abstract: I was also happy in the auditorium itself since I found out that contrary to the representation with which my childish imaginings had for so long provided me - there was only one stage for everyone. I had thought that one must be prevented from seeing clearly by the other spectators, as one is in the middle of a crowd; but now I realized that, on the contrary, thanks to an arrangement which is like the symbol of all perception, each one feels himself to be the center of the theatre. Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu. Dramatizing links between core elements of Marxist theory, moments from nineteenth-century political history, and scenes from Marx's and Engels' "private" life, this essay suggests that Western Marxism's constitutive dependence on the category of production derives in part from an antitheatricalism, an aversion to certain forms of parody that prevents sexuality from attaining the political significance that class has long monopolized. My title plays on that of an increasingly influential essay published in the 1984 collection Pleasure and Danger: Gayle Rubin's "Thinking Sex."' Widely noted for its impassioned defense of the rights and practices of a range of sexual minorities, "Thinking Sex" is also a major revision of Rubin's earlier analysis of patriarchy as a system predicated upon gender binarism, obligatory heterosexuality, constraints on female sexuality, and the exchange of women between men "with women being a conduit of a relationship rather than a partner to it." If this conception of the "traffic in women" has proven to be immensely productive for feminist analysis, Rubin's concomitant elaboration of what she termed the "sex/gender system" - "a systematic social apparatus which takes up females as raw materials and fashions domesticated women as products" - has become nothing less than indispensable, forming indeed one of the cornerstones of the field of Women's Studies.2 Yet Rubin's "Thinking Sex" begins to question the adequacy of this very framework. Recognizing that her earlier work "did not distinguish between lust and gender" but lumped the former indiscriminately with the latter, Rubin challenges in her later essay the assumption that feminism is or should be the privileged site of a theory of sexuality. Feminism is the theory of gender oppression. To automatically assume that this makes it the theory of sexual oppression is to fail to distinguish between gender, on the one hand, and erotic desire, on the other. (307)

Sodomy in the New World: Anthropologies Old and New

Abstract: hatred of homosexuality, the recovery of the history of sodomy in the new world is of signal importance as one way of resisting modes of thinking which, every day, seem to be growing more widespread, and which the decision of the Supreme Court can be said to have licensed. This history needs to be retold in as unpresuming and discriminating a fashion as possible in order to uncover the density of the concept of sodomy and to understand the work it is put to do; but also to recognize that sodomy, "that utterly confused category," as Foucault memorably put it, identifies neither persons nor acts with any coherence or specificity.2 This is one reason why the term can be mobilized - precisely because it is incapable of exact definition; but this is also how the bankruptcy of the term, and what has been done in its name, can be uncovered. It is that double reading that governs the inquiry that follows, situating and desituating colonialist texts - of more than one era - and their accusations. In the pages that follow I take as an originary moment in the history of the making of America what happened two days before Balboa first laid eyes on the Pacific Ocean. In a Panamanian village, after killing the leader of the Indians of Quarequa and six hundred of his warriors, Balboa fed to his dogs forty more Indians accused of sodomitical practices. The earliest account of these events of October 1513 that I know appears in Peter Martyr's Decades, first published in 1516. I will be citing from the 1555 English translation as one way of immediately suggesting that these events cannot be thought of solely as episodes in Spanish-American history; I have no interest in perpetuating the black legend that seeks to exculpate northern Europeans from the atrocities of the Spanish, and which is fuelled with proto-nationalist and racist energies.3 Richard Eden, the translator, not only makes Peter Martyr's text English; he also cannot

Interview with Gayatri Spivak

Abstract: Afsaneh Najmabadi: Let me start by posing two issues that I have heard raised by some students from the Subcontinent. The first: Prior to the publication of The Satanic Verses, these intellectuals had related to Rushdie's previous novels, Shame and Midnight's Children, as something that belonged to their culture, that they could identify with, be proud of. They could relate to the kinds of issues and criticisms that were expressed in these novels. But with The Satanic Verses they felt betrayed. What in The Satanic Verses could have engendered this sensation of betrayal? My immediate reaction is that it's the critique of religious sensibilities embedded in this book. So what I want to investigate is this: Why was it that when he was criticizing all kinds of other issues, such as male-female relations, political structures, even the partition and the anti-colonial struggle, all that did not feel like betrayal, but when he touched religion, it felt like betrayal?

The Media's War

Abstract: From the very inception of the Gulf Crisis, the dominant US media failed to fulfil the role of independent journalism. Instead it acted as public relations for the State Department, assimilating the language, terminology, and the assumptions of the administration, thereby undermining any critical perspectives upon the conduct of the war. Any attempt to discuss the media's coverage of the Gulf War must examine some of the ways in which it structured identification with the Pentagon's agenda, and the interests of an international elite.

Building Blade Runner

Abstract: In Febuary, 1990, at a public lecture series on art in Los Angeles, three out of five leading urban planners agreed that they hoped someday L.A. would look like the film Blade Runner. The audience, safe and comfortable in the Pacific Design Center, buzzed audibly with concern. One could practically hear rumors starting, that it was time to sell that condo by the beach, and move to Seattle. Two of the designers gave specific examples. They loved Santee alley, a bustling outdoor market in the downtown garment center, also not far from the homeless district. Of course, that general area is slated for urban renewal anyway, so this was a safe comment. It is easy to root for the horse once it is off to the glue factory. Another planner, architect for the powerful Community Redevelopment Agency, praised the Interstate Savings and Loan logo atop the new eighty-storey office building on the main library grounds downtown. It reminded him favorably of Blade Runner. That drew an audible hiss, so he added that in thirty years that bank would be out of business anyway, and the logo would be gone. Then he admitted that he had approved the logo because there was no way to stop businesses from getting permits to put one on buildings downtown (the governing rule, set up by the downtown redevelopment agency, allows for logos, though the full title of a company is considered invasive ambience over advertising). He was saying, in effect, why not allow free enterprise to show its face honestly, without the seamless camouflage? We need more than cityscapes and skylines, he and the others were suggesting. Apparently, we need the rude aesthetics of an immigrant market, but imagine it safely barricaded between buildings hundreds of feet high. We want to return to a fanciful version of the urban ghetto, back to cluttered industrial imagery, away from the simplified urban grid. We need Blade Runner (or do we?). The film Blade Runner has indeed achieved something rare in the history of cinema. It has become a paradigm for the future of cities, for artists across the disciplines. It is undoubtedly the film most requested in art and film classes I teach, whether to environmental designers, illustrators, fine artists, photographers or filmmakers. When it came out in 1982, many critics called it the success of style over substance, or style over story. But the hum of that Vangelis score against the skyline of L.A. in

The New Traditionalism: Repackaging Ms. Consumer

Abstract: She has made her commitment. Her Mission: create a more meaningful quality of life for herself and her family. She is the New Traditionalist - a contemporary woman who finds her fulfillment in traditional values that were considered 'old-fashioned' just a few years ago. The ad copy goes on to declare that the New Traditionalist is part of "an extraordinary social movement that is profoundly changing the ways Americans look at living." I tore the ad out of the paper and hung it on the refrigerator door, where it acted as a lightning rod, attracting horror and disgust from household and guests. Two weeks later, a second New Traditionalist appeared in the same prominent New York Times slot. This time she was a black mother flanked by two teenage daughters. After two and a half more weeks, an ad in the Sunday New York Times Magazine featured yet another - a New traditionalist who "started a revolution - with some not-so-revolutionary ideals." The ad copy declares that "market researchers are calling [new traditionalism] the biggest social movement since the sixties." By this point it was evident that the New Traditionalist was the star of a major promotional effort for Good Housekeeping magazine. It was also apparent that Good Housekeeping had hit a sensitive nerve. Angry reac

A Bit of This and a Bit of That: Rushdie's Newness

Abstract: We got drunk, Abdullah and I. Abdullah, a political activist from back home, started life as a nationalist; for a long time a Marxist, he now described himself as a radical humanist. We were open-mouthed all night, words coming out, booze going in. But I could have got high on the chitchat alone. The talk came around, via the recent spate of extremist nationalisms in south Asia, to The Satanic Verses. The fatwa was more than a year old, Rushdie's recantation still to come. "What do you think about the book?" he asked.

Environmental Problems Arising from National Revolutions in the Third World: The Case of Nicaragua

Abstract: Symptoms of imperialism's legacy abound in Nicaragua. First, and perhaps foremost for the short term, is the lack of a significant cash base. Clearly a big cash flow guarantees nothing with regard to development, but the lack of even a trickle can have profound effects since possibilities for initiating projects and programs are severely curtailed. From an environmental point of view this can be disastrous. For example, in 1987 the state forestry company signed a contract with several logging companies based in Costa Rica to cut significant areas of old-growth rainforest along the Rio San Juan. The argument was that Nicaragua, in its cash-flow crisis, could not afford the luxury of preserving the rainforest for posterity, or even for future higher cash returns. In the absence of the cash-flow crisis the issue may never have surfaced in the first place, given the Sandinistas' general attitude toward conservation. Fortunately in this case the issue was brought to the attention of the public by ABEN, the Nicaraguan Association of Ecologists and Biologists, and the contract was eventually blocked. Indeed, it is nothing short of amazing that the contract could have been blocked, given the dire straits of the economy and the immediate cash-flow that would have resulted from the sale, and certainly is evidence of the strength of environmentalism in the country. It is clear that the ten years of Contra war exacerbated the problem of a depressed economy considerably. But it is likely that even if the Contra war had never been initiated in the first place, the economic pressures evoked by the depressed economy which resulted from the permanent state of underdevelopment imposed by imperialism would have elicited similar environmentally destructive practices. While ABEN and other environmentally-conscious revolutionaries within Nicaragua will be ever vigilant to avert projects that tend to harm the environment and thus threaten the long term development of Nicaragua, the pressures on economic planners to write off environmental damage as an externality, a trick they learned some time ago from examples to the north, will remain as long as the cash-flow problem exists. But the lack of cash, that is, simply being poor, is not the only legacy of imperialism. So the story goes, when Somoza visited Costa Rica sometime in the 50s, Costa Rican president Jos6 Figueres showed him several new programs designed to boost Costa Rica's educational system.

Knowing Your Enemy, Knowing Your Ally: The Arabists of Hashomer Hatza'ir (MAPAM)

Abstract: One of the less-noticed casualties of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait was the Israeli peace movement. While it did not endorse the US-led military response to the Gulf crisis, the Palestine Liberation Organization did not support Iraq's seizure of Kuwait. However, many Palestinians in Jordan, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and even in Israel proper enthusiastically embraced Saddam Hussein's challenge to the Middle Eastern status quo. In response, several prominent Israeli advocates of negotiations between Israel and the PLO and the establishment of a Palestinian state

An Agricultural Project Comes to Town: Consequences of an Encounter in Sudan

Abstract: According to an old saw there are only two stories a stranger comes to town and someone goes on a journey. When an agricultural development project comes to town it is stranger indeed. This narrative wanders through some of the unanticipated consequences of one such visitation by capital on Howa, a subsistence farming village in central-eastern Sudan. I spent 1981 in Howa studying the relationship between the changes imposed by inclusion in the agricultural project and local processes of social reproduction particularly the production, exchange and use of knowledge among children.' I watched as social scales shifted under the impact of global processes, and witnessed the local ecology, intrahousehold dynamics, and even the villagers themselves drawn into the national decline in agricultural productivity.