Showing papers in "Wsq: Women's Studies Quarterly in 2016"

To Count or Not to Count: Queering Measurement and the Transgender Community

Abstract: An area of increasing attention at the intersection of social sciences and queer theory is how to study LGBTQ+ populations, particularly what methods are most appropriate for assessing the fluid subjectivities contained within the broader LGBTQ+ community. In this context, estimating the size of the queer (LGBTQ+) population both challenges this fluidity and acts to undermine heteronormativity and its exercise of Foucauldian governmentality (Foucault 1978). If compulsory heterosexuality "others" queer populations, then counting queer populations may undermine this "otherness" by demonstrating the legitimate needs of the LGBTQ+ population for basic facilities. The urgent need for transgender access to safe bathrooms and social services, including medical care, justifies the act of counting. Bathroom access enables trans and other gender-nonconforming people to move through public space. Since politicians excel in counting votes, without more complete estimates of trans and gender nonnormative people, public officials are unlikely to invest in safe and accessible public facilities. In late 2015 and early 2016, legislative efforts to keep transgender people out of bathrooms have intensified, making the counting issue even more critical.Queer methodologies require both researchers and subjects to acknowledge the complexity of their subjectivities and lived experiences (Ryan-Flood and Rooke 2009). Interactions between researcher and subject are easily compromised when respondents are subjectively categorized to facilitate the aims of the research. For instance, Warner (2004) argues that most research on LGBTQ+ populations reifies research subjects into fixed categories chosen by the researcher that do not reflect the lived realities of these subjects. Browne's (2008) participation in a quantitative survey using "tick boxes" to identify various LGBTQ+ subjectivities risked "selling out" her identity as a queer researcher, but it did provide useful insights into the inequalities faced by some lesbian and gay subjects that were an essential first step to ameliorating inequality and developing more just policies.Clearly, the measurement of subjective categories can be tricky. Weston (2009) suggests that measuring lesbian subjectivities requires the deconstruction of even the most basic approaches. For example, simply asking a subject about their identity is fraught, because self-identification is dependent on the ways that individuals interpret what it means to be a lesbian. However, because such identities, including "ex-lesbians" and men who identify as lesbians, are often in flux, the lesbian category destabilizes the very research process. Because self-definition also permits anyone to lay claim to lesbian identity, the results can be at odds with so-called common sense understandings of the term. In a pop-culture example of the fluid boundaries of self-definition, a character on the television drama The L Word, who was born male, insisted he identified as a lesbian and struck up a relationship with a female character who had a history of erotic involvement with other women (Weston 2009, 142).Measuring transgender identity is harder to do since it is one of the least visible segments of the LGBTQ+ rainbow. This paper applies a queer theory lens that seeks both to destabilize categories such as "gender" and to avoid severing queer bodies from the environment in which they live, breathe, and excrete bodily fluids. Within queer theory, Jagose, among others, highlights the instability of identity categories, arguing that "queer is an identity category that has no interest in consolidating or even stabilizing itself. . . . [Q]ueer is always an identity under construction" (1996, 131). Corber and Valocchi (2003) suggest that subjectivities arise not from within the self but outside it. Butler (1990) extends this instability to the performance of gender that transcends the body, and Grosz (1992) argues that a complex feedback relation exists between bodies and environments. …

Introduction: Queer Methods

Abstract: Queer studies is experiencing a methodological renaissance. In both the humanities and the social sciences, scholars have begun to identify research protocols and practices that have been largely overshadowed by dramatic advances in queer theory. The 2010 volume Queer Methods and Methodologies: Intersecting Queer Theories and Social Science Research, edited by Kath Browne and Catherine J. Nash, indexed this shift toward methods by reframing the endlessly rehearsed question "what is queer theory?" as the nascent "how is queer theory done?" Three years later, the Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies Program at the University of Pennsylvania hosted a two-day Queer Method conference. Organizers asked "what it means to understand queer work as having a method, or to imagine method itself as queer" (QueerMethod 2016). A 2016 University of Massachusetts Amherst conference similarly refocused queer studies-as well as black and postcolonial studies-through the lens of methods, and next year, the University of California Press will release a new collection on queer methods in sociology. With this special issue, WSQaffirms and enriches these conversations by presenting pioneering feminist work on queer methods in sociology, performance studies, African American studies, lesbian cultural studies, critical psychology, African studies, statistics, transgender and queer studies, media and digital studies, history, and English, as well as poetry and fiction.An Alternate HistoryWhat if a high-profile academic conference in 1990 had ushered in an enterprise called "queer methods" rather than "queer theory"?1 Our ques- tion-speculative and provocative in its rewriting of a watershed moment in queer intellectual history-is also surprisingly plausible. The methods that scholars used to establish gay and lesbian studies in the decades prior to queer theory were often quite queer themselves, particularly when guided by social constructionist approaches to the study of homosexuality. This was certainly true in sociology, as Steven Seidman (1994), Arlene Stein and Ken Plummer (1994), and others have noted.2 Why then has queer theory not staked a more pervasive, methods-oriented claim? Insofar as queer theory has relied on a humanities-centered displacement of the disciplinary innovations that were unfolding in the social sciences as "LGBT/queer studies" (see Lovaas, Elia, and Yep 2006), a focus on methods would not only have exposed that displacement but also forced a confrontation with disciplinarity that might have threatened queer theory's constitutional claims to inter/antidisciplinarity. The current turn "back" to methods may be perceived as an attempt to leverage disciplinarity against those longstanding claims by queer theory. Working explicitly through the question of queer methods, the following contributions thoughtfully negotiate such disciplinary impasses.From another angle, the political context that inspired early queer theory might also have translated into an inaugural focus on queer methods. Like much of gay and lesbian studies scholarship, academic queer theory was largely inspired by activist social movements of the day. In Time Binds, Elizabeth Freeman suggests that ACT UP exemplified the pragmatic ability of queer activists of the 1980s and 1990s to join "deconstructive reading practices and grassroots activism together, laying the groundwork for . . . queer theory" (2010, xv).3 Freeman thus links queer theoretical work in the academy to the questions of how that queer activism so ingeniously answered. To take her example, ACT UP was grounded in goal-oriented tactics and techniques including direct actions (e.g., teach-ins, kiss-ins, and die-ins), building coalitions across race and gender (e.g., affinity groups), highly stylized graphic designs, medical interventions (e.g., needle exchange, inclusive clinical trials, lay expertise4), video/media innovation, acts of disclosing, self-nominating, public shaming, outing, and marching. …

Haunted by the 1990s: Queer Theory's Affective Histories

Abstract: Through case studies of key texts across the history of queer inquiry, this article analyzes the temporality, affectivity, and politicization of the term queer in its academic usages. My goal is to lay bare the inarticulate and opaque method that orients what objects, processes, and relations "count" as queer within queer studies. For if queer is a singularly mobile and mutable term, capable of adjectivally modifying a range of phenomena-from sex practices, to social formations, temporalities, affects, diasporas, and inhumanisms-it is, nevertheless, not equally capable of being applied to anything nonnormative or boundary crossing. The method that orients what may be felicitously named queer is, I propose, fundamentally affective: it is a matter of sensing some resonance between ones object of study and the inchoate cluster of feelings that inhabit and animate the term queer. These feelings, I propose, must be understood as historical in origin. Specifically, I argue that despite the frequency with which queer inquiry has described itself as uncommitted to its pasts and by definition attuned to questions of immediate political urgency, it remains affectively haunted by the histori- cal and political moment of the U.S. 1990s in which it emerged. Ultimately, I propose that the future of the field of queer studies-and its relevance for scholarship on prior historical periods, racialized populations, and areas outside of the United States-requires a reckoning with the field's affective haunting hy the inaugural moment of the U.S. 1990s. This reckoning may take the form of a re- rather than a dehistoricization. That is, whereas queer scholars have tended to gesture toward the unbounded future as the domain in which queer can have a renewed life hy becoming other to what it has been so far, it may he more efficacious to engage queer's multiple pasts-including those prior to its explicit deployment as a political and theoretical term in the 1990s-in order to differently animate queer's dense affective histories. I close hy offering attachment genealogy as a method of exposing, fragmenting, and reworking queer's historical inheritances to enable queer to do different work in new contexts.Queer and NowBefore elaborating on the significance of the 1990s, I want to begin with a text that marks an important moment in queer studies scholarship: the introduction to the 2005 special issue of Social Text edited hy David Eng, J. Jack Halherstam, and Jose Esteban Munoz titled "What's Queer about Queer Studies Now?" Published as a field intervention that markedly highlighted the work of "a younger generation of scholars," this special issue, as described in its introduction, sought to foreground the question of "the political utility of queer" in its assessment of "what's queer" about contemporary queer studies scholarship (Eng, Halherstam, and Munoz 2005, l). The antennae of political utility, in turn, orients the editors to identify the target of queer critical intervention as a series of "late-twentieth-century global crises" which they describe, quoting Walter Benjamin, as "historical emergencies" (l). Their list of the "emergencies" to which this special issue responds includes:[T]he triumph of neoliberalism and the collapse of the welfare state; the Bush administration's infinite "war on terrorism" and the acute militarization of state violence; the escalation of U.S. empire building and the clash of religious fundamentalisms, nationalisms, and patriotisms; the devolution of civil society and the erosion of civil rights; the pathologizing of immigrant communities as "terrorist" and racialized popula- tions as "criminal"; the shifting forms of citizenship and migration in a putatively "postidentity" and "postracial" age; the politics of intimacy and the liberal recoding of freedom as secularization, domesticity, and marriage; and the return to "moral values" and "family values" as a prophylactic against political debate, economic redistribution, and cultural dissent. …

Queer Survey Research and the Ontological Dimensions of Heterosexism

Abstract: From the perspective of critical psychology, I offer one example of a survey instrument—developed with and through queer theoretical frames—that reflects a commitment both to statistical rigor and feminist objectivity. This instrument, the Sexual Orientation Beliefs Scale (SOBS), examines complex relationships between heterosexist attitudes and ontologies of sexuality—in other words, beliefs about what sexual orientation actually is. I argue that the SOBS’s unique analytic potential is to reveal relationships between attitudes and beliefs that are otherwise obscured by hegemonic discourse about biological essentialism. Finally, I introduce the results of one study that took a “person-centered” analytic approach, as opposed to a “variable-centered” approach, and found evidence of the weakness of biological-determinist beliefs about sexual orientation in distinguishing between individuals with high versus low levels of modern homonegativity. I suggest that with queer theory-informed instrumentation, this person-centered approach possesses a provisional capacity to function as a “queer method.”

Epistemology of the Subject: Queer Theory's Challenge to Feminist Sociology

Abstract: The place of queer theory in social research-particularly feminist research-is contested (Seidman 1996). Specifically, queer theory's attempts to deconstruct the subject provides an epistemological challenge to sociology (Green 2007), and queer theory's approach to gender and sexuality is often perceived as at fundamental odds with feminist objectives (Jagose 2009). Within a larger context of diverse epistemological perspectives within sociology, this article examines the intersections between feminist sociology and queer theory methods with regard to locating the subject. This article first considers the question of what it means to undertake feminist sociology and common issues arising in discussions of the subject category "woman." Using the work ofJudith Butler as an exemplar of where feminism meets queer theory, this article outlines a possible avenue that pays heed to feminist and other sociological approaches and adopts a queer method at the same time. Butler highlights the risks of re- inscribing the subject in discussions of gender and sexuality, a point that has particular resonance when considering ethnographic methods which place lived experience at the center of research. This article argues that although there may be divergences between the various perspectives, queer theory offers a new outlook on epistemological questions in research, which broadens the horizons of sociological understandings of the subject. Specifically, it argues that queer methods involve queer orientation. In this way we see queer methodology as involving a queering of methods, which directly involves challenging discrete subject positions.Feminist Sociology and the Category of "Woman"The question of whether a distinctive feminist sociology can be said to exist is contentious, given that "feminism" is itself a contested term. Feminism is often categorized as emerging in various-though disputed-"waves" over time (Garrison 2000; Snyder 2008; Renegar and Sowards 2009; Munro 2013), and there is also recognition of global feminisms that differ from these Western "waves" (Harding and Norberg 2002). As Clare Hemmings argues, splits and differences in feminism are not a reflection of a more recent postmodern turn; rather, these have always occurred: "[C]ontests over meaning . . . characterize feminist debate at all points of its history" (2005, 116). As Annamarie Jagose also highlights:Feminist theory, no less than queer theory, is a broad and heterogeneous project of social critique that works itself out across provisional, contingent and non-unitary grounds, unconstrained by any predefined field of inquiry and unanchored to the perspective of any specifiable demographic population. (2009, 172)Although feminism often broadly offers a focus on women and issues of gender, within this there are multiple approaches to what specifically is subject to critique (such as the law, capitalism, the state, or patriarchy) and what methods ought to be employed when undertaking "feminist" research. Therefore, in asking the question "What is feminist sociology?" we must first take into account that this broad-ranging term encompasses a plurality of perspectives. As such, it is difficult to locate a distinctive feminist sociological approach (Howard and Rosenberg 2008). There are multiple "forms" that feminist sociology might take including liberal, Marxist, radical, psychoanalytic, socialist, existentialist, and postmodern feminism (Crotty 1998, 162) and also "methodological diversity" within this field (Rosenberg and Howard 2008, 683). This is not to mention the many transnational feminisms which exist and which may be overlooked from a Western perspective (Mohanty 1988; Costa and Alvarez 2014) and the demand for feminism to decolonize (see for example, Hunt and Holmes 2015). Given this, it is useful to discuss some popular themes in feminism's treatment of the subject in research and the epistemological problems that arise from some feminist perspectives, while keeping in mind that this is a review of particularly Western traditions and is not exhaustive of all (or even the majority of) feminist thought but, rather, some dominant strands. …

How to Survive: AIDS and Its Afterlives in Popular Media

Abstract: A recent trend in documentary and "true story" films revisiting the early years of the AIDS crisis and its activism has gained a foothold in popular media. These include We Were Here (2011), Vito (2011), United in Anger (2012), How to Survive a Plague (2012), Dallas Buyers Club (2013), and the film adaptation of activist Larry Kramer's 1985 autobiographical play The Normal Heart (2014), to name a few. These films adapt the video footage and stories about activism generated during the early years of the crisis. With the exception of United in Anger, each film depicts AIDS activism through the lens of white male heroes. This is not new. W hat differs is that, unlike popular AIDS films of the 1990s-including And the Band Played On (1993) and Philadelphia (1993)-today's films narrate white men's struggle for survival as initially tragic, yet ultimately successful in prolonging their lives against the odds.1 Women and queers of color are marginal in these films, and appear only in order to go missing by the narrative's end.Given the extensive documentation that recalls the central role women and queers of color have played in AIDS activism since the onset of the crisis, these misrepresentations of the past are egregious. Nonetheless, they continue to receive popular endorsement. How to Survive gained an Oscar nomination for best documentary feature. Dallas Buyers Club garnered a bevy of industry nominations and awards for its script and cast. Though the film's lead protagonists pass, they are survived by the accolades that, presumably, could only be heaped upon white, male, and cisgender actors Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto. The Normal Heart was nominated for and won a number of Golden Globe, television, and online film awards for the movie and its cast. What does this popular revision of the AIDS past say about our present?Focusing on How to Survive, this article argues that the renewed interest in AIDS crisis activism has much to do with a historical impasse we have reached in the valuation of the living over the dead. The AIDS crisis emerged concurrently with late twentieth-century Reaganomics, including the arms buildup, dismantling of the welfare state, and criminalization of precarity.2 During this time, AIDS activism became the first U.S. social movement to integrate handheld camcorder technology into direct action to record the lives laid bare to state violence and vehement social neglect ( Juhasz 1995). Since then, the further removal of social safety nets, recent economic downturn, the exacerbation of class disparities, increased policing, retrenchment of freedoms, and continued global U.S. military occupations have made the experience of crisis ordinary (Berlant 2011, 11). AIDS crisis videos portray the modes of survival and livelihood that activists fought for which were alternative to what Lauren Berlant calls "cruel optimism"-the unrequited fantasy for "the good life" that is sustained by a thin thread of hope, in spite of evidence that opportunities to thrive have severely diminished (1). Archival AIDS activist documentary footage, then, is a living testament to collective will against the perpetuation of state oppression and colonial terror.The advance and proliferation of handheld audiovisual technologies, such as the smartphone, begs the question of what it means to record death as a mundane activity-and for the video to survive, "go viral," and galvanize social movements. Yet, according to How to Survive, the value or quality of one's life is measured and represented principally by an individual's biological endurance. The film trains attention on certain white men within the Treatment and Data Committee of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP). Mixing archival and present-day video footage, it focuses exclusively on their efforts to seek a medical panacea. The advance of this endeavor is attributed largely, if not entirely, to the white men. That Treatment and Data helped to forge life-extending medications, and that some of these white men survived the crisis, become the film's evidence that biomedical interventions can and should work for everyone. …

The Racialized Erotics of Participatory Research: A Queer Feminist Understanding

Abstract: At the intersections of empirical research, queer theory, and women of color feminism, I explore the place of racialized, gendered, and sexualized erotics in participatory action research (PAR). Focusing on my own erotic experience of a PAR study of intimacy, HIV/AIDS, and systemic violence and regulation, I argue for queer feminist PAR that refuses to cast failures, flirtations, and misreadings as obstacles to understanding. Queer feminist PAR instead recognizes such anxious situations as visceral experiences of social difference and affinity in which researchers, participants, and collaborators assert their personhood. Ultimately, such moments facilitate queer feminist inquiry.

Dyke Methods: A Meditation on Queer Studies and the Gay Men Who Hate It

Abstract: In the late 2000s, when I was writing Not Gay: Sex between Straight White Men (2015), mainstream LGBT political discourse was dominated hy aspirations for legal rights and hioevolutionary legitimacy (Duggan 2004; Spade 2015). The political future of lesbian, gay, and bisexual people seemed to hinge on the biological origins of same-sex desire, and considerable excitement was built around research projects that could provide evidence of these origins (Whisman 1995; Jordan-Young 2011; Walters 2014). Queer and feminist scholars were experiencing pressure to redefine interdisciplinarity as a partnership with neuroscientists and others who might deepen our understanding of the hormonal and genetic causes of "same-sex" desire-as if "same-sex" were a transparent concept. It seemed as if no one was paying attention to sociologist Vera Whisman, who, in her prescient 1995 hook Queer by Choice, made the compelling case that "horn this way" arguments typically serve gay men-politically and culturally-in ways that they do not serve queer women. And if people were thinking about the gendered implications of the sociohiology of sexual orientation, they were listening to evolutionary psychologists like Lisa Diamond, who explained women's sexual fluidity as a congenital condition, an evolutionary adaptation (2008).It was in this context that I wrote Not Gay, a hook about sex practices that, to my mind, begged for attention to the constraints of sociohiological accounts. Several sociologists have conducted empirical studies of sexual contact between straight-identified men (Anderson 2008; Anderson 2010; Reynolds 2015; Carrillo and Hoffman 2016; Silva, forthcoming). There was no urgent need for more empirical research on this subject. What had not yet been examined, however, were the cultural narratives circulating around straight white men's homosexual encounters and the rhetorical and material conditions that allowed white men's sex practices to circumvent the pathologizing gaze applied to men of color on the down low (Snorton 2014). Drawing on an eclectic archive of cultural materials and the tools of cultural studies, Not Gay investigated the stories people tell about why and how straight white men might behave homosexually. I drew on a broad theoretical and methodological repertoire-a synthesis of queer studies, cultural studies, sociology, and feminist theory. I wrote in a feminist tradition invested in exposing the myth of scientific objectivity by locating myself, and my utopian feminist longings, within the story of the research (Reinharz 1992). I followed the lead of critical race ethnographers by simultaneously studying up, down, and sideways as a white feminist dyke asserting her right to make claims about the meaning of homosexual contact between straight white men (Twine and Warren 2000). The entire hook was infused with the queer impulse to forget my disciplinary training (in sociology), to draw on lowbrow and eclectic archives that make new ways of thinking possible, and to see what desire, humor, and rage might yield if allowed to run through my writing, unleashed and directed at straight white men (see Halherstam 2011).I watched many hours of porn. I spent months trying to acquire the rights to reprint original photos of male sailors eating garbage out of each others anuses during a navy initiation ceremony. I wrote in cabins in the woods where I laughed and cried at my own excited response to the opportunity to subject straight white men's sexual encounters to a queer, feminist analysis. The hook was both a feminist "fuck you" to the persistent normalization and idealization of straight white men's bodies and sex practices, and an unexpected chamber in which my empathy for straight white men deepened.Not Gay was read hy far more people than I ever anticipated. Due to some savvy marketing on the part of NYU Press and the apparent salaciousness of the subject matter, the hook received an unusual amount of media attention, with coverage hy New York magazine, Forbes, Cosmopolitan, the Guardian, Newsweek, the Huffington Post, Vice, and Salon, and a number of reporters in Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. …

Querying Queer African Archives: Methods and Movements

Abstract: introductionThe archive as both repository and methodological concept has spawned increasing interdisciplinary exchanges, fueled by the development of digital forms of knowledge production. The "queer archive" has spurred further debates inspired by Michel Foucault's definition of the archive as a "system of discursivity" (1982, 129) and Jacques Derrida's postmodern musings on "archive fever" (1996) as central to the politics of individual and collective memory, desire, and interpretation.1 In mining various literary, performative, and visual materials and sexual subcultures, Ann Cvetkovich (2003) and Jack Halberstam (2005) in particular have stressed the importance of recovering a queer "archive of feelings" that accounts not only for the past trauma of queer lives but also for the repression, ephemerality, and often spectral traces of queer experiences.Although some scholars have written on the history and traditions of African same-sex practices, systematic and meticulous archival work on that topic has remained limited. In his research on male homosexuality in South African compounds and prisons at the turn of the twentieth century, Zackie Achmat, in his genealogical attempt "to recover from the archives a series of local knowledges for queers in contemporary South Africa," paved the way for other scholars to engage in similar research (1993, 108). Marc Epprecht notably has worked on uncovering "a pan-regional, proto-queer identity firmly rooted in history" in southern Africa while acknowledging the many obstacles encountered in the process, from the silence or destruction of historical sources and documents, to the prejudices laced with such accounts (2004, 4). Other historians have tackled the multidimensional complexity of archival work on the African continent, specifically South Africa, using a feminist and social lens that highlights the controversial status of queer African archives (Hamilton et al. 2002; Mangcu 2011).The study of queer archives in African contexts is further problematized by a number of indigenous and exogenous factors. The archival hubris of the colonial enterprise, intent on superimposing its own "imperial archive" of "knowledge" and "fantasy," has jeopardized access to African records and histories (Richard 1993). The colonial homophobia fostered by British antisodomy laws, for example, contributed to the reinvention of the continent as a hotbed of sexual perversions, which obscured indigenous same-sex practices in different ethnic groups. For Keguro Macharia, the political homophobia deployed by government leaders in countries like Cameroon, Uganda, and Nigeria has prompted activists to engage in queer archival work: "This turn to the archive also subtends sexual minority organising in Africa: against claims that homosexuality is 'un-African,' activists, artists, and intellectuals have attempted to produce archival evidence of same-sex acts in African pasts" (2015, 141). Conversations about the role of archives in gender- and sexual-diversity organizing generate questions about such archives' goals. For instance, Western queer archivization of African lives may be motivated by ethnocentric taxonomies and identity politics, undermining African scholars and activists' own work of restoration (Epprecht 2008). In addition, theories of the queer archive deployed in the U.S. academy have had limited methodological applicability to queer African archives, which require different understandings of temporality and subjectivity and should be approached with a sense of urgency heightened by the "necropolitics" of homophobia enforced by some African leaders (Mbembe 2001, 2003).Our goal is not to (re)locate same-sex practices or retrieve queer African agency from the past. Rather, we probe the discourses and "best practices" that can be implemented to uncover queer African archives, broadly defined as methods and movements. The ethical protocol guiding archival projects enables wider conceptualization of a transnational queer archive that, rather than dwelling in the porous uncertainty of its past, remains actively connected to both its political present and future. …

The Queer Ontology of Digital Method

Abstract: This article looks at the possibilities of a generative queer engagement with emergent digital and calculative technologies. While most queer writing on methodology has involved discursive and deconstructive interventions into qualitative methods—rejecting the quantitative outright as always already deterministic—I complicate the qualitative/quantitative distinction and advocate for new experimentation with digital networks of everyday practice. In addition, by highlighting uncomfortable resonances between queerly indeterminate epistemologies and the postnormative and nonrepresentational sociocorporal modulations of both “knowing capitalism” and the biodigital sciences, I suggest a reflexive reevaluation of the politics of queer method and a realignment of critical attention.

Thinking Sex with Geopolitics

Abstract: Thinking Sex with Geopolitics Valerie Traub's Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015Whatever queer/sexuality studies may have (or have not) become, we all at least have reason to believe that it stridently refuses all gestures of conceptual, methodological, and temporal totalization. Or so one hopes. Readings of sexuality now emerge as necessarily provisional and open to transformation and to the velocities and inscriptions of other histories. It is this willingness to perceive sexuality as always somewhere else, as a force of disruption, even displacement, which has been the rallying call of all forms of queer/sexuality studies. Indeed, what studying sex (within and without queer studies) has taught us is that we are always inhabited by histories that exceed our capacity to capture them. Valerie Traub's magnum opus, Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns, in many ways exemplifies such a dictum; it is in equal parts a spirited homage to the inscrutability, wantonness, and sheer messiness of histories of sexuality and a sharp censure of the limitations, methodologies, and theories of scholars obscuring those histories. Fueling Traub's project is her embrace of sexuality's constitutive opacity. As she writes emphatically: "[S]ex may be good to think with, not because it permits access, but because it doesn't" (4). Traub turns primarily to the early modern period (specifically Tudor and Stuart England) to explore the epistemological problem of sex where the opacities of eroticism (in all their forms) secure knowledge precisely in the ways in which they don't and can't be translated into digestible histories of the present.While there is much more to say about how the opacity of sex travels various routes within Traub's dizzyingly ambitious text, I want to gesture instead to its epistemic affinities with another conceptual category that is equally marked by its attachments to opacity: geopolitics. For both concep- tual categories-sex and geopolitics-the turn to and/or away from opacity orients habits of analysis that generate the value/capital that is implicit within both. Geopolitics, however, enters the diversified holdings of "historical sexuality and queer studies" (a term Traub uses to mark scholarship that is attentive to archives of the historical past) through languages of capitalization that shift the value of opacity into the labor of incommensurability. That is, geopolitical sites (particularly in the global South) continue to be read as obdurately and enticingly unresponsive-literally ungraspable forms. Indeed, the seductions of such unresponsiveness (often cast in the broad languages of divergent spatialities and temporalities) accrue a certain political value where you cede to geopolitical difference precisely to lay aside the epistemic work such difference does. Thus even as scholars repeatedly gesture to the vastness of geopolitical landscapes (the required self-reflexive move that marks a reading as limited to the West while more knowledge awaits us in the "Rest"), little effort is made to translate those gestures to the content of citations.1 There continues to be a paucity of comparative histories of sexuality that engage, for example, the various temporalities within which the idea of the "early modern" sutures itself to the category of sex across geographies and linguistic formations.2 Simply put, thinking sex with geosemiotics makes opacity a concept ineluctably linked to asymmetry, whereby a geographical location garners value through its (untranslatable) relationship to the West-in other words, through the labor of incommensurability.3 In so doing, we recast as it were, over and over again, the early debates inaugurated by Gayatri Spivak's seminal essay, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" as histories of elsewheres perform necessary scenes of nonrepresentability and reprieve (recall Spivak's opening invocation of the conversation between first-world intellectuals Deleuze and Foucault). …

Special Affects: Mermaids, Prosthetics, and the Disabling of Feminine Futurity

Abstract: I'll tell you about the mermaidSheds swimmable tail Gets legs for dancingSings like the sea with a choked throatKnives straight up her spineLancing every stepThere is a priceThere is a priceFor every giftAnd all advice-Adrienne Rich, "Quarto"In February 2009, the world was introduced to Nadya Vessey, an Australian double amputee with a seemingly spectacular narrative of personal transformation. Television New Zealand's (TVNZ) Close Up, the news program that first covered the story, introduced their segment "A Mermaid's Tale" on Vessey with the following lines:It's a fantasy isn't it, for many little girls, to be a beautiful mermaid, gracefully swimming through the water, splashing her tail. But when an Auckland woman sent a casual email to the film producers of the Weta Workshop, she never dreamed she'd one day be doing just that. In what's thought to be a world first, the double amputee now has a mermaid tail to help her swim. (2009)The story, in brief, goes something like this: after being questioned on a beach by a curious child who had observed her removing her prosthetic legs, Vessey playfully fibbed that she was a mermaid. A competitive swimmer, Vessey subsequently became taken with the idea of having a functional mermaid tail and submitted her request to the Weta Workshop, a special effects company whose film projects have included The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia. Viewing the project as an interesting challenge, the Weta Workshop accepted Vessey's request and a team of designers immediately set to work assembling the complicated prosthetic. Describing the process on their website, the team explains that "[e]very aspect of the tail has been custom made to Vessey's body using a blend of 3D modeling and milling technology, combined with Vi Vac vacforming, and a polycarbonate spine and tail fin" (3-Fins 2015). The result was a visually stunning and mechanically impressive piece of wearable technology, which Vessey modeled in several photo shoots.The story soon became a minor news sensation, with pictures, videos, and descriptions of Vessey-as-Mermaid circulating on various websites and blogs-each with their own colorfully exaggerated headline. One website, for example, declared: "Mermaid dream comes true thanks to Weta" (Calman 2009). Another hyperbolically reflected: "From Double Amputee to Mermaid? Famed movie director gives woman new life" ("Agreyson" 2011). Inspirational language like this is, of course, standard fare in human-interest stories involving disability, and many of the online comments posted in response to TVNZ's Close Up segment extended this logic of charitable rescue or courageous overcoming. Scripting Vessey into a familiar "pity" narrative, the public understands her to be dependent on the charity and benevolence of others, lacking the physical adaptations necessary for her own continued survival.And yet there is something undeniably queer and crip in the incongruous narratives of feminine and disabled futurity that converge uneasily around Vessey's adult mermaid embodiment. Following the work of Robert McRuer and Alison Kafer, I intend the term "crip" to signif y in this context both as a defiant refusal of the able-bodied norm and as a recognition of the performative nature of compulsory able-bodiedness as it inspires an endless series of failed repetitions. In what follows, I argue that Vessey's own playful relationship to her mermaid prosthetic makes the usual inspirational narratives and the affects they are meant to generate impossible to sustain. The result is the production of two related but distinct versions of camp sensibility. W hile Vessey's own clear commitment to artifice, stylization, and novelty makes her readable as a crip-femme dandy with a keen camp eye, the stubbornness with which many commentators persisted in equating Vessey's story with inspirational narratives of overcoming adversity makes the news coverage itself readable as naive camp. …

Put a Little Honey in My Sweet Tea: Oral History as Quare Performance

Abstract: In her 2008 essay, "Who Is the Subject? Queer Theory Meets Oral History," historian Nan Alamilla Boyd raises important questions about the challenges that queer theory poses for gay and lesbian history. In her survey of key texts in what she names as a "fledgling" subfield of U.S. history, Boyd rightly questions whether oral history as a method can ultimately escape the trappings of subjectivity "because it is through coherent and intelligible subject positions that we learn to speak, even nonverbally, about desire," which sometimes reifies notions of sexual identity rather than sexual desire (2008, 189). She summarizes John D'Emilio's Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities (1983), Allan Berube's Coming Out Under Fire (1990), Elizabeth Kennedy and Madeline Davis's Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold (1993), Esther Newton's Cherry Grove, Fire Island (1993), George Chauncey's Gay New York (1994), and John Howard's Men Like That (1999), and finds that only Howard's text represents a truly queer example of how historians might chronicle same-sex desire by moving "beyond the limits of intelligible speech, that is, racially coded articulations of desire, in order to produce a more complex accounting of the history of sexuality and sexual communities" (2008, 186). While I agree with Boyd's assessment, I believe the "challenges" to oral history posed by queer theory are less about oral history as a method, per se, and more about the disciplinary protocols of history as a field. In other words, history as a field trains researchers, including oral historians, to capture a narrative that provides insight about a particular time and place-training that Boyd notes sometimes gets in the way of tracking a libidinal economy of desire outside of identity politics.Coincidentally, my book Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South-An Oral History, appeared in the same year as Boyd's essay. In the introduction I, too, laud Howard's intervention in queer historiography, while also marking the difference between my approach to oral history as a performance theorist as opposed to a historian. Unlike historians who, according to Nell Irvin Painter, are invested in creating "historical narrative" (2005, iv), I am committed to attending to the storytelling act itself by "co-performatively bearing witness" (Conquergood 2002, 149) to the story. Oral history in conjunction with performance, then, calls attention to the fictive nature of oral history, but not necessarily as a methodological "problem," as it were. Rather, it situates oral history as an index of the meaning-making process of history itself, what Allen Feldman calls "historicity" (1991, 2). In other words, the narration is not only a recollection of historical events and facts in relation to an "authentic" self or "identity"; it is also a phenomenological experience-the moment of storytelling itself is an epistemological and embodied experience of the self as same, the self as other, and the intersubjectivity between teller and listener. The performance frame also exposes not only the erotics in/of narration, but also the erotic tension between the researcher and the teller, which has enormous implications for queer history. Rather than a "transhistorical and cross-cultural interpretation of history that conflates same-sex behavior with the ipso facto existence of sexual identities" (Boyd 2008, 1), the performance approach to oral history resists linear, progressive, or stable renderings of any one "history" by what Della Pollock calls "making history go" (1998, 1).Since I have responded in my earlier work to some of the anxieties about queer historiography that Boyd expresses, in this essay I wish to engage a different set of methodological conundrums based on my current research. Tentatively titled "Honeypot: Black Southern Women Who Love Women," this work focuses on the oral histories of African American women who express same-sex desire who were horn, reared, and continue to reside in the American South. …

Kill Daddy: Reproduction, Futurity, and the Survival of the Radical Feminist

Abstract: A curious thing always happens on the first day of my Introduction to Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies courses. During my opening notes, I ask students to define two terms: feminist and feminism. We begin with feminist. I ask the class to describe a feminist, giving them permission to draw on cultural stereotypes as well as their own understandings of the term. Without fail, the following responses end up on the board: lesbian, man hating, radical, extreme, opinionated, does not shave. Leaving these descriptors on the board, I then ask them to define feminism. Again, the answers are nearly always the same: a commitment to women's rights; the belief that men and women should be equal. As a pedagogical exercise, I ask my students to explain how column one relates to column two and, not surprisingly, they are quick to come to the defense of feminism's insistence on equality and reprimand the negativity associated with the definition of a feminist. The joy and intrigue of the exercise, for me, is how readily it highlights this persistent bifurcation of the figure of the feminist and feminism as ideology, with the clear distinction that the former is bad and the latter is good. W hat is even more apparent in this bifurcation is how the image of virulent radical feminist as the embodiment of feminism persists so vehemently, even in the face of a seemingly more palatable juridicopolitical definition of feminism as tethered to civil equality.How does this figure of the radical feminist persist, indeed, survive, in our current cultural moment? Furthermore, how has the radical feminist's survival as a malevolent extremist enacted her effacement as a critical figure for contemporary queer and feminist theory? Building on these questions, how does the figure of the radical feminist further push a critique of reproductive futurity, as recently argued by Lee Edelman in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004)?1In her recent book Feeling Women's Liberation, Victoria Hesford presents the figure of the "feminist-as-lesbian"-a figure explicitly connected to radical feminism-as a spectral trope that has served to both define and discredit the women's liberation movement (2013, 1). This figure, which emerged in the early 1970s, served not only to demarcate the boundary between proper and improper (read: heterosexual) femininity, but was also a catalyst for certain schisms and shifts within the burgeoning women's liberation movement. The lesbian, Hesford argues, "becomes the figure through which the emotive force of the attack on women's liberation is generated. . . . As a consequence, women's liberationists are marked as anterior to normal women, with the lesbian the boundary figure through which that separation is made" (2013, 27-28). Interestingly, in No Future, Edelman proposes a very similar figure-albeit one coded strictly as male -in the "sinthomosexual." Like the "feminist-as-lesbian," Edelman's sinthomosexual identifies the cultural fantasy of queerness as simultaneously the abject other and defining border of the normative political subject. Following this similarity between the feminist-as-lesbian and the sinthomosexual, this essay reads the two figures together in order to argue that the figure of the radical feminist, as the heir of the lesbian-as-feminist position, persists as a sinthomosexual figure. Pushing Edelman's argument further, I aim to demonstrate that the radical feminist reads more violently than his sinthomosexual, and thus, is more closely aligned with the destructive forces of the death drive, which Edelman highlights.Edelman's polemic takes to task an affirmative, humanistic political regime that grounds itself in an ever-deferred future staked on the symbolic logic of the Child. Edelman dubs this "structuring optimism of politics" as reproductive futurism (2004, 5). The queer, Edelman argues, figures in this logic as a negativity that "names the side of those not 'fighting for the children,' the side outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism" (3). …

CompuQueer: Protocological Constraints, Algorithmic Streamlining, and the Search for Queer Methods Online

Abstract: How has the concept of a queer method achieved coherence and popularity online, without becoming synonymous with an ethos of extreme, indiscriminate inclusivity—with a sense that “anything goes,” especially on the Internet and especially under the banner of “queer”? How do digital-networked technologies both manufacture and undermine the intelligibility of specifically queer methods? This essay considers these questions through the close analysis of specific social-networking services and a broad framework for identifying queer media and other inscriptions of queerness online: machine reading, which involves specialty search engines designed to circumvent human interpretation for the sake of discovering the avowedly queer.

Openings, Obstacles, and Disruptions: Desire as a Portable Queer Method

Abstract: I am going to ask an embarrassing question. Is all this romance totally sublimated in field notes and language learning only to emerge in texts as metaphors for the "heroic quest by the single anthropologists," or does the erotic ever make a human gesture? If so, what might be the significance of the erotic equation in fieldwork and its representation or lack thereof in ethnographic text?-Esther Newton, "My Best Informant's Dress: The Erotic Equation in Fieldwork"Exploring Ethnographic DesiresFor my doctoral research, I was always on the lookout for lesbians who worked at gas stations. One day, per my usual routine, I stopped at a gas station outside of my regular route to get a Diet Coke. As I was paying for my purchase, I realized that the cashier was a lesbian. Although I had my son with me (which sometimes leads others to read me as straight), she immediately recognized me as a lesbian. The ensuing interaction was instantaneous and largely nonverbal.In an effort to upsell me from my twelve ounce Diet Coke to a thirtytwo ounce that would cost me only an additional forty cents, she flirted intensely with me through smiles and gestures, despite the line of customers forming behind me. I was intrigued that she was flirting with me. Though I enjoyed the attention, I did not interpret it as flirting out of serious sexual interest, as I was old enough to be her mother, wearing a wedding ring, and toting around a kid. What then occurred to me is that I had just witnessed flirtatious emotional labor in action as a consumer. And of course, I did what any other desperate researcher in the field would do: I flirted back in an effort to establish a connection so that she would agree to an interview with me. In the end, I remained committed to my twelve ounce Diet Coke, but I did get the interview.Throughout my research, laboring lesbians tell story after story of going out of their way to please customers in order to create a sense of loyalty to the gas station. Over time, I realized that these women had developed techniques in the workplace to establish relationships with customers. In an interview setting, their use of these same techniques translated into a concentrated focus of attention on me as I was concentrating on them. The combined concentration of interest made the interview space ripple with desire. In fact, multiple desires arose throughout my project.My ethnographic research project focused on the everyday lives of laboring lesbians who work in U.S. gas stations for Hess Corporation. Through both a sociological and geographical lens, I examined how institutions of race, class, gender, and sexuality imprinted on the bodies of lesbians as they performed primarily feminized labor. Ultimately, I was interested in the ways in which sexuality matters in the workplace through an analysis of how lesbians perform feminized emotional labor within the historically masculine space of the gas station. Methodologically, I discovered early on in my research that a current of desire-both my own desire and that of my subjects-ran through my research experience, ultimately informing my project in multiple and profound ways.What was happening that could cause me to smile sincerely and wink at a woman I had just met? Why did she smile at me softly with a slight sparkle of interest in her eyes? Why did our bodies come closer together as the interview progressed, as if the possibility of desire was pulling us forward? I would have felt comfortable if this was a single encounter that I could safely attribute to a moment of mutual interest and admiration. But it happened again and again. These moments of desire happened in vary- ing degrees of awareness and strength. However, in remembering my nine years of fieldwork, I could feel it was always present. Over time, I began to understand that desire takes many forms within research: the political and personal decision of which research project to pursue, the intellectual curiosity needed to commit to a project over time, the pleasurable flow of desire between myself and research participants, and even moments of discomfort. …

Vision and Precarity in Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis

Abstract: What does it mean to survive, and when, and how, does survival matter? As the editors of this special issue have suggested, "To survive is messy, elaborate, layered," contingent as it is on biological, political, and material conditions that support life or liveliness. The claim for the renewed centrality of survival in modern times rests on the recognition of widespread threats to human life, social, and physical environments brought about by political violence, social persecution, and ecological crises. Domestic violence, the right to abortion, and equal pay are only a few of the additional issues that disproportionately impact women's lives. Survival is always contingent on the unfolding of an event's horizon and is shaped by evolving circumstances rather than guaranteed. The term itself is used in a variety of contexts: capital-S "Survivor," situated historically, may refer to a person who survived the Holocaust; in popular contemporary culture, the term refers to a reality game show franchise where contestants must "survive" in seemingly difficult and "exotic" settings. Ranging from the profound to the superficial, "survival" is multiply inflected in contemporary culture, and more often than not, these inflections overlap and contradict one another. Survival is marked by precarity and persistence, two qualities that also mark the text under analysis in this article.With these permutations in mind, in this paper I explore the multiple modalities of survival in Marjane Satrapi's "autographic" memoir, Persepolis (2003/4). Influenced by Art Spiegelman's Maus (1996) and David B.'s Epileptic (2002), Satrapi's comic skillfully addresses difficult subjects through an iconic visual style. Like both Spiegelman and B., Satrapi uses the comic form to explore the relationship between personal memories and cultural history. In this respect, I suggest that Persepolis significant-ly contributes to feminist cultural histories, because Satrapi's story is told through a female and Iranian perspective, two descriptors that have been-at least historically -infrequently linked within Western discourses, including feminist conversations.1Narrating Women's LivesI use the term "autographic" in reference to Gillian W hitlock and Anna Poletti's neologism in a special issue of Biography. Leveraging Leigh Gilmore's conceptual term "autobiographics" in her landmark study on feminist self-representation (1994), Whitlock and Poletti broadly define "autographics" as "[l]ife narrative fabricated in and through drawing and design using various technologies, modes, and materials" (2008, v). As one mode of autographic writing, comics offer what I call here a "frame of recognition" for the subjects they portray. By "frame of recognition," I mean first the physical frame-usually in the form of a line-that encloses images and words in comics, and second, the way that these frames are figuratively deployed to redress overdetermined narratives of marginalized subjectivities, including women's lives. In women's life writing, the work of comics is particularly significant because of the personalized field of vision that the form promotes. As Hillary Chute suggests, "The types of challenges we see in women's graphic narrative are not found anywhere else-or anywhere else in a post-avant-garde horizon," and part of the political significance of these images lies in their complexity and avoidance of an "obviously 'correct' feminist politics" (2010, 4-5, emphasis in original). The reader can observe the subtleties of narrating womanhood in Persepolis with its careful unraveling of cross-cultural codes and expectations.Since the 1970s, women's life writing has gained richness and depth from the production of graphic memoirs such as the underground anthology, Wimmen's Comix Collective (1972-1992), and more recently, Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragi-Comic (2006), Julie Doucet's My New York Diary (1999), and Aline Kominsky-Crumb's Need More Love (2007). …

The Intersection of Queer Theory and Empirical Methods: Visions for CLAGS, the Center for LGBTQ Studies

Abstract: In 1991 Martin Duberman and his colleagues founded the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies (CLAGS) at the Graduate Center in the City University of New York (CUNY). Since its inception, CLAGS has been at the forefront of queer studies, promoting the study of historical, cultural, and political issues of vital concern to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) individuals and communities. For twenty-five years, CLAGS has sponsored groundbreaking public programs and conferences; has offered fellowships and scholarships to academics, artists, and students; and has functioned as an indispensable conduit of information. As the first university-based LGBTQ research center in the United States, CLAGS (which was rebranded in 2014 as CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies) has served as a national center for the promotion of queer and trans* studies.For decades, CLAGS has been a haven for many queer theorists- from the CLAGS founder Martin Duberman to Kessler Award Winners (e.g., Judith Butler, Jonathan Ned Katz, Susan Stryker) to past CLAGS board members (e.g., Jose Esteban Munoz, Lisa Duggan, and Gayatri Gopinath). Queer theorists aim to challenge the conceptualizations ofwhat is legitimate and acceptable. CLAGS has been a place where people question how "normal" is conceived in society (through gender binaries, sexualities, politics, behavior) while celebrating what is "queer" (applauding that which is different while validating experiences of the oppressed). Queer theorists recognize that systemic heterosexism, sexism, and transphobia are embedded throughout society and that it is imperative to change the ways that scholars approach research, so as to not condone heteronormative and cis-sexist male approaches as the only methods of inquiry.Without the queering of methods of the past, there would be a dearth of LGBTQ academic literature today. If scholars in LGBTQ studies (including those involved with CLAGS for the past twenty-five years) had merely focused on rigid scientific methods as ways of rejecting null hypotheses, it is probable that there would be little academic writing about LGBTQ people. Participant samples would never be large enough, resulting in low effect sizes and few analyses that would be considered scientifically robust. If previous researchers had limited themselves to measures normed on samples of white, heterosexual, and cisgender men, it is likely that LGBTQpeople (and others) would continue to be stereotyped as abnormal, inferior to the dominant groups, or both.Over the years, CLAGS's approach to queering methods has been multifaceted. First, through public programs CLAGS encourages dialogue with people affiliated with the academy, as well as those who are not. In doing so, CLAGS offers CUNY students a queer education in that they learn not just from professors and textbooks but also from community members from multiple educational backgrounds, perspectives, and life experiences. Concurrently, CLAGS also queers education for individuals without scholastic opportunities, who now have access to learn about theoretical concepts that they might not ever be exposed to otherwise. For instance, since 1998, the CLAGS Seminar in the City series has allowed community members to take weekly classes, taught by a professor, on some topic related to LGBTQ studies. Often, the topic is one that is not offered by traditional academic institutions, such as "Queering the Crip/ Cripping the Queer: Introduction to Queer and Disability Studies" in 2003.CLAGS has also queered research methods to reframe the narrative of LGBTQ research. For centuries, non-LGBTQ-identified researchers studied individuals who were deemed to have nontraditional sexual orientations and gender identities in pathologizing and harmful ways. Scientists performed castrations, lobotomies, electroshock therapy, and other heinous acts to "cure" people of their "disorders." It was not until 1973 that "homosexuality" was removed from the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) on psychiatric disorders. …

Toward Trans* Epistemology: Imagining the Lives of Transgender People

Abstract: David Valentine's Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007Genny Beemyn and Susan Rankin's The Lives of Transgender People, New York: Columbia University Press, 2011There is something vertiginous about the swirl of scholarly work on transgender. Over the last decade, an explosion of interest in such topics produced dozens of volumes and literally thousands of articles examining the phenomena from a range of disciplinary perspectives. Many such studies posit a "massive destabilization of long taken-for-granted categorical frameworks" (Brubaker 2016, 1). The positioning of "transgender" seems somewhat paradoxical in these instances; it activates discourses of category crisis and rupture while serving as an increasingly ossified category of meaning in its own right. It is in this area that something we might call a queer method has the most purchase.If we employ the standard "queer" interpretation that positions subjects and subjectivities as "fluid, unstable and perpetually becoming" (Browne and Nash 2010, 1), it would seem impossible to fashion a concrete methodology or indeed anything resembling a coherent subject. But there is a varied tradition within the social sciences of thinking queerly about transgender people and communities. Both texts reviewed in this essay make the basic move of resisting prior classification schemes and allowing for research subjects to make complex meaning of their identities, communities, and social experiences. A queer perspective on transgender topics makes two primary intellectual moves: first, such studies take a humanistic approach, conferring the "dignity of belief" upon the "felt sense of gender" that research subjects describe (Salamon 2014, 116). Second, such studies deploy what I'll call a "trans* epistemology." The truncation symbol, or "*" at the end of "trans*," symbolizes the openness to a variety of endings, meanings, and interpretations, a multiplicity of as-yet undefined articula- tions. The "subject" of research, previously considered a static, knowable, coherent, and self-knowledgeable entity, bound by the imagination of the researcher, is redrawn as an open question about how the forces of culture, discourse, self-understanding, and social group membership interact to produce frameworks of meaning into which subjects position themselves. Such an epistemological orientation allows for multiple, unstable, contingent meanings, while still recognizing that individuals "bring a high degree of intelligible order to their circumstances" (Blommaert and Rampton 2016, 36), even when such circumstances seem dauntingly complex.David Valentine's pathbreaking ethnography, Imagining Transgender (2007), is an example of precisely this approach. It opens with a problematic that structures the ensuing three hundred pages. Valentine sits on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in a support group for transgender-identified people living with HIV. Both Valentine and the group facilitator are cisgender, white, homosexual men. None of the five group participants, all either African American or Latina, identify as transgender. They refer to themselves as "girls," as "fem queens," and often as "gay" but never transgender (3). In popular valence, the term transgender consolidates a vast array of gender-transgressive identities, from transsexual-identified people to those like the group participants, who have more complex gendered identifications. Yet while the group members rejected transgender identification for themselves, there was disagreement about Valentine's presence. One participant said he might keep attending because they were "all gay," while others wanted him to leave because he wasn't "a girl," like them (5). While transgender represents an ontological separation of gender from sexual orientation in the popular imagination, for Valentine's research subjects the division between the two concepts is strikingly complex. …

Ornamenting the Unthinkable: Visualizing Survival under Occupation

Abstract: Repetitive, messy, and often hard to see: survival is rarely photogenic. Relative to spectacular scenes of violent dying or heroic living that comprise familiar images of military conflict, survival may look rather dull, if it appears at all. Militarized violence typically becomes visible in mortality, but survival blurs the distinctions between life and death in the precarious environments that war creates, thus eluding or confounding predominant visual modalities for representing war zones. Related to this, survival is often illegible in politicized wartime fantasies about life and death, an incomprehensibility rooted in its deviation from mythologized visions of living and dying. In part, mainstream news media may find it difficult to depict survival-and consequently, distant spectators may find survival difficult to envision-because it is ubiquitous and temporally expansive. Dramatic events lend themselves to capture in single-frame photographs or short film clips, while the ongoing task of surviving war lasts as long, or longer, than the conflict itself, a duration that is inimical to the narrative constraints of news media and entertainment genres.Wartime survival is the maintenance of life in an extreme form of what Lauren Berlant characterizes as "crisis ordinariness" (2011, 10), a concept that encapsulates the everyday traumas and forms of precarity generated by the current global political economy. Structural violence nourishes crisis ordinariness, while circumscribing its visibility through corporate and state control of the media. Yet as generative as the idea of "crisis ordinariness" is, the "crisis" that modifies the "ordinariness" in this evocative phrase also risks overshadowing it. To focus too narrowly on abiding crisis (or interlocking crises) is to risk overlooking the active, inventive, everyday survival strategies that crisis elicits, and the ways that those innovations mitigate the crisis that begets them. Shifting our gaze away from crisis, we look here to a visual document of livable forms of ordinariness that emerge in fissures within the protracted crisis of militarized violence.Confronting survival in visual cultures of war often requires departing from ideological absolutes (for sometimes the work of survival is ugly) and fantasies about resistance (for sometimes the work of survival is primarily utilitarian). Instead, this visual departure opens up alternative critical, political, and spectatorial possibilities. Here, we consider the interweaving of survival, catastrophe, and ordinariness in the needlepoint artwork of Esther Nisenthal Krinitz to illustrate this potential. Krinitz, who lived through the Nazi occupation of Poland, juxtaposes the luscious materiality and pastoral settings of thirty-six fabric collage and embroidered panels with a visual narrative of surviving genocidal violence (Krinitz and Steinhardt 2005). Arresting both for its virtuosic level of detail and frank rendition of the occupation and attendant traumas, Krinitz's needlework ornaments the conjunction of the horrific and the quotidian. This jarring combination confronts viewers even as the haptic richness and sensory elegance of her craft pulls us toward spectatorial pleasures.Building on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's insistence on the importance of reparative practices that work to ameliorate the traumatic impacts of structural violence, we consider how the sensory lure of Krinitz's needlepoint grates against knowledge about the miseries these scenes depict (2003, 144). Reparative practices, as Sedgwick defines them, constitute the "many ways selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture-even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them" (150-51). Through an exploration of the haptic and visual aspects of Krinitz's reparative artistic practice, we argue that her creations visualize survival as a process of extracting sustenance from an imperiled material world. …

A Response: Difficulty, Opacity, Disposition, Method

Abstract: A Response: Difficulty, Opacity, Disposition, Method1 Valerie Traub's Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015Even as they evince their own interests and modes of investigation, these responses to Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns generously correlate the concerns of my project with their own. Generated from institutional locations as diverse as classics, history, medical sociology, and area and postcolonial studies, each response seizes on points of connection that provide a platform for affirming particular values and concerns: of history and interdisciplinarity, of complexity and contradiction, of the problematic travel in concepts. None of these values map onto a discipline; they point rather to habits of thought that are encouraged when we read for method.From this standpoint, it is fascinating to see what appears-and doesn't appear-in these pages. Although Kate Fisher and Rebecca Langlands begin by invoking what they describe as my book's "pedagogical principle" of historicizing, they quickly move to the affects generated by its epistemological investments. Describing my work as occasionally "difficult and discomforting," they report that it leaves them "with an acute awareness of the problems" of doing the interdisciplinary history of sexuality. They nonetheless applaud the effort to put methodological questions into dialogue with epistemological ones, insofar as it "reshapes our very concept of sexual knowledge as an analytical category. . . . The study of sex becomes the investigation of how sex is turned into knowledge."Similarly intrigued by epistemological processes, Lisa Jean Moore emphasizes the way Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns reveals the procedures by which analytical objects are constituted, thereby allowing us to interrogate "'how categories . . . came to be.'" Portraying our methods as "mutually reinforcing" and bringing my strategies into conversation with her favored scholarly tactics of "getting lost" and "situational analysis," she reformulates points of contact between our projects: "it is the elusive, contested, and controversial problematics around defining . . . objects that is the actual 'data"' Moore's invocation of the notion of "boundary objects" further collocates our mutual interest in "the centrifugal forces of opacity, plurality, and polyphony,' and the "centripetal drives of capturing the range of variation" and complexity.Both of these responses note the ongoing tension between empirical and queer approaches. With considerable force, Moore claims for queer studies an empirical method that starts with taking the world "as if it exists, no matter how it is constructed." Intriguingly, the imperative of that claim is implicitly de-dramatized by her portrayal of her relationship to queer studies as "flirt[ing]." Indeed, methodological flirtation suggests one tactic for sidestepping the double-binding scene of assessment that renders Moore's work too empirical to be "considered part of queer studies" (while "not empirical enough" by the standards of sociology). Flirting, after all, need not require a commitment on either side.Looming large in these responses is the book's advocacy of interdisciplinarity. Highlighting my engagements with, and critiques of, different ways of "doing" history, Fisher and Langlands confirm from their standpoint as practitioners of a large scale interdisciplinary project, "the inherent frustrations and fruitfulness of reaching across" disciplinary boundaries, while embracing what they describe as my "optimistic" brief on behalf of a practice that acknowledges "the impossibility of working together without friction and contradiction." Much of my book is dedicated to confronting such frictions, disciplinary and otherwise. An emphasis on method, I suggest, helps us appreciate that protocols that would lubricate interactions are still in the process of being worked out. Not only does such a practice entail valuing the thorny issue, the dilemma, the impasse, but it also enjoins a willingness to unpack incommensurate idioms and resist the impulse to either assume sameness in the room or strive for premature unity. …

The Queer Art of Survival

Abstract: W hen I received a letter from Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center inviting me to participate in a study for "Breast Cancer Survivors," rather than ignoring it as I had other appeals of this sort, I hung on to the enclosed card, as I imagined it might speak to the notion of survival that I was pondering for this contribution. The follow-up call that came a few weeks later made clear why I disown the category of "survivor" and turn instead to fashioning my own queer art of survival. On the phone the investigator asked if I had a few moments for her to evaluate my eligibility. After having her repeat herself several times, during which I misheard her say "distrust" and "stress," I finally agreed to submit to a "distress" monitor. This would consist of thirty-four questions that began with ranking my level of distress in the past two weeks including that day on a scale from one to ten. I selected "four." Had I experienced distress in the past two weeks including that day in relation to child care, housing, insurance, transportation, work or school, children, partner, depression, fears, nervousness, sadness, worried (sic), spirituality and religion, loss of faith, relating to God, appearance, bathing and dressing? I was to respond only with a "yes" or "no." This caused me some distress. I found the questions conceptually suspect and grammatically problematic, causing me to skip at least one of them. She then went through a list of eighteen physical symptoms to which I was again afforded a monosyllabic response. At the end of this barrage, she inquired if for any of the questions to which I answered "yes" was my distress related to my breast cancer. I replied "no." She promptly informed me that I was not eligible for the study, explaining that it was intended to help breast cancer survivors and they were looking for women who were expe- riencing distress in relation to their breast cancer or survivorship issues. I noticed that the study presumed that "help" for a "breast cancer survivor" was only warranted if distress was directly related to breast cancer, and that "survivorship issues" were equated with distress in relation to breast cancer. I ended the call with the frustratingly familiar feeling of estrangement I continually experienced with the cancer establishment during my diagnosis and treatment. The exchange brought into relief my discomfort with the homogenized and naturalized conception of the term "cancer survivor" that pervades cancer discourse. I am, of course, not alone in my disdain (Ehrenreich 2009; Jain 2013; Sulik 2011).To the extent that I associate neither my distress nor my well-being to cancer, I fail to qualify for the kind of help that those designated as "survivors" would require. That is, survivorship research is neither addressed to me nor gains from my input. But what exactly is a "survivor" and what qualifies as a "survivorship issue"? The National Cancer Institute has an Office of Cancer Survivorship which is dedicated to "the unique needs of the growing population of cancer survivors and to enhanc[ing] our ability to address those needs." Despite the tautology that tends to cloud so much cancer related discourse, it is all too clear that, in cancer world, there is a distinction between survival and survivorship. In cancer lingo, I seem to have no choice but to be labeled a cancer survivor because I have indeed survived my treatment and am now five years cancer free. I am hailed as a cancer survivor on every piece of correspondence I receive from the hospital, including the invitation to the study for which I was rejected. But survivorship is a different matter from survival. Survivorship, it would seem, is not something to which one defaults as a result of surviving treatment. Rather, survivorship is a particular stance vis-a-vis one's ongoing status as a survivor, for survivors do not merely survive, but take on, handle, negotiate, and manage their survivorship. Survivorship is a category of experience that has been instrumentalized and politicized. …

Spitfire and Sass: Valerie Solanas's "A Young Girl's Primer" and the Creative Possibilities of a Survival Self

Abstract: In July 1966, Valerie Solanas had just finished her play, Up Your Ass, and would soon begin to pen her famed indictment of men, masculinity, and "Daddy's girls," SCUM Manifesto (self-published in 1967, published with Olympia Press in 1968, self-published again in 1977 as the "CORRECT" version). While scholars have taken the intellectual contribution of the SCUM Manifesto and its relevance to contemporary (radical) feminism seriously (Deem 1996; Fahs 2008; Harding 2001; Harrison 2013; Haut 2007; Heller 2001; Ronell 2004; Third 2006; Warner and Watts 2014; Winkiel 1999), and a few have analyzed the histories of Up Your Ass (Harding 2001; Rosenberg 2010)-particularly its role in inspiring Solanas to shoot Andy Warhol (Rowe 2013; Warner 2012)-most work on Solanas has grossly ignored the savvy, subversive, and wildly funny essay Solanas wrote for Cavalier magazine, "A Young Girl's Primer, or How to Attain the Leisure Class" (1966). As Solanas's biographer, I have contextualized her life in relation to the times and places she inhabited, just as I have worked to frame her writing in relation to her various (and changing) constructions of herself (Fahs 2014). As her third piece of published writing, the "Primer" most directly speaks to the conditions of her embodied, lived experiences as a homeless prostitute on the streets of New York and, as such, serves as a commentary not only about Solanas herself but also about survival more broadly.Deploying rhetorical and affective strategies of nihilism, anger, and callousness, Solanas reveals how survival can paradoxically require contradictions and tensions like optimism/pessimism, humor/outrage, and grandiosity/self-effacement. This essay explores these contradictions and tensions, revealing the ways that Solanas carefully constructs different selves in her text and in her life that play up these alter egos and caricatures, all while actually struggling to survive on a daily basis. Barely getting by, starting to unravel with various symptoms of her emerging paranoid schizophrenia, and struggling as a writer who had to carry her typewriter from one crash pad to the next (Fahs 2014), Solanas wrote the "Primer" as a textual counterpart, an effortful meditation on how she could (and did) survive in a context that degraded and dismissed her.W hile most people may imagine "survival" to mean meeting one's basic needs for food, shelter, and safety, Solanas's needs presented a much more complicated set of priorities. As a fringe character on the margins of Greenwich Village bohemia and Warhol's "Stupid Stars," and as a brilliant writer and thinker (she scored in the ninety-eighth percentile on her IQ test), Solanas's survival ambitions extended far beyond mere physicality. Solanas's need to survive differently, embodied in her decision to craft an alternative self who could withstand the stressors of her daily life, shines through in the "Primer." W hatever deterioration she experienced in her actual self/body, she could resist these indignities and intrusions by honing her skills as a writer and satirist. Vivid in its startling contradictions with her actual self, brash and bold in its depiction of the shamelessly downtrodden, funky, low-down counterpart who emerges unscathed from life in the "Primer," Solanas cultivates a revolutionary self who thrives on the chaos of New York City panhandling and S&M sex.This essay considers this "survival self " as a viable strategy for (struggling) feminist artists, writers, and thinkers-particularly those whose conditions of daily life require an "alter ego" to endure the various taxations, trivializations, violences, and mockeries directed toward women within a patriarchal culture. Building on previous work on constructions of the self (Smith and Sparkes 2008), I first trace the particular textual assertions of Solanas's alter ego in the "Primer," and then analyze how it contradicted Solanas's lived conditions in 1966. Following this, I return to Solanas's philosophy of the gutter, where knowledge, revolution, and self are produced within conditions of trash, waste, and excess, and I make connections to Solanas's politics of the visceral, "guttural," and trashy/ trasher. …

The Subjects of Survival: The Anti-Intersectional Routes of Breast Cancer

Abstract: "You look better with hair." This was my grandmother's response when she saw me shortly after I had completed chemotherapy. And because she was dealing with Alzheimer's disease, this observation was repeated each time she saw me. My mother was worried that if I showed up on my grandmother's front door with a bald head, it would necessarily burden my grandmother with the requisite anxiety and fear that I might be dying of cancer. But my grandmother was far too superficial for that (I take after my grandmother), and her matter-of-fact tone that I might consider growing hair as an aesthetic preference entertained me every time. And yet, within my genderqueer communities, many seem to disagree with my grandmother. I was "cruised on" by queers during my chemotherapy more than any time before, and sadly, ever since. With the addition of a leather accessory, I could pretty much guarantee a wink or a look by a passing queer. And given my white, middle-class, Nebraskan background, being seen as a punkish queer was a delight indeed.The bald head was only the first of many opportunities for genderqueerness and coalitional subjectivity brought on by the deadly prognosis. Alongside horrific chronic pain from treatment, a likely death from cancer at some point in the not so distant future, and a highly tenuous journey on the tenure track, breast cancer allowed for a wide array of opportunities to embody some of the many intersectionalities of lived experience.I'm in good company. Some of the most inspiring feminist scholars have lived with and negotiated the constraints and conventions of breast cancer. Audre Lorde set the tone when she railed against the "imposed silence" of breast cancer, particularly as manifest in the demand that breast cancer patients wear prostheses and wigs in order to cover over the violence of breast cancer in U.S. society (1997, 7). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick offered us the playful suggestion that breast cancer might be one of the most profound opportunities for an "adventure in applied deconstruction" (1993, 12). And more recently, S. Lochlann Jain described how challenging it is for a butch lesbian to endure the "relentless hyper- and heterosexualization of the disease" (2007, 506).W hat brings these scholars together is not merely their feminist and queer critiques of the ways in which breast cancer is represented and contorted through the breast cancer industrial complex. They also share a longing and heartfelt search for agentic subject positions in which they can model and forge their own terms of survival. As Lorde observed, "Off and on I keep thinking. I have cancer. I'm a black lesbian feminist poet, how am I going to do this now? W here are the models for what I'm supposed to be in this situation? But there were none. That is it, Audre. You're on your own" (1997, 28). And Jain, in a similar though less intersectional vein, pointed out that across the hyper-heterosexualization of the disease, "There is simply no subject position available for the cancer butch" (2007, 521). And as Sedgwick expresses, in an exasperated tone, "I can't tell you how many people-women, men, gay, straight, feminists, gender traditionalists-have said or implied to me that my proper recourse for counsel, encouragement, solidarity in dealing with breast cancer would be (i.e., I infer, had better be) other women in their most essential identity as women" (1992, 202-3). Each of these scholars, in their own way, wrestles with the limited and contorted terms of survival subjectivity as produced by hegemonic breast cancer discourses. Throughout mainstream breast cancer, survival has been routed into a white, normative, heterogendered, ableist subjectivity.But in my experience, the anti-intersectional subject position offered by hegemonic breast cancer takes work. The breast cancer industry, in all of its postfeminist glory, works endlessly and strategically to guide breast cancer patients around and away from the obvious intersectionalities and multiple subjectivities of embodied vulnerability. …

The Veering Escapology of Sharon Hayes and Patty Hearst

Abstract: Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) Screeds #13, 16, 20 & 29 (2003) by Sharon Hayes begins with the title card, "Patricia Hearst s First Tape." An androgynous white woman with short hair that eagerly curls out around the ears begins speaking in a monotone voice. She gives very little away. On screen, Sharon Hayes takes the place of Patty Hearst, reading out the audio-screed ransom notes initially broadcast on Berkeleys KPFA radio station in 1974. Only, Hayes is not reading them-she is more nearly reciting them. The frame fits neatly around her face as she stares out to the deferred audience beyond the lens. Emotionless, she speaks directly into the camera, "Mom, Dad, I'm okay. I had a few scrapes ... and stuff... but they washed them up and they're getting okay?" On the word "okay," her intonation trails up at the end, so that it sounds more like a question than a statement. Around fifteen seconds into Screed #13, the first of the four Patty Hearst ransom tapes that Hayes respeaks, she misses her line and you hear that Hayes is not alone. There is a live studio audience for this recorded performance, a room full of people whom we cannot see, but who are present for the recording of the video.An audience member positioned behind the camera, somewhere in Hayes's line of sight, corrects her, feeding her the line that she should be performing instead of the one that she has incorrectly uttered. Hayes nods ever so subtly, and easily picks up with the correct line that comes next, "I am not being starved, or beaten, or unnecessarily frightened." She stumbles through the words, not stuttering, but not delivering the lines with their attendant bodily or emotional meanings. She maintains steady eye contact with the camera, performing specifically for the video. It quickly becomes clear, however, that the invisible live audience in the time of the video recording is in possession of Hearst's transcript. They have been instructed to correct Hayes when she deflects from the script and to feed her Hearst's exact lines, however inarticulate or awkward they may be. Hayes concentrates to remember the proper words, fluttering her eyes and momentarily closing them, or scrunching her nose and squinting as though she is straining to see something in the distance as she reaches inside to find the words in their correct order.From respeaking public documents, such as the Guantanamo Bay prison tribunals (the collaborative Combatant Status Review Tribunals, pp. 002954-003064: A Public Reading) and Ronald Reagans official "Address to the Nation" speeches (My Fellow Americans: 1981-1988), to her performance of political protest slogans on the streets of Manhattan (in the Near Future), Hayess performances, installations, and videos explore the manner in which words, politics, and histories tend to "find a home in the body" (interview by the author, February 20, 2012). Her work is performance based-expanding across video, painting, lithography, and sound installation-and often has an initially "public" moment on the street featuring unknowable open audiences, or a "live" crowd in the moment of address. Afterward, the performance script, audio recording, or video documentation of that action is reframed and presented in the space of the gallery. Hayes's work, like the various audiences and moments created in her choreography of media, engages questions of public address to explore the power of recitation in the body and on the tongue. Coming of age and coming into art in the New York City of the early nineties, Hayes is deeply attached to the specificity of space and context, to the performance situation in which art comes to he, and comes to he seen. She explains emerging into a political, queer, dance, theater, and performance scene in 1991 in NYC-from ACT UP to Queer Nation to the Lesbian Avengers-saying, "We became political, we became artists in deep relation to precise historical conditions and these singularities, these precisions linger with us; they're carried along with us in our bodies" (Hayes 2009). …

When Is a Clitoris Like a Lesbian? A "Sociologist" Considers Thinking Sex

Abstract: When Is a Clitoris Like a Lesbian? a "Sociologist" Considers Thinking Sex Valerie Traub's Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015When is a clitoris like a lesbian? Sounds like the start of a joke, right? But as I read Valerie Traub's new book, I reflected on the challenges of researching sexuality both historically and today. The clitoris and the lesbian-one of Traub's subjects, one of my own-are "boundary objects" (Star and Griesemer 1989; Star 2010), existing at the junctures of social worlds and animated by intense controversy and competition to define them. For sexuality scholars, the trick has often been to simultaneously recognize the material realities of bodies, acts, affects, identities, performances, engorgements, and resolutions while accounting for our own "situated knowledges" bounded by time, location, geography, and discipline (Haraway 1988).In studying the clitoris, I call it into being-but not as a stable and singular entity to be discovered (Moore and Clarke 1995; 2001). I cannot simply and correctly calibrate my tools/techniques/methods to "find" lesbians or clitorises because these objects are always both becoming and confounding. Traub explains that the ontological and epistemological instability of these objects is indeed part of what queer methods should uncover-these opaque processes of becoming knowable and known is what our queer methods reveal. And it is the elusive, contested, and controversial problematics around defining these objects that is the actual "data." Traub implores queer methodologists to wallow in the actual troubles of researching sexual objects, rather than thinking we can figure our way out of them. Feminist methodologist Patti Lather (2007) calls this methodological tactic "getting lost."As a feminist medical sociologist trained in grounded theory in the early 1990s by Adele Clarke, I occupy a strange position between empirical sociology and cultural studies. On the one hand, my research on fe- male genital anatomy, human sperm, and honeybees can be deemed not quite empirical or sociological enough by certain standards. On the other hand, my work has rarely been considered part of queer studies, though I see myself as queering sociology. I suspect that my work is too empirically grounded and too reliant on methods. In certain circles, the palpable hostility to empiricism has sometimes inspired me to keep my mouth shut and silence my critiques. Since my methods act toward the world as if it exists, no matter how it is constructed, I start my projects with what I consider to be material realities-contested, political, and heterogeneously represented realities, and yet still material realities.Honeybees die, clitorises disappear in genital anatomy textbooks and reappear in pornography, and human global sperm counts decline. Understanding how we coproduce the conditions of these material realities, and then work to interpret them, is my job as I understand it. Like Traub, I suggest that our work must interrogate "how categories . . . came to be" (81). Her historical analysis uses literary sources to recursively think with and about sex and at the same time reveals inconsistencies, frictions, and ambiguities of sexual objects.My feeling of being a misfit is why Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns is so affirming for me as a queer empiricist. Though I am not a literary scholar, Traub's acknowledgment of the need for methodological commitments among historical, literary, and queer studies scholars was refreshing. "Queer's free-floating, endlessly mobile, and infinitely subversive capacities may be one of its strengths-accomplishing strategic maneuvers that no other concept does-but its principled imprecision poses considerable analytic limitations" (76). I like to flirt with queer studies scholarship, and I have promiscuously used theoretical concepts to illuminate my data. Understanding the anatomical renderings of the clitoris as disciplinary (a la Michel Foucault), sea level rise as a hyperobject (a la Timothy Morton), or leaking breast milk as an interruption of phallocentrism (a la Judith Butler), enables me to know my fieldwork differently. …

The Mothership Strikes Back

Abstract: The Mothership Strikes Back Andrew Parker's The Theorist's Mother, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012"I am your mother, Luke," said no Star Wars character ever. While Luke Skywalker negotiates relationships with a succession of father figures (Uncle Owen, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Yoda) before Darth Vader declares himself to be Luke's true father and hacks off his son's hand with a castrating blow from his phallic lightsaber, Luke's mother remains obscured in his incestuous romance with Princess Leia, who is ultimately revealed to be his twin sister. Just as it would have been unthinkable for Darth Vader- much less any Jedi Knight-to have been Luke's mother in the Star Wars universe, when Jacques Derrida was asked, " What philosopher would you have liked to be your mother?" he responded, "It's impossible for me to have any philosopher as a mother . . . my mother couldn't be a philosopher. [Switches to French] A philosopher couldn't be my mother" (Derrida 2007). Derrida's horrified reaction is used by Andrew Parker as a launching point for his own proposal in The Theorist's Mother, which suggests "that what unifies the otherwise disparate traditions of critical theory and philosophy from Karl Marx to Jacques Derrida is their troubled relation to maternity" (1).With fifty-six pages devoted to notes and a bibliography, the dense but elegant writing in the other one hundred fourteen pages of this "accidental book" provide both a challenging and pleasurable reading of Jacques Lacan and Gyorgy Lukacs in their roles as legitimate heirs to the traditions fathered by Freud and Marx. Preceding the three main chapters and a coda, the introduction in which Parker lays out his theoretical groundwork is the most compelling portion of the book. While claims to paternity have always been doubtful, those of maternity were assumed to be unambigu- ous until advances in reproductive technology made it possible for motherhood to be split along genetic, biological, and social axes. Because the identity of the mother has been revealed to be a social construction instead of a biological cornerstone, Parker concludes that such indeterminacy reveals three problems with employing the mother as a signifier: the distinction of the literal (procreating body) from the figurative (creativity), the relationship of the singular ("my mother") to the general ("the Mother"), and the " border between a theorist's life and writing" (22-25).More or less corresponding to the three kinds of mother trouble identified in the introduction, the main chapters of The Theorist's Mother deconstruct the relationship between texts and their supplements-becoming supplements themselves, located both inside and outside of the original texts. If the work of Freud and Marx were to be compared to the Star Wars original trilogy, and the work of Lacan and Lukacs to the Star Wars sequel trilogy, then Parker's book could be viewed as a highly sophisticated form of fan fiction that exposes the assumptions of canonical readings by rereading them from the perspective of a minor character. In the Star Wars sequel, the drama is driven by Chancellor Palpatine's tug-of-war with ObiWan Kenobi over Anakin's loyalty as a disciple; yet the death of Anakin's mother and his brief romance with Luke's mother function as fulcrums in the transformations of both Darth Vader's pathology and the political economy of the Star Wars universe. Returning to the universe of The Theorist's Mother, Parker's work tries to locate the role of the Queen mother as a unif ying agent-both biological and social-in the reproduction of modern theory.In the first main chapter, Parker attempts to ground this project in his own experience by describing his original exploration of the boundary between the mind and the body in a 1985 essay he wrote about his mother's hypochondria. Parker then segues into a discussion of Lacan reading his critics' responses to his earlier work while he was giving his famous seminar on female sexuality. …

Who Is Chandni bibi?: Survival as Embodiment in Disaster Disrupted Northern Pakistan

Abstract: In our academic contemplations, we mistakenly take for granted the qualities that make us human.1 These include the very ability to form meaningful relationships, negotiate care, and experience a moral life despite adversity (Finnstrom 2008; Kleinman 2006). We are, however, inclined to describe the human experience in adversity far more precisely, clinically, and intellectually, allowing our scientific impulses to separate, categorize, and label. This includes the modalities of testimony, evidence, and reparation, which establish trauma as a valid moral category pushing for the political and cultural recognition of its victims and survivors (Fassin and Rechtman 2009). While it is somewhat useful to set apart our protagonists in calculated ways-to highlight the extraordinariness of their lived experiences-we may be unknowingly contributing to their dehumanization as somebody entirely else (McGown 2003; Swartz 2006). These faulty new personas we create are at risk of being noncomplex, quite ready for co-option by problematic machineries of humanitarianism, development, and social policy (Kleinman et al. 1996; Malkki 1996).Admittedly we have come full circle, first by investing thought in establishing the very vocabularies of victim and survivor (Agamben 1998; Bouris 2007) and then allowing their absorption back into everyday sensibilities, fearing that we may have overlooked the ordinariness of the spaces where much of the work of survival is enacted (Baines and Gauvin 2014; Das 2007). Curiously, as academics we are engaged in an inherently fraught intellectual project that disembowels and defragments humans and then painstakingly pieces them back together.To elaborate these concerns, I explore the life of Chandni bibi,2 a resi- dent of the remote Siran Valley in Northern Pakistan, and her navigation of the 2005 Kashmir and Northern Areas Earthquake. The earthquake killed 73,000, severely injured over 128,304, and affected some 5.1 million people throughout the Himalayan region.3 Contrary to the claims of her family and community that she had struggled with her vision since childhood, Chandni bibi insists that the earthquake made her completely blind. She describes this experience as a "taking away of light, brightness and illumination." In order to complicate the victim/survivor binary routinely presented in academic, humanitarian, and other interventionist discourses on disaster survivors, I juxtapose the seemingly mundane details of Chandni bibi's daily life with the calm, incremental, accretive violence of natural disasters (Nixon 2011). In this way, I reveal the "ordinariness" of survival-which is rarely achieved through some grand transcendent gesture (Das 2007). Rather, Chandni bibi's story is an achingly human one, mired in quotidian details. By revealing how she understands her encounter with the earthquake, I provide an alternative to interpreting her experiences in purely clinical and reductive terms.This paper is based on a series of interviews and ethnographic research conducted with Chandni bibi at her home in Siran Valley.4 Siran is one of Northern Pakistan's several forgotten valleys, hidden among the cracks and crevices of the lesser known Himalayan region. It rarely appears on any map and is rather unceremoniously absorbed into the boundaries of the larger Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Siran is dispersed into numerous sparsely populated, smaller villages. Modest houses with mud and corrugated iron sheet roofs dot its mountainscapes.5 To an outsider these houses appear out of place, but they are rather strategically placed based on local understandings of acceptable topography, flat enough to construct a homestead. The terrain is rugged and homes are connected via narrow, makeshift mountain pathways. Residents overcome this apparent lack of connectivity with considerable ease, and do not let the trivialities of topography interfere with everyday life.6Admittedly, I arrive in the valley with at least some disciplinary baggage, troubled by an unresolved past as a humanitarian worker in similar spaces (Aijazi 2014). …

The Story of Oil

Abstract: When I was a child, I had a book-a book that was already old, a relic- The Story Of Oil. In the book was a drawing-it must have been a drawing, although in my memory it is as vivid as a photograph: the landscape is rendered in the soothing, alien palette of Pleistocene dioramas-ocher skies and yellow grasses. In the center is a vast lake of tar in which Strange Beasts of the Past (another book-another story) are trapped, struggling against an inescapable destiny-which is to become the engine and essence of this inevitable present. A gentle giant of some sort (a mastodon? a giant sloth?) whose only crime was mistaking death for drinking water, struggles to lift her feet, her eyes filling with a deep pooling sadness as relentless as the tar itself. Riding her back is a tigerbeast, as opportunistic as pickpocket, angry and snarling, trapped by her own greed. The image is a parable, a gazing ball through which the entirety of evolution is revealed, not only pointing to "us" but to the combustion engine. Decoded correctly, any child can see that the reason these prehistoric beings lived and died (and suffered) was to lubricate and propel the future perfect present in which we live.I am stuck in this image, as surely as the animals depicted in it. I think of it often, as it is a vision of horror, like a lake in hell. This image is a Trojan horse, carrying many agents and messengers. Through this image I am initiated into many "truths"; encoded in the DNA of this image is evidence of the cruel suffering caused by the processes of the natural world. This idea of the Cruel Natural World preempts any discomfort one might feel at the evidence of cruel suffering caused by human intervention in the Natural Order . . . All beings live, starve, suffer, and die-we are not a disruption but simply a flavor. In fact, look at this image long enough, and swallow it deeply enough, and it is clear that our appropriation of their animal bodies is a form of redemption. These wooly mammoths, like Christ, died so that we might live.But symbolic orders are unreliable and have a tendency to shift, leaving us stranded and floating. Now I am an adult, and I know we do not get our oil from wooly mammoths but from phytoplankton (so much more difficult to depict microorganisms struggling in lakes of tar-I get that). I also know the bottom is really the top: Perhaps we are the ones who live, whose combustible engines fire, so that the phytoplankton (who, let's face it, had dominion orders of magnitude longer than it has taken us to evolve from shrew-like peons) can purge the earth? Perhaps we are only the mechanism to bring to fruition the version of the universe that became locked and trapped in these cells, slumbering like a genie in a lamp until our catalytic converters set it free?The thing about immortality is that you have to take the long view: to give up your attachment to notions of stasis/normality and accept the eternal constant of change that eternity means . . . Perhaps these ancient animals are simply time bombs, correcting for a planet that has become overrun with mammals-particular mammals: pants-wearing, gun-toting, phanstasmaphilic bipeds full of sentiment and overly sensitive to change.Seen from far enough away, one has to ask: W hy all this sentimental attachment to a blue planet? Thought of as a process of corruption, the translation of molecules in the atmosphere disturbs . . . but if you think of it as liberation, from the tyranny of chlorophyll and sunlight, what then? Is it possible to imagine an illustration in which we (and by "we" I don't just mean humans, but polar bears, hippos, frogs, and bees) are suffering/ surrendering so that an unimaginable future can struggle into being?Immortality means there is always time for another roll of the dice- perhaps there are many ways to be consumed by the inevitable, and being stuck in a lake of tar is only one. …