Performing the Filipina “mail-order bride”: Queer neoliberalism,affective labor,and homonationalism

The 2005 video/performance art piece, Always a Bridesmaid, Never a Bride, by the Filipina American performance-art ensemble, the Mail Order Brides, examines the role of affective labor in constituting gay marriage as a form of US homonational belonging. In a contemporary context of capitalist globalization, Always a Bridesmaid, Never a Bride critiques the subjugation of the third-world woman worker within a queer neoliberal logic, highlighting the inability of the mainstream US LGBT movement to address issues of race, migration, and labor. The Mail Order Brides enact forms of feminist camp and ethnic drag to denaturalize the affective labor that is embodied within the figure of the Filipina “mail-order bride.” In doing so, Always a Bridesmaid, Never a Bride links an analysis of transnational Filipina labor with a critique of queer cultural politics in the US In its critique of queer neoliberalism, Always a Bridesmaid, Never a Bride builds on and contributes to queer of color social movements committed to racial and economic justice.     

North American field guide: Kenneth Pietrobono's queer landscape of US Empire

“North American field guide: Kenneth Pietrobono's queer landscape of US Empire” offers a meditation on the photographic and exhibition strategies of Queens-based artist Kenneth Pietrobono. Chambers-Letson argues that Pietrobono builds a critique of the imperial and exclusionary practices of the US state by appropriating and (re)deploying the state's appurtenances of power, resignifying the landscape on which US nationalism is constructed and over which US power is exercised. As a point of critical entry, Pietrobono builds upon feminist and queer representational strategies, refusing direct figuration of the body while emphasizing the body of the spectator in the art encounter. Inviting the spectator to project a range of bodies into the landscapes that Pietrobono offers up, the artist asks the spectator to make connections between embodied experiences of race, gender, and sexual difference and the exercise and expansion of US Empire.     

Judith Scott’s What is Property?: an inquiry into principles of dependency,propriety, and self-possession of an “outsider” artist

The essay addresses the politics of biography in the interpretation and reception of “outsider artist” Judith Scott’s work. Drawing from feminism, disability studies, and Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt’s History and Obstinacy (1981) and its political economy of labor power, the essay proposes a new method of analysis which would foreground Scott’s work as a mode of institutional critique. Kluge and Negt ask “Can capital say ‘I’?.” The essay argues that Scott’s work compels a concomitant questioning of this “I” and the very terms of biography, authorship, and ownership that undergird the myths – and the institutions – of the “outsider” and her “art.”     

Double Melancholy: The (Class) Politics of Loss in Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

In his essay ‘The “Uncanny”’, Sigmund Freud claims that ‘the double was originally an insurance against the extinction of the self’. The author suggests that literary writing, particularly memoir, can perform a kind of doubling, enacting this ‘self-preservation’ through ‘self-observation’. In her memoir Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal?, Jeannette Winterson seeks to convey a ‘doubleness at the heart of things’. The author argues that this ‘doubleness’ functions on two levels, both of narrative and of politics—Winterson’s preoccupation with her subjectivity is informed by politics and her politics are structured around her subjectivity. In order to think through the text’s focus on what the author deems maternal melancholy and ambivalence, the author considers how political melancholy works through and against Winterson’s desires for self-creation. Attending to the themes of writing, loss, adoption and depression throughout, the author sustains a class analysis that is motivated by a queer feminist approach. The author argues that the text works to recall the poor/working-class body into the narrative of the bourgeois subject in order to legitimate the present self—the double—both as exceptional and as different from the other.     

Carnal teachings: raunch aesthetics as queer feminist pedagogies in Yo! Majesty's hip hop practice

This essay puts forward a notion of “raunch aesthetics,” theorizing raunch as an aesthetic, performative, and vernacular practice: an explicit mode of sexual expression that transgresses norms of privacy and respectability. Raunch aesthetics describe creative practices that often blend humor and sexual explicitness to launch cultural critiques, generate pleasure for minority audiences, and affirm queer lives. The author activates her formulation of raunch in analyzing Yo! Majesty, a hip hop group comprised of black female emcees who openly describe their sexual desire for women, and explores how the queer youth of color she works with have responded to their music. Working beyond the unexamined moralisms that give critiques of raunch culture their legitimacy, the author argues that Yo! Majesty's raunch aesthetics transmit queer and feminist teachings. While celebrating carnal pleasures, these artists critique heterosexism, subvert narratives about the incompatibility of belief in Christ and queer sexualities, and trouble notions concerning the emancipation of coming out of the closet and declaring a stable homosexual identity. In demonstrating how raunch aesthetics generate consciousness raising, the author discusses how her youth participants critically read and consume hip hop while negotiating unwieldy meanings of sexuality and gender presentation.     

A king named Nicki: strategic queerness and the black femmecee

This article explores the deployment of race, queer sexuality, and femme gender performance in the work of rapper and pop musical artist Nicki Minaj. The author argues that Minaj's complex assemblage of public personae functions as a sort of “bait and switch” on the laws of normativity, where she appears to perform as “straight” or “queer,” while upon closer examination, she refuses to be legible as either. Rather than perpetuate notions of Minaj as yet another pop diva, the author proposes that Minaj signals the emergence of the femmecee, or a rapper whose critical, strategic performance of queer femininity is inextricably linked to the production and reception of their rhymes. This article engages a pair of music video releases that reflect the range of Minaj's gender performances as cinematic lenses into the strategic moves that Minaj is able to make from her femmecee stance. King Nicki's hypervisibility as a black femmecee and refusal to cede to any regime of recognition confound the multiple common senses that seek to produce her as a compliant subject.     

Rhythms of resurrection: The comebacks of Ruth St. Denis

Ruth St. Denis (1879–1968) had one of the first and longest careers as a professional modern dancer. At age 62, she embarked on a “comeback” that lasted nearly three decades, appearing on stage and screen in the dances that had made her an international star earlier in her career. This essay examines the relationship between her well-known “Orientalism,” her feminism, her spirituality, and her perspective on aging and ageism. In particular, it brings into relief her innovative efforts to redefine dance as a feminist project at the intersection of aging and modern dance history. St. Denis converted “oriental tradition” into a feminist dance praxis, thus, staking a claim for the aging dancer under the banner of feminist politics.     

Feelings are “patterns in the weave of our life” 1 – not a basis for a feminist epistemology

Feelings (or “emotions”) have frequently been debated in feminist theory. A large part of this discussion can be considered to aim at a “rehabilitation of the emotions”. However, when feminist theorists make epistemological claims concerning “emotions”, i.e. what philosophy of mind calls “mental states”, we run a grave risk of ending up in subjectivism and thus of reiterating the “private access fallacy” of traditional epistemology. Starting from the feeling of shame (a paradigm for a socially constructed feeling), this article makes a Wittgensteinian reading of “emotions” which offers an alternative to the atomistic, mentalistic and episodical view of mainstream philosophy of mind. Wittgenstein's thrust against foundationalism, his conceptual remarks about “inner experiences”, his anti‐behaviourism and his emphasis on the primacy of action, are all concordant with the social constructionism of the slogan “The personal is political”.     

“It's here,it's that time:” Race,queer futurity,and the temporality of violence in Born in Flames

This paper uses the film Born in Flames to engage questions around hope and the future that have been central to queer studies in the last decade. As the author understands it, the film's critique of the time of reform and progress holds profound implications for how we think about the future. By demonstrating the repetitions of racialized and gendered violence over time, the film produces a theory of the future where the continuation of the present as it is means the future will not come. If the state organizes populations, institutions, and forms of knowledge through a regulatory imagination and disciplined vision, it also determines the future in the same manner. The state ensures that the future can be extrapolated from the present by managing, contorting, and eradicating the future before it arrives. It uses preemptive action (war, assassination, incarceration, policing, administrative violence, and surveillance) to make its “imagined future come to pass.” The author argues that by showing the continuity between the racialized and gendered violence of the past, present, and future, the film constructs an anticipatory queer politics of urgency and presentism.     

Impossible Hosting: D’lo Sets an Undomesticated Stage for South Asian Youth Artists

At the center of this article is D'Lo, a Sri Lankan American hip hop performance artist, as the host of YouthWallah, a performance in Los Angeles, which features the work of South Asian youth artists. The focus of the article is on the possibility of an undomesticated stage that D'Lo creates for community youth artists as a female, yet unmistakably masculine host who translates female masculinity to a primarily straight South Asian audience as herself and, in drag, embodying her mother. D'Lo's performance includes autobiographical narratives of being gay and South Asian, which she uses to ground her politics in her experience. D'Lo does not perform the “exclusion” of a queer subject from a diasporic home. On the contrary D'Lo, as the host of this article home of YouthWallah 2004, provides an important undomesticated stage for the emergence of South Asian diasporic youth artists' voices and their alternative imaginations of diaspora. Therefore it becomes necessary to rethink the common conflation of notions of home and notions of domesticity, as a colonially inflected version of the home, which reproduces a colonial and gendered relation of power and thereby precludes the imagination of a decolonized community.     

From “Non-governmental Organizing” to “Outer-system”—Feminism and Feminist Resistance in Post-2000 China

ABSTRACT

In post-2000 China, both the frontiers and the landscape of feminism and feminist resistance have changed, and this change embodies a move away from the “non-governmental organizing” path that characterized the development of feminism during the 1980s and 1990s. This article addresses this “paradigm shift” in Chinese feminism by examining the “outer-system” political stand of post-2000 feminism and their domains of action through performance art, philanthropic volunteerism, and cyberfeminist articulations. These novel modes of feminist protest in the absence of a formal organizational structure challenge our understanding of feminism as a process of “non-governmental organizing” in public space and warrant a cultural analysis to shed light on how feminism engages in cultural contestation and subversion, often in semiprivate and semipublic spaces, in order to develop new and alternative cultural patterns and interpretive frames.

Abbreviations CPPCC The Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference WF The All-China Women’s Federation     

Spaces of self-consciousness: Carla Accardi's environments and the rise of Italian feminism

“Spaces of self-consciousness” examines three environments created by the Italian artist Carla Accardi in light of an emerging feminist politics. Though better known as a painter, Accardi created these three-dimensional works during an era of political and social upheaval in which her own commitment to the Italian feminist movement began to take shape. Her environments were deeply imbricated both with her own experience of autocoscienza, or consciousness-raising, as well as with radical design proposals that rejected the current state of civilization. This article examines how these environments functioned as prototypes of the transient, anti-institutional spaces that she would later create as co-founder of Rivolta femminile, a historic Italian feminist collective, and examines a previously obscure moment in Carla Accardi's career.     

Fashionable ‘Formation’: Reclaiming the Sartorial Politics of Josephine Baker

ABSTRACT

This article historicises Josephine Baker’s use of fashion in terms of contemporary black stage performers, particularly Beyoncé Knowles-Carter’s evolving black feminist politics. It examines Beyoncé’s references to Baker as an inspiration for her own black feminist art and argues that they offer an opportunity to re-examine Baker’s legacy in our own contemporary moment. Using Beyoncé’s arguments about Baker as a starting point, the article examines Baker’s fashions and costumes and argues that she used them to manipulate her relationship to the models of white supremacy that attempted to structure her identity and relationship to the public sphere. Using contemporary black feminist criticisms of respectability politics, it argues that Baker’s fashions produced a politics of disrespectability, where clothing and body worked together to carve out space for black feminist experimentation. By constantly changing the terms through which her audiences and the public read her, Baker carved out a subjective space where she could become in relation to her clothes without restraining herself to the identity categories normatively allotted to black women.     

Sex Positive: Feminism,Queer Theory,and the Politics of Transgression

From the feminist ‘sex wars’ of the 1980s to the queer theory and politics of the 1990s, debates about the politics of sexuality have been at the forefront of contemporary theoretical, social, and political demands. This article seeks to intervene in these debates by challenging the terms through which they have been defined. Investigating the importance of ‘sex positivity’ and transgression as conceptual features of feminist and queer discourses, this essay calls for a new focus on the political and material effects of pro-sexuality.     

Queer Black Feminism: The Pleasure Principle

In this critical personal narrative Harris explores some of the gaps between conceptions of feminist thought and feminist practice. Harris focuses on an analysis of race, class, and desire divisions within feminist sexual politics. She suggests a queer black feminist theory and practice that calls into question naturalized identities and communities, and therefore what feminism and feminist practices might entail.     

The Faux Debate in North American Suffrage History

The history of the US women’s suffrage campaign in the twentieth century has often devolved into a debate about whether mainstream politics or militant agitation won the day. This article argues that this division—between those who credit Carrie Chapman Catt and her pragmatic approach and those who trumpet Alice Paul for her campaign of White House protests—is a faux debate. A reading of American history suggests that any political movement for social change—from civil rights to LGBTQ rights—requires a one-two punch. The inside politico engages the powers that be, courting sympathy, while the outside agitator throws rocks at the establishment’s gates, stirring fear about the risks of inaction. The coming centennial of the nineteenth amendment’s ratification offers an opportunity to assess whether this scholarly battle over credit is anything more than a historical distraction, and to lament the missing veins of scholarship lost in its gaze.     

Why a materialist feminism is (Still) Possible—and necessary

The title of this paper derives from Christine Delphy's (1980) rejoinder to her Marxist critics, formulated at a time when feminist theory was centrally preoccupied with material social inequalities. Since then, we have witnessed the so-called “cultural turn” as a result of which perspectives that focus on social structures, relations, and practices have been sidelined. Not all feminists, however, took this turn, and there have recently been signs of a revival of materialist feminism. In assessing the effects of these theoretical shifts, and in making a case for the continued relevance of materialist feminism, I will focus on the analysis of gender and sexuality. Here, I will argue that a sociologically informed, materialist approach has more to offer feminism than more culturally oriented postmodern and queer perspectives.     

The women's project: A profile

This paper offers an analysis of the Oprah Winfrey talk show's success as emanating from an ideal typical form of branding that we term “dynamic branding”, in which the gap between production and consumption is almost entirely bridged. Oprah has managed to maintain a dynamic relationship with her viewers based on multiple feedback and feed-forward processes in which consumers' concerns are immediately translated into Oprah's performed identity in her talk show. Such an ongoing exchange of information with her viewers was the basis for Oprah's performance of her own self as a “failed self” embattled with the problems of everyday life, thus creating an equalitarian relationship with her audience. The success of Oprah's brand identity thus derives from its content as much as from the mode of its construction, a mode which involves an intimate and adaptive relationship with consumers that enables Oprah to immediately respond to and incorporate viewers' concerns, values and norms. This paper analyzes in detail Oprah's performed identity with analytical tools informed by linguistic anthropology and brings it into conversation with contemporary branding theories.