Listening to color: a set of propositions on pain as feminist aesthetic

This performative text asks whether it is possible to imagine an antisocial feminist aesthetic that does not invoke the wounded body. Its form – numbered propositions that engage with critical theory, literature, and memoir – riffs on that of Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, a key interlocutor for this question of aestheticizing embodied pain. How does Nelson’s genealogy of blue model a methodology for a “queer genealogy of femininity,” to borrow Jack Halberstam’s term? How does looking at color in this way offer an approach to narrating trauma, one that displaces the primacy of the visual? Turning to the work of Christina Crosby, Toni Morrison, Fred Moten, and José Esteban Muñoz, as well as drawing upon the author’s experience as a volunteer for a peer listening hotline, this essay considers the implications of “listening to color” for minoritarian knowledge formations and feminist praxis.     

Onlining queer acts: Digital research ethics and caring for risky archives

This essay considers how the current compulsion to digital reproduction – the urge to digitize, network, and online previously not-online materials – offers researchers of and within queer circuits the opportunity to defamiliarize and denaturalize our participation in academic systems of exploitation and to reorient our work towards decolonizing research economies, habits, protocols, and relationships. It takes the Cabaret Commons, the authors’ speculative digital archive of and for trans- feminist and queer (TFQ) grassroots performance scenes in Canada, Mexico, and the United States, as its point of departure. The authors frame TFQ performance and party scenes as negotiated intimacies, cultivating ethics of vulnerability and risk, which operate within and as networked intimate publics. Reading across decolonial, queer, feminist, and trans- ethics and methods, this essay revisits the value of ephemerality, of strategic evaporation, non-storage, and forgetting in online research contexts.     

Cross way cross civil war chronicles,part iii

What possibilities might melancholia offer for a queer ethics, and what might it mean to perform such an ethics onstage? In this essay the author analyzes mobile figurations of U.S. nationalism, violence, and visuality as theorized in the work of contemporary queer chorographers Bill T. Jones and Keith Hennessy. The author suggests that Jones's 1989 Untitled and Hennessy's 2006 Sol Niger evidence shifts in racialized sexuality and empire from the 1980s to the War on Terror, even as they both mark convergences between geopolitics and biopolitics. Reading these works together – despite their markedly different aesthetics and tones – elucidates a queer ethics rooted in and capable of contending with our contemporary political moment of war and U.S. empire building. Further, these works model how dance and other embodied, collective practices can engender what Jill Dolan calls “utopian performances” or possibilities for critique and transformation rooted in moving social bodies.     

Counterpublic and counterprivate: Zoe Leonard,David Wojnarowicz,and the political aesthetics of intimacy

In this paper we explore the space that dyadic intimacy plays within the counterpublic world-building of political activism. We reflect on a particular encounter between the artists and ACT UP activists Zoe Leonard and David Wojnarowicz by offering two readings of what we call the “counterprivate” relation between the two. In the first part of our argument, we contend that the counterprivate couple form (found in our case study of Leonard and Wojnarowicz) occasions a space of provisional leave from the normative affective, aesthetic, and identity-based impulses which tend to emerge in social movement group formation. Despite established critiques of the private, dyadic intimacy of the couple within social movement theory and queer and feminist cultural studies, we highlight the value of counterprivate couples – not in place of the collective world-building that is made possible by political organizing and collective identity, but as a necessary aesthetic complement to collective, participatory politics. In the second part of our argument, we read the intimacy between Leonard and Wojnarowicz as a private moment of expressed doubt that has subsequently been institutionalized into a public discourse through the context of art. Here the counterprivate couple form in turn becomes a counterpublic mode of collective world-making once more. This transformation from counterprivate relation to public discourse occasions a practice of collective subject formation (in the institutional terrain of art) that affirms doubt, curiosity, and poetic beauty as part of the reproductive labor involved in political participation.     

A dog in the fight

Holly Hughes’ “A Dog in the Fight” is a queer and feminist literary performance that models a feminist politics of performance that stands as alternative to performances of power that come from the officially anointed space of politics. In this piece, Hughes meditates on the queer relationship between US Presidents and their faithful companions, their dogs. Refusing to jump through the “ceiling” to get into the White House, Hughes offers critique of power from her own couch, recounting her hopes and disappointments in the young Obama administration, while forcing a hated former leader (George W. Bush) from the White House into her performance space as she offers up both a critique of his politics and admits to an uncomfortable affiliation with his love of dogs. What emerges from this performance is a critical call to continue an engagement with struggles for social justice from the fecund and powerful places that exist outside of the authorized institutions of politics, no matter what women and men take up positions within these institutions.     

affective politics,debility and hearing voices: towards a feminist politics of ordinary suffering

This paper is an intervention within feminist and queer debates that have re-posed so-called negative states of being as offering productive possibilities for political practice and social transformation. What is sometimes called the politics of negative affect or analyses of political feeling has sought to de-pathologise shame, melancholy, failure, depression, anxieties and other forms of ‘feeling bad’, to open up new ways of thinking about agency, change and transformation. Ann Cvetkovich’s recent memoir explores depression as a public feeling and argues that ‘feeling bad might, in fact, be the ground for transformation’. As she suggests, the question, ‘how do I feel’ could usefully be reframed as ‘how does capitalism feel’? This performative staging of political forms of psychosocial reflexivity opens up new strategies for survival, new visions of the future, and importantly de-medicalises feeling beyond an individual expression of psychopathology. The grounds for affective politics might be found within new feminist futures that are attentive to the relations between emotion, affect, feelings and politics. This paper will be situated within these debates and the challenge of thinking about the productive possibilities of negative states of being. However, rather than focus on depression, I will turn my attention to experiences such as psychosis and temporal dissociation, based on my long-standing research with the Hearing Voices Network. In the context of discussions of disability and capability I will discuss the value of concepts such as debility, and ‘living in prognosis’, and respond to the call to think through what such states might offer for feminist and queer practice.     

Never late: Unwelcome desires and diasporas in Chavela Vargas’ last works

Theodor Adorno, and Edward Said after him, theorized late style as a discrepant musical orientation at odds with what is expected, desired, or current. Late work is musical work formulated by an older subject that refuses to retire quietly and with docility. While Adorno and Said discuss Classical-period music, the author is interested in engaging this concept in thinking about the recalcitrant rancheras and boleros of a lesbian, migrant, and aged musical performer of the early twenty-first century, Chavela Vargas (1919–2012). She examines a couple of Vargas’ last works, Cupaima (2006) and ¡Por mi |Culpa! (2010), paying particular attention to how her aesthetic choices continue to de-form the classic repertoire of rancheras and boleros. The entwining of beloved, familiar lyrics and melodies with details that recall invisible and hyper-visible subjects, namely migrants and indigenous communities, result in unexpected, repellent musicality. Inspired by feminist and queer theory, the author examines how her later body of work conveys an unbearable sonic assessment of contemporary struggles of those unwelcome, despised, and outside neo-liberal chronology.     

A Letter Sent,Waiting to be Received: Queer Correspondence,Feminism and Black British Art

Abstract

This article examines what the published letter does as a form that is both intimate and public, and how it is particularly resonant when dealing with the silences and absences around queer and feminist artist of colour histories. Connections are made between three letters published in feminist and queer journals and books, written for readers who may include the writers’ loved ones, friends, contemporaries, and future readers. These three letters are contained within the following publications: Surviving Art School (2016) by the group Collective Creativity, a QTIPOC artist group who made the publication as part of a wider project examining the history of Black British Art (members are: Evan Ifekoya, Raisa Kabur, Rudy Lowe and Raju Rage); a special issue of FAN (Feminist Arts News) edited by Lubaina Himid and Maud Sulter in 1988, the precursor to the more well-known collection Passion, edited by Sulter in 1990; ending with Himid's recent reflections on her curation in the 1980s through a series of ‘Letters to Susan’ published in the 2011 catalogue for the exhibition Thin Black Line(s) at Tate Britain. Through close examination of these examples, this article explores the particularities of the letter form, asking if it allows feminist and queer artists of colour to present their experiences in a manner that encourages all their readers to take part in the conversation, whilst prioritizing calls for other people of colour to respond. The article proposes that the published letter form keeps feminist histories alive and creates a counterpublic that speaks to and for a community that is imagined as both geographically and temporally diffuse.     

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.     

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.     

Feminist perspectives on empowering research methodologies

This paper focuses on what feminist thought and practice add to the emergence of a postpositivist era in the human sciences. After delineating key assumptions regarding postpositivism, three questions are addressed: What does it mean to do feminist research? What can be learned about research as praxis and practices of self-reflexivity from looking at feminist efforts to create empowering research designs? And, finally, what are the implications of poststructuralist thought and practice for feminist empirical work?     

Queer love economies: Making trans/feminist film in precarious times

In this essay, the authors, all experimental filmmakers, discuss the impact of Born in Flames on their own work, as well as the ways their various projects pick up, extend, or change the political questions raised by the film. The relationships of experimental film to political community and community building are explored, particularly in the context of queer, feminist, trans, anti-racist politics and media.     

The shadow block: Female bonding in quilters

In these brief notes, the author's aim is to situate Born in Flames historically, including within the history of feminist theory. His starting point for thinking through this film was the presumption that what it means now differs from what it meant in its own time. While that would be true of almost any text, it has seemed to the author that Born in Flames, as an incendiary text, is extraordinarily provocative in the very ways that make it now seem “dated.” It remains inspiring, however, because it offers a vision of intersectional political coalition more radical than any feature film that we are likely to see now, despite the influence of decades of feminist, queer, and critical race studies. Revisiting the discourses the film generated at the time of its release, the author has come to recognize that, though times and the trends in theory have changed since 1983, the stakes of the revolution in the film have not. It presents a desire to make the world otherwise, economically and culturally.     

British Lesbian Poetics: A Brief Exploration

In a post-feminist, post-lesbian feminist, postmodern or queer world, should lesbian work remain clearly identifiable, even when it refuses to claim lesbian identity as such? Scanning anthologies from the past three decades of lesbian poetry, and focusing particularly on the work of Maureen Duffy, Marge Yeo, Dorothea Smartt, Gillian Spraggs and Carol Ann Duffy, Liz Yorke addresses issues of lesbian visibility, lesbian identification, lesbian desire, and lesbian performativity. How do we identify what constitutes a lesbian poetic in an era when ‘lesbian’ as an identity is less overtly defended, and many anthologies gloss over lesbian difference in prioritizing a higher order dedication to theme?     

Cracks in the Feminist Mirror?: Research and Reflections on Lesbians and Gay Men Working Together

This article is an offshoot of a research project on lesbian and gay self-organization in the UK's public sector union UNISON. The site upon which lesbians and gay men ‘work together’ is a complex and contradictory one, located at the juncture of several pathways – women's and men's movements, gendered politics and sexual politics, purist ghettos and queer rainbows. The UNISON group furnishes an ideal site for a case-study of sexual and gendered dynamics in lesbian-and-gay politics by dint of institutional arrangements whereby separate spaces for lesbians and gay men respectively encourage reflexivity in working through these hyphens. While reflections from the lesbian feminist mirror have been active ingredients in the ongoing resocialization of gay men, it is argued that reflections from a gay male mirror will also be necessary if we are to nurture greater wisdom and justice in gender relations. Since the lesbian and gay group co-exists with other selforganized groups for women, black people and disabled people within a broader pro-socialist movement, the potential for working across other sets of differences is also noteworthy. Nevertheless, it can be demonstrated that a sustained coalition between lesbians and gay men is not sufficient in bringing about coalitions with other oppressed minorities or majorities, and may even be at loggerheads with them.     

Postmaternal,Postwork and the Maternal Death Drive

ABSTRACT

The term ‘postmaternal’ has recently emerged as a way to articulate the effects of neoliberalism on the public devaluing of caring labour [Stephens, Julie. 2011. Confronting Postmaternal Thinking: Feminism, Memory, and Care. New York: Columbia University Press]. This term suggests a valorisation of values associated with care and mothering that have traditionally been gendered and rely on a heterosexist matrix for their intelligibility. Marxist feminist writers during the 1970s struggled with the question of the particular form of care that reproduction entails, and this feminist archive has been recently extended to a discussion of ‘post-work’ [Weeks, Kathi. 2011. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham: Duke], in which calls for the valuing of unpaid work as a viable form of labour have been reanimated. In this article I examine the relation between these two analytic categories – ‘postmaternal’ and ‘postwork’. Both categories require that we re-think some of the most trenchant issues in feminist thought – the sexual division of labour, the place of ‘reproduction’ in psychic and social life, and the possibilities for a new feminist commons.     

Inscrutably,actually: hospitality,parasitism, and the silent work of Yoko Ono and Laurel Nakadate†

With interest in queer socialities, the author considers Jacques Derrida’s provocation in Of Hospitality to “say yes” as hospitable gesture in order to challenge the gendered and racialized demands of this charge. If Orientalist conflations of the East with femininity have in turn sexualized Asian women as simultaneously hypersexual and submissive, then how can we as viewers and readers performatively read Asian femininity in a different, and not anti-relational, orientation to hospitality? Building upon Anna Watkins Fisher’s concept of parasitic performance, this article posits inscrutability as a feminist methodology by considering Yoko Ono’s performances of Cut Piece and Laurel Nakadate’s video Happy Birthday for their interesting solicitations to audience-participants, costars, and viewers.     

‘they’re talkin’ bout a revolution’: feminism,anarchism and the politics of social change in the global justice movement

Despite the proliferation of works on the ‘global justice movement’ (GJM) in recent years, surprisingly little has been written on the intersections between feminist and anarchist strands within this ‘movement of movements’. In an effort to rectify this gap in the literature, this article seeks to explore in what ways and to what extent anarchist and feminist renditions of revolution, within the context of the GJM, are conceptually compatible and thereby potentially politically reinforcing. In order to ascertain the degree of convergence between these two radical projects, in the first part of the article I examine what each camp is fighting for and against and whether their struggles for social justice are ideologically consonant. In the second part, I turn my attention to the types of practices being enacted and defended by these two activist constituencies and ask how they see their respective revolutions being brought about. What notions of social change are at work here and are their political practices, and the different temporalities sustaining them, reconcilable? After arguing in the first two parts of this article that anarchism and feminism are more compatible than is often acknowledged and that the considerable synergies between feminist notions of social justice and social change and anarchist conceptions of revolution merit far more attention than they currently receive, I end the piece by reflecting on some of the points of tension that still militate against merging their respective political imaginaries. I do so in an attempt to identify what I see as the conditions of possibility for a more integrated, mutually collaborative feminist anarchist revolutionary politics.     

When two become one: sexuality studies and critical studies of men and masculinities

Men think about sex … a lot. Is this a problem or is this a site for reformation? In this paper, we set out to think actively, deeply, about the question of sexuality, to penetrate the limits of men and masculinity studies, and to tease at a range of questions that it seems the field is not attending to for any number of reasons. When men’s studies scholars speak of sex, we often speak of rape culture, violent sex, ideas of entitlement to sex, sex workers and pornography. Many of these approaches would be framed and understood by many as ‘sex negative.’ This paper sets out to think about what a ‘sex positive’ vision of men’s studies might look like – and also to ask if a sex positive vision of the field is even possible, desirable or necessary. In this paper, we braid together sex positive feminist theory, queer theory and men’s studies to complicate the matter of sexuality, both as an actual site of the kinds of things we do, and as a site of psychic and affective possibility.