Conversations with Rosângela Silvestre and Steve Coleman

This article incorporates material from separate interviews with Rosângela Silvestre and Steve Coleman, two artists who have maintained common research interests and frequent collaboration over the last decade. Silvestre, a Brazilian dancer and choreographer who has incorporated “traditional” movement vocabularies into her experimental work, and Coleman, an innovative American musician whose work also defies categorization, both reflect on the technical mastery underlying improvisation, the blurry boundaries between movement and music-making, and the significance of gender in collaboration.     

Ghostly givings: Nao Bustamante’s melancholic conjuring of brownness

Centering the relationship between artist Nao Bustamante and the late theorist José Esteban Muñoz, this article explores the ghostly offerings of performative communal melancholia. Elaborating the importance of haunted communion as a site of relation, Bustamante’s performance furthers what we might understand as a Muñozian sense of brown. From her performance of Given Over to Want (1999–2018) to her contribution to the memorial evening Transnocheo for José (2014), Somewhere, My Love, Bustamante conjures a haunted body of work, casting within it an invitation to give oneself over to a mode of queer sociality that offers an otherwise organization of time, corporeality, and relationality and a hermeneutic for the mining of the pathological in furtherance of a theoretical project that offers the relational as a sustaining approach to the hostile present.     

The queer digital touch of racial sight

Michael Jason Enriquez digitally altered celebrity headshots to make the celebrities look like they are wearing chola make-up. The “cholafied” headshot circulated on a Tumblr account, which at its most popular, in 2012 and 2013, spread to over 160 countries and had half a million page views, over 20,000 Tumblr followers, 90,000 reblogs, and at least 60,000 shares on Facebook. Attending to the sensory, affective, and historical rituals hidden in the haptic register of this quotidian digital archive, the author argues, insinuates and approximates one aspect of what racial seeing feels like in our contemporary moment.     

Other forms of conviviality: The best and least of which is our daily care and the host of which is our collaborative work

In this collaboratively written essay, artists Park McArthur and Constantina Zavitsanos take a queer materialist feminist approach to the entanglement of dependency and reproductive labor, disability, intimacy, and the impossibility of exchanging incommensurables. The text merges the authors' experiences receiving and providing one another care with their artistic practices, and includes instructive performance scores for past, rather than future, events.     

First-Year College Student Affect and Alcohol Use: Paradoxical Within- and Between-Person Associations

Based on 10 weekly telephone interviews with first-year college students (N=202; 63% women; M=18.8 years, SD=.4), within- and between-person associations of positive and negative affect with alcohol use were examined. Multi-level models confirmed hypothesized within-person associations between weekly positive affect and alcohol use: Higher positive affect weeks had greater alcohol consumption, more drinking and heavy drinking days in the same week, and less plans to drink the following week. However, between-person, average positive affect did not predict individual differences in alcohol use. The negative affect—alcohol use association was complex: Within-person, higher negative affect was associated with less drinking days but between-person, with more drinking days; lability in negative affect was associated with greater average alcohol use and more drinking and heavy drinking days. Health promotion efforts for late adolescent and emerging adult students are advised to recognize these paradoxical effects (e.g., promoting dry celebratory campus-events, strategies to manage negative mood swings).

Reassembling Gender: On the Immanent Politics of Gendering Apparatuses of Bodily Production in Science

Abstract

Arguing that new feminist materialist work has insufficiently attended to how gender is differently materialized and embodied in practices with non-human others, this article examines ethnographically what genderings come to matter in the knowledge-making practices of mass spectrometry and peer review in a Czech research laboratory. The article returns to Donna Haraway's analytics of the ‘apparatus of bodily production’ and its extension by Karen Barad as a productive device for tracing the situational making and unmaking of gender in specific human–technology assemblages and the sedimenting histories of such intra-actions. Through a triple movement of disassembling, contextualizing and reassembling particular embodiments, the author brings unstable, implicit and absent genderings, and their affective textures, affordances and valuations to the fore, including the corporeal orientations associated with enterprising adrenalin-driven masculinity and denigrated forms of embodiment such as shame and defeat. The article shows how these (de)genderings render present tensions and exclusions in prevailing apparatuses of knowledge production and pose questions of responsibility.     

Anger, Happiness, and Sadness: Associations with Depressive Symptoms in Late Adolescence

This study used self-report and observational methods to examine associations between depressive symptoms and patterns of emotional experience and expression during late adolescence. Fiftyone male and 49 female first and second year college students completed questionnaires on emotion experience and were videotaped while completing a frustrating task with a friend. Emotion expressions were coded from videotapes. Findings revealed associations between depressive symptoms and reporting high anger experience in the past month but displaying low anger with a friend, reporting low happiness but showing high happiness in the task, and reporting high sadness experience. Gender differences were found in depressive symptoms and in observed and reported happiness. Findings highlight the importance of anger and happiness, in addition to sadness, for depression.Received a PhD in child clinical psychology with a minor in developmental psychology from the Pennsylvania State University. Her research focuses on the role of emotion regulation in the development of psychopathology, particularly the development of depression in adolescence.     

Attention under repair: asceticism from self-care to care of the self

This essay examines the contemporary mindfulness movement as a cultural response to a larger problem of attention in the United States. As raw material for both capital (re)production and subjectivity, attention is a zone of indeterminacy and struggle for workers in a so-called immaterial economy. This essay suggests that the rise of concern around “paying attention” from the 1950s onward is driven by post-Fordist labor requirements more than networked technologies. First, it examines mindfulness as a technique of attention management for businesses and gives a broad survey of its current popularity and prevalence in US culture. Second, it proposes viewing techniques of attention like mindfulness through a triple lens of repair: (1) as managerial tools to repair psychic labor capacity for capital; (2) as practices that subjects use to repair alienation; and (3) as sites for reparative reading. Third, the essay illuminates the ties between Eve Sedgwick’s repair and Michel Foucault’s care of the self in order to suggest that resistance to practicing the self is founded on a paranoid defense. Its central argument is that attention is a method in Foucault's care of the self, and, as such, a potential portal into pleasure and political change rather than a mere feedback loop into capital.     

The man who envied women

Boredom is a permeating, trespassing force – an intensity not necessarily recognized as such. This essay approaches the aesthetics of political failure, and in particular, the cinematic intensities of boredom as affective expressions of post-traumatic malaise. Lou Ye’s Summer Palace (2006), one of only three Chinese narrative films to represent the 1989 Tiananmen Incident, draws upon an aesthetics of banality to dramatize the epistemological limits and resultant trauma of 6/4, a historical event subsequently repressed in mainland Chinese media. Refusing melodramatic catharsis, the film’s stalling and stupefying effects perform both the amnesiac circumstances surrounding 6/4, as well as the compassion fatigue that followed. Even more surprisingly, Lou’s overuse of sex, a dull instrument by the film’s end, constitutes Summer Palace’s privileged sight/site of boredom. Indeed, sex, rather than constituting the censored obscene act, stands in for something far more offensive. Summer Palace frenetically pivots around an open secret, the historical memory of Tiananmen, as nervous sensation is composed within and without the text, centering on women’s bodies. Drawing on close textual analyses, this essay contends that the excessive contours and shapes of the memorial wound in Summer Palace take on the particularly anxious forms of dull sex in a messy Square.     

Queering it up,strutting our threads,and baring our souls: genderqueer individuals negotiating social and felt sense of gender

This article draws from data of a year-long qualitative study on the lived experiences of genderqueer individuals. Two critical questions helped aide in thinking about the lived experiences of genderqueer individuals: (1) What does it mean to claim a genderqueer identity? and (2) How is genderqueer experienced, embodied, and understood? The principal work of José Muñoz, Gayle Salamon, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and Jasbir Puar was used to support the theoretical frame and qualitative data analysis. What makes a person genderqueer is not clearly defined, but is organic and personal, and brings forth negotiations of social and felt sense of gender, and internal and external oppression. Specifically, the ways in which genderqueer individuals negotiate their identity related to the social construction of gender, the felt sense of gender, and gender as becoming are analyzed and discussed.     

The influence of sense of coherence,self-care and work satisfaction on secondary traumatic stress and burnout among child and youth residential care workers in Switzerland

The present study aimed to investigate the incidence of post-traumatic and secondary traumatic stress as well as burnout symptoms among child and youth welfare workers in residential care in Switzerland and to assess the predictive value of sense of coherence, self-care, and job satisfaction. A sample of 319 child welfare professionals in Swiss child and youth residential care was assessed using questionnaires that addressed sense of coherence, perceived collective efficacy, self-care, and work satisfaction, as well as symptoms of traumatic stress and burnout. Linear regression analyses were conducted to determine the influence of sense of coherence, self-care and job satisfaction on symptoms of burnout and traumatic stress. Enhancing sense of coherence, work-related self-care and work satisfaction could reduce stress symptoms and increase the well-being of child and youth welfare staff. The authors discuss how child and youth residential care institutions could improve these factors among their staff.     

A Growth Curve Analysis of the Joint Influences of Parenting Affect,Child Characteristics and Deviant Peers on Adolescent Illicit Drug Use

This study purports that parental rejection and warmth are critical to the development of adolescent drug use, and investigates a model that also considers children's vulnerability and deviant peer affiliations. It tests mediation through the proximal risk factor of deviant peers. Poisson growth curve modeling was used to examine participants from the Canadian National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY; N=2194) over 4 waves. Results indicated that parental rejection was positively related to drug use, whereas parental warmth was negatively related to it. Both effects were significant when child ADHD symptoms were taken into account. Parental rejection and warmth had differential effects over time. Deviant peer affiliations were positively associated with drug use, did not have a differential influence over time, and did not mediate the other effects. There was significant between-individual (level 2) variability in drug use. Results are discussed in light of adolescent perceptions of parent-child relationships. Research Interests: social and emotional development; family processes; adolescent problem behaviours; main area of work is about understanding risk and protective factors in typical and atypical adolescent development Department of Human Development and Applied Psychology, University of Toronto, 252 Bloor Street West, Toronto, Ontario, M5S 1V6, Canada Research Interests: social and emotional development; family interaction; child psychopathology; main area of work is about understanding emotion processes in children and in family life that help us to understand psychopathology in childrenDepartment of Human Development and Applied Psychology, University of Toronto, 252 Bloor Street West, Toronto, Ontario, M5S 1V6, Canada