Browsing by Subject "Activism"

Border Images and Imaginaries: Spectral Aesthetics and Visual Media of Americanity at the U.S.-Mexico Border, proposes an emerging aesthetic of spectrality in visual media about the U.S.-Mexico border that challenges the power of militarized and racialized visibility. The visual media projects I work with, including cinema, electronic performance art, site specific video installation, and photography generate an aesthetic of spectrality as they try to conjure and express the socially invisible through sensual elements like affect, sound, kinaesthetics, and full embodiment. This aesthetic elicits the perceptions of our other senses beyond only the visual and makes visible the social flesh of the movements and socialities of migration rather than racialized, migrant bodies. The border, I claim, is an important site for understanding the continued deployment of visibility in the neoliberal legacies of what Quijano and Wallerstein call, Americanity, a term denoting the development of the modern capitalist system in the Americas which relied upon the imbricate logics of colonialism, racism, and the deification the modern. Images of spectrality are intermediaries between what Diana Taylor calls, archive and repertoire, being both documents and sites of embodied engagement that produce both certain and uncertain knowledges of race and migration at the border. The visual media projects in my dissertation cultivate spectral aesthetics to theorize an alternative visibility and the changing production of public memory. By making visible the social flesh of heterogeneous encounters with media, spectral aesthetics reforms collective memory making it a process of democratic editorialization that privileges experience as the site of a multivocal history. This project reclaims the image as a terrain for the multitude's inquiry and imagination about the US-Mexico border, and puts the imaginaries generated by these images in dialog with activist projects happening in relation to immigration.

There are more slaves on planet earth right now than at any other point in history. This thesis works to highlight the reality of human trafficking, share stories of victims and survivors, study the canon of Scripture proving that this conversation matters to God, hear from experts currently engaged in this work, and offer practical options for individuals and churches to join in the fight to end human trafficking. I believe Christians should be leading the charge to advocate, legislate, and do something about modern day slavery. This is a criminal empire that is seemingly in the dark, but it is hidden in plain sight. My prayer is that this thesis shines a light on the atrocity that is human trafficking. The primary methodology of this thesis includes the sharing of testimonies, stories, and realities that others have produced and shared over the last several decades. In the grand scheme of the world, this topic has not been widely discussed or written about. In order to honor those currently doing this work, I labored to include a wide variety of resources that shine a light on human trafficking. This underscores the scope of the issue while engaging with other voices in the conversation. I will begin by offering an accurate assessment of what trafficking is and looks like. I will highlight why this should matter to Christians and churches by engaging Scripture, theologians of the past and present, and existing scholarly work. I will then interview leaders from three different organizations about the work they do and what their suggestions would be for individuals and churches to be engaged in the fight against trafficking. Finally, I will take all of this data and research and conclude by offering my recommendations for individuals and churches to make a difference in their neighborhoods, communities, country, and the world. I believe this project is feasible, manageable, and needed by our society. I believe it will make a difference, and lives will be saved because of it.

My Moving New Futures workshop uses improvisatory movement to help social justice practitioners—organizers, activists, civil rights lawyers, and others—imagine new possibilities for a just society. The workshop grew out of my own backgrounds in dance and social justice work. It has two major philosophical underpinnings: (1) the radical imagination necessary for prison-industrial complex abolition and (2) the growing body of scholarship showing that our entire bodies, not just our brains, produce thought. Facilitating the workshop for two separate groups of social justice practitioners, I recorded discussion portions and used a survey to gather data. Discussions and survey responses affirmed my hope that movement would be a source of new knowledge and imagination for social justice practitioners. After these two iterations, I performed a public lecture-demonstration in which I discussed the development of the workshop and results. In a co-creative process with practitioners, I will continue developing the workshop as a tool for their work.

In an ethnography of queer women’s (lala) activism in China, I tell the story of a social movement from its effusive beginning to disillusionment and pose the difficult question of what went wrong. I trace the dissolution of a key organization, the Chinese Lala Alliance, in which I played a leadership role for over ten years, and examine the pattern of interpersonal drama that frequently erupted between lala activists throughout China. With “glass hearts” that easily shatter, many activists air their grievances and angrily demand redress with an affective intensity that further escalates conflict and fractures sociality. I argue that trauma results from the chronic, systemic oppression that impact the lives of most queer women. The intimate kinship bonds formed between lala activists also leads to deeply felt pain and injury when conflict erupts.Delving into the in-fighting, the break-down of social bonds, and the demise of an organization, I point out the problems with the tools of critique and confrontational politics, which have defined queer and feminist politics around the globe. Utopia is a vision of the social, but those with utopian fantasies of safe space in the activist community are inevitably disappointed when interpersonal conflicts arise. Perceiving their experience of injury and pain as abuse and oppression inflicted by another, activists with glass hearts deploy the powerful tools of confrontational politics against other activists, with devastating consequences. To build sustainable social movements, we need a different activist culture that prioritizes healing and reparative work. I also situate “movement trauma” in the national landscape and draw parallels between the temporal arch of lala activism and the Chinese Dream. The pursuit of progress, in both capitalism and activism, follows a trajectory from effusive optimism and hope to disenchantment a decade later.

This dissertation turns to illiberal state violence and state formation in Latin America’s Southern Cone region as the ground for trans politics and activisms. Focusing on the entanglements of Argentine trans politics with histories of dictatorship (1976-83), I ask: how do contemporary transgender cultural producers deploy and revise historical narratives of national trauma to stake gender rights claims in the present? What sorts of political, aesthetic, and legal tactics do trans cultural producers adopt within political contexts hyper-saturated by state violence? What ethical and political challenges arise? In response, I formulate a trans framework of analysis that combines archival, visual culture, literary, and ethnographic methods to study contemporary transgender politics and cultural production as these have taken shape in response to shifting Argentine state formations.

Each chapter considers how trans activists strategically deploy existing visual and material culture, activist strategies, and legal interventions developed by antigenocide activists such as the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo to forward trans rights claims. In doing so, my work traces unexpected affinities between Argentine transgender and antigenocide politics, cultural production, and activisms. Taken together, the dissertation’s chapters evoke an interdisciplinary method that twins the study of cultural practices with histories of state violence, focusing on gender and sexuality as central to such analyses. By tracing the ways Argentine trans activists reanimate the past to meet the demands of the present, my dissertation offers an historical interpretation of trans political subjectivity that extends and revises trans studies’ geopolitical imagination, bringing Latinx American archives, national histories, and political strategies to bear on existing trans studies scholarship.