Browsing by Subject "Queer"

This dissertation explores the concept of agential abjection through Jean Genet's involvement with and writings about the struggles of disenfranchised and pathologized peoples. Following Julia Kristeva, Judith Butler has argued that modern subjectivity requires the production of a domain of abjected beings denied subjecthood and forced to live "unlivable" lives. "Agencies of Abjection" brings these feminist theories of abjection to bear on the multiple coordinates of social difference by exploring forms of abjection linked to sexuality, criminality, colonialism, and racialization. Situating Genet within an archive that includes the writings of former inmates of penal colonies, Francophone intellectuals, and Black Panther Party members, I analyze both the historical forces that produce abjection and the collective forms of agency that emerge from subaltern social forms. I find that the abjected are often able to elaborate impure, perverse, and contingent forms of agency from within the very institutions and discourses that would deny them subjecthood.

"Agencies of Abjection" carefully situates Genet's writing within the discursive fields in which it intervenes, including that of the memoirs and testimonies of former inmates of the boys' penal colonies, of Francophone decolonizing poets and intellectuals, and of Black Panther prison writings. This method illuminates subaltern genealogies of thought on the problems of abjection, subjection, and subaltern agency so central to Genet's writing. By charting the twists and turns between Genet's writing and that of other subaltern writers of abjection, "Agencies of Abjection" reads Genet as a thinker continually involved in a process of exchange, intervention, borrowing, and revision concerning the specific histories and experiences of social abjection.

This dissertation is a theoretical and art/archival practice-based exploration of aesthetic-affective resistance to neoliberal recuperation of urban space that not only constitutes a physical manifestation of capitalist accumulation by dispossession, but also serves to aesthetically valorize affluent middle-class normativity. Through archival research, I discuss the rise of aesthetic-political dissidence against the rent-seeking displacement of the minoritized in Istanbul, and follow its trajectory from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s. Using visual analyses, I theorize the aesthetic strategies of cultural-political dis-identification from the presiding logics and affectations of neoliberalism. These aesthetic strategies include satire, valorization of the obsolete, discarded, devalued and superfluous, and the fragmental provocation of memory to keep the lived history of Istanbul active against neoliberal erasure without monumentalizing a particular historical narrative. The art practice component of this dissertation provides self-reflection on my art works that draws upon aesthetic-political developments in Istanbul. In my discussion, I also put my art practice in conversation with queer temporality, utopian realism, and a queer-feminist ethic-erotic that orient us to social practices of production, reproduction, and subjectivization based on relational principles driven from sensuous reciprocity that go beyond the familial and the naturalized, and that the dominant political-economic order renders unfeasible.

What can an intersectional lens that considers race, gender, and sexuality offer ballet in the 21st century? Historically, Black and Queer stories have been relegated to the margins of ballet history in service of Eurocentric, heteronormative ideals. This creative and written project investigates the ways Black Queer Ballerinas disrupt dominant discourses on dance and identity by moving against, through, and around oppressive structures. The purpose of this exploration is two-fold: 1) to examine the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and ballet, with a particular focus on the stories of Black Queer Women and Femmes, and 2) to collaborate with the aforementioned artists on a performance installation that explores the embodiment of a Black Queer Fem(me)inist aesthetic through movement and material artifacts.Grounded in the present moment and framed by a close reading of Black and Queer presence in the archive, Quare Dance documents how Kiara Felder, Audrey Malek, Cortney Taylor Key, and Alyah Baker imagine and enact new possibilities for ballet’s future—possibilities that have both aesthetic and pedagogical implications. Employing an interdisciplinary lens and mixed methods approach that centers dance and material culture, this project situates these performances of Black Queer Fem(me)inity in relationship to Black feminist studies, Queer theory, dance studies, and performance theory. I argue that Black Queer Ballerinas trouble dominant discourses embodying an important, yet previously overlooked counter-narrative for what ballet and the ballerina is and can be.

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 project traces the seemingly improbable intersections between performances of blackness and the development and traces of an American liberalism defined by Gunnar Myrdal's overwhelmingly influential, sociological text, An American Dilemma. I argue that when Myrdal determined in his 1944 study on the "Negro problem" that the messy inconsistencies between how the United States articulated its laudable egalitarianism and the violent histories of oppression defining the lives of African Americans was a matter resting in the "hearts and minds of white America" rather than entrenched structural inequalities, he enabled a radicalized version of sentimentality that would structure how liberalism attempted to rectify this racial paradox right into the 21st century - to walk in someone else's skin rather than their shoes. While American liberalism is a notoriously contested and slippery set of ideologies, the texts I study provide a performative logic of American liberalism that deconstructs and historicizes its own ideological impulses around notions of racial difference.

The project situates the discursive legacies of Myrdal's study alongside a series of spectacularized narratives of what I call "racial im/posture" - adventures in racial impersonation authorized by American liberalism and reliant on the logics of both blackface minstrelsy and racial passing. I consider these narratives of racial im/posture in the literary genres of memoir, autobiography, fiction, and speculative fiction, along with the legal brief, the film, and the photograph. Although I read these seemingly disparate texts from my own epistemological disciplining of literary studies, the methodology employed here is an interdisciplinary one indebted to performance and visual studies, race and queer theory, as well as new Southern studies. The project intervenes in the conventional thinking around racial masquerade by reframing the temporality of what has largely been considered an issue of the 19th and early 20th centuries as well as by considering these texts through the anxieties, ironies, and contentions of the discursive legacies of American liberalism. In five chapters that satellite around the ideological apparatuses of our sociopolitical and cultural landscape including social and literary fictions, the law, and transnational capital, I think through issues of authenticity, belonging, community, appropriation, and performance.

June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court of the United States, ruled that same sex marriage was constitutional, extending the right and its accompanying benefits to millions of persons to whom legal recognition of their marriages were denied on a federal level. With a sense of urgency, several of the Black Church denominations put out statements affirming that marriage is only recognized in a heterosexual frame. And while expressing love for the Queer community, each statement from these Black Church denominations stated that same sex marriage was against the Bible. The response of the Black Church concerning same sex marriage illustrates its weaponization of the Bible against Queer members of the Black Church who, are often unequipped to blunt the weaponization of the Bible against them, opting for either a rejection of affectional orientation, or a passive existence both which reinforce shamed based pathologies and correlates with unsafe practices which fester in contexts where communal accountability is absent. This project aims to provide Queer members of the Black Church with a manual for biblical interpretation, one which is rooted in the interpretative strategies of the Church, and particularly that of the Black Church whose interpretative strategies blunted the weaponization of the Bible in support of slavery and Black inferiority. Available research from historians, biblical scholars, theologians, social scientists, and journalist were utilized in support of this project. This project examines: the taboo framing of Black sexuality, how the Bible was developed, biblical interpretative strategies, Black Church interpretative strategies, and the importance of self-awareness in biblical interpretation.