theory

The Scholar and Feminist Online, Issue 8.3 (Polyphonic Feminisms: Acting in Concert)

brittany — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 17:00:00 +0000

In hindsight, I probably should have waited to read all of the articles in this issue of Barnard Center for Research on Women’s The Scholar and Feminist Online journal, “Polyphonic Feminisms: Acting in Concert,” before emailing out sections that resonated with me and the work I’m interested in doing. Instead, I enthusiastically exploded the email inboxes of family, co-workers, friends, and even professors with links, starting with the thorough but concise introduction by guest editors Julie Kubala and (Elevate Difference founding editor) Mandy Van Deven, followed by lists of extensive blog and print resources, key thought-provoking and productive articles, strategic quotes, inspiring photography, and other creative projects.

On a visual level, I was first attracted to the gorgeous photographs, intriguing title (what does the musical term polyphony have to do with feminism?), and black/red/white aesthetic that is simultaneously academic, professional, creative, and approachable. There are also a variety of writing styles (poetry, conversational prose, mixed media, and theory) and a diversity of contributors (artists, healers, authors, activists, survivors, educators, students, and performers).

Regarding the theoretical content, what resonated with my own passions and work was the exploration of how the once radical idea of intersectionality has become institutionalized and conceptualized as “a remedy for exclusivity and hegemony.” Jennifer Nash (“On Difficultly: Intersectionality as Feminist Labor”) argues (echoing the thoughts of other contributors) that, “While naming difference certainly allows feminists to bear witness to power's operations, it does little to analyze the mechanisms by which these systems of exclusion are replicated and re-created.” Instead, she calls for intersectionality to be understood as “a metaphor, as one illustration of how structures of domination might cooperate to maintain their power.” A lot of what the journal addresses is about is “how to encourage dissent within communities” in order to continue challenging the forms of resistance; who is speaking, visible and accessing the circulation of radical ideas; and focusing on the possibilities and “what next?”

As the editors explain, “Polyphony, with its focus on non-hierarchical multiplicity, [is] a way to address” these issues, and I would recommend this online journal to anyone interested in joining, or at least reading about, the continual conversations about theory, activism, and the plurality of feminisms.

Written by: Abigail Chance, April 5th 2011

The Affect Theory Reader

brittany — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Edited by Melissa Gregg, Gregory J. Seigworth

Duke University Press

As the first definitive collection of essays on affect studies, The Affect Theory Reader demonstrates how the affective turn in academia has been, and continues to be felt, throughout a variety of disciplines. Studies on affect produce qualified and valuable effects in the realms of aesthetics, ethics, and politics—to name just a few. Affect, in other words, is all pervasive, and the efforts of editors Gregg and Seigworth focalize on this estimation, while at the same, as evident in the gamut of essays, they emphasize that affect is readable in specific bodies and spaces.

What is “affect”? The editors offer a working (and, unfortunately, longwinded) definition on the first page of their introduction: “Affect, at its most anthropomorphic, is the name we give to those forces—visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion—that can serve to drive us toward movement, toward thought and extension, that can likewise suspend us…across a barely registering accretion of force-relations, or that can even leave us overwhelmed by the world’s apparent intractability.” One, arguably feminist, value of affect in academic studies is that it has allowed the body (human or otherwise) to function as an epistemological site of knowledge and inquiry. The body, sloughed off and pushed aside by decades of poststructuralist and deconstructivist studies, has new value as both producer and product of affect. The essays by Elspeth Probyn (“Writing Shame”), Lauren Berlant (“Cruel Optimism”), Patricia T. Clough (“The Affective Turn...”), and Megan Watkins (“Desiring Recognition, Accumulating Affect”), all, in subtle or explicit ways, pronounce the underlying feminist register of studies on affect.

The collection of essays, while thematically varied, almost upon a spectrum of the materiality of affect (from the emotion of “happiness” to the commodity-fetish of affect in consumer culture), all philosophically and methodologically derive from a handful of prominent theorists and critics: Spinoza, Bergson, Freud, Deleuze and Guattari, (Raymond) Williams, and Lawrence Grossberg, who is figured as the inspiration behind the editors’ decision to create this volume and who is interviewed in the piece that bookends the volume. Grossberg, they claim, is “the principal figure in cultural studies to have recognized ‘passion, emotion, and affect as the new frontier for politics,’” and the interview offers a genealogy of Grossberg’s own affective turn.

In addition to the aforementioned essays, especially Berlant’s, whose “Cruel Optimism” made me squee—internally—at my own naïve “cruel optimism” about my sexual attachments (“‘Cruel optimism’ names a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility whose realization is discovered either to be impossible, sheer fantasy, or too possible, and toxic”); Sara Ahmed’s “Happy Objects” is a standout piece that opens the volume. In this essay, Ahmed studies how happiness “functions as a promise that directs us towards certain objects and how, in turn, there are bodies—such as feminist kill-joys, unhappy queers, and melancholic migrants—who thwart collective societal happiness by refusing to reproduce happiness-norms. Ahmed shows us how happiness is indeed socially produced but at the same time idiosyncratic; happiness is subjectively experienced and qualified individually, by each body. The result, as she notes in her analysis of the “unhappy queer,” is that “[a]lthough we can live without the promise of happiness, and can do so ‘happily,’ we live with the consequences of being a cause of unhappiness for others.”

C’est la vie.

Written by: Marcie Bianco, February 16th 2011

Erotic Revolutionaries: Black Women, Sexuality, and Popular Culture

tina — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Shayne Lee

Hamilton Books

Shayne Lee, an Associate Professor of Sociology and African Diaspora Studies at Tulane University, sets out to make feminism more “chic” and release black women from the shackles of respectability in his latest book Erotic Revolutionaries: Black Women, Sexuality, and Popular Culture. To accomplish these goals, Lee applies a combination of scripting theory and third-wave feminism to numerous women in popular culture whom he sees as models of empowerment, thus diversifying black sexual politics, which he sees as too focused on women’s sexual victimization and objectification.

The introduction presents a clear foundation by providing the reader with background information regarding past and current scholarship in black female sexuality, establishing the methodology for his study, and outlining the overall trajectory for the book. Then, Lee jumps in with a quick rundown of sexuality’s social construction before treating his readers to a succession of eight relatively short chapters, each offering snappy observations of “erotic revolutionaries” from such popular culture arenas as music, sports, comedy, talk shows, and books. A few of these revolutionaries include Beyonce, Serena Williams, Wanda Sykes, Tyra Banks, Karrine Steffans, Mo’Nique, Laila Ali, Zane, and Sheryl Swoopes. Clearly, a strength of Lee’s analysis is the shear variety of women he includes in the study as well as the fact that his focus is not exclusively heterosexual.

However, while I appreciate the breadth of Lee’s scope and number of textual examples, I couldn’t help but want a more nuanced, complex analysis of them. Too often Lee’s discussion of books, songs, videos, images, etc. read more like a review than a careful examination anchored in precise features.

As Lee asserts, such cultural studies are vital contributions to the scholarship of black female sexuality because they are sorely lacking, and a more complex vision of what it means to be an empowered woman who enjoys a healthy and active sex life is needed. For that reason, this book is a notable contribution to the field. Yet, for me, there is a fundamental flaw in Lee’s project. He claims that “flipping the sexual script” ushers in a new discourse of black female sexual expression and in some ways, he’s correct. Women having and talking about sex “like a man” graphically exposes the sexual double standard and denaturalizes conventional gender roles as they relate to sexual practice and expression. This certainly offers women a wider range of roles to play and provides them with venues in which to practice more sexual agency.

That being said, the script seems to essentially remain the same. Sure, the actors performing the script are exchanged, but they are reciting identical lines. So, while “flipping the script” permits black women a greater range of sexual expression and certainly challenges the politics of respectability, I’m left wondering if it’s truly revolutionary. For instance, Lee praises Carmen Bryan’s memoir It’s No Secret because its “vivid descriptions of the physical anatomy and sexual habits of powerful famous men expose how memoirs embolden women with the rare opportunity to objectify men.” This is just one of many such instances where Lee praises men’s objectification. In another example, Lee praises Zane’s novels featuring the secret sorority Alpha Phi Fuckem (APF), whose members treat “men like disposable resources or ‘cum daddies.’”

I, for one, would like to see more representations of female sexuality that don’t walk within the well-established footprints of conventional male sexual expression and don’t rely on using men as a means to an end rather than as equitable partners of pleasure. That said, I’m heartened that the conversation about an empowered and active black female sexual landscape has begin in earnest with Lee’s book, but I am also left wondering: what does an empowered female sexuality look like that doesn’t repeat the vision of sexual agency assigned to men? Give me an expression of female sexuality that is not predicated on acting “like a man” and that would be truly revolutionary.

Written by: Dr. Jennifer A. Smith, November 22nd 2010

The Material of Knowledge: Feminist Disclosures

emily — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Susan Hekman

Indiana University Press

This is a book for the post post-modernist thinker. Written by professor of political science, Susan Hekman, The Material of Knowledge: Feminist Disclosures seeks to alleviate the theorist's conundrum with the material consequences in the events of natural disaster and destruction. Many theorists today are curiously silent on tsunamis, terrorist attacks, and earthquakes and Hekman sees this as a problem of post-modern thinking.

Philosophy from the second half of the twentieth century onwards has been largely preoccupied with what is called 'the linguistic turn'—an understanding that all reality is only perceivable through language. Also known as linguistic constructionism, the trend fails at taking into account the tangible elements of concepts and theory. A new way to theory-making or 'settlement' is in order and feminist theory is, argues Hekman, at the forefront of this breakthrough. And this is because no other system of thought is invested heavily on the experiences of oppression often imprinted on the body the way feminist theory is. However, the body alone is not enough to represent 'matter'.

Hekman argues that non-human matter have agency too in that they are not always predictable and in that regard, somehow have a 'life of its own'. This makes the relationship between human and non-human all the more interesting if a little unsettling. To illuminate the mechanics of this relationship, Hekman adopts Andrew Pickering's unglamorously-named concept of the mangle; things get mangled up when humans and non-human agents meet, producing inevitably messy outcomes. Hekman sees the mangle at work in the disaster of Hurricane Katrina and the prenatal sonogram. Both display the way different discourses (poverty and abortion) work with and against non-human elements (dangerous weather conditions and medical apparatus). The mangle represents an important link between the abstract realm of ideas and the world 'out there'.

The underlying argument throughout Hekman's thesis is, if crudely put, that philosophers are out of touch with reality. However, Hekman does not challenge the circumstances that grant philosophers the privilege to talk about society and yet seem to not be able to incorporate “real life” into their work. The critique of lofty intellectualism remains frustratingly absent here. While the mangle is undoubtedly a useful concept to understanding material destruction, Hekman makes a bold (if rather morbid) leap in suggesting that feminist theoretical approach to the body holds the key to new ways of understanding death and destruction of epic proportions.

The Material of Knowledge is a slow-burning demonstration of Hekman's linear thinking towards the new 'settlement'. As a proposal for a new theoretical tool to approaching pain and material devastation, Hekman's book leaves the reader with more questions than answers. To begin with, the concept of the mangle seems to absolve itself of refinement both by virtue of semantics and theoretical characteristic, and I am left wondering whether Hekman had backed herself into a theoretical corner where to understand material destruction is cook up an analytical mess.

This evokes a level of pessimism and an assumption that multiple elements of living and non-living persuasions affect each other on a more or less equal playing field; an event is simply a web of things and lives thrown in together, which leaves one to ask: where are we in Hekman's new settlement? Where is human agency in the midst of mangled discourses and wordlessness of fear and pain? It would be difficult to recommend Hekman's latest book for the uninitiated in post-structuralism and post-modernism as this slim tome can be a slog for even the well-versed. The Material of Knowledge: Feminist Disclosures does however inspire optimistic thoughts about the role of feminism in contemporary philosophy and the slow march of theory towards grasping reality.

Written by: Alicia Izharuddin, October 30th 2010

Living in the End Times

barbara — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Slavoj Žižek

Verso

Reading Slavoj Žižek for the first time is not unlike being stuck on a bar stool next to a slightly inebriated, repentant MBA who just read a Karl Marx biography and thinks he has the world figured out. An aside about the deeper meaning of 3:10 to Yuma, a diatribe against Slovenia’s failure as a communist state, and praise of the five stages of grief seem like disconnected nonsense unless taken as a larger, comprehensive analysis of the failure of global capitalism. After a while, you’re either also drunk or so bewildered by the onslaught of information that you begin to see the reason behind this grizzled young man’s ramblings. Now just imagine that this is one of the most gifted living intellectuals.

Žižek—one of the world’s leading contemporary academic thinkers—is at once obscure and brilliant. In Living in the End Times, he pulls together themes from several smaller works and dozens of speeches and papers from the past several years to illuminate the apocalyptic zero-point for which the world is headed. The four horsemen of the apocalypse are approaching—ecological crisis, explosive social divisions and exclusions, consequences of the biogenetic revolution, and systemic imbalances (struggles over raw materials, food, and water; as well as more abstract battles over issues like intellectual property)—and our textbook-diagnosed reactions show that the end is nigh.

Using Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ model, he categorizes our reactions to modern economic, social, and ecological crises as stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. While many believe Kübler-Ross’ framework to be somewhat flawed, it does provide a handy way of determining one’s own stage of grieving the collapse of society. How else to make sense of our apathy in the face of the simultaneous rise of extreme religious fundamentalism, crumbling banking systems, and expansive, violent political repression? What other way to explain away the near-psychotic binaries in wealth and poverty in places like Kuwait and Dubai, oil-dependent towering desert empires built by thousands of slave-wage immigrants and ruled by a frighteningly wealthy upper class—and the ways with which we turn the other cheek?

If you believe the state of the global economy, social hierarchy, and legal affairs to be as dramatically desperate as Žižek, you’ll not be surprised that he beckons us to prepare for famine, plague, global warfare, and ultimate death. If you have little faith in humanity, you’ll find good company in the bright if troubled theorist. If you believe in our eventual recovery, you’ll also find nuggets of helpful wisdom between his dismal predictions.

You may not be able to keep up the apocalyptic philosopher, but you’d be better off for trying.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, October 23rd 2010

Fast Feminism

mandy — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 02:00:00 +0000

By Shannon Bell

Autonomedia

Autonomedia has just published Fast Feminism, the latest book by the performance philosopher and associate professor in Political Science at York University, Shannon Bell. The book contains 198 pages, including thirty-one plates taken of Bell's genitalia during masturbation/ejaculation performances. It may appear unusual that an academic is involved in public displays with highly charged, erotic content; however, Bell has been conducting workshops on the female phallus and instructing women on the art of female ejaculation for the past two decades.

Bell’s oeuvre follows a long tradition in performance art that includes Vito Acconci's "Seedbed," in which he masturbated underneath a ramp at the Sonnabend Gallery, New York as people walked by above him; Valie Export's film Mann & Frau & Animal (1973) that shows her pleasuring herself in a bathtub; Annie Sprinkles' ritual magic masturbation performances; Elke Krystufek's 1994 masturbation performance at Vienna Kunsthalle; and a public performance in the mid-nineties by transgendered academic and performance artist Allucquere Rosanne Stone, who stimulated the palm of her hand to produce an organism. Moreover, Bell’s performance is "embedded in praxis," and "The 'I' of the text is a post-identity recognized by gait, movement and speed." Fast Feminism is a confessional and articulate text that straddles academic writing and colloquial language; it draws heavily on sexual expletives to stress the subcultural activity in which Bell's performance praxis operates.

Fast Feminism's text is definitely Deleuzian. One idea begins and is shattered, only to be taken up in the next already somewhere else, free-floating and circulating. Rather than "buggering" the texts and producing a bastard offspring, an activity Bell states as her intention throughout the book, Fast Feminism appears at least on the surface as homage to masculine writers. Texts by George Bataille and the Marquis de Sade collide and intersect with Emmanuel Levinas ethics of the other; the latter used in her chapter on the perverse aesthetics of the homosexual, pedophile, child pornographer, and writer, John Robin Sharpe. I must say that although I accept Sharpe's erotic writings are situated within an established and honored literary genre, I was uncomfortable with this section because I have raised a child and believe that children should be protected from those who may hurt or abuse them.

I was less interested in the practice of female ejaculation and Bell’s manual of how to achieve it (which forms much of the basis of chapter two), than the writing itself and the various references to philosophical theory, performance art, and politics of the body. When Fast Feminism is meditating at a wake for Horsey—a dog that died because he could not digest a bone, Bell asked one of the participants at the wake to reach inside her vagina and remove the package of money she'd placed there as a donation. This action evoked Carolee Schneemann's 1975 performance, "Interior Scroll," in which she slowly extracted rolled up paper from inside her vagina, whilst reading from a text that reflected the subject positions of both genders. Moreover, Fast Feminism draws attention to the relationship between currency, the female body, and the way is has been abused by others throughout human history. By branding her body Bell has created a living, breathing commodity.

It is clear from her photographs that Fast Feminism is not an everyday example of an aging female body. Having never borne a child, Bell does not posses drooping breasts, excess fat deposits, stretch marks, scars, sagging stomach muscles, or the like. But she does underscore the fact that in our youth obsessed society, bodies that are old, diseased, or less than "perfect" are generally encouraged to remain hidden from public view. Indeed, a strategy against the aging body and diseased organs is the development within biomedicine of tissue engineered replacement body parts. Riding on the intrigue and possibility for experimentation as well as the resulting rarefied aesthetic that tissue-engineering offer, a number of artists have been motivated to move into the realm of creating bio-artificial artifacts. Bell’s tissue-engineered phallus invites us to think about human evolution in relation to the construction of sexuality and the immense impact that various technologies do and will have on the way we perceive ourselves and others in real and imaginary domains.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Fast Feminism and would recommend it to anyone interested in performance art, philosophy and sexuality.

Excerpted from Anything But Human

Written by: Julie Clarke, September 4th 2010

A Decade of Negative Thinking: Essays on Arts, Politics, and Daily Life

admin — Sat, 15 May 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By Mira Schor

Duke University Press

A Decade of Negative Thinking is a collection of essays on feminism, paintings, and feminist art history. As a teacher of graduate students, Schor’s experience provides us with practical and theoretical background to an artist’s commitment to contemporary art.

The main theme of the study encompasses the ideas and images from Schor’s earlier life that were significant in influencing her artistic direction. The underlying theme explores the ways in which the past is perceived either consciously or subconsciously by people, and how easily it is to be misguided when forming our current views and opinions because of the undue influence of past styles. The artist writes as a New Yorker because she considers this city to be the center of the world art market, and an inspiring place from which to observe contemporary art and culture.

In part one, "She Said, She Said: Feminist Debates, 1971-2009," Schor describes debates on feminism and feminist art in a number of symposia, art magazine forums, and conferences over the years. Initially, as one of the chapter titles states, "The –ism Did Not Dare Speak Its Name" refers to the many academic –isms theories such as modernism, postmodernism, feminism, and post-structuralism. But later in “Generation 2.5,” the focus is on a community of women artists who had ideals about the feminist art movement, and who followed their direction during difficult times. They challenged the notion of a canon in art production and the cult of celebrity in contemporary culture.

In part two, "Painting," Schor analyzes the production of art history from a feminist perspective. She concentrates on the works of Alica Neel, an abstract painter who created Two Girls. Spanish Harlem (1959), Dore Ashton (1952), and Self Portrait (1980). She also considers works by Lisa Yuskavage and Myron Stout.

In part three, "Trite Tropes," Schor presents her views on common themes in art that are popular among college students and practitioners of the avant garde academy. Schor claims that art education is inadequate or even non-existent. She also asserts that practical visual contact by students with the artists themselves would help to clarify some misconceptions on art. As the writer explains, “negative thinking may indicate more of a programmatic belief in modernist ideas of resistance via that methodology of negative dialectics than is actually in play.”

Schor would like to see art works discussed and analyzed even if that analysis may be negative from the point of view of the art market. She clearly believes in the power of art despite all odds. This hope can empower our thinking and our actions. Schor vigorously researched her topic and included visual images of paintings in her book, which contributed to the visual pleasure of her narrative. I found her essays engaging and appealing, mostly because of Schor’s anecdotes and the choice of her personal stories; however, I needed a few breaks in the reading of her theoretical background, as some of the essays require extreme concentration on the part of the reader.

Overall, Schor, who is also a painter and writer, creates a very witty, brave, carefully designed, in-depth study on the question of politics and aesthetics in the contemporary world.

Written by: Anna Hamling, May 15th 2010

Working Virtue: Virtue Ethics and Contemporary Moral Problems

admin — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 09:00:00 +0000

Edited by Rebecca L. Walker, Philip J. Ivanhoe

Oxford University Press

Working Virtue: Virtue Ethics and Contemporary Moral Problems is a book outlining how virtues can be included in modern ethical analysis. There are multiple ways to apply virtue ethics, or, as the authors like to say, to put virtue ethics "to work." Illustrating the variations are thirteen different authors giving detailed accounts of virtue ethics at work inside schools, hospitals, courtrooms and boardrooms. The chapters test the theory as it relates to war, race, affluence, and the environment. Also important to note is the delineation they make between ethics for personal use and ethics for professionals working in specific fields.

Readers can digest the book in parts or as a whole. The former is ideal for a person interested in methodological instruction, say a doctor looking to include ethical reasoning in their daily encounters with patients. In fact there are several chapters that would prove enlightening if not instructional in the daily routines of heath caregivers. On the other hand, a person will benefit from the book as a whole if they are interested in the revival of virtue ethics as a growing body of theory. For someone with this kind of academic pursuit, Working Virtue offers a thorough and diverse overview of contemporary issues and their need to be understood from an ethical perspective. Nevertheless, this book is of relevant interest to anyone seeking a broader perspective on the universal plight of moral wrangling.

As a philosophical subset, morality is predominantly rooted in three theories. Virtue ethics is one, along with deontology (emphasis on duty and rules) and consequentialism (emphasis on utilitarianism). Generally speaking, the focus of virtue theory is on the human character: if you live with a consistent disposition to behave appropriately, and if your actions reflect this disposition, then you are generally living a good and moral life. The variety of this book's interdisciplinary approach does much to illustrate the difficulty in compartmentalizing these theories from one another, especially when trying to isolate their worldly applications.

Its utility is evident after the thirty-page introduction, in which the editors offer thoughtful analysis of each of the chapters within. They also spend time to qualify and explain the theory's major conflicts and historical predication. While it is unlikely that every topic will resonate to every reader, it is of great importance to see how each falls technically within virtue ethics. From the many authors that make up Working Virtue comes a wealth of knowledge that can help a generation of professional people who seek to be informed by ethical theory and guided by ethical principle.

Written by: Katy Pine, January 1st 2010

Statistical Panic: Cultural Politics and the Poetics of Emotions

admin — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 09:28:00 +0000

By Kathleen Woodward

Duke University Press

When I finished Statistical Panic I was left mulling over the ideas presented in the book for the next few days. A deeply theoretical exploration of the emotional landscape, Kathleen Woodward frames her book in American culture over the past fifty years, revealing the political, social, and cultural power that emotions have in our lives. She argues that emotions are largely undervalued in the social sciences, and that conveying emotional experiences can be a powerful form of communication, organizing and socializing.

An avid reader, Woodward allows personal narratives to help her navigate this exploration. Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, Virginia Woolf, and many other writers infuse Woodward’s theory with personal experience and literary sensibility that bring her text to life. Woodward also does an impeccable job of mapping out emotional outlets in the media from tabloids to politics and, in doing so, we begin to see why her incorporation of narratives allows for a more thorough conveyance of emotions in our media driven world.

Statistical Panic offers a thorough examination of the political aspects of emotions, something that contrasts with twenty-four-hour news cycles, Twitter, and other media outlets that rely on shock and the quick turnover of emotional response. From shame to compassion, Woodward’s analysis bridges the emotional with the social and political, critically assessing emotions in a way validates their importance. Using Freud and Virginia Woolf, Woodward scrutinizes anger. She ties this to the social implications of experiencing anger as a woman and moves into a discussion on the uses of anger in feminist writings. Jean-Paul Sartre and Toni Morrison help guide Woodward’s understanding of shame and how it operates in a society wrought with sexism and racism. Part of what makes _Statistical Panic _such a powerful read is Woodward’s insistence on including “experts” like Sartre and Freud, while at the same time refusing to examine emotions in the vacuum of white male privilege. As a result, the scope of Woodward’s work is immense, offering the reader an enormous wealth of theory, social analysis and of course, literature.

When Woodward’s analysis moves to the political realm we begin to understand the tangible consequences of what she calls “statistical panic,” and how this has legislative and bureaucratic repercussions. First Woodward discusses compassion, both analyzing liberal guilt and compassionate conservatism (something the George W. Bush familiarized the nation with) as tools of organizing. Woodward also covers bureaucratic rage, a growing phenomenon due to the horrendous state of health care and finally, statistical panic, a feeling that Americans have been inundated with over the past fifty years, and even more so since September 11th.

Statistical Panic offers a critical exploration of emotions, how they are used for political gain, how they normatively reinforce social inequality, and how their subversion can combat the same inequalities. Woodward offers emotions as a source of political and social mobility, and her writing challenges us to be critical of the way statistical panic is used. She urges us complicate our understanding of our own emotional responses to everything from personal relationships to Twitter feeds.

Written by: Lizzy Shramko, July 13th 2009

A Garland of Feminist Reflections: Forty Years of Religious Exploration

admin — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 09:35:00 +0000

By Rita M. Gross

University of California Press

Preeminent feminist Buddhism scholar Rita M. Gross’ A Garland of Feminist Reflections is an indispensable collection of her best collected writing from the past forty years. Drawing together theory, philosophy, and religious exploration, Gross’ self-selected anthology is deeply thought provoking and can serve as an introduction to her vital scholarship, or a necessary refresher on important concepts and ideas. Among the pieces she chose, Gross included several groundbreaking essays on methodology and theory. The collection also includes large sections of Gross’ writing on feminist theology and Buddhist feminism.

Gross’ writing is strikingly beautiful, though it is also a dense read—and a complicated one—for anyone not already deeply engaged with comparative religious studies or knowledgeable about Buddhism and gender in an academic framework. This isn’t a criticism, but speaks to Gross’ passionate relationship with her work. Some essays, such as “What Went Wrong? Feminism and Freedom from the Prison of Gender Roles,” offer more accessible insight into how gender affects our very existence. Thirty years after the beginning of the second wave of feminism, Gross argues that in many ways, we are no better off than we were before. Still confined to the prison of gender roles, we’ve only become more appreciative of the male gender and increasingly more competitive and materialistic than before.

While Gross’ academic work is reason enough to pick up this collection, the personal essay, which begins the book, highlights the unique challenges she continues to face as the most renowned feminist Buddhist theologian of our time. An introspective woman from a conservative home in Wisconsin, who came of age in the 1950s, Gross is the unlikeliest of comparative religious scholars. Her deeply moving personal essay, “How Did This Ever Happen To Me?” is heart wrenching and inspiring in its detail of her battles against the male-dominated academy, small school academics uninterested in intellectual debate, and a world simply unable to understand a radically peaceful woman much more interested in cultivating her mind than anything that could grow in her womb.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, June 22nd 2009

The Terror Dream: Myth and Misogyny in an Insecure America

admin — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 17:39:00 +0000

By Susan Faludi

Picador

Many people are rightfully weary of discussing and analyzing 9/11. While it could be labeled insensitivity, it more likely has to do with a stifled national discourse, repugnant media spin, and a lack of in-depth processing. For the past several years, we’ve all been hibernating, trying to escape the aftermath of the terrorist attacks rather than actively deconstruct their meaning. The myth of American national security was shattered in 2001, and our belief that we—both as a nation and as individuals—could protect ourselves has evaporated.

Instead of productively handling this mass psychosis or treating the 9/11 terror attacks like another criminal act, its meaning has been buried under patriotic language, hyper-masculine war costumes, and false reports of our collective return to domesticity. In the face of our personal terrors, the media created a different account of our collective experience, marked by disturbing gender binaries and renewed focus on dismantling feminist achievement. Rather than following what should have been a thorough plan to prosecute the terrorists responsible, the news media pounced on feminism, blaming radical women for the attacks as supposed champions of the “soft” values that made the U.S. a vulnerable target.

The collective inability to make meaning of 9/11, to give the story a voice, is what Susan Faludi attempts to name in The Terror Dream. Mainstream media interpretations—from films like United 93 and Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center to television shows like Rescue Me and the off-Broadway play The Guys—have only served to regurgitate the timeline, replay the events of that day, celebrate the men—and only the men—who served their city and country. No major productions have attempted to dig deeper into what it has meant for American diplomacy, hero myths, or gender.

While the U.S. government temporarily showed an interest in “freeing” the veiled women in the Middle East, American women—specifically female fire fighters and policewomen—might as well have been wearing veils for all the attention they were given in the media. Female writers who called for a collective healing, for deconstruction, for a larger discussion about religion, terror, and diplomacy were silenced. Ignored or publicly belittled before being deemed irrelevant, some of the greatest women in modern journalism, social justice, and literature were thrown under the bus. Katha Pollit, Susan Sontag, Barbara Kingsolver, and Arundhati Roy were among the many once-prominent female commentators that quickly became the media’s proverbial whipping boys. Of course if they had been boys, they would have likely been handed a comic book, asked to show up on Fox News as a talking head, and told to fight like a man. Faludi devotes an entire chapter of The Terror Dream to the story of Jessica Lynch, a U.S. soldier in Iraq who made headlines when the story of her “rescue” was spun into yet another tale of the brave men saving a defenseless women (nevermind the implicit racism that the white soldiers saved Lynch from the Arab savages).

Explaining 9/11 to ourselves is perhaps even trickier when the Bush administration couldn't explain it either. Faludi points out that President Bush’s reaction that the attacks were “unimaginable” could explain his painful blundering and his inability to act with dignified transparency and reasoned authority. Trauma can cause extreme reactions, and many went into hiding, waiting for the nightmare to end. No one was able to rouse us to collectively meet our horror head on, to question what it meant so that we could move forward, because we had a president more focused on cowboy-themed catchphrases than leadership.

Faludi is perhaps the only person who could have written this book. Her thorough understanding of the way in which American culture, gender relations, and politics fuse together makes her one of the greatest living feminist journalists. She is able to tease out truths where the rest of us are still left scratching our heads. While other brilliant female journalists, like Naomi Klein, have dismantled terrorism myths to point to a hidden agenda—in Klein’s case, a disaster capitalist dismantling and rebirth of Iraq and Afghanistan, coupled with U.S. profits from the reconstruction plans—it has been difficult to name what has happened to the American psyche and specific gender ideals and relations. Deconstructing comic-book style firefighter hero myths, the return of the cowboy narrative, the Bush administration’s brief flirtation with Muslim women’s rights, and the almost complete vanishing of female voices of dissent (and reason) in the media in the aftermath of 9/11, Faludi explains the global inability to make sense of the media’s response to the trade center attacks, as well as our own inability to understand our personal reactions.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, January 3rd 2009

Will to Live: AIDS Therapies and the Politics of Survival

admin — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 01:39:00 +0000

By João Biehl

Princeton University Press

Ethnographers, novelists, and prisoners write heart-wrenching books because they present simple truths. Will to Live is a powerful, at points searing ethnography of HIV antibody surveillance systems in Brazil and pharmaceutical industry influence in bringing forth new relations of politics and health care. It tells of the bodily suffering of Brazilians who contract, and eventually die from, AIDS - and of those who fear such diagnoses, although they are HIV antibody negative.

It demonstrates the varying degrees of access that Brazilians have to highly active antiretroviral therapies (HAART) and that track along the fault lines of social structure. That HAART works for many (but not others) or that it comes too late (or too early or is engaged too haltingly) signifies the contradictions and paradoxes of culture and social structure that are usually revealed in epidemics. Although it is filled with positive stories and better outcomes (HAART brings many back from the brink of death), Will to Live is as painful to read as Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ Death Without Weeping, also about Brazil but in context of infant mortality; Paul Farmer’s AIDS and Accusation, also about AIDS but set in Haiti; and Begonia Aretxaga’s Shattering Silence, about Northern Ireland women who deploy their incarcerated bodies and even bodily fluids in political protest.

Will to Live shows that the national and international response to HIV and AIDS has in Brazil “shifted from controlling the epidemic to controlling individualized disease.” “Yes,” the author writes, “distribution programs make antiretroviral therapies accessible, but they are one element in the full treatment of a disease that... remains a matter of a regional politics of nonintervention.” “It’s a shame what is happening to AIDS” is the direct utterance of an otherwise well-intended caregiver, suggesting just how much the cart has been put before the horse and what the public health costs can be of imagining only a pharmaceutical response.

João Biehl is a Brazilian anthropologist and Associate Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University who has a long time studied the conceptualization, implementation and evolution of the Brazilian AIDS Control Program (BACP). Multi-sited in location, multi-method in logistics, multi-voiced in narrative, and multi-purpose in scope, Will to Live unravels and critiques the ways in which NGOs (non-governmental organizations), churches, the Ministry of Health, pharmaceutical industry representatives, gender and sex work activists, and those suffering from HIV or AIDS mounted a “national” response to HIV and AIDS that is anything but. “A central concern of my ethnography,” the author notes, “has been to produce alternative epidemiological evidence and to generate some form of visibility and accountability for the abandoned subjects with AIDS.”

A site of Biehl’s particular focus is Caasah, a part-community house, part-hospice, part-pharmacy, part-training ground in advocacy. Caasah was formed in 1992, “when a group of homeless AIDS patients, former prostitutes, transvestites, and drug users squatted in an abandoned maternity ward in the outskirts of Salvador” and turned it into a care center. He returned to Caasah in 2001 to find a near-complete turnover there of patients and staff and a reorientation of service provision and funding source. As such, Caasah well represents both the protean nature of AIDS and the constraints upon and conditions under which local-level responses to it were mounted.

All but a very few pharmaceutical industry representatives, health authorities, and politicians talk in double-speak. Many exacerbated cleavage between rich and poor, politically visible and not:

As with all things political and economic, the reality underlying the AIDS policy is convoluted, dynamic, and filled with gaps. The politicians involved in the making of the AIDS policy were consciously engaged in projects to reform the relationship between the state and society, as well as the scope of governance, as Brazil molded itself to a global market economy. One of this book’s central arguments is that on the other side of the signifier _model policy _stands a new political economy of pharmaceuticals, with international and national particularities. As NGO activism converged with state policy making, and as the public health paradigm shifted from prevention to treatment access, political rights have moved toward biologically based rights.

Comprising eight chapters including Introduction and Conclusions, Will to Live is equally heavy and light, grim and hopeful, ethnographic and theoretical. The Introduction (“A New World of Health”) bookends painful personal stories and broadly sweeping discussion of the political-economy of pharmaceuticals. Rhetorical and other slippage in the overly optimistic assessments of AIDS bureaucrats and pharmaceutical representatives is revealed in stories of busted aid posts, iatrogenic illness, and social structures that sicken people. Chapter One (“Pharmaceutical Governance”) discusses the complexities of state-local, transnational-NGO and doctor-patient relations. Biehl writes perceptively about the successes of Brazil in manufacturing generic drugs that challenged patent rights granted by the WTO.

The particular successes and failures of Caasah are scattered in discussion throughout the book, but Chapter Two (“Circuits of Care”) looks intently at the new subjectivities (e.g., patient-citizen, “risk group” member, the “worried well”) that arise in social, technical and economic relations brought to bear by HIV, HIV antibody testing and AIDS. The failures of the surveillance system – but also its tremendous promise – are shown acutely in the next chapter, “A Hidden Epidemic,” which reveals the biases in public health and society at large with regards to surveillance, treatment and counseling. Chapter Five, “Patient-Citizenship,” examines the Phoenix-like rise from the ashes of imminent death that has been occasioned in many of those who have responded particularly well to HAART. Many have resumed reasonably normal sexual and political lives relatively free of the anxieties and technoneuroses brought on by the antiretrovirals themselves and the HIV antibody testing and counseling regime. The first section of Chapter Six, “Will to Live,” is appropriately titled “Lifelong AIDS,” for it reveals the stark contours of the limits and promises of a largely biomedical “fix” for what is clearly and also about sickness in the social-structure.

There is little for a reader about which to complain. A quotation is repeated and some Index entries are incorrect, but there are extremely few typos or grammatical infelicities. I want to highlight one particular kind of problem that mars Biehl’s presentation at many points, however. Biehl claims that “Epidemiological surveillance services registered the first HIV/AIDS cases in 1982.” This conflates HIV and AIDS, as he does ad infinitum, and HIV hadn’t yet been identified, either. It doesn’t excuse him to say that everyone else does, too - for real damage is done in such conflation, for example, that “HIVab+” means a death sentence and a rhetorical slide to “AIDS” to “contagious” to social leperhood.

Moreover, “AIDS” had not yet congealed into a biomedical category, either. This leads him at many, many points to confuse cause and effect, vector and pathogen, infection and antibody, for example, when he says that “the homosexual/bisexual mode of transmission accounted for less than thirty percent of the total number of AIDS infections.” Ontologically, epidemiological notions do no counting; epidemiologists do. Logically, “bisexual” mode of transmission (of HIV) has also to mean “heterosexual,” which then must be explained anew for its expanded and more complicated, often hidden properties. Empirically, the “total number of AIDS infections” would multiply the epidemiological categories of “HIV antibody positive” and “AIDS diagnoses” by at least five-fold if not twenty-fold, that is, in terms of pulmonary tuberculosis, cryptosporidium, toxoplasmosis, pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, persistent diarrhea, anaemia, and so on. As well, this undercuts the force of Biehl’s informants who rightly point to the endemic state of such infections and problems prior to the arrival of HIV and AIDS. Further, it suggests that these individual infections or pathogens are sexually transmitted and that there are characteristic differences along the lines of sexual identity (i.e., “heterosexual” transmission of this, “homosexual” transmission of that).

The lengthy discussion of subjectivity comprising Chapter Four is difficult to follow and jargony, although its theorization of “technoneurosis” (and elsewhere, of “auto-bioadministration”) is spot-on. Biehl argues from the standpoint of careful analyses of case studies that the “confused and painful experience of Oxygen [the pseudonym of a sick and anxious woman repeatedly testing HIVab negative] was somewhat technically engineered. This testing apparatus played a determinant role in the emergence of a socially visible imaginary AIDS.”

Nevertheless, this and other chapters exemplifies well the Foucaultian thesis that discourse about subjects (in this case, about the technical aspects of an HIV antibody test and about what constitutes “good” and “bad” sex) creates new subjects: the worried well, the sick and the anxious, the promiscuous and the guilt-ridden. The algorithm of HAART adherence is predictable on sociological grounds. “Failures” are on blamed on the individual, not the system; not the social structure; not the lack of housing, food, education, and employment. Nor was the HAART roll-out so universal and stable as its proponents claimed

Laid atop an already struggling public health system, Biehl found that “the universal availability of essential medicines has been subject to changing political winds; treatments are easily stopped, and people have to seek more specialized services in the private health sector or, as many put it, ‘die waiting in overcrowded public services.” The meaning of “primary care” has changed to mean selective targeting of those more likely to live, and triage has replaced universality as a metaphor of coverage. Clients become clinical trial subjects. Treatment trumps prevention. Risk becomes individualized instead of increasingly social. Infection becomes increasingly moral and subject to religious edict. HIV antibody test counselors compete with one another not to be the one to read the positive bands. Social scientific insights are swept aside.

This newest addition to Princeton University’s (In)Formation Series, edited by Paul Rabinow, is a sober but accessible and extremely humane text, just as well constructed as attractively presented. The black-and-white photographs taken by Torben Eskerod are arresting and invite commentary, speculation and, in my case, envy. Around this exciting new work could be wrapped all manner of upper-division or graduate-level courses in anthropology, public health, medicine and even political-economy. Like too many countries and cultures to count, ill-tempered politicians, cynical epidemiologists and overburdened healthcare workers in Brazil have contributed to an official portrait of HIV transmission dynamics, infectious burden and prevention efforts that often bears little resemblance to reality. Once again, the inequalities of social structure get off scot-free. This ethnography is a major contribution to social theory and justice.

Written by: Lawrence James Hammar, Ph.D., June 14th 2008

Latina Activists Across Borders: Women's Grassroots Organizing in Mexico and Texas

admin — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 14:10:00 +0000

By Milagros Pena

Duke University Press

Milagros Pena’s book, Latina Activists Across Borders, is a significant attempt at recording the oral histories of women responsible for developing and running NGOs (non governmental organizations) in Mexico and the border cities of El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juarez. This particular kind of work is necessary to further understand how women organize as activists outside of more privileged academic, feminist settings.

As a feminist who chose to leave the academy, I am often baffled by how women comfortably practice their feminist values outside the sanctuary of women’s studies departments and women’s centers on college campuses. In many ways, practicing feminism outside of the ivory tower takes guts, particularly in those parts of the U.S. (and elsewhere) that insist men and women practice and participate in traditional gender roles. Pena’s book provides some insight on how women outside of the academy practice feminist values in what could be considered hyper-patriarchal locations.

The notion of taking “baby steps” has a very real impact in places where feminist ideas and beliefs are considered foreign, feared or maligned. I was impressed by one interviewee from Michoacan when she proclaimed what an achievement it was for women to meet (outside of the home) to discuss feminist-informed initiatives. Of course, there are places in the U.S., other than the border, where minute actions would also be considered quite significant—the small, southern town where I live, for example.

The importance of networking between NGOs, even those with a religious impetus, is vital for the survival of these grassroots efforts. It is important to note, that the organizers interviewed in Mexico saw a natural relationship between the goals of organizations with religious roots and those with more feminist ones. In other words, they were not mutually exclusive. Both types of organizations worked to help those in need. Yet, many of the women in Mexico were careful about labeling their efforts feminist since local reactions to preconceived, reduced views of what feminism entails (primarily, those who reduce it to “man hating,” and those with religious reasons for resisting feminism) are rather entrenched. Instead, these organizers have labeled their activism as part of a “woman’s movement” to help soften the edges of public misperceptions of feminism. While this magical renaming no doubt helps to get women in the door that need the services and programming these NGOs provide, it also has the potential to further entrench the idea that feminism is something to be feared, denigrated and resisted.

The book is worth reading for those who work in NGOs, study feminist theory or consider themselves feminists. The tone is academic, as is the language, but the excerpts from the transcripts are quite interesting and warmer in tone than the whole of the book. There are varied ways of practicing feminism and this book underscores those multiple practices as being necessary for surviving a patriarchal and capitalist reality.

Written by: Denise Menchaca, July 23rd 2007

Ultra-Talk: Johnny Cash, The Mafia, Shakespeare, Drum Music, St. Teresa of Avila, and 17 Other Colossal Topics of Conversation

admin — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 13:43:00 +0000

By David Kirby

University of Georgia Press

In the introduction to Ultra-Talk, David Kirby writes, “What I offer in these pages is a way to read, see, and savor, a post-theoretical world view that everybody can share.” That is a strong assertion, and though this collection of essays covers diverse and interesting ground, Kirby doesn’t quite live up to his goal.

Elsewhere in the introduction, the author defines a set of criteria for what is “good”: that which “must not only appeal to both the elite and the public…it must also have a track record.” This criteria, presumably, sets the stage for the subject matter he will present in this “book of king-sized cultural monuments.” It is true that the variety of subjects does not disappoint; from Walt Whitman to Saint Teresa of Avila to Nascar to the reality show Big Brother, Kirby delights with his surprising turns and associative logic. Despite his efforts to speak across racial and class boundaries, however, Kirby succeeds in speaking directly, and only, to white, middle-class, academically-inclined readers.

Most of these compositions are a compelling blend of personal essay and literary or cultural criticism; they manage to both entertain and inform, which is a difficult task. Each essay reaches farther than the typical personal essay—start with a hook-y personal anecdote, then move outward toward some larger truth about life or human nature—and attempts not only to contemplate big questions, but also to educate readers in the process. I found Kirby’s explorations of Dante, Whitman, Shakespeare and Dickinson fascinating. But then again, I read those authors extensively during my academic career. Aside from the sporadic, required high school poetry lessons that many teenagers sleep through, most Americans, arguably, have not. By assuming that his reader is well-versed in classic literature, Kirby excludes much of his potential audience.

My point is that Kirby perhaps shoots himself in the foot with the grandiose definition his book presents in the introduction. It’s not that this collection of essays is bad. I, as a white, middle-class, academically-inclined person, very much enjoyed Kirby’s whimsical yet didactic tone and unique perspective on popular culture. The essay “Why Does It Always Have to Be a Boy Baby” was particularly well-crafted in its refusal both to endorse and to criticize religion, opting instead to examine the intrinsic role religion plays in every person’s life, whether or not s/he is a willing participant.

Kirby, a poet and literature professor, is skilled at making intellectual subject matter interesting and accessible. I simply wonder: is his “post-theoretical world view” really one “that everybody can share?”

Written by: Sarah Hudgens, July 5th 2007

Figures of Resistance: Essays in Feminist Theory

admin — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 23:40:00 +0000

By Teresa de Lauretis, Patricia White

University of Illinois Press

Figures of Resistance is a collection of essays, including previously unpublished lectures and essays, by the absolutely brilliant, feminist thinker Teresa de Lauretis. The texts in this collection span from the concept of feminist aesthetics (or deaesthetics) in film as well as the notion of the narrative, and lesbianism. This collection is perfect for both those already familiar with de Lauretis’s work and those unfamiliar.

Patricia White, the editor of the book, has organized de Laurestis’s texts beautifully. The collection is broken down into three sections: “Representations” which includes essays on cinema, literature and theory with a focus on self-representation in contrast to the medium; “Readings,” in which each text is focusing on a very specific subject for analysis (ranging from a short passage in a novel to a film); and “Epistemologies,” which focuses on ways of knowing and formulates figures of feminist consciousness. Also, each section the text is arranged chronologically, which gives the reader a chance to develop their own thoughts along with Teresa de Lauretis.

This collection is a rare and exciting opportunity to encapsulate the work of a critic and thinker at the top of her game. Figures of Resistance is a must have for any one with interest in feminist film theory, feminism, film and aestheics.

Written by: Jen May, July 3rd 2007