Indiana University Press

Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire

andrea — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Edited by Bruce Erickson, Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands

Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire explores the intersections of queer studies and environmental studies and aims to trouble dominant discourses of nature and sexuality. The authors in this collection argue that we should adopt a queer ecological perspective, a “transgressive and historically relevant critique of dominant pairings of nature and environment with heteronormativity and homophobia.” Drawing on science studies, environmental history, queer geography, ecocriticism, critical race theory, cultural studies, landscape ecology, and LGBTQ theory, this interdisciplinary anthology presents the various possibilities for “queering ecology and greening queer politics.”

What do queer ecologies and greener queer politics look like? To answer this question, the essays use various theoretical and methodological strategies to explore how understandings of nature shape discourses of sexuality and how understandings of sex and reproduction shape perceptions and uses of the environment.

The chapters delve into topics as diverse as animal sexuality, hermaphrodite frogs, eco-porn, biophilia, lesbian rural communities, pollution and overpopulation, and penguins as environmental icons. Several themes weave throughout the entire collection, including critical analyses of homophobic and racist evolutionary narratives and the ways that particular spaces become imbued with sexual meanings. Overall, Queer Ecologies critiques the heteronormative, racist, nationalist, and colonialist narratives that structure popular environmentalist discourses.

The volume approaches these issues through three sections. In the first part, "Against Nature? Queer Sex, Queer Animality," the authors examine how sexual natures are produced through dichotomies such as animal/human and nature/culture. These essays argue that the question is not whether queer acts are “unnatural,” but rather how definitions of nature and culture (and the boundaries between them) are produced and mobilized.

The second section of the book, "Green, Pink, and Public: Queering Environmental Politics," explores the intersections of sexuality and nature as sites of engaged political action. These contributions critique the heteronormativity and whiteness of environmental politics and offer possibilities for radical ecologies and sexual environmental justice.

The final part of the book, "Desiring Nature: Queer Attachments," speaks to the pleasures and losses of engaging with the “more than human” world. The authors in this section explore the links between the regulation of sexuality and the destruction of non-human life. One of the most profound essays in the collection is by editor Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, who writes on the subject of mourning in queer writing about nature. Drawing on a politicized melancholic sensibility from lesbian and gay experiences of AIDS, she attempts a queer re-thinking of environmental destruction, arguing that few, if any public rituals exist to express mourning over the loss of the environment.

Overall, this collection moves forward conversations in queer and environmental literatures, and makes important connections between discourses of sexuality and nature that offer promising possibilities for productive political coalitions and more critical theories. While the authors are careful to note the materiality of bodies and spaces, the volume relies predominantly on textual analysis. The authors examine familiar cultural texts such as mainstream movies like Brokeback Mountain and Happy Feet, popular documentaries like An Inconvenient Truth, and the poetry of Adrienne Rich and Minnie Bruce Pratt.

Readers will come away from Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire with a complex understanding of the dangerous assumptions that shape environmental discourses, as well as the importance of environmental considerations to queer theorizing and movement building. The queer ecological framework offered in this collection has valuable insights for readers across a broad spectrum of interests.

Written by: Traci Yoder, January 5th 2011

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

Women in Power in Post-Communist Parliaments

admin — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 01:01:00 +0000

By Marilyn Rueschmeyer, Sharon L. Wolchik

Indiana University Press

Reading the title of this book, Women in Power in Post-Communist Parliaments, one pictures Chancellor Angela Merckel standing alongside Presidents Obama and Medvedev. Then, East German women swimmers, intimidating and Frankenstein-esque, and hearty Russian farmers, resilient with scythes in hand march across the landscape of one's mind, all of them serious and dour in shades of grey and brown. As the vision morphs back into post-communist parliaments, Yulia Tymoshenko, the current Ukrainian prime minister, appears blonde and leather clad, sitting astride a motorcycle in campaign posters. The free-association, in a dance now, takes you to Russian mail-order-brides, flirtatious and malleable, then models tall and leggy. Aside from Merckel and Tymoshenko, there is little that is overtly useful to understanding women in power in post-communist parliaments.

By not focusing on the post-communist superstar, this book draws a nuanced picture of the various women serving as members of parliament in the post-communist era. Focusing on six countries, including East Germany (as integrated into Germany) and the Ukraine, all but one (Russia) are members of the European Union, and all but one (Russia again) presently appears to be making strides towards further liberalization.

The book is divided into two sections: the first section focuses on the research and the second on the people. Both sections are dry and difficult to read, but the second part provides a human component with the inclusion of interviews with, and essays by, the parliamentarians themselves. Because of its personal nature, the second section pushes you past the farmers and models. As the women describe their routes to parliament and their work there, they create an account of their experiences with and in power that is comparable to those of women in the West.

These women are not self-described feminists, and they deny that definition in the Western sense. Most of the women became involved in politics as a result of spousal or communal pressure, not of their own volition, and their political identification is one of party and not gender. Their work focuses on family issues of pensions, pay, daycare, and education. The female parliamentarians focus on feminine issues only when they do not interfere with the party line.

The women and their work are best summarized in the words of a female Bulgarian parliamentarian as “gender empowerment,” that it is in the interest of women to have women in parliament to air their views on social issues in what she describes as a sort of “enlightened self interest” drawing attention to the issues one can expect to win, and not wasting one’s breath and seeming hysterical. The dancing women will not be experiencing fainting spells, but they will also not be leading brazen charges.

Written by: Elisheva Zakheim, January 12th 2010

Censorship in South Asia: Cultural Regulation from Sedition to Seduction

admin — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 17:01:00 +0000

Edited by Raminder Kaur, William Mazzarella

Indiana University Press

There is no use in burying the head of an ostrich in censorship and imagining the enemy knows nothing of what we are doing. — S.C. Lind

Censorship in South Asia dissects the history and socio-political dynamics of censorship in India, which have been transcribed into the public culture of the South Asian society over the years. The book digs deep into all forms of formal, state censorship, as well as unofficial censorship tactics that are employed by political and pressure groups—from blackening out images and words from advertising and cinema to street politics and political communication. The popular response to books like Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses and films like Deepa Mehta’s Fire and Water show the way censorship has left its traces on everything that goes away from the tide.

The book further explores how censorship has not only shaped the public culture, but has also given a more vivid definition to its adversary: publicity. Censorship as an organized activity has one too many actors and Censorship in South Asia examines the intentions and outcomes of these actors’ anxieties over a free press. Yet, the essays also emphasize another essential agent caught within the web of censorship: the media's call for liberalism and free speech. Despite the board of censorship’s continual attempts to control free speech, in one way or another, information does leak.

The process of censorship is not necessarily a smooth one, and controlling the liquid nature of the press can be a hard task. Censorship in South Asia traces the genealogy of censorship through time to reveal its ever-contested presence in Indian cinema and beyond.

Cross-posted with Gender Across Borders

Written by: Maria Khan, November 1st 2009

Queer in Black and White: Interraciality, Same-Sex Desire and Contemporary African-American Culture

admin — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 16:36:00 +0000

By Stefanie Dunning

Indiana University Press

Stefanie Dunning takes the scalpel of reason to the twin sores of misogyny and homophobia that sometimes stain traditional notions of a black nationalist consciousness. The result is an intellectual illustration challenging “the notion that the black queer is "not black enough" and both examines and explains “the frequent representation of the interracial as a device signifying the ideas of nation, authenticity and blackness.” Dunning effectively answers a question that I, as a young black gay man, frequently ask: is it possible to be fully black, fully gay, and satisfy normative perceptions of traditional black masculinity simultaneously? Thankfully, one can find an affirmative answer and a stringent defense of a more comprehensive and inclusive characterization of those straddling multiple communities of origin within the text of Dunning's literary cultural exploration.

The act of loving a person of another ethnicity or miscegenation is a mental act and stance rather than something “that happens between bodies.” Once one accepts this as fact, it is easier to follow the use of “miscegephors,” or the points at which inter-raciality is used to “stage questions about race, ethnicity and belonging.” Dunning reviews miscegephorical use in music, television, and literature--including Ann Allen Shockley's Loving Her_, the first novel about a black lesbian; Me'Shell NdegeOcello's hip-hop volume Plantation Lullabies_, and Eldridge Cleaver's essay “Notes on a Native Son.” The pages and lyrics of these works provide the canvas for the discourse Dunning pursues. Cleaver's essay and its characterization of the “negro homosexual” as a constituent of another group outside of the black community are challenged by such representations as the relationship (fictional albeit) of Terry and Renay in Loving Her.

This challenge was put into the most stark relief when in Shockley's Loving Her, Dunning finds a juxtaposition between the parallel images of Renay, the recently single black mother with her new white lesbian lover, Terry. We see Renay doing the “little things,” the domestic chores that Terry refuses and Dunning cites the evocation of a black women “working” for a white woman rather than loving her as it meshed “perfectly with the traditional black servant's role.” Then, we witness Renay introducing Terry to soul food, slipping into dialect―using food and language―to act as an ethnic bridge within their interracial relationship. Dunning cites Barbara Smith's review of this scene as a central challenge to the notion that being black and being gay is the assumption of a “racially de-natured” state. Renay and Terry's relationship is not constructed on color-blind terms, and the circumstances of ethnic origin that each bring to the relationship are not eroded; rather, they are amplified.

Within the creative pieces Dunning highlights and the dialogue that each seemed to further, I found the opportunity to consider my own identity and my own personal struggle to associate equally with different communities of origin. Black gay and lesbian artists, such as those that authored the works reviewed by Dunning, are not threats to biological and cultural continuity, but in reality, are at the forefront of remaking “our conceptions of blackness.”

Written by: Brandon Copeland, October 17th 2009

Enterprising Women in Urban Zimbabwe: Gender, Microbusiness, and Globalization

admin — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 08:52:00 +0000

By Mary Johnson Osirim

Indiana University Press

In the early 1990s, Mary Osirim took a team of interviewers to several urban areas in Zimbabwe to learn about the lives and financial status of women working in the “microenterprise sector.” She found that while women were largely excluded from education and much of the Zimbabwean economy, some had found a niche as crocheters, seamstresses, hairdressers, and “market traders” in fruits and vegetables and other goods.

There is plenty of sociological theory—the author is, after all, an eminent sociologist—much of it concerning the damage wrought by globalization generally and more specifically by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the Economic Structural Adjustment Program of 1991, which seem here to overshadow colonialism and even patriarchy as root causes of poverty and oppression. And there are a lot of statistics: “Seventy-nine percent of the traders reported that they made all decisions about the use of profits from their enterprises”—which are suggestive, if taken from small sample sizes.

The essence of Enterprising Women in Urban Zimbabwe is in the voices of the women themselves. These women are trying to survive in jobs that have them vending in outdoors stalls in all weather and economic vagaries—many of them providing for families and extended families. The interviewers ask questions like “Why did you start this business?” and “Who makes the decisions in your family?” and “Does your husband assist with domestic duties?” The answers, although too often painfully synoptic, provide a mixed picture of these women’s experiences. Many of them are living on dreams deferred, still hoping that a career as nurse or air hostess is not entirely out of reach.

One crocheter reports, “I’m happy because [my husband] does not hit me. I live nicely. He gives me money.” One of the recurrent themes embedded here is the struggle for autonomy as made manifest in the women’s earnings: “Husband makes decisions about money and bills.” In some of the accounts, one can hear echoes of the novels of Buchi Emecheta, although her work captures a different time and place.

Time and place present a problem in this study. First, the interviews are fifteen years old, and so are most of the bibliographic references. In the Zimbabwe of the early 1990s, many apparently held out hope that Robert Mugabe would acknowledge the role women played in gaining Zimbabwean independence by creating meaningful reforms allowing women greater access to education and the workplace. Locating the study specifically in Zimbabwe is also somewhat problematic in that the workers are “cross-border traders" coming from, traveling to, and trading with nations throughout the region. In the strictest sense, their lives and experiences are not exclusively Zimbabwean.

Still, Enterprising Women in Urban Zimbabwe is a valuable report on the status of a worldwide phenomenon; the term “enterprising women” is more a generic label than a specific title: the transformative possibility of women’s entrepreneurial work throughout the world. At least in terms of this report, the experience of women in “microbusiness” has mitigated poverty for some, brought some measure of financial independence for some, and has changed the lives of a few. Overall, though, it does not, at least in Zimbabwe, seem to have had large-scale transforming effects in either the status of women or in the patriarchal traditions or the laws that still oppress them.

Written by: Rick Taylor, October 2nd 2009

Gender Violence in Russia: The Politics of Feminist Intervention

admin — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 09:05:00 +0000

By Janet Elise Johnson

Indiana University Press

In periods of rapid social change, the poets of one ideological system or another rush to find the cogent metaphor or, more recently, the winning soundbite, that will interpret the change to suit their own ends, to control meaning. To find and sell the right descriptive phrase is to raise the flag of possession over a historical event. For example, the collapse of the Soviet Union—or, even more stridently, the U.S. victory in the Cold War—spins the end of the 1980s, the end of history, as some proclaimed it, as a triumph of righteousness, rendered even more morally spectacular by the supposed “coldness” of the conflict, and the ushering in of a new world order. That’s why a book like Janet Johnson’s Gender Violence in Russia is so badly needed.

The book lacks the poetry of impassioned argument, and it is heavy with charts and appendices and social science-y apparatus, but it makes a couple of very painful and crucial observations. One is that the end of the “evil empire” actually made social conditions for Russian women considerably worse. The incidence of violence against women demonstrably worsened as official attitudes, in spite of increasing international pressure, actually resulted in changing criminal codes to the detriment of women’s rights. Trafficking in women, rape, sexual harassment, domestic violence all got worse in the 1990s, and the Russian government relied on age-old sexist lies to justify their apathy.

A different sort of ideological poetry, one also confronted painfully in this book, is the emergence of global feminism in the 1990s. The movement is inscribed in the U.N. Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women (1993) and in the Beijing Declaration on Women (1995) and in a new level of worldwide feminist activism aiming to confront injustice and make the world see that women’s rights are human rights. As if the pronouncement the other day by a Saudi judge justifying “slapping a spendthrift wife” weren’t warning enough, the very mixed picture of the women’s rights movement in Russia should warn us against triumphant rhetoric concerning the record of global feminist intervention. Clearly there has been a powerful “push-back,” not only from the old guardians of patriarchy but from those identifying global human rights movements as forms of neocolonialist western interference that must be resisted.

The conclusion Johnson’s study reaches is a rather dreary one: that what really works, in terms of feminist intervention, are “alliances between global feminists and large donors.” Money talks, apparently; or rather its use in creating organizations for women’s advocacy is the best agent for social change. What Johnson calls “flexible and responsive funding” is the key, targeting funds where they are most needed and can do the most good to protect women and to begin to change cultures of violence which have proven fearfully resistant to change.

Written by: Rick Taylor, July 2nd 2009

Our Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts: Manifestations Of Aje In Africana Literature

admin — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 01:12:00 +0000

By Teresa N. Washington

Indiana University Press

Teresa N. Washington, an associate professor of Africana Literature at Kent State University, has attempted a vindication of Africana writers who have tried to explicate the importance of aje in women of African heritage. The Yoruba word aje denotes the potency of personal spiritual power derived from Creation that can be possessed by both women and men. The controllers of that power, however, are revered women – matriarchs of society and the cosmos, who are given the respectful title of Mothers. Washington’s scholarly text, Our Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts, is a well-researched volume that explores this ancient spiritual power and its manifestations first in Africa and later into the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States. Wherever people of African descent settled, either willingly or by force, aje was brought with them. Understanding of its nature and its power was misconstrued by those not of this heritage, but Washington asserts that even within the culture and spiritual realms of Africans aje was falsely linked with witchcraft. Washington traces how this power was denied and then scandalized first by early missionaries in Africa and later by men who saw patriarchy as a means to establish their own power. Washington shows how aje was used as a means of enacting retribution on the oppressors who denied them their humanity. This retribution took the form of hoodoo, a system of practice that could harm, destroy, heal, and create. She traces this through oral histories and literature by significant Africana writers, such as Ntozake Shange, Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston as well as the works of lesser-known writers Ama Ata Aidoo, Gloria Naylor, Mary Monroe, T. Obinkaram Echewa, and Ben Okri. Our Mothers, Our Powers, Our Texts is not light reading, though there are moments when humor and insight combine to make it a brilliant work. Patiently, Washington takes the reader through the complex cosmology and practices of Yoruba religion and philosophy. It is a much needed affirmation of feminine power and resource, and is essential reading for anyone attempting a greater understanding of the work of contemporary Africana writers.

Written by: Janie Franz, November 30th 2006