Social Text

The Sixties in a Cube

2012-12-19T20:20:32Z

We love our little objects. Perhaps you are reading this on yours, pinching and stroking the screen to enlarge the text. These physical interactions with the things themselves, with the actual media of media, are part of the history of reading, of looking at pictures, of listening to recordings. They embody the modern fantasy of portable culture, although to see our handling techniques solely as gestures of modernity is to ignore the distinctly corporeal pleasures we derive from our mediating objects. This pleasure can be difficult to describe, especially when it is obsolete. Try putting into words what it felt like to insert an audio cassette into a car stereo. I have devoted the morning to it, and all I have to show is a stilted fragment of nerdporn: "you feel some resistance going in, then the machine grips the tape and you hear a satisfying mechanical munch." There is so much more to say.

If words fail to capture the sensory concreteness of past technologies, it is because the modern regime of obsolescence serializes our object choices and encourages us to forget past attachments. It is as if extinct formats and devices cease to exist once we have transferred our "content" to another "platform." Reconnecting with the signifying properties of obsolete technologies requires unorthodox research methods, applied to archives we assemble ourselves from the sensory shapes of our own lives, from the "content delivery systems" of the past, and from journeys through technological subcultures populated with luddites, fetishists, and novelty collectors.

A recent artists book, Flash+Cube (1965-1975) by Marget Long (Punctum Books, 2012) exemplifies what such a project might look like. Its subject matter is a forgotten piece of technology, the Sylvania flash cube. Through an engrossing counterpoint of image and text, the book reconstructs relations of looking in the ten year period, 1965 to 1975, when flash cubes were marketed. As Long notes in her introduction, these were also the years of the Vietnam war, and one of the book's achievements is the way it renders visible the often unexpected conjunctions between these parallel timelines. These conjunctions are formed in language and its tropes, in mentalities and visual repertoires, in bodies and their classification, and Long's provocative stream of footnoted images conjures the diverse, crisis ridden contexts into which the flash cube entered.

The techniques of assembly Long uses to create her image stream are not aligned with one particular discourse or disposition. A range of practices--montage, citation, repurposing, fan fiction, narrative testimony--go into her meticulous construction of an object's sensory politics at a particular moment. Among the diverse source materials that comprise her archive are magazines advertisements, newspaper clippings, servicemen's personal photographs, blog entries, and Long's own work, including photographs she took in Vietnam in 2009.

One cannot communicate an object's obsolete pleasures to others without specifying its place in the politics of sensation, past and present. This requires more than a deft verbal and visual rhetoric, although there is plenty of that in Flash+Cube. It also involves finding material and tactile modes of expression. Long finds them in the material form of the book. Flash+Cube is a page turner, by which I mean that my experience of reading it was highly physicalized. I paged forwards and backwards through it several times, fluttering the pages and scanning them with my eyes, clasping thick sections between thumb and forefinger as I compared, say, the front of a reproduced photograph with its reverse side, where someone had typed or handwritten a politically or personally revealing caption, and which appears later in the book. This is how Long choreographs the act of reading. Readers peer and riffle, marking and re-marking their places, as they peel ideas from her gluey archive.

Although its structure is non-linear, this does not mean that randomness governs the reader's engagement with Flash+Cube. The book's pages are carefully sequenced to produce particular reading sensations. Take a two page spread showing a sequence of stills from the film Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte, "accompanied" in a footnote by a voiceover Long wrote herself. By themselves, the images wittily alert us to the paradoxical status of the flash in photography. It is at once an object and an event, it is both a source of illumination and an explosive and unpredictable element of the imaging process, one that threatens to eradicate the subject entirely. Reading back and forth between the still movie images and the text of Long's voiceover creates new mental images--flashes--that personalize and embody the formal, epistemological paradoxes of flash photography.

Long encourages us to think about the apparatus of photography and the apparatus of history specifically through the act of grasping a book, but her oblique strategy can be applied to other objects--not only those that are obsolete (photographic prints, vinyl records, cassette tapes) but also those that have yet to become obsolete (physical interfaces, touchscreens, headsets.) From the oblique strategist's perspective, it is not the platform that counts, but rather the cultivation of a sensory, physical experience in which, to (barely) paraphrase Ben Shahn, format is the very shape of content.

Today, "content" is a word that describes a new commodity form in the domain of cultural goods. It refers to those aspects of what we once called a work that can be considered alienable from it, and which constitute a new commodity form. It is new in that it has the power to create value (and diminish it) not only through traditional systems of exchange but also through its complex relation to the conceptual currencies of the digital economy: searchability, discoverability, interactivity, and so forth. In its "platform agnostic" form, the job of the content commodity is to undermine our outdated attachments, to make us fall out of love with our little objects as they grow older and bulkier, developing memory problems.

In her other work, Long uses photography, video, performance, and installation, alone or in combination, to explore the ineffable sensations and unspoken memories encoded in our physical relations with objects. An early series of photographs of hunting blinds in the woods of upstate New York is exemplary in this regard, and it strikes me that Flash+Cube's procession of concrete ephemera is a blueprint for a new kind of visual history, the kind that artists might be able to tell best.

Copies of Flash+Cube (1965-1975) are available at Dashwood Books.

Social Text Periscope on OWS

2012-12-19T17:49:15Z

Click here to read. On the one year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, Social Text is pleased to debut "Is This What Democracy Looks Like?" a collection of original essays on horizontalism in theory and practice. Written and edited by faculty and graduate students from NYU's Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, in collaboration with the Center for Digital Research and Scholarship, Columbia University Libraries/Information Services and the CUNY Graduate Center Digital Initiatives. Click here to read the entire dossier free online.

Is This What Democracy Looks Like?

2012-12-19T17:21:32Z

Click here to read. This dossier takes its cue from one of the Occupy movement's bedrock slogans, "This Is What Democracy Looks Like" (though this was first nurtured, as were many Occupy paradigms, tactics and customs, in the global justice movement that came of age in Seattle in 1999). This proud assertion, stiffened by populist certitudes about the 99% hyper-majority, exercised a clear appeal to protesters. It is self-congratulatory, confrontational, and also quite articulate as a political statement. Not everyone has to believe the slogan to chant it. But what if it were taken up as a more literal goal? What if the Occupy model of horizontalism were to be pushed into every venue of civil society, eventually supplanting the roots of our representative democracy system? Who would stand to gain and who would lose? How would our own institutions, organizations and networks be transformed in the process? The radical innocence of Occupy allowed such questions to be asked. After a year of operations, the record allows some provisional answers to be offered. Read More ...

Table of Contents

Introduction: Is This What Democracy Looks Like
Cristina Beltrán, A.J. Bauer, Rana Jaleel, and Andrew Ross
Their Fight Is Our Fight: Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, and New Modes of Solidarity Today
Anthony C. Alessandrini
This is What Democracy Feels Like: Tea Parties, Occupations and the Crisis of State Legitimacy
A.J. Bauer
Occupy's Alliance With Labor
Suzanne Collado
Occupy Wall Street and Consensus Decision Making: Historicizing the Preoccupation With Process
Andrew Cornell
A Queer Home in the Midst of a Movement? Occupy Homes, Occupy Homemaking
Rana Jaleel
For Democracy, Strike Debt: Resonances of Abolition in the Occupy Movement
Nicholas Mirzoeff
The Islamic Republic of Iran Loves OWS: Is This What Solidarity Looks Like?
Manijeh Nasrabadi
The Question of Infrastructure: An Interview with Michael Ralph
A.J. Bauer
Democracy and Debt
Andrew Ross
Policing Political Protest: Paradoxes of the Age of Austerity
Stuart Schrader
Not Your Academy: Occupation and the Futures of Student Struggles
Zach Schwartz-Weinstein

YouTubing Theory

2012-12-04T19:44:09Z

What exactly is happening to also those videotapes of lectures ... and Derrida answering the phone.

Digital Publishing Today

2012-11-21T21:06:26Z

Graduate Center, CUNY -- Center for Humanities

Nov 26, 2012, 6:30pm | The Skylight Room (9100)

Ashley Dawson, Matthew K. Gold, Michael Mandiberg, Tavia Nyong'o

What are the radical possibilities of open access publishing? This panel will bring together a number of scholars who have published online to consider how university presses are either facilitating or impeding efforts by academics to explore new forms of cultural production and media activism unleashed by movements such as Occupy Wall Street. Join us to explore these questions and to develop new strategies and models for contemporary academic publication.

Registration requested but not required: http://digital_publishing_today.eventbrite.com

Co-sponsored by The Digital Studies/Digital Humanities Seminar

Hip Hop from '48 Palestine: Youth, Music, and the Present/Absent

2012-11-05T02:45:54Z

The digital material presented here is meant to supplement the article "Hip Hop from '48 Palestine: Youth, Music, and the Present/Absent" from the current issue of Social Text (30.3, Fall 2012). An abstract for the article can be read below.

DAM: "Born Here"

Wlad el 7ara's song in Memory Of Mahmoud Darwish: "3ud Ya Ma7mud"

Video of Dmar, female rappers from Nazareth, for Lammet Shamel project (family reunification of Palestinians within and beyond Israel)

Interview with Tamar Nafar of DAM

DAM: "Who's the Terrorist?"

Safaa Hathoot's music on MySpace

Saz's music and videos on MySpace

Abstract:

This essay explores hip hop produced by Palestinian youth within the 1948 borders of Israel, a site which reveals some of the most acute contradictions of nationalism, citizenship, and settler colonialism. It focuses primarily on the pioneering Palestinian hip hop group, DAM, from Lid, and also on Arapeyat from Akka; Saz from Ramleh; and Awlad el Hara from Nazareth. The article offers the concept of the "present absent" as a profound analytic lens for understanding the fundamental contradictions of the social, political, and cultural conditions created by specific histories of settler colonialism for '48 Palestinians, who are simultaneously visible/invisible, indigenous/inauthentic, and absent/present. We argue that this new genre of rap re-imagines the geography of the nation, linking the experiences of these "'48 Palestinians" to those in the West Bank, Gaza, and in the diaspora, and producing an archive of censored histories.

The article situates this music within a genealogy of artistic and protest movements by '48 Palestinians, providing a historical context for the national and political identities articulated in the music of a new generation of '48 Palestinians. There are three major aspects of the articulation of the present/absent in '48 Palestinian hip hop that we discuss: i) the critique of official narratives and state policies that rupture Israeli mythologies of democracy and inclusion; ii) the rewriting of the ambiguity and alienation of being Palestinians from "'48"; and iii) the attempt to connect Palestinians "inside" and "outside."

The 1%

2012-10-24T20:13:20Z

The breathtaking, unrepentant arrogance of the 1% is on full display in Jessica Pressler's profile of AIG CEO Bob Benmosche.

The Queer Shamed and Shame Queered

2012-10-24T18:00:04Z

Not too far away from the charming and gentrified university campus in central Philadelphia where I initially offered the following meditations, exists another gathering space: a space where black and brown cis- and transgendered bodies were situated as repositories for others' sometimes gendered fantasies, racialized fetishes, disdain, fascination, affection, dis-ease, dollars, and semen.

I waited there once and I yearned for a deposit.

In my early 20s, I was in search of the embrace of strangers willing to move hands upon my face and move my heart to beat beats and not blues. I desired the type of fuck that easily resembles eros, or rather, intimacy that connects souls and escapes words. I longed for pleasure, a few feet from a corner, on 13th street in downtown Philly. I was alone and lonely and resisting the urge to do it and pushing myself to let it be done and saying no and embracing yes not too far away from a street otherwise known as Market (how appropriate).

I needed to be touched because touch had always occurred in secret, at least in my life. I craved to be held firmly by tender hands because threatening hands seemed to only operate as weapons in my past. I wanted sex because it was the language that I had been taught, early on, as the means through which one translates connection, pleasure, and desire. Sex work, which I knew nothing about while standing with deep longing and trepidation moving in my body, was not what I intended to provide. No, I wanted to perform love work and traveling to the netherworld of ambiguity was, in my mind, well-worth it. I sought after liberation: freedom from the anxieties of heteronormativitity. And, if I am honest, I wanted to have boundless sex with another man in a "world" that did not create me, but in one that I created. And isn't it the case that we, queers, are often in search of other worlds because we have been shamed in this one?

13th Street became a site of possibility in a world that rendered my beingness impossible. My imagined and material worlds were never too far away from each other because of it.

Shame fashions imagination.

I never really desired to participate in Pride Parades until recently. This year alone I marched in two large parades, Boston and NYC. In Boston, I marched with an assemblage of blacks and Latinos. We were situated, interestingly, between the Asian and Pacific Islander contingent and a group of queer animal lovers. There, in a sea of queer whiteness, waded the blacks, the browns, the animals, and those who loved all three. I marched hyper-aware of my place in the lineup-under the gaze of animated onlookers, within the close proximity of hands clapping vigorously in praise of the black, the Latino, the animal, and the animal loving queer-in disgrace, in shame because we were visibly invisible.

In NYC, where pride is a bit more immodest ... where I marched with great admiration directed at the black and brown young people who marched alongside us ... where the black and the brown body doubly signified the center via its queerness and the edge by way of its racialization...where applause was thunderous because, alas, black and brown were visibilized through the once crestfallen bodies of those who escape the violence of heterosexism (but are gripped by racism and class elitism) in queer spaces like Christopher Street in Greenwich Village...I felt the familiar sensation of embarrassment-of what it means to feel disgraced even in the deep of a parade of pride amongst would-be communities of solidarity.

The other times I felt similarly invisible, and there were many, occurred was when I showed up black and queer to white and gay and male-centered spaces anywhere in the US. I can recall, for example, having to attend a young professional LGBT social hosted by several fab and gay and white men at a posh apartment in the Chelsea neighborhood of NYC and feeling shamed and abandoned as if I had been hidden under an enchanted cloak of invisibility...except for the unfortunate fact that I was not. I did long for one, however.

Yet, in all three cases-the Boston and NYC parades as well as the Chelsea un-gathering-my presence and the presence of some others felt profoundly necessary. Our black, brown, and animal bodies were at once signs of materiality, of presence, of one's place in the illusory queer routes and spaces where shame is thought to be disinvited.

Shame produces resistance.

These narratives provide a way for me to think about the ways in which queers (or, rather, this queer) might variously experience shame and the ways in which shame, often conceptualized as a type of negative affect, might also be queered. Indeed, scholars like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Heather Love, and Tavia Nyong'o have penned critical works wherein the affective domain, particularly shame, is queered.

Shame stunts, pushes, destroys, and forms. And while I am careful to avoid rendering shame as an affective response to blameless actions or somehow give the impression that the act of shaming is acceptable, I want to consider shame's potential to catalyze imagination and resistance in the lives of queers.

Some isolate shame within the realm of negation. For example, Donald L. Nathanson categorized shame as a type of negative affect, coupled with humiliation, in his book Shame and Pride: Affect, Sex, and the Birth of the Self. Shame is conceptualized, then, as a feeling that is easily fixed on one side of a binary system. On the opposite end of shame is pride. But if it is true that some forms of pride (like that which is supposedly representative of and exhibited in queer parades and spaces) can produce humiliation and some forms of shame (like that which is thought to characterize and move some toward sex work) can catalyze self-awakening, then it follows that attempts to divide pride and shame does not allow for the complicated enmeshment of affect. In other (less complex) words, shame ain't all negative and pride ain't all positive. Our resistance to the binaries and dismantling of the boxes, which seek to contain either as if they are stabilized feelings, is a queer act.

What the binary allows us to do, rather easily, however, is to pin our affective responses to the actions of others, which may not be a bad move. If we can successfully demonstrate that our shame as queer persons is the result of, say, a heterosexist society and people or if we can make the case that we, queers, have every right to overly illuminate gay pride in response to our shamings, then we might find reason to support the claim that we, queers, exist as the monolithic vindicated amongst the guilty majority. We need shame as an analytic because without it, and the binary frame in which it is fixed, there would be no need to remake our selves through ritualistic performances of pride. Indeed, there would be no need to proclaim to the "straights" as we march in pride parades, whether in Boston, NYC, or Austin, "We're Here! We're Queer! Get Used to it!"

But how are we, queers, to account for the fact that we too shame? How are we to account for the fact that in our proudest and most visible moments we too might render invisible some others? What are we to do when our modesty gives way to racisms, sexisms, transphobia, elitism, and nationalisms that debase, that harm, that shame others? Pride ain't all good. And shame ain't all bad.

I want to return to shame's possibilities, then. Shame stunts, pushes, destroys, forms, and also serves as an affective force that has the potential to ignite the "queer imagination" and move queers towards resistance. It has been the case in my own life that shame, even in its most intense and brutalizing formations, has forced me into uncomfortable spaces (both fictive and material) that kindled my imagination. Whether in a church where I sat under the sound of a verbose and brash sermon that likened me to "Satan" or on 13th Street in Philly where I visibly hid in search of love and sex, shame moved me to rethink the world and to move in the direction of its re-creation.

As a writer, this queer imaginary has proved useful because in it I have often discovered the languages and images necessary for my survival. I have written words that have enlivened me and, in some cases, others. For instance, I will always remember receiving one heartrending note from a person who read an essay that I published on PrettyQueer.com that explored my personal struggle with suicidal feelings. The note read (and I paraphrase):

Thank you for writing this essay. I have been considering suicide and while I do not know what tomorrow may bring, I decided to live today.

The reader seemingly found hope in words that had been birthed by shame. Shame moved me, in those instances, to body forth revelations. I wrote what I envisioned, namely, the moving forward of our bodies in life and not death, the limitlessness of our spirits, the articulating and actualizing of radical politics by communities, the fashioning of different modes of being, and the making of new and just worlds in futures of endless possibility. And shame, surprisingly, produced this queer imaginary and the resistance necessary to actualize it, at least in those moments.

Darnell L. Moore is a writer/activist whose work is informed by anti-racist, feminist, queer of color, and anti-colonial thought and advocacy. He lives in Brooklyn, NY. 1 This essay was originally presented in the form of a public presentation as part of a panel titled "Exploring Queer Shame," which was graciously hosted by the Kelly Writer's House at The University of Pennsylvania on October 2, 2012.

Sensible Politics: Book release

2012-10-01T04:16:28Z

Zone Books is pleased to announce the publication of Sensible Politics: The Visual Culture of Nongovernmental Activism, edited by Meg Mclagan and Yates Mckee.

Political acts are encoded in medial forms--feet marching on a street, punch holes on a card, images on live stream, tweets--that have force, shaping people as subjects and constituting the contours of what is sensible, legible, visible. Thus, these events define the terms of political possibility and create terrain for political actions.

Sensible Politics: The Visual Culture of Nongovernmental Activism considers the constitutive role played by aesthetic and performative techniques in the staging of claims by nongovernmental activists. Attending to political aesthetics means focusing not on a disembodied image that travels under the concept of art or visual culture, nor on a preformed domain of the political that seeks subsequent expression in medial form. Instead, it requires bringing the two realms together into the same analytic frame. Drawing on the work of a diverse group of contributors, from art historians, anthropologists, and political theorists to artists, filmmakers, and architects, Sensible Politics situates aesthetic forms within broader activist contexts and networks of circulation and in so doing offers critical insight into the practices of mediation whereby the political becomes manifest.

"Photographs, maps, videos, reports, charts, spaces, and bodies--these and many other material things assemble into what the editors of this remarkable volume call an 'image-complex' that conditions how we know what we know, and what we do with that knowledge. Sensible Politics is a practical, theoretical guide for thinking and acting in the aesthetico-political register that puts art and politics together with rigor, imagination, and urgency. For anyone concerned with these matters, this is not just an interesting book, or a useful book. It is a necessary book."
--Reinhold Martin, author of Utopia's Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again

Sensible Politics "seeks to attend to the dispersion of aesthetics across the multiple institutional and discursive networks and platforms that constitute political action in the present. And so it does! Sensible Politics confounds our current divisions of the aesthetic and the political and challenges scholars and activists--scholaractivists and activistscholars--to rethink the political potential of images as they are absorbed by the concrete apparatuses of contemporary regimes of governmentality."
--Elizabeth A. Povinelli, author of Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism

Contributors include: Barbara Abrash, Negar Azimi, Ariella Azoulay, Amahl Bishara, Judith Butler, Eduardo Cadava, Jonathan Crary, Ann Cvetkovich, Faye Ginsburg, Sam Gregory, Zeynep Devrim Gürsel, Roger Hallas, Andrew Herscher, Sandi Hilal, Kirsten Johnson, Liza Johnson, Thomas Keenan, Carrie Lambert-Beatty, Jaleh Mansoor, Yates McKee, Meg McLagan, Alessandro Petti, Hugh Raffles, Felicity D. Scott, Kendall Thomas, Leshu Torchin, Eyal Weizman, Benjamin J. Young, Huma Yusuf, and Charles Zerner.

"Apophatic Sovereignty Before the Law at Guantanamo"

2012-09-26T02:55:27Z

"Apophatic Sovereignty Before the Law at Guantanamo"

Allen Feldman

Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication

New York University

Date: Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Time: 6-8 PM

Location: 6 East 16^th Street, Room 1103

SPONSORED BY THE POLITICS DEPARTMENT, NSSR

In Kafka's fable "Before the Law" the appeal to infinite regress, to higher and deeper authority, creates the illusion of an interiority of law, that someone or something is within the hallowed and hollowed abode of the law even if this indwelling is merely the performance of withholding law from others. The Combatant Status Review Tribunals at Guantanamo (2004-2005) similarly inscribed a territory, a space, and a speculum where the sovereignty of the state was performed as the event of withholding of law. In the recesses of the security state, in the security state as an assemblage of recesses, the law itself is securitized and subjected to an extraordinary rendition and consigned to a black site from which all other black sites are authored and transmitted.

Allen Feldman is the author of three books, including Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland and the forthcoming Archives of the Insensible: On Aisthesis, War and Dead Memory that engages the political photology of the war on terror, transitional justice and political animality. He has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Northern Ireland on political violence and hunger striking, in South Africa on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and in New York City on the criminalizing spatialization of AIDs affected homelessness. He has published numerous articles on political violence, the political philosophy of the body and the senses, and on transitional justice. He teaches the politics of the gaze and philosophy of media at New York University. He received his Ph.D with a dissertation honors in "political and legal thought" from the Graduate Faculty where he studied under Stanley Diamond, Reiner Schürmann, Talal Asad and Ernesto Laclau.

Occupy, Gaga

2012-09-24T15:39:58Z

Under review:

J. Jack Halberstam. Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal. Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 2012.

The stardom of Lady Gaga has stimulated academic studies in ways that few celebrities typically have (aside from icons like Madonna and Michael Jackson), including an entire journal called Gaga Stigmata, edited volumes like The Performance Identities of Lady Gaga: Critical Essays, Mathieu Deflem's "Lady Gaga and the Sociology of the Fame" course at the University of South Carolina[1], and my own Journal of Popular Culture article on the trope of monstrosity on which much of Gaga's cultural project is based[2]. A central concern of this research has always been the relationship between the anxieties of the present day and the works of the pop superstar, upheld as she is by a powerful record label and a fan base brought together via social media. But the initial phase of scholarship focused on Gaga's cultural project--made up mostly of interpretive readings of her performances and videos--is gradually giving way to a new wave of writing, one engaged in more thorough contextualizations of her work in broader social crises and the responses of Occupy movements and others engaged in imagining alternative futures.

The September 2012 publication of J. Jack Halberstam's Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal can be seen as a point of departure for this new phase of scholarship, one that more strongly articulates the connections among social ruptures, change movements like Occupy, and the creative practices of Gaga and other performance artists. There is perhaps no one better to launch this new wave than a central figure in queer studies and cultural studies like Halberstam. Both passionate and serious, her Gaga Feminism is also often humorous and unafraid to draw links to romantic comedies, animated films like Finding Nemo and Fantastic Mr. Fox, and television shows like The Wire. Halberstam even relays conversations with her children as well as her candid reactions to students who have taken her gender courses. She effectively uses these stories to illustrate how scholars are as ensnared in the maelstrom of meanings that drive mass culture as non-academics. We are therefore also deeply invested in the emancipatory possibilities of the new framework that she envisions.

Halberstam characterizes gaga feminism as "a form of political expression that masquerades as naive nonsense but that actually participates in big and meaningful forms of critique. It finds inspiration in the silly and the marginal, the childish and the outlandish. Gaga feminism grapples with what cannot yet be pronounced and what still takes the form of gibberish, as we wait for new social forms to give our gaga babbling meaning."[3] This notion elegantly captures the etymological power of a household word that has been invested with new meanings as a household name, while at the same time raising questions about the need to actively generate new forms. Situating Gaga alongside Marina Abramović, Shulamith Firestone, and Yoko Ono, Halberstam sites Gaga as the locus for new revolutionary aspirations and efforts to loosen the strictures on individual identity. As she writes, "gaga feminism will locate Lady Gaga as merely the most recent marker of the withering away of old social models of desire, gender, and sexuality, and as a channel for potent new forms of relation, intimacy, technology, and embodiment."[4] Gaga is a cultural space and stage being occupied by those who demand and create new models of social relations. But Gaga is herself an occupier of spaces and stages from which transformation might not be expected, especially the glass and steel towers of media empires. Tampering with corporate logics from within can go hand in hand with social movement demands from below.

Halberstam's reading of Gaga as a way to promote a radical rethinking of the 'ties that bind' can be aligned with other research on her enterprise, including my own interest in Gaga's relationships to New York subcultures, an area that is increasingly acknowledged as important to understanding her impact. Describing her status as "an adopted national hero" in Japan, the recent Vogue cover story noted, "There's also the fact that the spirit of the Club Kid, that early-nineties New York City invention (a moment that clearly left a mark on LG), has never died in Tokyo."[5] In addition, Marvin J. Taylor at NYU's Fales Library has begun to curate a Lady Gaga Collection. The school is an appropriate setting given Gaga's time at NYU Tisch and what Taylor sees as the discernible influence of NYU scholars from the concretist movement in poetry. In fact, Taylor curated an exhibition at NYU about concretist poetry inspired by lyrics in Gaga's song "Black Jesus + Amen Fashion."[6] As Taylor told me, Gaga is "such a product of NYU," given his belief that her familiarity with concretist themes can be directly tied to her coursework at Tisch. Understanding Gaga's links to these strains of thought--something best accomplished by asking her directly--will shed light on the ultimate potential of a gaga feminism.

There were some parts of Halberstam's book where I wished that she had gone further, as in her analysis of the "Telephone" video. While plenty of observers have noted the video's Warholian celebration of pop artifacts, Halberstam draws an unexpected but appropriate link to Warhol's would-be assassin, the radical feminist Valerie Solanas. Halberstam was also too quick, I think, to jettison the Born This Way album as a pillar of gaga feminism (the eponymous Foundation is not mentioned). I would claim that a song like "Hair" is one example of a gaga feminist work in which the body is shown to be imbricated with the norms that constrain alternative expressions of gender. "Judas" was perhaps Gaga's most explicit encounter with the role of women and female icons in ancient spiritual narratives. And what better representation of the kind of alternative intimacies in which Halberstam is interested than a video like "Yoü and I," with its depictions of a mermaid in love with her mad scientist captor as well as Gaga in drag (Jo Calderone) romancing Gaga as a nymph of the cornfields?

Far from being a pop paean, Halberstam's work is unenthusiastic about Gaga's efforts to repeal "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" and to promote gay marriage. Halberstam forcefully defends her own position against gay marriage, arguing that it is not worthwhile to defend legal attachments to a failing social arrangement. Still, the outrageous nature of Gaga's performance art and her popularity among mainstream media elites and music industry veterans means that she is a powerful vehicle for the transformative agenda that Halberstam sketches. Since Gaga's pop performance art remains the best proponent of the radical queerness that the book envisions, Halberstam can link her arguments to both the intensely frustrated vigor that animated the Occupy movement and a music superstar currently touring the world. The reader may be skeptical until considering the following as one expression of possible common ground between Occupy activists and Gaga supporters: "New affiliations between bodies, sex, and power remind us that the categories of being that seemed to specify and define human nature over one hundred years ago have quickly become rather inadequate placeholders for identity."[7]

Still from commercial for Lady Gaga's FAME fragrance

Victor P. Corona, Ph.D., (http://victorpcorona.com) is a sociologist at Hofstra University. He is currently writing a book that traces a social and aesthetic lineage from the Warhol Factory to the Club Kids and the current generation of performers, artists, and nightlife personas in New York.

Transforming Society

2012-09-17T02:17:53Z

Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex

(AK Press, 2011)

Nat Smith and Eric A. Stanley (eds.)

Even though it was over 30 years ago, I remember well the anxiety about entering the penal system: how would I fare in this harsh new world of repression, of regimentation, reputedly rife with violence? For me, for many of us, the saving grace was solidarity from other prisoners as those already established helped us learn to navigate these rocky shoals. But what if you're someone who faces an extra dimension of hostility from the guards, with many prisoners joining staff in abusing you -- not for anything you did but just for who you are? That's the situation for many trans gender and queer prisoners. The isolation, disdain, and violence can be vicious and incessant. This isn't just a problem for trans/queer (T/Q) prisoners; it's an important issue for all of us. Every time we join the dominant powers in society in mistreating others, every time we miss a key dimension of how this anti-human system rules over us, we undermine our ability to resist and to work for strong and supportive communities that can provide the sane and humane alternative to the punitive and damaging prison industrial complex (PIC).

Now we have a wonderful new weapon both for deepening our understanding of the system and for building solidarity in Captive Genders, a collection of essays edited by Eric Stanley and Nat Smith.

This razor sharp, double-edged sword argues effectively both that prison abolition must be central to T/Q liberation struggles and that T/Q self-determination is essential to abolition. The PIC helps produce and physically enforces the gender binary, rigidly defined by birth genitalia rather than self-determination, while attacks on T/Q people divide prisoners and reinforce the repressive powers of the state. For both prison activists and T/Q advocates, all of us need to be "... firmly grounded in the interests, experiences, and agency of the most marginalized within our communities ... " (53). We need to be conscious, as Yasmin Nair reminds us in this volume, how racism, poverty, lack of health care, poor education and limited job prospects affect millions of us in this country.

In this book, "trans/queer " (T/Q) is used as an umbrella term. "Trans" includes all those who express gender differently from the way it is traditionally assigned at birth -- whether as transgender, transsexual, cross-dresser, androgynous, or any other challenge to the strict gender binary and stereotypes. "Queer" refers to people whose sexual desires, identities and practices don't conform to heterosexual norms. The prison industrial complex, with emphasis on the "complex," encompasses the political and economic forces of repression and control: prisons and jails, immigration holding centers, juvenile detention centers, "secure" psychiatric wards, prisoner of war camps, street policing, and the many means of state surveillance and harassment.

Captive Genders is emphatically not about liberal reforms such as passing "hate crimes" legislation. As Morgan Bassichis, Alexander Lee, and Dean Spade argue forcefully in their essay, such laws strengthen the repressive institutions while misidentifying the problem as a "few bad apples," individual bigots. But instead, the problem is endemic to a system based on racism, patriarchy, state violence, and capitalism. And for T/Q people it's not just a question of discrimination but more basically of their very life chances and life spans. T/Q people are more likely to be disowned by their families, kicked out of school, rejected for jobs, denied entry into gender-defined shelters or treatment centers, and unable to get appropriate medical care. These realities often force people into the underground economy, which piggybacks on police bias to make them highly vulnerable to harassment and arrest. And where the various oppressions intersect, people face situations. For example, transwomen of color are subjected to extremely high rates of assault, murder, and imprisonment.

Once inside, prison can become hell. Kim Love recounts how she was regularly raped by a deputy sheriff during her stay in county jail. Then, once in a California state men's prison, a captain assigned her to be the "wife" of a gang leader, as correction officers (COs) provide such sexual access to keep influential prisoners placated. Needless to say, Kim had no say in this forced union, in reality three years of serial rapes, beatings, and abuse, which played out the worst values and practices of male supremacy. On the other hand, transmen in women's facilities, as the interviews summarized by Lori Girshick explain, generally don't have problems from women prisoners, but face all kinds of harassment from the COs.

Oppression takes a toll, including a tragically high suicide rate. But the T/Q prisoners who speak out in this book have strong survival skills, remarkable resilience and a sense of humanity that are impressive and inspiring. The spirit is aptly captured by this quote from Audre Lorde: "Within the war we are all waging with the forces of death, subtle and otherwise, conscious or not -- I am not only a casualty, I am a warrior" (141). Captive Genders opens with the seminal Stonewall Rebellion of June 1969, when sexual and gender outsiders in New York rose up against police harassment and brutality, and the book ends with a Resource List of organizations that fight for T/Q people and against the PIC. Kim Love herself, now out of prison, is a dedicated activist in the Transgender, Gender Variant, Intersex Justice Project.

As several essays (e.g. S. Lamble's) make clear, the path to T/Q self-determination is not the one advocated by some predominantly white and middle class LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) groups: assimilation into the mainstream. Instead the only direction for achieving fundamental change is to join with all of the oppressed -- based on racism, elitism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism -- to transform society. At the same time, T/Q liberation adds an essential dimension to prison abolition, not only in counteracting a division among prisoners but also in showing how the strict enforcement of the gender binary and stereotypes -- the pressures for men to always be "macho" and for women to appear "weak" -- limit everyone's humanity.

Prison abolitionists aren't just advocates for a narrow sector of the oppressed, prisoners. Even more, we are for safe, healthy, self-determining communities that have the resources needed to flourish. The criminal justice system works totally at cross-purposes to that vision. On one level the punitive approach promotes more harm and violence, while the costs of prison drain off public funds needed for positive programs. But the contradiction is even more fundamental. The war on crime and the mushrooming of incarceration -- the U.S. prison population is now eight times what it was in 1973 -- has been the spearhead for turning back the advances by the Black liberation movement and the many other struggles for social justice it helped inspire in the 1960s and early 1970s. The Julia Sudbury essay is particularly good at sketching the history of Black struggle, (and Stephen Dillon's relates the heightening of repression to the imposition of brutal neoliberal economic policies throughout the world). That overwhelming counterattack is a central reason we are so limited today in having strong community organizations that can serve as examples of effective alternative solutions to crime. The answer to our weakness cannot be to strengthen the very forces that ravaged and undermined our communities. We need to do the very opposite: build strong movements and develop solidarity among the oppressed.

Some of the worst conditions prevail in immigration detention centers, where medical neglect has been scandalous. Victoria Arellano was a transwoman from Mexico who had a job and also volunteered at a drug and alcohol facility in Los Angeles. She was HIV+ but maintaining good health with her medications when she was arrested on minor charges and then sent to an immigration detention center in San Pedro in April, 2007. There, denied her AIDS medications, she developed a high fever and vomiting--but still did not receive the needed medical care. Her death after two months of detention, at the age of 23, is unconscionable.

There was another dimension in this tragic situation--the response of her fellow detainees. These men regularly bathed her face with wet washcloths to try to bring down her fever and at the same time assertively demanded the needed medical care. Reportedly at one point 80 detainees refused to line up for count and instead loudly chanted, "Hospital! Hospital! Hospital!" Let's take heart from those men in San Pedro and work full-heartedly for unity among the oppressed, to end the PIC, and to instead develop safe, healthy, self-determining communities for all of us.

*****

David Gilbert is a political prisoner, author, and mentor. He is the author of No Surrender: Writings from an Anti-Imperialist Political Prisoner, a book of essays, and the new memoir Love and Struggle: My Life in SDS, the Weather Underground, and Beyond. Readings from his new memoir by Gilbert, Sundiata Acoli, Mumia Abu-Jamal and others can be heard here.

Pussy Riot: Performance, Politics, and Protest

2012-09-13T19:21:23Z

Of interest to Social Text readers:

Sep 14, 2012 3:30 PM - 6:00 PM
20 Cooper Square, New York, NY | NYU Journalism 7th Floor Commons

The Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia at NYU and the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute present:

Panel Discussion | Pussy Riot: Performance, Politics, and Protest

Please note this event will be streamed live during the event.

Yanni Kotsonis, Director, NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia 
Eliot Borenstein, Professor, NYU Russian & Slavic Studies 
Barbara Browning, Associate Professor, Performance Studies 
Katharine Holt, Ph.D. candidate in Russian literature at Columbia University
 Avital Ronell, University Professor; Professor of German, Comparative Literature, English 
Katrina vanden Heuvel, Editor and Publisher, The Nation

On August 17, a Russian court sentenced three members of the feminist punk-rock performance collective called "Pussy Riot" to two years in a prison camp for "premeditated hooliganism" motivated by "religious hatred or hostility." Six months earlier, the balaclava-clad band members had performed a "punk prayer" at Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior, calling on the Mother of God to remove President Vladimir Putin from office.

Pussy Riot is at the center of domestic controversy in Russia, and their sentence has sparked outrage throughout the world. But what exactly is the significance of the Pussy Riot phenomenon? How does Pussy Riot engage with traditions of dissidence while at the same time frustrate traditional expectations about political protest? How can we understand Pussy Riot in the context of performance art? What does this Russian riot girl movement tell us about feminism and gender politics in post-socialist Russia?

This event is sponsored by The Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia at NYU and the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

Life after the Internet

2012-09-10T13:50:51Z

Barred by law from the internet, an Anonymous hacker relishes "the feeling of being able to close my eyes without being bombarded with flashing shapes or constant buzzing sounds."

Pinkwashing

2012-09-06T02:25:20Z

Collective member Jasbir Puar with Maya Mikdashi on pinkwashing and pinkwatching.