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84 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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The History of Sexuality Vol 1 |
1980 Michel Foucault -Veritable discoursive explosion. Discourse is a systematized method/language that determines how you understand the subject. -Sex becomes about population: we talk about reproduction, not people, birth rates, marriage rates -Power in silence. -Incitement to discourse: confess! |
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“An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” |
1977 Chinua Achebe Art is politics -We are blind (all readers) and accustomed to seeing Africa as this absence, this dark Other to everything, that we don’t even question it, because it keeps being represented as this over and over again. -Even if we excuse Conrad, we can’t excuse ourselves and for our blind reading and refusal to see how it represents Africa -Can this be a great work of art? No -Everything that’s been handed down to us is deeply racist |
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“Who’s Afraid of Critical Race Theory?” |
1995 Derrick A Bell University of Illinois Law Review 4 -“As I see it, critical race theory recognizes that revolutionizing a culture begins w/ the racial assessment of it -Addresses The Bell Curve (1994) by Charles Murray and Richard Herranstein —>attaches great significance to stat that black ppl, on average, score 15pt below whites on IQ test —>also claims that “race and class differences are largely caused by genetic factors…and are immutable” —>even though when they implemented an “oppression factor” (taking into account discrimination Af Ams face) found that blacks performed 15pt higher than whites -Whites threatened by black success—>race riots, turmoil, etc -Argues that Bell Curve authors intentionally falsified data “to spare blacks the reprisals and even bloody retaliation they would have suffered had the real truth regarding superior test performances come out” —>might also lead whites to ? if they had been similarly disadvantaged b/c of class—>political upheaval -To see things as they really are, you must imagine them for what they might be. -The critical race theory perspective offers blacks and their white allies insight, spiked w/ humor, as a balm for this latest insult” and prepare for others “certain to follow” -Defines CRT as “a body of scholarship, now about a decade old,” mainly POC, against racism —> writing and lecturing is characterized by frequent use of the 1st person, storytelling, narrative, allegory, interdisciplinary treatment of law, and the unapologetic use of creativity” —>highly suspicious of liberal agenda; more committed to egalitarianism -Tension bt radical critique of the law (which is normatively deconstructionist) and a radical emancipation by the law (which is normatively deconstructionist) (modernist and postmodernist) -Sees law as “not a formal mechanism for determining outcomes in a neutral fashion” but disjointed, illogical -CRT not cohesive, but still committed to fighting racism and scholarly resistance; *deliberate* -“see all-inclusiveness as the ideal b/c of our belief in collective wisdom” —> [too multicultural?] -Emphasize own marginality —> position holds hope of transformative resistance -Importance of using stories in arguments since ppl “enjoy stories and will often suspend their beliefs, listen to the story, and then compare tier views, not w/ mine, but w/ those expressed in the story -Story of The Space Traders: trade black ppl for environmental resources. -Issue of poor whites still racist against blacks but not resentful of rich whites —> whiteness as a **property right** ***-Whites are oblivious to the worlds w/in worlds that existed just beyond the edge of their awareness and yet were present in their very mindset (905) -Subversiveness of slave songs and spirituals -Like Af Am Spirituals, CRT writing aims to communicate understanding and reassurance to needy souls trapped in a hostile world -To critics, quotes Louis Armstrong: Man, if you don’t know, don’t mess with it |
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The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism. |
1988 Henry Louis Gates -Many African Americanists see him as very conservative and assimilationist -Signifyin a political and artistic practice that provides them with two separate meanings and two separate audiences. Resistant subtext. Yoruba traditions and Derrida’s version of Saussurean linguistics. Double meanings. -Gates emphasizes that these are two separate tracks that African Americanists must bridge and occupy that center space that will never be combined completely successfully -Using white tools and using black lit -White theory can allow us to 1. look at black literature as literature and 2. In the fact of race, even if it’s a social construct, that has real life effects, blackness when read through Derrida transforms deconstructionism for the better. -Must draw on black vernacular. Don’t be ashamed of using “black dialect” if you’re a Harvard prof. It’s one of your great strengths -Doesn’t believe in authenticity but also experience is an important tool -One of Gates’ goals is pedagogical: wants black and brown people in white universities (not black ones) teaching white and black and brown studies about these cultural traditions |
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The Black Atlantic |
1993 Paul Gilroy -Gigantic turn in discussions about the African diaspora, postcolonialism, critical race theory, blackness, -Refers to Gates and Gates relies heavily on Gilroy -Postwar British context. Black Britons. Britians were never solely white--no authentic british identity. -Criticizes post colonialists interested in African nationalism (Fanon) make the error of enforcing a binary representation of race. Never “us v them.” Always cultural, genealogical exchange. -Metaphor of black Atlantic/ship -Cultural theory of Marx doesn’t work: global structures of class and inequality don’t cut it--there’s something else happening here c-Critique not just towards white cultures, but African Americanists or Africanists: essentialized transhistorical concept of race, ethnicity, etc that results in nationalism -Not exclusively sticking to black british life. Can also claim Shakespeare and Ruskin just like any other Briton. -Idea of black people sharing something intrinsically is anathema (Souls of Black Folk) |
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Orientalism |
1978 Edward Said -Self situates, which is something that later scholars also do. -Orientalism: 1. Someone who studies the Orient, 2. binary mode of thought, and 3. form of discourse, cultural imperialism. -The very study of the field itself is based on the opposition of the Occident and Orient. Orientalism is the study of the West and how it identifies an Other than serves to uphold and bolster scholarly and economic/political structures that supplement and shore up the discourses of colonialism. ***-Must understand Orientalism as a discourse, a fantasy, myth, and theory -Sees literary and cultural movements as political. -This constructed divide creates the modern British citizenship -This is a new idea, that literature is political in this way -Says he uses tools of master to dismantle master’s house -This lets off our writers: we’re not giving them enough credit or responsibility. These writers were deeply aware of political realities of empire. Not recognizing it is a form of critical blindness. -Reading on the surface; interested in exteriority of texts. Takes author on her word and focuses on what’s actually there. So not a deconstructionist. -Also not deconstructionist: Foucault, I owe you a lot, but I believe the author is a hugely important actor in the creation of these sorts of discourses. -For him you’re acknowledging you’re a body, a name, a history, is a way to avoid the trap of refusing to acknowledging your own participation in power/system. “Inventory the traces upon me, the Oriental subject, of the culture whose domination has been so powerful a factor in the life of all Orientals” (2010). -(Vs Toni Morrison who sees white Am men constructing identity vs slavery, not the East like Said. |
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Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination |
1992 Toni Morrison -I was interested…in the way black ppl ignite critical moments of discovery or change or emphasis in lit not written by them 1.the pervasive use of black images and people in expressive prose 2.in the shorthand, the taken-for-granted assumptions that lie in their usage 3.the sources of these images and the effect they have on the lit imagination and its product -The imagination that produces work which bears and invites rereading…implies a shareable world and an endlessly flexible language -Whole readership has almost always been assumed by most any writer -Blackness and Af Am and Am history haunt white writer’s writing —>a real or fabricated Africanist pre scene was crucial to their sense of Americanness —>the study of is called American Africanism —>important b/c through a close look at lit “blackness,” the nature—even the cause—of literary :whiteness” -the habit of ignoring race is understood to be graceful, even generous, liberal gesture -Looking at racism is often asymeticrical—used to look at “the impact of racism on those who perpetuate it” -Reads as a writer, not a reader —>how does lit utterance arrange itself when it tries to imagine an Africanist other? -The fabrication of an Africanist persona is reflexive an extraordinary meditation on the self -Analyzes Arthur Gordon Pym—No early Am writer is more important to the concept of Am Africanism than Poe -these images of blinding whiteness seem to function as both antidote for and meditation on the shadow that is companion to this whiteness—a dark and abiding presence that moves the hearts and texts of Am lit w/ fear and lining -Why was young Am so interested in the Gothic and Romance? —>the terror of human freedom, the possibility of conquering that fear, that darkness, —>transferred internal conflicts to a “blank darkness,” to bound and silenced bodies (39) -Nothing highlighted freedom—if it did not in fact create it—like slavery -Africanism defines Am identity—it may be something the US cannot do without -Huck Finn: ending describes the paradoxical nature of white freedom—>Huck needs Jim for his own identity -Thus whiteness is ultimately mute, meaningless, unfathomable, pointless… -Race has become metaphorical—a way of referring to and disguising forces, events, classes, and expressions of social decay and economic division |
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What Was African-American Literature? |
2011 Kenneth Warren “A black man, Du Bois famously said, was “a person who must ride Jim Crow in Georgia.” So once no one had to ride Jim Crow in Georgia, what would a black man be?” -“Historically speaking, the collective enterprise we now know as Af Am or black lit is of rather recent vintage -It was a postempancipation phenomenon that gained its coherence as an undertaking in the social world defined by the system of Jim Crow segregation -the mere existence of literary texts does not necessarily indicate the existence of a literature -Prior to emancipation black Americans were just writers -After emancipation, this coalesced into a cognizant tradition, Negro/Af Am Lit -Instrumental (tool like Sutton Griggs) or Indexical (part of identity, like Claude McKay (writing an end in itself) -Those like Wheatly sought to produce lit, not *a* (cohesive) lit -Gates wants critics to look at black lit in regards to its artistic merits while Warren says it’s not possible b/c black lit wouldn’t exist if didn’t have to prove they weren’t inferior (Barbara Smith?) -Fighting oppression also gave black writer’s lives meaning —> they became “enlightened” b/c they had to fight and not just accept the status quo —> so without that fight, which is what they fight for, wouldn’t they become ordinary just like whites? -Suffering brings deeper knowledge, but some, like R Wright at times, wished to live an easy “surface” life —>yet “giving up” being black and merely assimilating would constitute a terrible loss. -Therefore, suffering, and not racial connectedness, binds groups together? No more cohesive black culture if no more oppression? -What if race is skin deep? -Regardless of answer, Af Am writers know their writing was constrained by Jim Crow and when/if Jim Crow disappeared, their writing would change -[Vs Michelle Alexander who says Jim Crow hasn’t really ended and plus it’s about caste, not class, and class is often code for race] -Af Am lit was more concerned w/ what it was going to be rather than what it already was -Later 20th C (around 50s) black critics made their bones by taking down the work of black predecessors -But they didn’t think much of Am lit in general either —> racism has strutted its growth (like Faulkner) -In 1960s, debate of whether black lit was particular (to black experience) or universal. -Af Am lit was “a lit in which claiming to be different from and claiming to be the same as the dominant society could appear to have = critical force -it is my contention here that to understand both the past and present, we have to put the past behind us. -Walter Benn Michaels historicism: the process by which the past (what happened) becomes our past (what happened to us) -His point here is not that the civil rights movement rid America of racism. It is instead that the way we do inequality now (including the way we do racial inequality) is not the way we did it then, and that acting as if it is constitutes both an intellectual mistake (you get the history wrong) and a political mistake (you end up making things more unequal instead of less). -“The on-going anti-Jim Crow commitment to proportionality as a marker of racial justice, he argues, has instead functioned to legitimate inequality, and the ongoing commitment to African American literature (and indeed to African American identity itself) is a class project, in the service of both black and white elites.” -“the reality is that socioeconomic status is by far the largest factor in determining who goes to college and who doesn’t. So black students are still excluded but it’s their poverty and not their color that’s excluding them.” -“But insofar as poverty is the problem, Warren argues, history has nothing to do with the solution. After all, from the standpoint of the poor, why does the history of how they became poor matter? -Can’t rely on your identity; must look to your conditions: so some black people might share more in common with poor whites than rich blacks. Cohen thinks similarly with queers. |
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Visible Identities |
2005 Linda Martin Alcoff -Begins w/ personal account of Panamanian professor/father being pulled over by US soldiers in US occupied Panama -Argument “beings form the premise that structural power relations such as those created by global capital are determinant over the meanings of our identities, the possibilities of social interaction, and the formations of difference —>Nonetheless, the focal point of power most often today operates precisely through the v personal sphere of our visible social identities -Race, ethnicity, gender are “the most telling predicts of social power and success” —> “reveal that class works through, rather than alongside, the categories of visible identities” [VS Warren] -Tries to develop an ontology of identity…to understand their historical and contextual nature, and through this, to come to terms w/ their significance in our lives -Ideology of individualism -Urges for unification of wring class and warns against identity politics that divide and confuse -Argues “that the acknowledgment of the important differences in social identity does not lead inexorably to political relativism or fragmentation, but that, quite the reverse, it is the refusal to acknowledge the importance of the differences in our identities that has led to distrust, miscommunication, and thus disunity -[What Black feminists have long been saying -Must know each other’s differences to know the person better and to see how alike you really are —> acknowledging difference leads to acknowledging similarities -In our society we believe the real is visible. If someone passes as something else and is discovered, what is hidden becomes the real -Argues that many academics are suspicious of identity -When issues of race crop up, common response —> not all white people and of gender —> not all men —>universalism over identity -Identity politics (that identity matters) 1st raised by the Combahee River Collective (1997) -Foucault: discourse as an event, which would incorporate into analysis not only the words spoken but also the speaker —>assess on idea of identity: A young athlete sayin in-line staking is easy -“social identities are relational, contextual, and fundamental to the self -divides identity (they don’t always match): 1. public identity: our socially perceived self within community 2. lived subjectivity: who we understand ourselves to be -can’t be separated but still not wholly dependent. Interelational (not exterior/interior) -X poststructuralism: The rejection of subjectivity unintentionally collides w/ this “genetic human” thesis that particularities of individuals are irrelevant or improper influences on knowledge -Cultural feminists vs poststructuralists: Are there women? -She wants to combine the concept of identity politics w/ a conception of the subject as positionally, we can conceive of the subject as non-essentialized and emergent from historical experience and yet objectively located in describable social structures and relations" |
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Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza |
1987 Gloria Anzaldua -Emphasizes linguistic, regional specificity. When you translate something you lose meaning -DuBois: intellectual integration -She argues that we need to work together. Anglos need us because there’s a wound that needs healing -Multiple consciousness, instead of double consciousness which is unlivable -Bhabha and hybridity and the edge. He is high theory, one language, and uses Indian sources but predominantly situating self with being aligned with Western elites -Discusses emotions, sex, bodies, feeding people, melding through the bodies of the metisza (which many feminists of color critique since these are same roles that oppressors use.) --Kind of like Souls of Black Folk--literature is theory, theory can be literature. Uses old stories, contemporary poetry, some of her own imagination, Aztec mythology, which are sources of philosophy that remain untapped for her. All of these ideas aren’t new. These things are as relevant, even more so, than strictly speaking theoretical texts. -Criticized for: saying that everything wrong with Chican@ comes from imperialism (like some African Americans who say that queerness comes from imperialism) -Psyches mirror border towns -Emphasizes listening to your queer folk -Connects with idea of performativity and subject: you are your history, your past, and the matter of your body, the way you speak and move goes back in a transhistorical self-citing and self-acknowledgement that we bring into important conversation with others and others with whom we relate are profoundly distinct -Critique her for “magical/wise brown person” -After her, people don’t translate Spanish or other native languages. Idea being that that’s how I need to say it. This is a Derridean move in that translation is brutal. Translation eliminates nuance, betweenness, borderness -”The dominant white culture is killing us slowly with its ignorance” (108). We need intimate knowledge of the Other, the Other’s history, food (bell hooks “eating the Other;” the only way whites experience other cultures is for food” -Emphasizing complexity without sacrificing specificity -Reject idea of “pure” blood line, one of the Anglo constructions of race -English colonial model that assumes races are separated fundamentally can’t understand Spanish colonial model with multiple gradations of race, culture, and people are flexible among and between those, to a degree. Not “sole” ethnic quality. -Hispanic is so much more than we may realize |
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"Sex in Public" |
1998 Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner “The aim of this paper is to describe what we want to promote as the radical aspirations of queer culture building: not just a safe zone for queer sex but the changed possibilities of identity, intelligibility, publics, culture, and sex that appear when the heterosexual couple is no longer the referent or the privileged ex of sexual culture” (548) “Radical aspirations of queer culture building” -We regulate each other’s bodies through illusions to privacy -Participation in national culture is participation in privacy and heterosexuality, which is allowed this bubble of privacy and nuance and everything outside of that is unhealthy, bad, evil, immoral -Zoning laws are said to protect families and children but are a superstructural means of cloaking and reifying what are in fact structural, economic realities. Zoning laws in NY and destroying gay culture -A culture that reifies the couple model, heteronormative. I.e. everything designed for family of four (cars, movie ticket specials, etc). -Queer counterpublics: other forms of intimacy being recognized as valid such as other family structures -Queer: working class people, people of color. Intimacy has been privatized and needs to be made public -Castro district in San Francisco transforms life across US and globally. That is a queer public and when publics like that disappear it’s akin to a culture being destroyed. -Heteronormativity: It est belonging, citizenship rights, as requiring that sexuality, rendered increasingly private, secret, and panopticon and regulating each other -Lie of heternormativity: no one is actually like this, but trying to keep up appearances and police one another |
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Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment |
1990 Patricia Hill Collins -Af Am W’s oppression has encompassed 3 interpendent dimensions 1st economic oppressionL the exploitation of BW’s labor essential to US capitalism… Kept busy so had few opportunities to do intellectual work as it has been traditional defined 2nd the political dimension: denied Af Am W the rights and privileges routinely extend to White male citizens 3rd ideological dimension: controlling images applied to BW that originated during the slave era *mammies, jezebels, and breeder women of slavery to the smiling Aunt Jemimas, Black prostitutes, and welfare mothers [Ideology refers to the body of ideas reflecting the interests of a group of ppl] -All 3 work to suppress the ideas of BW intellectuals and to protect elite white male interests and world v iews -Also Western feminists have suppressed BW’s ideas…to concerned w/ White, middle-class W’s issues -Also from Black organizations who only give them subordinate roles and don’t stress BW’s issues [Connection w/ Barbara Smith who looks at WW and BM’s misreading of Sula -As a historically oppressed group, US BW have produced social thought designed to oppose oppression. Not only does the form assumed by this thought diverge from standard academic theory—it can take the form of poetry, music, essays, and the like—but the *purpose* of BW’s collective thought is distinctly different” -BW’s participation in constructing Af Am culture in all-Black settings and the distinctive perspectives gained from their outsider-within placement in domestic work provide the material backdrop for a unique BW’s standpoint -Different gender ideologies and expectations for WW and BW -References S Truth: “Rather than accepting the existing assumptions about what W is and then trying to prove that she fit the standards, Truth challenged the v standards themselves” (15) —> heractions demonstrate the process of deconstruction—namely, exposing a concept as ideological or culturally constructed rather than as natural or a simple reflection of reality -Deconstructed concept of woman -Shows that BW intellectuals are not a female segment of W E B DuBoi’s notion of the “talented 10th” -Af Am W’s social location as a collectivity has fostered distinctive albeit heterogeneous Black feminist intellectual traditions that I call Black feminist thought (17) -4 basic components of Black feminist thought: its thematic content, its interpretive frameworks, its epistemological approaches, and its significance for empowerment -Notes intersectionality from Crenshaw and matrix of domination -Intersectionality: refers to particular forms of intersection oppressions, for example, intersections of race and gender, or of sexuality and nation. Reminds us that oppression cannot be reduced to 1 fundamental type, and that oppressions work together in producing injustice -Matrix of domination: refers to how these intersection oppressions are actually organized -Uses “we” and “our” to show how she’s connected to her discussion: feeling one’s way an unavoidable epistemological stance for BW intellectuals -Black feminist thought constitutes one part of a much larger social justice project that goes far beyond the experiences of Af Am W. |
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“Combahee River Collective Statement” |
1978 Combahee River Collective -Deeply suspicious of Am indivdiualism -“The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression -We "see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are ***interlocking*** -The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives -Contemp BF is the outgrowth of countless generations of personal sacrifice, militancy, and work by our mothers and sisters (262) -Needed to develop politics that were antiracist (unlike those of WW) and antis exist (unlike those of BM and WM) -All BW faced oppression: for example, when we were told in the same breath to be quiet both for the sake of being “ladylike” and to make us less objectionable in the eyes of white ppl (262-3) -Feelings of craziness before becoming conscious of the concepts of sexual politics, patriarchal rule, and most importantly, feminism, the political analysis and practice that we women use to struggle against our oppression -Consciousness-raising/life-sharing helped them recognize the commonality of our experiences and to subsequently build a politics to better their lives -Above all our politics initially sprang from the shared belief that all BW are inherently valuably, that our liberation is a necessity not as an adjunct to somebody else’s but b/c of our need as human persons for autonomy” (263) -“This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of *****identity politics**** -Although we are feminists and lesbians, we feel solidarity w/ progressive BM and do not advocate the fractionalization that WW who are separatists demand -Agree w/ Marx, but needs to be taken further: We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and antiracist revolution will guarantee our liberation (264-5) -People aren’t merely faceless, sexless workers -X biological determinism -The inclusiveness of our politics makes us concerned w/ any situation that impinges upon the lives of W and those of 3rd world and working ppl in general |
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“Queer Theory Revisited” |
2011 Michael Hames-Garcia -Queer theory always centered on upwardly mobile, upper class, interested in monogamy, white subject -Openness of queer evacuates the way different queer subjects face fundamentally different forms of oppression while eliminating realities of class and white guilt -Feminisms, esp WOC feminisms, postcolonial feminisms, are fundamentally the revolutionary origins of any kind of queer analysis. They’re not separate, they’re not fused, they’re the same -Intersectional becomes all encompassing term that doesn’t allow for recognizing uniqueness of vectors of identity. He says that focusing on the intersection, where vectors (class, race, gender, language, etc) come together and are seen as equally influential become meaningless. It hints at the universal, that what it means to have one of these vectors makes people the same -Prefers interconnected: we can’t talk about them as separate but they do need to be distinct. -Black feminists: interlocking |
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Feminist Theory: From the Margins to the Center |
1984 bell hooks “To be in the margin is to be part of the whole but outside the main body. We could enter that world [the white world] but we could not live there. We had always to return to the margin, to cross the tracks, to shacks and abandoned houses on the edge of town -Living on the edge, we developed a particular way of seeing reality. We looked both from the outside in and from the inside out. We focused our attention on the center as well as on the margin. We understood both.” -Critiques Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which only really talks about white middle or upper class college educated married women -“There is much evidence substantiating the reality that race and class identity creates differences in quality of life, social status, and lifestyle that take precedence over the common experience women share—differences which are rarely transcended” -Feminist struggle so easily co-opted to serve the interests of conservative and liberal feminists since feminism in the US has so far been a bourgeois ideology -Defines oppression (no choices) -When black women critique white women’s actions, white women feel like they’re the victims and get angry, see black women as domineering, etc -“WW and BM have it both ways. They can act as oppressor or be oppressed” (15) -Critiques feminism “not in an attempt to diminish feminist struggle but to enrich, to share in the work of making a liberator ideology and a liberator movement” -W in feminist reform movements were inclined to think less about transforming society and more about fighting for = and = rights w/ M -Feminist consciousness raising needs to be more radical, teach them about capitalism, about new political systems, attic maternalism, exposed exploitation of W and M globally -Feminist movement to end sexist oppression can be successful only if we are committed to revolution, to the set of a new social order (159) -Feminist must understand that we have all acted in complicity w/ the existing oppressive system and all need to make a conscious break w/ the system -Any effort to make feminist revolution here can be aided by the example of liberation struggles led by oppressed ppl globally who resist formidable powers |
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Speculum of the Other Woman |
1974 Luce Irigaray -For the profession of psychoanalysis, Irigaray believes, female sexuality has remained a "dark continent," unfathomable and unapproachable; its nature can only be misunderstood by those who continue to regard women in masculine terms. -brings to the fore the masculine ideology implicit in psychoanalytic theory and in Western discourse in general: woman is defined as a disadvantaged man, a male construct with no status of her own. |
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“Melville’s Fist: The Execution of ‘Billy Budd’” |
1979 Barbara Johnson -“Each character sees the other only though the mirror of his own reflection” (588) -“Claggart, looking at Billy, mistakes his own twisted face for the face of an enemy, while Billy, recognizing in Claggart the negativity he smothers in himself, strikes out” (587) -Both die because both ways of reading are destructive -“For Vere, the functions and meanings of signs are neither transparent nor reversible, but fixed by socially determined convention” (590) -“While Billy and Claggart read spontaneously and directly, Vere’s reading often makes use of precedent, allusions, and analogies” ***-Can’t read lang as absolute, timeless, universal law; must take into account history -“In the final analysis, the ? is not: what did Melville really think of Captain Vere? but rather: what is at stake i his way of presenting him?” (592) -Need to judge his judging, not judge him (but then again, judgment does result in death) |
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“Work, Immigration, Gender: New Subjects of Cultural Politics” |
1998 Lisa Lowe Global feminization of labor -Global third world: pockets of 3rd world in 1st work. Working class women no matter where they’re living they’re in a different historical time and place than the rest of the population around them -Reading lit as testimony/political and testimony as literary/theoretical -Disidentification (Munoz) (distinct from intersectionality because she argues that there are those who are multiply outside or at the margins of racial/sexual/gender mainstream of a culture). -“Throughout lived social relations, it is apparent that labor is gendered, sexuality is racialized, and race is class-associated. ”-People who occupy multiple sites (worker, Asian, American, woman) are forced to identify with mainstream culture but the way they do it transforms mainstream culture (kind of similar to Bhabha’s rep of British mining women: labor rights movement and women’s rights movement, but can’t go with just one so create a new one) -For her, these women are also necessarily subjected to/interpellated by their own specific cultural circumstances. In a simultaneously transformative/hybridized space of bring together their Asian culture and American culture in a way that’s livable for themselves. |
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Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection |
1982 Julia Kristeva -the abject marks a "primal order" that escapes signification in the symbolic order; the term is used to refer to the human reaction (horror, vomit) to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object, or between the self and the other. -More specifically, Kristeva associates the abject with the eruption of the Real into our lives -"A wound with blood and pus, or the sickly, acrid smell of sweat, of decay, does not signify death. In the presence of signified death—a flat encephalograph, for instance—I would understand, react, or accept. No, as in true theater, without makeup or masks, refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this sh** are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. (Powers 3)" -According to Kristeva, the best modern literature explores the place of the abject, a place where boundaries begin to break down, where people are confronted with an archaic space before such linguistic binaries as self/other or subject/object. -According to Kristeva, literature explores the way that language is structured over a lack, a want. She privileges poetry, in particular, because of poetry's willingness to play with grammar, metaphor and meaning, thus laying bare the fact that language is at once arbitrary and limned with the abject fear of loss: "Not a language of the desiring exchange of messages or objects that are transmitted in a social contract of communication and desire beyond want, but a language of want, of the fear that edges up to it and runs along its edges" (Powers 38 ). |
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“Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses” |
1984 Chandra Talpade Mohanty -Observes that colonization has taken a wide meaning in recent scholarship --> "almost invariably implies a relation of structural discrimination and a suppression--often violent-of the heterogenity of the subjects in ? -Wants to analyze the production of the 3rdWW as a singular monolithic subject in some recent Western feminist texts -appropriation and codification of "scholarship -Also to draw attention to the similar affects of various textual strategies used by Western feminists that codify Others as non-Western and hence themselves as (implicitly) Western -No such thing as apolitical scholarship -Creation of the "3rd World Difference" that stable, ahistorical something that apparently oppresses most if not all W in these countries--> also homogenizes 3WW -Leads many 3WW to conflate Western feminism w/ imperialism 1. The assumprion of W as an already constituted coherent group which can be applied universally and across-cultures 2.uncritical use of paritcular methodologies in providing "proof" of univerality and cross-cultural validity 3. a specifically political principle underlying methodologies ie the model of power and struggle they imply and suggest -All result in average 3WW as uneducated, sexually oppressed, and helpless victims -Stresses need for careful, historically specific complex generlaizations -Strategic coalitions which construct oppositional political identities for themselves are broad in generalization, but the analysis of these group identities cannot be based on universalistic, ahistorical categories -Western feminist colonialist move: turns themselves into subjects and 3WW as objects --> 3rd World Difference -Ties in w/ humanism, which takes Western male as subject and "disinterested," "objective" |
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“(Re)Writing the Chicana Postcolonial: From Traitor to 21st Century Interpreter” |
2002 Naomi H. Quiñonez Primer for Chicana feminism -la malinche, retelling of the story from whore/mother/traitor to something empowering and productive about serving as inbetween as a cultural, linguistic translator -Maniche-baiting by Chicano men -Code-switching a political act, makes non-Spanish speaker the Other -Frantz Fanon: we need a nation to be a people. Anzaldua, first wave chicana feminists, reject -Chicana feminism: engagement with intellectual tradition that doesn’t have to claim a singular school, tradition, approach. Can cite theory and discuss experience and talk myth -Cultural nationalism: Chicano selfhood. Celebrate culture, not geographic entity. Separate within a larger culture. |
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Sentimental Men |
1999 Anthony Rotundo |
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Epistemology of the Closet |
1994 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick -“The book will argue that an understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition; and it will assume that the appropriate place for that critical analysis to begin is from the relatively decentered perspective of modern gay and anti homophobic theory” (1) -The contradiction bt seeing homo/heterosexual definition on the one hand as an issue of active importance primarily for a small, distinct, relatively fixed homosexual minority (what I refer to as a minoritizing view). and seeing it on the other hand as an issue of continuing, determinative importance in the lives of people across the spectrum of sexualities (what I refer to as a universalizing view) -Argues that “the relations of the closet—the relations of the known and the unknown, the explicit and the inexplicit around homo/heterosexual definition—have the potential for being peculiarly revealing, in fact, about speech acts more generally” (3) -“Closetedness” itself is a performance initiated as such by the speech act of a silence” -Also specific speech acts with coming out -Can’t reduce sexuality to gender -I want to challenge the assumption that feminism is or should be the privileged site of a theory of sexuality. -“some dimensions of sexuality might be tied, not to gender, but *instead* to differences or similarities of race or class” (31) Melville -Story can be “read as an account of the interplay bt minoritizing and universalizing understandings of homo/heterosexual definition, has tutored out to be the moment of the death of Claggart, the man through whom a minority definition becomes visible (127) -Shows fantasy trajectory toward a life *after the homosexual*” (127) -“the glamorized, phosphorescent romantic relations bt Vere and the doomed Billy constitute the shinning furrow of the disappearance of the homosexual" |
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“Toward a Black Feminist Criticism” |
1982 Barbara Smith Part of Combahee River Collective -One of the big reasons black women’s writing has been undervalued is 1. because of racism and sexism, an additional burden to prove black people are human and black women are human, and 2. Because they’re black when they’re read as just feminist it seems like bad writing and when we only read them as black then questions of gender disappear (and critiques of black misogyny are seen as betrayals of creating celebratory, unifying black canon) -As lit critic: argues that theory is political and vice versa. Daily life is political and a act of reading and cultural production. -(She’s a total essentialist) |
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De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography |
1992 Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, eds. -Neocolonization: globalization and increased technology -Have problem with recent trendy use of term colonization, since in a sense every body is colonized in some way -“If decolonization holds out the promise of a change in subjects, so universalized a notion of colonization forecloses that possibility. B/c no one can escape the realm of “the subjected,” b/c decolonization remains a utopian dream, no one set of political actions assumes legitimacy, efficacy, or a prompt utility. The colonized subject is effectively stripped of agency” (xiv) -Also part of trend of Western theorizing to erase the heterogeneity as well as its agency of the subject ie feminist theories that hypothesize a universally colonized “woman,” universally subjected to “patriarchal” oppression -As bell hooks and Spivak have argued, privileging the oppression of gender over and above other oppressions effectively erases the complex and often contradictory positioning of the subject. -Gayatri Spivak: “the situation of the subject(s) of post-modern neo-colonization must be rigorously distinguished from the situation of immigrants, who are still caught in some way w/in structures of ‘colonial’ subject-production; and, esp, from the historical problem of ethnic oppression on 1st World soil” (xv) -Feminist insistence of global sisterhood of oppressed women another form of colonization -But also concept of colonization too carefully circumscribed w/ specific historical processes and geographical venues also has limitations -Thinking broadly of the constitutive nature of subjectivity and precisely of the differential deployments of gendered subjectivity helps us tease out complex and entangled strands of oppression and domination -Feminism can still be useful, esp in critiquing postcolonial theories that assume universal subject and/or leave out women’s considerations (xvi) -Judith Butler: agency “located w/in the possibility of a variation on the[e] repetition” of certain “rule-bound discourses” |
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“Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” |
1997 Hortense J. Spillers, From Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism |
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“Can the Subaltern Speak?” |
1983 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak -Die hard deconstructionist -Making this theoretical intersectionality. I’m all of this (deconstructionist, feminist, Marxist) and none because I use them to carve out a space that is heavily influenced by all of them but unique unto itself. -Subaltern, develops Gramsci’s idea who applies it to the proletariat, and she applies it distinctly. Stands in “ambiguous relation to power--subordinate to it but never fully consenting to its rule, never adopting the dominant point of view or vocabulary as expressive of its own identity” (2194) -Early on: answer is no. But she retreats from that argument later. Potential the subaltern speaks but it cannot be heard. -Colonial subject, instead of feeling oppressed, says yes to the law of the father, goes to Oxford, etc. -According to deconstructionist and Western academy, subalterns can speak for themselves as they come to “enlightenment,” but this process of internalization that 3rd world women can understand the ways they’re oppressed, can understand how they’ve been [brainwashed] it, and can speak to these theorists/the academy. Can’t get away from it, it enables conversation, but still problematic. -She’s asking what is her role? She’s effectively the Indian intelligentsia. -For Spivak, Said’s seeds of feminism ain’t good enough. Need to go further. “So called” female agency is manipulated through structures of gender that are culturally specific but are nevertheless the same across the board. 3rd world women suffer from patriarchy and colonialism -Colonial subject, instead of feeling oppressed, says yes to the law of the father, goes to Oxford, etc. -She wouldn’t know what the subaltern would say because she’s not of them, can’t translate for them. -(Wollstonecraft interested in middle class/bourgeois, not workers or rich people because they’re so removed from everyday reality as we recognize it that no true transformation can occur there. Kind of like Spivak: needs bridge group bt subaltern and elite.) -Kind of like Lenin, proletariat can’t just be expected to have consciousness, need someone to pull them out. -Once you represent the subaltern it is no longer the subaltern. When someone can speak their oppression then they’re no longer subaltern, they’re in buffer group. -Strategic essentialism |
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West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns |
1992 Jane Tompkins |
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“The Progress of Gender: Whither ‘Women’”? |
2002 Robyn Wiegman From Women’s Studies on Its Own: A Next Wave Reader in Institutional Change |
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“Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” |
1997 Cathy Cohen A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies -highlights limits of a les and gay political agenda based on a civil rights strategy, where assimilation into and replication of dominant institutions are the goal -Despite the possibility invested in the idea of queerness and the practice of queer politics, I argue that a truly radical or transformative politics has not resulted from queer activism -Instead, often reinforce binary of hetero and everything else "queer" -(How) can we construct a new politics? -->a politics where the nonnormative and marginal positions of punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens for ex as the basis for progressive transformative coalition work -Need to create a space in opposition to dominant norms, a transformaitve space -Queer theory reveals constructedness of categories but also power invested w.in these categories -Queer politics: in your face politics of a younger generation, thereby confronting normative power -->unlike other social change movements, seeks to destabalize identity -Argues that queer politics has not emerged as an encompassing challenge to systems of domination and oppression like heteronormativity -->even though queer politics seeks to deconstruct, it stabilizes queer/straight binary -solution? ***Intersectional analysis*** (quotes Combahee) -and realize the ways our multiple identities work to limit the entitlement and status of being hetero, like welfare queens -also a left analysis and elft politics aware that while fighting racism you're also fighting classism, sexism, etc -Need to show systematic relationship am,ong forms of domination -Doesnt identify self as queer anything (common w/ POC, too narrow, feel alienated) -Explores "some of the ways in which nonnormative heterosexuality has been controlled and regulated through the state and systems of marginalization -->black slaves, although wanting to form hetero partnerships, were denied marriage -->also interracial relationships, single/black mothers, forced sterilization of POC (and poor/incompetent whites) ****-I am suggesting that the process of movement building be rooted not in our shared history or identity, but in our shared marginal relationship to dominant power which normalizes, legitimizes, and privileges -Need to complicate and destabilize concepts of identities and communities --> not calling for destruction or abandonment of identity categories -Recognize that the gov's abandonment of gay men in issue of health care resembles the abandonment of poor POC in prison in regards to health care |
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"Stolen From Our Bodies: First Nations Two-Spirits/Queers and the Journey to a Sovereign Erotic." |
2004 Qwo-Li Driskill American Indian Quarterly -Healing our sexualities as First Nations ppl is braided w/ the legacy of historical trauma and the ongoing process of decolonization. -Two Spirits are integral to this struggle -Sexual assult is an explicit act of colonization and a colonial form of violence and oppression -Healing the spirit of the individual will eventually spread to healing the spirit of family and this in turn will spread out into the communities -Soverign Erotic: an erotic wholeness healded and/or healing from the historical trauam of 1st Nations ppl -Comes from Audre Lorde-->erotic knowledge becomes a way to analyze all aspects of experience -Individual erotic cyclical w/ communities -2 SPirit shows distinction from white LGBT groups --> not meant as a monolithic term. Words like trans or gay don't fully work bc they embody Euro ideas of identity/relationships -As Native ppl, our erotic lives and identities have been colonized along w/ our homelands -Stolen from our land/stolen from our bodies -A masculinity rooted in genocide breeds a culture of sexual abuse. -Argues that sexism is a Euro problem brought to their communities -A colonized sexuality is one in which we have internalized the sexual values of dominant culture --> must unmask and exorcise the specters of conquistadors, priests, politicians from our psyches and spirits -Calls for creation of our own Sovereign Erotic lit -The image of the queer Indian challenges Am conceptions of Natives -Lesbian 2 spirit erotic seen as even more threatening --> need to take control and not police own sexualities -We were stolen from our bodies, but now we are taking ourselves back" |
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Queer Indigenous Studies |
2011 Qwo-Li Driskill et al |
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Female Masculinity |
1998 Jack/Judith Halberstam -“Female masculinities are framed as the rejected scraps of dominant masculinity in order that male masculinity may appear to be the real thing” (1) -As details the many ways in which female masculinity has been blatantly ignored both in the culture at large and w/in academic studies of masculinity. -masculinity becomes legible as masculinity where and when it leaves the white male middle-class body -Female masculinity generally received by hetero- and homo-normative cultures as a pathological sign of misidentification and maladjustment, as a longing to be and to have a power that is always just out of reach (9) -“I am not suggesting in this book that we follow the futile path of what Foucault calls “saying no to power,” but I am asserting that power may inhere within different forms of refusal: “Well, I don’t care.” -What of a biological female who presents as butch, passes as male in some circumstances and reads as butch in others, and considers herself not to be a woman but maintains distance from the category “man”? (21) -For such a subject, identity might best be described as process with multiple sites for becoming and being” -Bathroom problem for butches -Argues that “thirdness” merely balances the binary system and, furthermore, tends to homogenize many diff gender variations under the banner of “other” (28) |
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In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives |
2005 Jack/Judith Halberstam -Queertemporalities—not governed by hetero life markers (birth, marriage, reproduction, and death). Like AIDS epidemic—shortens, intensifies, life -Queer: refers to nonnormative logics and organizations of community, sexual identity, embodiment, and activity in space and time -Queer time: a term for those specific models of temporality that emerge within postmodernism once one leaves the temporal frames of bourgeois reproduction and family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance -Queer Space: refers to the place-making practices within postmodernism in which queer people engage both in sync with and running counter to what Jameson has called the “logic” of late capitalism -Postmodernims: simultaneously a crisis and an opportunity—a crisis in the stability of form and meaning, and an opportunity to rethinking the practice of cultural production, its hierarchies, and power dynamics, its tendency to resist or capitulate -Brandon Teena rep both anachronism (an earlier model of gay identity as gender inversion) and dislocatedness (a person who chooses the rural over the urban as his theatre for staging his gender -Flexibility commodfied: transgression as individualism -The Brandon Archive -archieve as a capsule of narrative trauma, in this case queer -Some queers need to leave home in order to become queer, and others need to stay close to home in order to preserve their difference -The commodification of meaning by biographers of transgender subjects [One kind of queer temporality: stretched-out adolescents of queer culture makers—> disrupt Berlant and Warner’s term “institutions of intimacy” ***** -Looks to lesbian and POC queer punk bands, slam poets, drag kings |
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Gay Latino Studies: A Critical Reader |
2011 Michael Hames-Garcia and Ernesto Javier Martinez |
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African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality, and Globalization |
2007 Neville Hoad |
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Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology |
2005 Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson. |
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Sexual Discretion: Black Masculinity and the Politics of Passing |
2014 Jeffrey Q. Mcune Jr. |
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Disidentifications: Queers Of Color And The Performance Of Politics |
1999 José Esteban Munoz performance studies Disidentifications: through identifying with something but acknowledging the ways you can never identify with it, like drag performance by queers of color, you engage in a radical form of critique that he calls disidentifications |
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Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times |
2007 Jasbir Puar -examines how liberal politics incorporate certain queer subjects into the fold of the nation-state, through developments including the legal recognition inherent in the overturning of anti-sodomy laws and the proliferation of more mainstream representation. -Puar contends, however, that this tenuous inclusion of some queer subjects depends on the production of populations of Orientalized terrorist bodies. Heteronormative ideologies that the U.S. nation-state has long relied on are now accompanied by homonormative ideologies that replicate narrow racial, class, gender, and national ideals. -These ****“homonationalisms” are deployed to distinguish upright “properly hetero,” and now “properly homo,” U.S. patriots from perversely sexualized and racialized terrorist look-a-likes—especially Sikhs, Muslims, and Arabs—who are cordoned off for detention and deportation. - Looking at various cultural events and phenomena, she highlights troublesome links between terrorism and sexuality: -in feminist and queer responses to the Abu Ghraib photographs, -in the triumphal responses to the Supreme Court’s Lawrence decision repealing anti-sodomy laws, -in the measures Sikh Americans and South Asian diasporic queers take to avoid being profiled as terrorists, -a growing Islamophobia within global queer organizing. |
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“Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Experience.” |
1980 Adrienne Rich Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society -At time of pub, relationship bt feminism and lesbianism focus of much debate -Argues that, instead of being natural, heterosexuait is imposed upon women and reinforced by a variety of social constraints -Instead of a simple division bt lesbian and heter women, out experience can be located along a lesbian continuum -Interested in 1. forced invisibility/invalidation of lesbian or W centered experience 2. the virtual or total neglect of lesbian experience in a wide range of writing, including feminist scholarship -Ways male power is manifested and maintained: 1. to deny W [their own] sexuality 2. or to force it [male sexuality] on them 3. to command or exploit their labor to control their production 4. to control or rob them of their children 5. to confine them physically and prevent their movement 6. to use them as objects in male transactions 7. to cramp their creativeness 8. to withhold from them large areas of the society's knowledge and cultural attainments -Argues that this doesn't stem from men's primal fear of W but rather the fear that W could be *****indifferent to them altogether, that W would be allowed sexual and emotional-therefore economic-access to W only on W's terms -Compulsory heterosexuality leads to sexual slavery and abuse -->also emphasizes "the primacy and uncontronllability of the male sexual desire -Feminist research and theory that contribute to lesbian invisibility or marginality are actually working against the lib and empowerment of W as a group -the failure to exmaine hetero as an institution is like failing to admit that the eco system called capitalism or the caste system of racism is maintained by a variety of forces, including both physical violence and false consciousness -Term "lesbian experience" suggests both the fact of the historical presence of lesbians and our continuing creation of the meaning of that experience -Lesbian continuum includes a range--through each W's life and throughout history--of W-identified experience, not limited to the sexual -Les experience is a breaking of a taboo and rejection of a compuslory way of life and resistance, but also pain b/c of isolation, of no known history -Les experience can't just be equated w/ male homosexuality--profoundly female experience -Les relationships not just sexual--emotion, work related, multidimensional -includes W who lived w/ W, W who lived alone, W who left marriages --> Emily Dickinson, Zora Neale Hurtson -A feminism of action, in small revolutions (like not having children) -A double life--an apparent acquiescence to an institution founded in male interest and perogative -References black les feminists like Lorde, Lorraine Bethel -urges feminist les to examine W's lives, work, and groupings w/in every racial, ethnic, and political structure -Doesn't say we should condemn all hetero relationships, but we must analyze the institution itself, not just individual relationships ***-Patriarchy a model for every other form of exploitation and illegitimate control [v Bell] |
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“Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality” |
1984 Gayle Rubin “Sex is always political” Limits of feminism (gender don't cover it) -We are still living with the effects of 19th Century. Traces of anti-obscenity laws, sodomy statutes, anti-prostitution legislation -We need a radical theory of sex against sexual essentialism (Foucault: who we are sexually is innate and are identity. Instead he shows how it’s a social construct and gives it a history), erotic injustice and sexual oppression. -1. Sex negativity (sex is bad); 2. misplaced scale (get more attention saying you’re gay than saying if you like chicken--”burden of significance”); 3. hierarchy of sexualities (some lower and higher status and denied complexity of description since it’s just “bad”); 4. domino theory (sex leads to immorality and chaos); 5. absence of concept of benign sexual variation (no bad or good sex, just differences) -Psychology can’t “cure” why someone likes BDSM--it doesn’t necessarily stem from something bad -agency and choice stem from recognizing that being the Cartesian subject renders you blind. But we do have choice if we recognize that and be critical of this. |
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Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture |
2002 Siobhan Somerville -End of 19th C much work in order to “classify, separate, and racialize bodies as either ‘black’ or ‘white’” (2) -“Meanwhile, as radicalized social boundaries were increasingly policed so too were emerging categories of sexual identity” (2) -Foucault: sexual acts did not always equal sexual identity (2) -“In this book, I ask what this ‘crisis of homo/heterosexual definition,’ which emerged in the US in the late 19C, had to do with concurrent conflicts over racial definition and the presumed boundary between ‘black’ and ‘white’"(3) [-Ida B Wells and sex bt white women and black men] -Ain’t a coincidence -“this study responds to and challenges a persistent critical tendency to treat late-19 C shifts in the cultural understanding and deployment of race and sexuality as separate and unrelated’” (3) -Argues that Af Am studies and queer studies aren’t parallel but are intersecting bodies of scholarship (4) -Kobena Mercer and Isaac Julien” The prevailing Western concept of sexuality… already contains racism” (5) “My readings.. listen for ‘the inexplicable prescense of the thing not named'” (6) -Def of Sexuality rers to “a historically and culturally contingent category of identity…. more than sexual practice per se” (6) -Sexual desire doesn’t necessarily equal sexual identity -Def of race “refers to a historical, ideological process rather than to fixed transhistorical or biological characters: one’s racial identity is contingent on one’s cultural and historical location” (7) -“There exist no discrete markers of racial difference, in scientific discourse or otherwise, uniformly distinguishing one ‘race’ from another” (7) (Somewhat like Warren?) -Isn’t saying that being a POC “is like” being gay or ”that sexual orientation is “like” racial identity” (7) -Can be both gay and black (8) -Same sex marriage and interracial marriage (look at more) end of (7) -In Wilde case, “the Love that dare not speak its name” —> control of language -Same with Plessy court case -the property of a “good name;” whiteness as property that can be passed down, as privilege (9) -False idea that the body is ahistorical (9) -[From review: “she identities a historical shift from a cultural system that relied on physical traits to differentiate people from one another, to a more modern one which focused on desire as the most meaningful axis of difference” |
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Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where “Black” Meets “Queer" |
2006 Kathryn Bond Stockton |
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Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings that Formed the Movement. |
1995 Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas, eds. |
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Culture and Imperialism |
1993 Edward Said -Opens w/ Heart of Darkness quote—conquest is ugly, so you need ideology behind it to make it pretty -This book seeks to describe a more general pattern of relationships bt the modern metropolitan west and its overseas territories —>much repetition of the idea of bringing civilization to Africa, Indian, parts of Far East Asia, Australia, and the Carribean —>idea that “these people” only understand force -“they” are not like “us” and “for that reason deserved to be ruled” -Includes non-European responses/resistance -novel: immensely important in the formation of imperial attitudes, references, and experiences -stories are at the heart of what explorers and novelists say about strange regions of the world; they also become the method colonialized ppl use to assert their own identity and the existence of their own history -natives themselves are narrations -Culture ain’t separate from politics, one nation’s culture isn’t separate from the world -Look at Conrad’s Nostromos:while in some way progressive, it cannot imagine a world where the West isn’t the center—can’t envision alt to imperialism -We must recognize that there has always been resistance to imperialism —> must look at the interdependence of cultural terrains of the colonizer and the colonized -Partly b/c of empire, all cultures are involved in one another, none is single and pure, all are hybrid and monolithic -This book is an exile’s book: Said feels he belongs in 2 worlds and none, allowing him to see them clearer -imperialism: the practice, the theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center ruling a distant territory -colonialism: almost always a consequence of imperialism, is the implanting go settlements on distant territory |
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Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity |
2006 Judith Butler -Draws on Beauvoir one is not born a woman -“gender is a copy with no original” -Idea of man and woman results from compulsory heterosexuality and phallocentrism, need to shore up particular version of masc identity requires rendering of female identity as eternal, essential -For her, feminism relies on a lie: poison chalice: get rid of counterproductive commitment to this category of “women” as conventionally and heteronormativity understood -When “others” (queers, “aberrants”) exist they show cracks in gender, shows it’s a fiction that disguises itself a law. -second wave feminists readings of drag as misogyn, she sees as exposing lie of gender |
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Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex |
1993 Judith Butler |
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Undoing Gender |
2002 Judith Butler |
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Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the New Racism |
2004 Patricia Hill Collins -"I believe that ppl become empowered when they think and speak for themselves (even if they are ignored or disbelieved)" -In prior works discussed Black Feminist Thought; here she examines treatment of Black men -Black gender ideology "used to justify patterns of opportunity and discrimination" -Also draws upon widepspread cultural beliefs concerning the sexual practices of Black ppl -Sexuality: a system of ideas and social practices that is deeply implicated in shaping Am social inequalities -Sexual politics: a set of ideas and social practices shaped by gender, race, and sexuality that frame all M and W's treatment of one another as well as how they are individually perceived -Racism important focus, but gender must be central b/c of intersectionality of oppression -Book is work of social critical theory: consists of bodies of knowledge and sets of institutional practices that actively grapple w/ the central ?s facing groups of ppl differently placed in specific political, social, and historical contexts characterized by injustice -A diagnostic project not meant to be prescriptive but w/ commitment to social justice -Def isn't post-racial in way Warren is-sees arguments about race as constructed as irrelevant when it comes to practical issues, like voter rights -Says that these issues can apply, w/ historical specificity, to many other groups but "examining the particularities of Af Am experience in its own right is inherently valuable -Draws on pop culture. For example, butts/sexual objectification of BW -JLo --> Destiny's Child -->Josephine Baker-->Hottentot Vensus/Sarah Bartemann -Looks to examples from ppl like Lorde who seek different definitions of sexuality -New Racism: Globalized, 1. no longer centralized power (ie legal Jim Crow is ended but blacks still at bottom of hierarchy) 2. relies more heavily on manipulation of ideas w/in mass media -They work to obscure the racism that does exist, and they undercut antiracist protest -->ie racism is over, Obama! -Quotes Cohen and Tamara Jones: Black ppl need a liberatory politics that includes a deep understanding of how heterosexism separates as a system of oppression, both independently and in conjunction w/ other such systems...that affirms black les, gay, bisexual, and trans sexualities...that understands the roles sexuality and gender play in reinforcing the oppression rooted in many black communities" |
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The Location of Culture |
1994 Homi Bhabha -hybridity -Instrumental into pointing in the direction a number of scholars will follow: there is no prior to colonialism, effectively. National culture is affected by colonialism and the colonizer is also affected and hybridized by this change. -East and West blend together and directly affect each other. Against Said, talk about the fact that the terms were never divergent, whereas Said is more interested in the fantasy of the Orient -No clear distinction between theory and political activism -Recognition of what deconstruction offers of explosion of “dualisms” leads to deeply significant political ramification. Theory is politics -Argues there is no authentic national culture; cultures are hybrid -Most interested in sites of border where all cultures (dominant and oppressed) become a blending of the two. Interested in it historically, geographically, politically, racially, |
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Differance |
positing/putting together of two terms and recognizing the ways they’re different from each other in static time and the ways they differ over time and the opposition shifts and changes and develops |
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Trace |
each word contains within it the residue of earlier etymologies, the words not used |
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Mimesis |
mirror image, to mimic effectively |
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Mestiza Consciousness |
“a consciousness of duality," embracing ambiguity and contradiction Multiple consciousnesses since double consciousness is unlivable "Soy un amasamiento, I am an act of kneading, of uniting, and joining that not only has produced both a creature of darkness and a creature of light, but also a creature that questions the definitions of light and dark and gives them new meanings." Gloria Anzaldúa |
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False Consciousness |
workers accepting crumbs that fall off the table (or indeed are handed out to keep them quiet) rather than claiming a rightful place at the table. Marxist |
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Double Consciousness |
describes the individual sensation of feeling as though your identity is divided into several parts, making it difficult or impossible to have one unified identity. W.E.B. DuBois |
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Discourse |
authorized vocabulary Foucault: discourse is how power works and we all participate in it; different forms of language; forms of categorization that provide meaning, that enable us to frame meaning and seem to participate in it that in good ways: yes I’m a college prof and I speak in this way, which is their participation in power -Discourses he’s interested in: religion, science, and later psychology |
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Unconscious |
the ocean: the deepest darkest trench would be the unconscious. It’ll never be available to you. It’s all powerful. So hysterical paralysis is real paralysis (not faking). The mind and the body are deeply and closely intertwined. Unconscious will always communicate. It’s the engine of the mind. (Freud) |
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Sexual Difference |
(Irigaray) argues that throughout the whole of Western history we don’t really have sexual difference b/c we have men and then lesser men (opposite that is the same: doesn’t have a vagina, she lacks a penis). Interested in language is always gendered and what we say is neutral is actually male/universal. So male/universal vs those that don’t fit. Women become women when they fail to become human which means male. Looks at rational discourse: the fact that you’re biologically a woman doesn’t mean you can’t participate in this but you’re at a disadvantage. As a prof, you give up being a woman when speaking according to the dictates of rational discourse and if you didn’t you’d be hysteria → gender essentialism. -Some universal thing that all women have some similarity. -Female body as a form of discourse: everything’s always gendered but you never noticed b/c its male and b/c you’re shocked when she talks about vaginal lips speaking is b/c it’s not male |
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Biopower |
State control of the biological, man as a living being |
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The Feminine Mystique |
1963 Betty Friedan |
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Performativity |
-“that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains.” (Butler) -“For Butler, the distinction between the personal and the political or between private and public is itself a fiction designed to support an oppressive status quo: our most personal acts are, in fact, continually being scripted by hegemonic social conventions and ideologies” -Performance, not expression -Myth of gender keeps us all (Lacan: split subject) anxiously performing our gender normativity -Really disparate discrete acts of gender performance, not eternal self |
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Heuristic |
speculation in order to explore something; imperfect practical method. Example: For Paul Gilroy, black Atlantic and slave ship |
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Signifyin |
a political and artistic practice that provides them with two separate meanings and two separate audiences. Resistant subtext. Yoruba traditions and Derrida’s version of Saussurean linguistics. Double meanings. Henry Louis Gates Jr |
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"Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex" |
1989 Kimberle Crenshaw -Critiques “a problematic consequence of the tendency to treat race and gender as mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis. (208) -multidimensionality of Black women’s experience vs single-axis analysis (bad—>theoretically erases Black women and imports own theoretical limitations) -“in race discrimination cases, discriminate tends to be viewed in terms of sex- or class- privileged Blacks; in sex discrimination cases, the focus is on race- and class-priviledged women” (209) -Argues that Black women are often excluded from feminist theory and antiracist policy discourse v/c both predicated on discrete set of experiences that often don’t accurately reflect the interaction of race and gender” -Can’t just add Black women into an already set analytical structure—> need something more, intersectional analysis -Discusses feminist critique of rape and separate spheres ideology, and the public policy debates concerning female-headed households w/in the Black community” (209) -***Like traffic: can travel in any # of directions. If an accident occurs in an intersection, it can be caused by cars traveling from any # of directions and, sometimes, from all of them -Similarly, if a BW is harmed b/c she is in the intersection, her injury could result from sex discrimination or race discrimination” -“Judicial decisions which premise intersectional relief on a showing that BW are specifically recognized as a class are analogous to a doc’s decision at the scene of an accident to treat an accident victim only if the injury is recognized by medical insurance” (216) -“Similarly, providing legal relief only when BW show that their claims are based on race or on sex is analogous to calling an ambulance for the victim only after the driver responsible for the injuries is identified” (216) -“BW can experience discrimination in ways that are both similar to and different from those experienced by WW and BM” (217) -Sometimes they experience double-discrimination: the combined effects of practices which discriminate on the basis of race and on the basis of sex” -“And sometimes, they experience discrimination as BW—not the sum of race and sex discrimination, but as BW” (217) -Fear about The Color Purple movie would negatively portray black men instead of examining the issue of sexism and patriarchy in the Black community -Moynihan report: “depicted a deteriorting Black family, foretold the destruction of the Black male householder and lamented the creation of the Black matriarch” (227) and labeled BW as pathological for their “failure” to live up to a WW standard of motherhood" |
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The New Jim Crow |
2010 Michelle Alexander -Jim Crow system of segregation—> put black people back in a subordinate racial caste” -Racial caste system still in place today -mass incarceration of Af Am men is a Foucauldian form of surveillance. It’s that body, what it reps (not the individual), is so non-normative, so dangerous, they get shot in head for nothing. Police state/brutality isn’t aberrant, but reveals the truth of how a regulatory system that cannot encompass and make way for non-normative folks, works. -Racial bribe: extending special privileges to poor whites in an effort to drive a wedge bt them and black slaves —> were allowed to police slaves Caste is something akin to a biological characteristic and for her the history of race relations in the US is the public/private enforcement of what is a caste law, not class |
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"Passing, Queering" |
1993 From Bodies That Matter Judith Butler -Nella Larsen Passing. Both about racial and queer passing -Feminism isn’t enough to analyze this -Race is sexuality. Inseparable -Passing racially is also passing sexually Irene’s desire for Clare both desire of race and sex, not separate; she wants her and wants her passing -Bellow defines himself as white through disavowed recognition of wife’s whiteness. Needs her for racial identity -Butler says that what it meant to be a black woman, a Foucauldian emphasis on all politics to local, her relationship to being black is utterly determined by her status as a woman and those 2 terms have to be seen in in 20th C discourse of uplift. Role of talented 10th to uplift less privileged -She’s a black woman but still internalized racism. Clare is an open ended sexual and racial threat. She’s so liminal and she reveals the truth of race that it is a lie -phallocentrism: not about individuals, but because of complex system; they’re also weakened b/c no one actually has a phallis, its always phallic -phallisism also his whiteness -phallic power and white power are inextricably melded together and in the figure of Clara, who he recognizes/doesnt as black, is constructed as a white/phallic subject that he really down deep knows he can never be -This is the grand tragedy in sex/race |
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Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism |
1985 Gayatri Spivak -It should not be possible to read nineteenth-century British literature without remembering that imperialism, understood as England’s social mission, was a crucial part of the cultural representation of England to the English. -The role of literature in the production of cultural representation should not be ignored. -Yet it continues to be in lit studies -To consider the Third World as distant cultures, exploited but with rich intact literary heritages waiting to be recovered, interpreted, and curricularized in English translation fosters the emergence of “the Third World” as a signifier that allows us to forget that “worlding,” even as it expands the empire of the literary discipline. -Unfortunate when feminist criticism reproduces the axioms of imperialism -“As the female individualist [Jane Eyre], not-quite/not-male, articulates herself in shifting relationship to what is at stake, the “native female” [Bertha] as such (within discourse, as a signifier) is excluded from any share in this emerging norm” (245) -In Frankenstein, “the place of both the English lady and the unnamable monster are left open by this great flawed text” (909). Thus we can see yet again that the function of woman and Other overlap and intertwine in imperialist discourse. |
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Epistemic violence |
“the forcible replacement of one structure of beliefs with another” Spivak |
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Ontology |
study of being |
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Epistemology |
study of knowledge |
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"Perverse Presentism" |
1998 Judith Halberstam From Female Masculinity -suggests a middle path: putting these terms in scare quotes, involves using contemporary theories from gender, queer, feminist studies, and using them in a deconstructive way under erasure. Deploying those terms to read the past while always recognizing with rigorous assertions of historical specificity it’s an heuristic, a rule of thumb, that allows us to see the Boston marriage, not to call it a friendship, all the while not calling it lesbianism -Term lesbian is contextually bound and doesn’t encompass other sexual expressions in 19C -Using it as an umbrella term erases the specificity of tribadism, hermaphroditism, and transvestism and tends to make lesbiansism into the history of so-called W-indetified W” (51) -Argues that sexual identities, when and where they emerge as identities, tend to be exceedingly specific and often refer to a limited range of pleasures rather than an expansive set of pleasure that can be summarized by a term such as “lesbian" -Anne Lister’s diaries -Lots of sex; proud of her masculinity, sees it as far superior to ineffectual male masculinity. Doesn’t let other women touch her, not interested in masculine women, tribad |
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Nonce Taxonomies |
-(from Eve Sedgwick): “[E]verybody who survives at all has reasonably rich, unsystematic resources of nonce taxonomy for mapping out the possibilities, dangers, and stimulations of their human social landscape. It is probably people with the experience of oppression or subordination who have most need to know it.” (22-23) Nonce taxonomies are categories that a subject makes tactically in order to navigate the social world. Oppressed subjects have more need of them as they must navigate a field fraught with more danger. “[N]once taxonomy … the making and unmaking and remaking and redissolution of hundreds of old and new categorical imaginings concerning all the kinds it may take to make up a world.” (23) |
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Perverse Presentism (term) |
model of historical analysis, a model, in other words, that avoids the trap of simply projecting contemporary understandings back in time, but one that can apply insights from the present to conundrums of the past” - “I am questioning in the 1st instance what we think we already know, and then I move back toward the ? of what we think we have found when we alight on historical records of so-called lesbian desire” (53) |
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Perverse Implantation |
naming sexualities, making it a category (Foucault) |
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Queer counterpublics |
other forms of intimacy being recognized as valid such as other family structures (Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner) |
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Queer temporalities |
not governed by hetero life markers (birth, marriage, reproduction, and death). Like AIDS epidemic—shortens, intensifies, life (Halberstam) |
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Queer time |
a term for those specific models of temporality that emerge within postmodernism once one leaves the temporal frames of bourgeois reproduction and family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance (Halberstam) |
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Queer Space |
refers to the place-making practices within postmodernism in which queer people engage both in sync with and running counter to what Jameson has called the “logic” of late capitalism (Halberstam) |
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Imperialism |
the practice, the theory, and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center ruling a distant territory (Said) |
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Colonialism |
almost always a consequence of imperialism, is the implanting go settlements on distant territory (Said) |
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Critical Race Theory |
-The critical race theory perspective offers blacks and their white allies insight, spiked w/ humor, as a balm for this latest insult” and prepare for others “certain to follow” -Defines CRT as “a body of scholarship, now about a decade old,” mainly POC, against racism —> writing and lecturing is characterized by frequent use of the 1st person, storytelling, narrative, allegory, interdisciplinary treatment of law, and the unapologetic use of creativity" —>highly suspicious of liberal agenda; more committed to egalitarianism -CRT not cohesive, but still committed to fighting racism and scholarly resistance; *deliberate* -Like Af Am Spirituals, CRT writing aims to communicate understanding and reassurance to needy souls trapped in a hostile world -“As I see it, critical race theory recognizes that revolutionizing a culture begins w/ the racial assessment of it (Derrick Bell) |
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Lesbian Continuum |
includes a range--through each W's life and throughout history--of W-identified experience, not limited to the sexual (Rich) |
