I know class is over but this is an awesome link to check out dealing with family and kinship ties and the State.

Happy holidays.

Handout: Overview for Feminist Theory

Section One: Antigone: Becoming States and States of Becoming

Terms:

Ontology and Epistemology (states of becoming; states of becoming)

Incest: laws and states; political economies of sex

Performativity and Performance

Reproduction and recognition

Loci:

“Liberal Humanism”

“Psychoanalytic Criticism”

Feminist responses:

Judith Butler:

Judith Butler: “Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?”

“…I do not mean to resolve this dilemma in favor of one or the other but to develop a critical practice that is mindful of both. I want to maintain that legitimation is double-edged: it is crucial that, politically, we lay claim to intelligibility and recognizability; and it is crucial, politically, that we maintain a critical and transformative relation to the norms that govern what will and will not count as an intelligible and recognizable alliance and kinship” (117)

Gayle Rubin

Artifact:

Hedwig and the Angry Inch:  How does Hedwig bring into play the “state/States” of gender/sex?; Founding myths and performance; “….there was a wall erected between in the city of Berlin….Hedwig is like that wall….”

Section Two: Huckleberry Finn: Automation and Animation: Re-thinking the intersections of race/sex/gender

Automation: Taylorism, Fordism

Animation: gesture; “surfaces”; embodied defiance

Irony: Reading between possibility and limitation (finitude); James Cone: tragedy and transformation encountered through difficult and complex surfaces: skin; symbols; stereotypes

The “obscene cut” in Twain; Jim at the cut between automation and animation

Reading and race

Minstrel

Fred Moten: “Black Mo’nin’ In the Sound of the Photograph”: Performative writing; “a poetic that makes possible a semantics of the anguished cry…”

“Blackness is an ongoing performance of encounter: rupture, collision, and passionate response.”

“…the nature of photography and our experience of photography… that mode of semiotic objectification and inquiry which privileges the analytic-interpretative reduction of phonic materiality and/or meaning over something like mimetic improvisation of and with that materiality that moves in excess of meaning.”

“The cut”: rupture and collision

Loci:

“Post-structuralism and Deconstruction”

“Feminist Criticism”

Artifact:

 Art/performances of Kara Walker : How might we think about Moten’s “cut” in relation to her work?   Where do the “surfaces” of race/sex/gender come together in her work?  The significance of irony.

Section three: Passing: in/on/through/with

Passing

Modern/postmodern Blackness (sex/gender)

Performance and performativity (once again)

Whose history?

Raced/gendered/sexed “looks”

Authority and states: “socio-political machinery”; “subjective territory”; “transversal acts”

bell hooks: The postmodern critique of “identity,” though relevant for renewed black liberation struggle, is often posed in ways that are problematic. Given a pervasive politic of white supremacy which seeks to prevent the formation of radical black subjectivity, we cannot cavalierly dismiss a concern with identity politics. Any critic exploring the radical potential of postmodernism as it relates to racial difference and racial domination would need to consider the implications of a critique of identity for oppressed groups. Many of us are struggling to find new strategies of resistance. We must engage decolonization as a critical practice if we are to have meaningful chances of survival even as we must simultaneously cope with the loss of political grounding which made radical activism more possible. I am thinking here about the postmodernist critique of essentialism as it pertains to the construction of “identity” as one example.

Reynolds: “subjunctive spaces” – “what if”/ “as if” – between subjective territory and transversal territory

Artifact:

Paris is Burning:  Authorship? What conceptual machinery is reproduced?  What kinds of transversal spaces are made possible?  Postmodern blackness?

Found this in The Nation today.  I was really intrigued by Kara Walker and thought you might like to see it, though I have some unresolved feelings about it myself.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071210/schwabsky

Cheers–Noren

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIsaW9Jeg2c

Feminist Theory
Final Essay: Projects/Presentations

The next assignment has two components:

1) A final essay of 8-10 pages in response to one of the following options:

a) A critical essay that explores a theme or concept we have looked at in class. For example, you might write a paper structured around a specific argument or claim on “representations of race and animation.” In this case, you might work with Huck Finn, one other animation example (historical or contemporary) and one or two additional critical texts (one of which might be something we read in class).

b) A critical essay that explores one or two fictional texts we have read in relation to a theme or idea. For example, “Passing: Antigone and Passing.” Again you would want to draw on some critical texts or ideas we have worked on in class and, if possible, one additional critical text drawn from outside research.

c) A critical essay structured around a reading of a performance or artifact. An example: a focused look at two or three media representations of Katrina that draws on one or two critical ideas and texts.

d) A performance, art object, or creative piece of your own making structured in response to one of the concepts or ideas discussed in class. NB: in this case you STILL must undertake an approx. 8 page artist statement that functions as a critical essay.

e) Some other topic or interest that you talk with me about beforehand.

2) The project should have some intermediary product associated with it in addition to the final write up. This could take the form of a small video, a performance, or an oral presentation on research undertaken. You will do presentations on your final work in the final class sessions listed below.

Timelines:

You will write an abstract in class on your project on November 26h

Presentations will be scheduled for the weeks of November 28th- December 5th

Draft of 4-5 pages of final essay due on December 5th

The final 8+-page write-up is due the last day of finals week, Thursday, December 13th

http://www.chronwatch-america.com/articles/479/1/Does-Hillary-Clinton-Pass-the-quotKitchen-Testquot/Page1.html

Note that these are just examples to work from. Your document will be shorter and will not include as extensive a literature review (as I said in the email I sent out).

These are very different topics from what we have been working with! However, these do provide good frames and contexts. In the instance of the staffers report, try to imagine creating headings for, say, a discussion of “gentrification in Roanoke”; or, an overview of the debates on gay marriage.

***in the case of the staffers report, (though now public) you should print that document or view it Blackboard, but not re-post it here (as you can see, it’s the real deal and fairly recent)

There is a link at Blackboard as well to the The Congressional Research Service (CRS), a non-partisan public policy research arm of the United States Congress. There are all sorts of examples and interesting documents at this site!

Jen

Erasing Race