Here are some additional materials related to our discussion this week:

1. The Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks on Gender are a useful resource for accessible explorations of feminist method. The volume on MATTER relates most closely to our course material from this quarter. Although it does not focus on speculation in particular, the entry I wrote for this handbook on gender, matter, and colonialism includes (in the 2nd half) discusses many of the foundational texts that our authors this quarter were building on.
2. Here are the two websites we looked at concerning ‘trigger warnings.’ The first is the draft guidance on classroom inclusion by Oberlin University.  The second is a statement by 7 professors against institutionalizing administrative procedures requiring TWs.

First, some dog agility training:

This one is long but even just a few minutes will do:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zG6TeAn4N6I&list=FLXtYxn6KLvi7vUCO6kh95Iw&index=2&t=313s

Sweet Ollie:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4N7G29GWQI

In this post, I want to share what has been helpful for me in thinking about Donna Haraway’s work. This is, perhaps, elementary but I found so much of my thinking around her work particularly dealing with non-human animals and post-humanism solidified when I watched dog agility competitions online such as the UK’s Cruft’s Dog Show (clips from which are above). Speaking directly to ideas discussed in When Species Meet and The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness, Haraway explores the boundary between human and the non-human animal through an exploration of the ways in which dogs, other critters, and humans have evolved together. Centered on the domestic, her work rallies against human exceptionalism. In The Companion Species Manifesto, she focuses on her own dog, Ms. Cayenne Pepper, and uses dog agility training as an example of two species who are in communication with one another in a way that is not merely an “owner” asking its “pet” to perform tricks. Rather, clearly illustrated in agility training, the dog’s agency is clearly visible—they can choose not to follow a command, to bark and yip, or go off course. It is not an instance of a non-human animal “performing” for their “owner.” There is an entire relationship between handler and dog wherein each creature has agency.

In her latest work from which we read an excerpt, it seems that Haraway is expanding her focus from the domestic and dogs to thinking of ourselves and other critters as a compost—a continual, joyous “becoming with” one another in all our creaturely forms: animal, human, and plant life, micro, and macro. Haraway envisions this compost as a literal, but not pejorative, hot mess wherein “Nobody lives everywhere; everybody lives somewhere. Nothing is connected to everything; everything is connected to something.” She also expresses this idea through the idea of the tentacular wherein “The tentacular are also nets and networks, it critters, in and out of clouds. Tentacularity is about life lived along lines — and such a wealth of lines — not at points, not in spheres.” And it is an attention to the present—to this hot messy compost—that we must begin wherein we must be “truly present . . . as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings” (1). Haraway urges readers to be open to “unexpected” collaborations (4). So, back to dog agility training—could we begin to conceptualize of this compost as numerous conscious and unconscious collaborations like the relationship or collaboration of that between dog and human? If we think of the compost of all organisms and beings on earth, then could we situate dogs and humans as one of these collaborations?

Again, that’s probably simple stuff when it comes to Haraway. But I suppose in reading this it wasn’t until I started thinking back to agility competitions that it clicked for me. I am curious as to what implications Haraway’s recent work has for gender?

Hi Folks,

Just wanted to post a couple of songs for your enjoyment and and some artistic/intellectual nourishment.

1. This awesome Sun Ra song that Weheliye mentions a few times in Habeas Viscus. I wanted to share a quote about the piece from an All About Jazz review that illustrates the ways in which speculation is practices both poetically and musically: “Recorded live at the Donaueschingen Music and Berlin Festivals in 1970, this gem ideally captures Sun Ra and His Intergalactic (Research) Arkestra at its most otherworldly self. Individual and collective sounds reach for ears at times beyond human comprehension. The 21-member Arkestra is anchored by its leader captaining keyboards of various frequencies of inter-planetary communication and fresh audible sensations—from his Farfisa organ, “roc-si-chord,” “spacemaster,” Mini- Moog synthesizer, Hohner clavinet and electra, to acoustic piano. Soundscapes vary from Twilight Zone-ish scores (the Moog-heavy “Out in Space”) to African ritualistic percussive escapades (“Watusi”).”  Read more here.

2. I also wanted to share this bitchin’ song from legendary black rock/funk band Funkadelic which came out on their “America Eats its Young” Album (1972). “Biological Speculation” radically contends with black struggle and the ways in which violent oppression can only be met with unapologetic resistance.

“We’re just a biological speculation
Sittin’ here, vibratin’
And we don’t know what we’re vibratin’ about
And the animal instinct in me
Makes me wanna defend me
It makes me want to live when it’s time to die
Y’all see my point?”

hi everyone:

here are the notes for a 2015 lecture I gave on affect and security (select keyword #4 for affect/security). it has details and further reading on the four traditions of affect theory I discussed tonight in seminar re: berlant/ahmed

-neel

Yesterday at a seminar at Stanford, Jasbir Puar engaged a set of considerations that I want to think about in light of today’s reading as well as the last few weeks. Keeping in mind that these questions are only a part of what Puar was discussing and brought certain considerations to the forefront for me, they are not the only statements Puar was making in the context of current liberation struggles in Palestine. Puar introduced some of her thinking in her upcoming book, where she engages with Foucault’s biopolitics and Membe’s necropolitics. In the context of Israel’s occupation of Palestine Puar sees a specific difference that she terms “the right to main.” Puar positioned Palestine as exemplary of a contemporary control society, where all movement is under surveillance and regulated to the point that in Puar’s words, “there is no plane of redemption or relief, no fantasy that the occupation will change, and no fantasy that if it did lives would change, therefore there is no ‘good life’ to aspire to.” Puar theorizing “maiming” vs killing as an act that produces a discourse of humanitarian benevolence, that helps reify narratives of liberalism surrounding Israel.

I was struck by this condition Puar articulated as a lack of a future “good life” and it invoked for me Ahmed’s thinking around happiness. For Ahmed, future happiness is not a necessary ingredient for revolutionary consciousness. If as Puar says, there is no aspiration to a good life in Palestine, what is striking to me, is that this does not equate to an apathy or lack of revolutionary movement. In Speculate This! speculation is defined as “[…] essentially always about potentiality: a reach toward those futures that are already latent in the present, those possibilities that already exist embedded in the here and now, about human and nonhuman power, which is, in effect, the ability to become different from what is present.” In the context of Palestine, the potentiality of liberation, if we take seriously Puar’s concerns around “no good life,” would fall into the category of affirmative speculation, “embracing uncertainty.” What kinds of temporal concepts are being invoked in Speculate This!? How does this relate to a question Puar’s asked yesterday? “What happens to forms of temporal attachments if they must give up the “fantasy” of temporal futurity (in context of good life)?”

While trying to consider this example, the extremity of surveillance and lack of autonomy experienced by Gazans, both Dawn and Critical Thought in the Face of Capitalist Hydra I came to mind.  In Dawn, despite the reality of being contained and under constant surveillance, the futurity and hope lay in the possibility of freedom and autonomy that may be possible once back on Earth. In the case of the EZLN, autonomy has looked like a many decade autonomous project where everything from governance, basic daily needs, education, and theorization around gender and futurity, comes from the maintenance of that autonomy. As Ahmed makes clear with her considerations of happiness, it is not possible to read revolutionary potentiality within the context of a future that is perfectly legible to all. Thinking of these in tandem with the conditions of possibility that Puar described in the context of Palestine, motivates me to further interrogate ideas around revolutionary imaginary, autonomy, and how we as a class were and weren’t articulating them around the EZLN text.

Here is the google doc that Kirstin created. Thanks! Feel free to use the blog or whatever is most convenient to develop working groups

This isn’t necessarily any questions or specific thoughts as much as I’m just adding a little to the dialogue.

The EZLN released the Zapatista Women’s Revolutionary Law in conjunction with their 1994 uprising and First Declaration. I think it is interesting to see their declaration in tandem with the reading.

The following are the ten laws that comprised the Women’s Revolutionary Law:

• First, women have the right to participate in the revolutionary struggle in the place and at the level that their capacity and will dictates without any discrimination based on race, creed, color, or political affiliation.
• Second, women have the right to work and to receive a just salary.
• Third, women have the right to decide on the number of children they have and take care of.
• Fourth, women have the right to participate in community affairs and hold leadership positions if they are freely and democratically elected.
• Fifth, women have the right to primary care in terms of their health and nutrition.
• Sixth, women have the right to education.
• Seventh, women have the right to choose who they are with (i.e. choose their romantic/sexual partners) and should not be obligated to marry by force.
• Eighth, no woman should be beaten or physically mistreated by either family members or strangers. Rape and attempted rape should be severely punished.
• Ninth, women can hold leadership positions in the organization and hold military rank in the revolutionary armed forces.
• Ten, women have all the rights and obligations set out by the revolutionary laws and regulations

Something else I would like to mention, and I think goes well with the Endnotes, is about women’s labor in EZLN, specifically embroidery. It is a form of capitol, but is also community building and often a form of protest. (I’m taking this from a paper I wrote):

Embroidery is a local trade that women partake in to help subsidize their Zapatista communities and maintain economic independence. The embroideries are sold to tourists throughout Chiapas but can also be bought online. Embroidery is also used as a form of protest and political propaganda. Zapatista women create embroidered flags with political messages to hang throughout their communities. Many of the wears women sell, from bookmarks to bags, have the emblematic Zapatista star, figures wearing the standard Zapatista balaclava, and a myriad of other symbols or sayings related to their political goals. The women gather in cooperatives to support each other’s craftsmanship and ensure fair costs.[1] From the onset the Zapatista movement has been dedicated to the equal rights of women in their communities. Issued in conjunction with the First Declaration by the EZLN, the Women’s Revolutionary Law declared, among other things, a women’s right to partake in the revolution in any way she sees fit, to work and receive fair wages, to bear as many children as she chooses, to education, to be free of violence, and to occupy leadership positions and hold military rank.[2]

In none of my reading on Zapantera Negra (the exhibition that my paper was about) did I find specifics about the embroidery collectives who completed the work, only that there were two, one focused on hand embroidery and the other machine embroidery. More generalized information about Zapatista embroidery collectives is available. The collectives are not formed only to produce embroideries. They are gendered spaces where women provide support to one another and discuss both the personal and the political. Anthropologist Mariana More spoke with one collective member, Auralia, who was 16 at the time. She stated,

“In our collectives, we work the vegetable gardens, we have rabbits, we learn to do embroidery and make artisanry. But not only that, it is only the beginning. There we also give talks and reflect on our life in the house. Those who are older explained to us who are younger how we need to defend our rights. Autonomy is against the bad government and also against the men who don’t treat women well.”[3]

Mora rightfully points out that the collectives blend the economic, political, and personal, blurring the line between the public and the private, between politics and life itself.[4] She goes further, stating that from material work emerged a “process of collective self-reflection,” that provides a space for thinking through the micro-politics of everyday life, generating new forms of knowledge to address local inequalities.[5] Fascinating in their own right, I hope only to have established that embroidery collectives are gendered spaces where women cooperate to produce works that have the potential to reflect upon and project their political goals.

[1] Sirena Pellarolo, “Zapatista Women: A Revolutionary Process Within a Revolution,” (keynote address for the International Women’s Day event organized by the California State University, Los Angeles, California, March 8, 2006), accessed March 20, 2017, http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/auto/sp_zw.html.

[2] EZLN, “Zapatista Women’s Revolutionary Law,” El Despertador Mexicano, January 1, 1994.

[3] Mariana Mora, “Decolonizing Politics: Zapatista Indigenous Autonomy in an Era of Neoliberal Governance and Low Intensity Warfare” (PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin, 2008), 186.

[4] Ibid., 186.

[5] Ibid., 187.

Random examples:

Finally, and I know this is so long! After reading Endnotes  I thought of artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles.  She is a feminist artist whose work is service oriented and conceptually explores domestic, civic, and service maintenance.

She coined the term “maintenance art.” She does maintenance work as a performance but also, after writing her manifesto, she spent four days logging her actions (or labor) as housewife, mother, and artist.

I think that’s it!

EZLN: Critical Thought in the Face of the Capitalist Hydra

I found the provocations raised in this “seedbed” of papers to be generative and energizing. I appreciated EZLN’s calls for critical thought and genealogy that do not rely on Western frameworks of theory or history, which have been overdetermined, colonizing, and oppressive. Rather than write a summary of the text and concepts here, I want to note a couple themes or questions that could perhaps be useful for class discussion.

“Neither theory without practice nor practice without theory” (181)

Can the necessary entanglement of theory (or critical thought) and practice in EZLN’s work be understood as a framework for activist scholarship and decolonizing methodologies? How can we as graduate students think about the intersection of activism and scholarship? While the text is “accessible” – as in it refrains from academic jargon, uses metaphoric descriptions and stories, and is produced for an indigenous activist audience – it is intellectually rigorous. EZLN draws on both indigenous and canonical (Greek mythology, Marxist theory) knowledges to develop a critical approach to capitalism, one that is both theoretical and practical in its mode of collective action.

I was compelled by the metaphor of the capitalist Hydra as a system that reproduces itself in the face of resistance to dominate, appropriate, and oppress. I was thinking of Gramsci’s hegemony throughout the text, as well as Audre Lorde’s insight that “the master’s tools can never dismantle the master’s house.” By chipping away at the wall and ensuring the cracks do not close, the Zapatistas are collectively working to create new ways of challenging capitalism that do not reproduce new heads of power. As they state, “Our resistance is our YES to something else possible” (188). The future or ends are not yet defined; can EZLN’s activism, then, be understood as a mode of (or akin to) feminist speculation?

In these papers, EZLN is grappling with the question of how to (or whether we even should) draw on theories and concepts that have themselves been the tools of violence and oppression (such as political economy, capital, or labor). What does it mean for EZLN to draw on Marxist thought, which largely disregarded structures of colonialism that served as the foundation for capitalism? Which reduced the social order to an oversimplified binary of dominant and subjugated? Which defined value and labor in sexist terms? I’d be interested to discuss further in seminar how we can critically and ethically engage with theory, and how we incorporate it in practice (or, what we do with theory). As an anthropologist, I’ve been trained to understand good ethnography as that which lets the theory emerge from the local contexts of research, rather than being applied from outside. I see a potential relationship here between EZLN’s mode of critical thought and ethnographic research.

Loas Otroas: Gender and Alterity

Does EZLN challenge the gender binary through their use of a blended masculine/ feminine suffix (-oas)? As the front notes state, they use this suffix “in order to give a range of gender possibilities including male, female, transgender, and others.” I found this choice interesting and potentially radically inclusive. However, the text often relied on rigid and naturalized distinctions between men’s and women’s experiences, particularly in the sections “Our Struggle as Zapatista Women” and stories about the girl Defensa Zapatista. One particular statement that stood out to me was that men “cannot be feminists because you’ll never be able to put yourselves in our [women’s] position” (111), meaning in part that they do not have female reproductive capabilities, though also how they are anchored to particular types of labor (as the Endnotes article discusses). I therefore couldn’t help but read the –oas as referring to the Zapatistas as a mixed group of men and women, rather than a more radical index of multiple gender possibilities. How did other people read this?

I also wondered if the figure of the cat-dog might serve as a metaphor of loas otroas as a blended or radically alter figure, one whose gender or being is untranslatable into Western, secular language. It might be worth reflecting on the radical and critical possibilities of language in academic writing, as well as the question of how indigenous concepts are culturally translated and made intelligible in academic work.

1. I’m interested in the idea of Critical Thought in the Face of the Capitalist Hydra as a collective work. While it is clearly a transcription of an event, the act of turning the seminar into a text so that it can be read at a later date is interesting to me. Is collaborative writing/art making/archiving an activist and/or feminist act? I’m reminded of disparate texts such as poet C.D. Wright’s One With Others wherein different voices/texts describe a moment in history and various POVs are included within one work. Likewise, I was also thinking about Svetlana Alexievich’s Second Hand Time: The Last of the Soviets as her work also includes a collection of voices (and, of course, there are many other texts that embody such collectivities of voices/places/groups). What does it mean to decenter a single author from a text, a manifesto, or an event? What does this communicate about the event’s or text’s politics? It allows for interruption as we see on 109 with the collected voices of non-indigenous women. It also allows for contradiction and complexity to arise. Going back to this section again about the experience of Zapatista women and youths, only pages earlier did a young Zapatista express their pride over not wearing the clothing that the very women would later justify wearing. Perhaps, in this way, a collective text also allows for conversation.
2. This comment is, perhaps, more telling for myself than for anyone else as I struggle with dense theoretical texts but I was pleasantly surprised at the clarity of the EZLN’s work. I’m curious what role accessibility plays in theory and activism? Should it all be “accessible?” What does it mean to be accessible? Rather, what do we (“we” as in creators) prioritize (accessibility, clarity, rhetoric) and how does this relate to a text/piece/event’s goals?
3. I am fascinated with Ana Mendieta’s work and spent a good few hours Thursday night learning more about her art and her life. I didn’t know who she was prior to this class and am both astonished and unsettled by her work and her life (rather, her tragic and mysterious death). The repetition of her body in the siluetas series that traverses a multitude of places and affects show the malleability of a (fragmented? absent? suggested? body that was once there but has vanished?) body that simultaneously allows for regeneration (flowers, a body seeming masked by a tree, etc.) and for violence and disintegration (blood on sand, a flame silhouette). The body vanishes, blends, becomes with, grows, dies, evaporates, and burns, among other acts. Is Mendieta returning to the earth or is she escaping it? Is she grounding herself or evaporating? I’m also fascinated by the possibility for remnants of other unknown bodies in these pieces. I wonder if there is a suggestion of the bodies that have come before and grown into something else: dissolved into smoke, grown into a field, or washed away in the sand? What are the silhouettes that have come before Mendieta’s work and what will come after? What role does temporality play in her work?

First, an excellent article for anyone interested in further reading on black science fiction writers .

I’m rather conflicted. Is it possible for an imagined society to be simultaneously queer and normative? The male/female/ooloi trinity that replaces the male/female mode of reproduction is, to my mind, unquestionably queer. By our standards, it is polyamorous, a triad rather than a pair. It calls the binary into question by incorporating a third which is not remotely intelligible according to our conceptions of masculinity or femininity; the ooloi are always it, non-gendered, in a certain sense not quite seeming like people either. Their existence blurs the boundaries of both species and gender. The shift to nonphysical sexuality, too, is different; for all that we understand sexuality and attraction as occurring on a neurological and biochemical level, there is still something about ooloi tentacle sex that seems curiously chaste, asexual even. Sexuality is thus divorced from both gender and the physical body.

And yet, within this new system, does the possibility of non-normative sex/sexuality remain? Even before the humans begin forming bonds with ooloi, they all pair off into heterosexual couples. Did the Oankali select only heterosexual humans? If so, that would be a pragmatic choice for a repopulation effort, but this does not seem to be addressed. The introduction of the ooloi does not question the heterosexual dynamic; rather, it cements it. Everyone exists within a new unit, always male/female/ooloi, this dynamic paralleling the existing male/female/ooloi relationships of the Oankali. Human sexuality is somewhat queered, but from the Oankali perspective, humans are being incorporated into their norms about sexuality. The process of queering human sexuality (from the humans’ perspective) is, in fact, a process of (forcibly) accustoming them to a different set of norms. There is the temptation to call it heteronormative, in that it involves three distinctly different genders, but I am not sure that reusing the word in this context is necessarily helpful or accurate. Or is it?

I think one of the greatest strengths of Dawn may be its ability to imagine genders and gender relationships that I don’t even have the vocabulary to accurately describe (I had to google to figure out if there was a three-part equivalent to “binary” ). It calls into question how we articulate sex, gender, and sexuality, and suggests that there are inherent limits to our existing terminology. I’m just not entirely sure if I agree with how it questions these.