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.
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?
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?