Issues

“Make the Music with Your Mouth”: Sonic Subjectivity and Post-Modern Identity Formations in Beatboxing

By Shanté Paradigm Smalls

This paper investigates the possibilities of pleasure, sound, and the disruption of the iterations of identity in progressive time. How does sound reformulate how we see whiteness, heterosexuality, and female-bodied people? Beatboxing as a citational and intertextual form—phatic, rhythmic, sonorous, and lyrically side-steps some of the traps of rap music or other hip hop forms through its embodiment of sounds rather the logics of lyrics and traditional musical structure. In that way it remakes—queers—our alliances, allegiances, and sonic sensibilities.

Preservations of Silence in the Queer Archive

By Andy Ditzler

Ditzler’s recording blurs the lines between theory, aural ethnography, and critical intervention. Framed as an attempt to archive a site-specific “telling” of one queer-identified man’s history, it is in the recording’s failure to capture that telling as a “whole” (i.e., in ways that perpetuate the fantasy of unmediated access to the past by rendering the fact of recording invisible) that the piece’s queer potentialities emerge.

Whistlin’ Dixie

By Meredith Heil

Whistlin’ Dixie seeks out folks at the forefront of the Southern queer music scene — living examples that queer community can thrive in these previously written off country roads and postindustrial cities. This documentary showcases these communities and examines their influences, challenges and motivations while putting a face on what it means to be queer, young and Southern.

I STAND IN RUINS BEHIND YOU: QUEER TACTICS OF NOISE

By Daniel J. Sander

Daniel J Sander’s article specifically takes up noise as a tactic that enacts “the stigmatizing cut of queerness” in ways that take up contamination, fragmentation, abjection, and melancholia as modes of queer subjectivity and sociality. By tracing the echoic afterlives of Foreigner’s “I Want To Know What Love Is” in explicitly queer texts, Sander links the aural contamination of the original song to practices of queer world-building and self-making that inhabit those spaces which cannot be redeemed by the logics of capitalist production and reproductive futurity.

Don Loves Roger

By Elisa Kreisinger

Elisa Kreisinger’s clever reworking of the dialogue from “Mad Men” introduces to the show’s portrayal of 1950s corporate and advertising culture a queer noise that makes audible the homoerotic desires and potentialities that are always already embedded in these spaces. Sound and silence are crucial to this intervention, for the desires that are otherwise unspeakable in this space are articulated in and through silences. By making silences not only speak, but speak queerly, Kreisinger inverts the pattern of silencing that has historically been used to render queer desires publicly unspeakable.

“A Very Soft or Long Attack and Release” or Heyyyyy: Queer Extensities

By Amalle Dublon

Amalle Dublon’s piece takes up extensity — the drawing out of certain sounds in verbal speech — as a phonic gesture that exceeds the temporal (and we might argue productive) regulations of merely representative, coded speech. In doing so, extensity creates what Dublon describes as “a kind of anticipatory penumbra that halos and holds the unstable coordination of mutual respondents.” Here, Dublon’s work seemingly provides an entry point into imagining queer community-formation as a project made possible by phonic excess.

Toward a Queer Temporality of Hip Hop: An Annotated Playlist

By Hilary Berwick

Hilary Berwick’s annotated playlist suggests that black musical practices enact temporal interventions within which currents of desire, identification and memory reshape the boundaries of what is representable. Indeed, Berwick’s discussion of haunting as a primary mode of hip hop representation demonstrates the potential contributions that engagements with sonic culture could make to explorations of the erotic and psychoanalytic dimensions of black historical memory and practices of remembrance, particularly as it relates to reckoning with trauma.

Introduction: Theory

By Patricia Ticineto Clough

Lateral’s Theory Thread offers essays that critically explore the relationship of carceral and educational institutions—but not as alternatives to one another as often has been assumed in various kinds of social activism. The authors of these essays, Sora Han, David Stein, Shana Agid, Gillian Harkins and Erica R. Meiners, assume the tightly knotted interrelationship of prisons and schools and instead address the question posed by Han: is there something, being affirmed in the identity or identification as a “prison abolitionist” today?

Abolition: At Issue, In Any Case

By Sora Han

Toward what does the “prison abolitionist” identity or identification strive? This thread is organized primarily around Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s essay, “The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses.” And we think there is not a better place to begin staging the relation between abolition and that to which we refer as “teaching”, with all the compromised valences such work can carry given the state of the educational system today. Indeed, as if to answer the above question about whether there is something affirmed by prison abolitionism, Moten and Harney seem to answer “yes”, there is something. In this essay, I would like to explore this “yes” as it emerges in Moten and Harney’s essay, and how it might unfold in how we imagine our engagements with law.

Full Employment for the Future

By David Stein

Who deserves what types of entitlements? On what grounds? In this moment of rampant and structural joblessness, there is an increasing critique of universities for their failure to create appropriate routes to employment for their graduates who are borrowing increasing sums of money to attend. Do these good students, who make, what President Obama has dubbed “good choices,” deserve jobs? If so, why only them? Or, with the extreme wealth of the U.S., should these good students, along with the bad, and everyone else, be entitled to a job or income? And what do employment rates for undergraduates have to do with the university anyway?

Beyond Crisis: College in Prison through the Abolition Undercommons

By Gillian Harkins and Erica Meiners

This thread explores inter-relationships among institutions of higher education and prisons. We focus in particular on teaching and learning – the hallmarks of college in prison programs – as they relate to research and administration within and across universities/colleges and prisons. Our aim is to contribute to broader structural thinking about how we can work in college in prison programs most ethically and in ways that contribute to prison abolition within and across campus and prison settings.