Jean-Thomas Tremblay’s Breathing Aesthetics draws our attention to how respiration as a cultural analytic maps the uneven distribution of risk in our contemporary moment. Intervening at the intersection of queer theory and the environmental humanities, Tremblay deciphers an archive of cultural texts that range from CAConrad’s ritualized poetry to Ana Mendieta’s elemental performance art and Toni Cade Bambara’s novel The Salt Eaters. In so doing, they reveal an understanding of how breath registers precarity across race, gender, and disability, while also serving as a mechanism for healing and care. This discerning analysis, combined with a focus on the exchange between body and milieu, makes a case for respiration as a distinctly ecological and embodied relation. Ultimately, Breathing Aesthetics provides crucial insight into how aesthetic expressions of respiratory variations evidence a tension between morbidity and vitality within bodies whose ability to breathe is most endangered.
Keyword: gender
Review of Vulgar Beauty: Acting Chinese in the Global Sensorium by Mila Zuo (Duke University Press)
In Vulgar Beauty: Acting Chinese in the Global Sensorium, Mila Zuo examines how female Chinese actors perform “vulgar beauty” as a way of “worlding” to create community and belonging through affective shocks, and specifically, to produce feelings of Chineseness. By using the sense of taste, and specifically the flavors bitter, salty, pungent, sweet, and sour, as a framework, Zuo delves into close readings of television and cinematic case studies to look at the different ways vulgar beauty is deployed by these actors. In its analysis, this book offers a reconceptualization of feminine beauty outside of white western dictates and suggests that (vulgar) beauty can be utilized as a potentially disruptive and transformative force, specifically in destabilizing racial and patriarchal power structures.
Satisfaction Guaranteed: Techno-Orientalism in Vaporwave
A characteristic frequently glossed over in scholarly examinations of the online electronic music genre vaporwave is its use of East Asian cultural imagery in its paratexts. One exception is a piece by musicologist Ken McLeod, who connects vaporwave’s use of visual references to Japanese culture to techno-Orientalism, a term that describes how paranoia around Japanese economic expansion in the late twentieth century manifested in American and European cultural products. This article extends McLeod’s argument to show how the uses and reproductions of East Asian cultural elements in vaporwave serve to reinforce stereotypes consistent with histories of techno-Orientalist representations, particularly with regard to gender. This article elaborates on the anonymous nature of the vaporwave scene to complicate approaches to techno-Orientalist analyses of digital artifacts. In doing so, this essay contributes to the growing body of scholarly literature addressing the roles representation, aesthetics, and affect play in the formation of communities around music genres online.
Review of Television and the Afghan Culture Wars Brought to You by Foreigners, Warlords, and Activists by Wazhmah Osman (University of Illinois Press)
This review examines Wazhmah Osman’s book Television and the Afghan Culture Wars, an ethnographic study of television media in Afghanistan. The book explores the Afghan mediascape through richly detailed interviews with media industry professionals and local Afghans, which provide a realist portrayal of the perils and triumphs of media houses in Afghanistan, local cultural contestations, changing gender norms, and the role and reception of television in the nation’s rather tumultuous political and cultural life. Osman deflates the dominant notion in Western discourses of Afghanistan as a “hopeless landscape of powerless people,” (2) arguing that there is a thriving, internationally backed media infrastructure and a hopeful, culturally conscious citizenry in the nation. She argues that despite Afghanistan’s history of violence, ethnic tensions, atrocities against women, and imperialistic agendas by foreign powers, the Afghan media sector is a widely accessible platform for retribution against years of underdevelopment and war, with “the potential to underwrite democracy, national integration, and peace” (3).
Review of Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal Islam by Evren Savcı (Duke University Press)
Evren Savcı’s Queer in Translation presents an alternative, both in methodology and analysis, to the Orientalist analytical frameworks typical of Western scholars studying queer politics in Middle Eastern regions. Specifically, Savcı analyzes the rise of Turkey’s Adalet ve Kalınma Partisi (AKP; in English, the Justice and Development Party) to show how the AKP’s increased securitization and oppression of marginalized communities—including, but not limited to, Turkey’s LGBTQ community—is the result of the marriage of Islam and neoliberalism. Savci produces compelling case studies that reveal how Turkey’s weaponization of religion, morality, and capitalism serve to secure the nation against dissenting citizens. From the discourse surrounding the complicated murder of a gay Kurdish man, to unlikely solidarities between religious hijabi women and LGBTQ activists, and the public commons that became Gezi Park, Savci’s critical translation methods reveal how the language to construct and resist securitization in Turkey are far more nuanced than simple attribution to solely Islamist extremism or Western neoliberal influence.
Review of Diagnosing Desire: Biopolitics and Femininity into the Twenty-First Century by Alyson K. Spurgas (The Ohio State University Press)
In Diagnosing Desire, Alyson K. Spurgas examines female sexual dysfunction, specifically low desire in women, and refuses to take anything for granted. One part history of modern sexology and one part feminist critique of the biopolitics engendered by sex research, Spurgas uses anti-racist, queer, disability studies, and trauma-informed theories to argue that the apolitical and atheoretical approach used in much of the modern science of sexuality confines women’s sexual desire to a purely receptive model. Spurgas problematizes essentialist, anti-intersectional, and hetero- and cisnormative frameworks through which women’s sexual desire has become a problem to be solved through self-improvement and by learning to push through feelings of low desire. Instead, Spurgas offers insights into the lives of women with low desire by attending to their experiences with inequality and trauma, and proposes a new understanding of women’s sexuality—and of femininity more generally—based on prudent and critical attention to power.
Review of Robo Sapiens Japanicus: Robots, Gender, Family, and the Japanese Nation by Jennifer Robertson (University of California Press)
Jennifer Robertson’s Robo Sapiens Japanicus: Robots, Gender, Family, and the Japanese Nation assesses the robot phenomenon in Japan within the last decade. Offering sustained critiques on contemporary techno-fix narratives, Robertson reveals how humanoid robots are designed and deployed to reify conservative values under the guise of technological advancements. Robertson’s impressive ethnographic project weaves together robots of science fact and fiction, leaving readers to interrogate how humanoids, androids, gynoids, and cyborgs both challenge and reify existing social structures across the globe.
Review of Disruptive Situations: Fractal Orientalism and Queer Strategies in Beirut by Ghassan Moussawi (Temple University Press)
Ghassan Moussawi’s Disruptive Situations challenges the exceptionalist representations of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans (LGBT) experiences in Beirut through a focus on the everyday queer strategies and tactics. Moussawi analyzes the everyday practices of LGBT interlocutors navigating al-wad’ (the situation), a term that refers to the normative order of disruptions, precarity, and instability that permeate daily life across contemporary Beirut. Al-wad’ simultaneously features as a historical condition of perpetual instability bearing on daily life in Beirut, as well as a lens to analyze the practices of everyday life for Moussawi’s LGBT interlocutors. Moussawi’s inductive ethnographic approach charts the strategic use of identities, visibility, and “bubbles” or sources of solace in order to challenge exceptionalist representations of Beirut and LGBT experiences in the city. Moussawi critiques these reductive representations as “fractal orientalism”, a reductive representation that embeds hierarchies and exclusion through geographic associations, such as in fashioning Beirut as the “Paris of the Middle East”. Beirut becomes charming and “cosmopolitan” in a way that is similar to, but not quite, the same as Paris. Moussawi’s focus on queer daily practices against the backdrop of al-wad’ shows the limitations of these reductive representations in an effort to reimagine queerness, subjectivity, and politics.
Opposing A Spectacle of Blackness: Arap Baci, Baci Kalfa, Dadi, and the Invention of African Presence in Turkey
The imaging of Africans in Turkey is indicative of the extant register of cultural understanding in the Turkish popular imagination regarding the imaginability, knowability, and understandability of Black form represented. In Turkish popular culture, the figures of the arap baci, baci kalfa, and dadi index this register. This essay takes the representation of Africans on Turkish popular television through the combined usage of blackface-like and drag-like techniques to configure the figures of the arap baci, baci kalfa, and dadi and juxtaposes it against the material ways Turks of African descent have found to figure themselves within the public sphere. This juxtaposition demonstrates how Blackness and Black form are not perennial processes but rather constructed measures that come into relief.
Response to Lindsey Macdonald’s “We are All Housewives: Universal Basic Income as Wages for Housework”
What types of subjectivities and political actors are emerging around calls for UBI? Lindsey Macdonald’s article, “We Are All Housewives,” eloquently speaks to the concept of universality, while also situating socialist-feminist demands for UBI within specific activist traditions. I pose questions about the distinctions between different socialist arguments for UBI and the political groups that advocate for its implementation: first, what are the differences between autonomist and feminist proposals; and, second, how might we distinguish and evaluate organizations that are fighting for a feminist-socialist UBI?
Review of Measuring Manhood: Race and the Science of Masculinity, 1830–1934 by Melissa N. Stein (University of Minnesota Press)
Melissa N. Stein’s Measuring Manhood tackles the complex intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and their attendant “sciences” across a century of US history. While the burgeoning fields of ethnology and sexology were equally prominent in Europe during this period, her focus on the US specifies the ways in which American “racial scientists” and sexologists differed from their European counterparts, as their research was often used to justify or bolster nation-specific cultural norms and legislation. The concept of masculinity was not simply a matter of “manhood” in the narrow sense, but carried with it a glut of other associations: humanity, civilization, citizenship, intelligence, morality, whiteness, cisgender heterosexuality, and middle-class restraint. Stein manages to convey the complexity and reciprocity of these constructions in each chapter with careful argumentation and ample examples.
In Search of Digital Feminisms: Digital Gender & Aesthetic Technology
What is it that influences girls’ choices of new technology? How is digital creativity affected by gender norms? “Digital Gender & Aesthetic Technology” aims to make visible females as creative developers of the Internet and new technology, through interviews with students, artists, project managers, and entrepreneurs. The prevailing social norms appear to be reflected on the Internet as “digital gender norms,” where girls and boys prefer apparently different communication tools. While working with the question of “digital gender,” I have developed the hypothesis of “Aesthetic Technology,” namely that girls often have an artistic approach towards technology. Girls mainly learn technology for a personal reason, planning to create something once they have learned the technique, and their goal often have aesthetic preferences. The question of girls “becoming technical,” is more complicated than one might first think, in relation to gender. Even though young girls are often just as interested in technology as young boys are, it is difficult for them to keep or adapt their technical interest to normative femininity in their teens. Another problem is that expressions of technical competence or innovation, which do not correspond to the predominant male norm, might be hard to recognize. Females who study within the field of creative digital technology often begin their career by struggling with questions of equality, instead of just practicing their profession.
Meditations on the Multiple: On Plural Subjectivity and Gender in Recent New Media Art Practice
In this text I revisit a multi-venue exhibition I co-curated with Susan Richmond, a professor of Art History at Georgia State University and independent curator Cathy Byrd. “Losing Yourself in the 21st Century” explored how contemporary women artists articulate notions of gendered subjectivity through new media in a social context where notions of a singular and stable self are constantly undermined through the now widespread negotiation of multiple identities that people experience online. We developed a blog that was utilized as a call for participation for the exhibition and also as a platform through which we could engage in dialogue with the artists and for the artists to respond to each other’s work. The blog also served as a particularly useful tool for a feminist project such as Losing Yourself, as it afforded transparency to the collaborative curatorial process. We selected thirteen artists to feature in exhibitions at the Welch Gallery at Georgia State University in Atlanta (October–December 2009) and Maryland Art Place in Baltimore (February–March 2010). The artists included were Ali Prosch, Susan Lee Chun, Katherine Behar, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum, Amber Hawk Swanson, Noelle Mason, Saya Woolfalk, kate hers, Shana Moulton, Amber Boardman, Stacia Yeapanis, Renetta Sitoy, and Milana Braslavsky.