Schedule of Events

Thursday, May 3

Performance and visual art

Wafaa Yasin: We All Belong to the Same Line (Meeting Room D)

6:30 – 9:30pm

Student Community Center, Meeting Room D

Description: Wafaa Yasin  will be showing a retrospective of her work, including images and video from different installations and performances. She will be exploring the relationship of the body to the site of performance, asking the question of where and when the body collides (or not, for that matter) with the site.  The work also asks when the body becomes the site itself, especially that through the interaction of the body with the site it gives a birth to new meaning of the site and its relation to our memories stories and narratives.

Bio: Wafaa M. Yasin was born in Galilee, Palestine. Between the years of 2004-2008, She was awarded artist residencies in Italy, France, Turkey, and Germany. In 2009 she was awarded the Murphy Cadagan Fellowship, including an exhibition at the Arts Commission Gallery in San Francisco.

In 2008-2010 she received a full tuition scholarship for her  MFA in Social Practice from California College of the Arts in San Francisco, where she is currently living and continuing her artistic development and career. In 2010 her thesis project was selected for “Introductions 6: The Annual Exhibition of New works by Recent Art College at Irvine Contemporary Gallery,” Washington, DC.

In 2011 she was invited to participate in multiple exhibitions including the Thessaloniki Biennial Performance Art Festival in Greece, and in the Bay Area at SoEx, the Contemporary Jewish Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Performance Art Institute, and Krowswork Gallery.

Friday, May 4

8:00-9:00AM: Registration & Coffee

Student Community Center (http://campusmap.ucdavis.edu/?b=223)

9:00-10:30AM: Morning Session

Panel A: Visible Sexualities (Meeting Room A)

Moderator: Tallie Ben Daniel, Ph.D. Candidate, Cultural Studies, UC Davis

 

●     “Post IMF Anxieties: Retreat/Retirement of Single Gay Men”

John (Song Pae) Cho

Postdoctoral Fellow in Center for Korean Studies, UC Berkeley

●     “Punishing the Precluded: The Anti-Homosexual Bill and State Securitization in Neoliberal Uganda”

Daniel Hwang

Columbia University, Dept of Anthropology

●     “Project Army Wives”

Maria Faini

Ph.D. Student, Department of Comparative Ethnic Studies, Critical Theory, UC Berkeley

Panel B: Rights Discourse in Security Culture (Meeting Room B)

Moderator: Isabel Porras,  Ph.D. Candidate, Cultural Studies, UC Davis

 

●     “Nappy Roots: Detangling the Policing and Criminalization of Gender Nonconformity”

Marvin Dumas

Gonzaga University: English, Sociology and Gender Studies

●     “‘Naked’ Security- Re-imagining Full-Body Scanners”

Angelo Haidaris

B.A., Feminist Studies UCSC

●     “Calculating (Against) the Incalculable: Queerying Apocalyptic Rhetoric in Political Deliberation”

Jim Sydnor

Sociology, Philosophy, and Queer Studies, CSU-Fullerton Class of 2012

 

10:30-11:30PM  Morning Keynote (Multipurpose Room)

Liz Montegary, Lecturer in Women and Gender Studies, Yale University

Title: “Fit Families, Secure Bodies”

●     Introduction: Caren Kaplan, Professor of Women and Gender Studies, UC Davis

 

11:30-12:30PM Lunch Break

12:30-2:00PM Afternoon Session

Panel A: Critical Anarchisms  (Meeting Room A)

Moderator: Hilary Berwick,  Ph.D. Candidate, Cultural Studies, UC Davis

●     “We Must Love Each Other and Protect Each Other; A Critical Examination of Safety in Direct Action Spaces”

Elliott Fukui

Urban Studies, The New School Eugene Lang

●     “‘These People Are Savages’: Anarchism, Rationality, and the Violence of Property”

Benjamin Abbott

American Studies PhD Program, University of New Mexico

Panel B: The Logics of Neoliberalism and the Legacies of Colonialism (Meeting Room B)

Moderator: Bryan Yazell, Co-Chair, Postcolonial Research Cluster,  and  PHD candidate in English. UC Davis

 

●     “Queering the Bomb: Nuclear Weapons, Resistance and Failure”

Eileen Shaughnessy

Masters Student in American Studies, University of New Mexico

●     “Under the Radar: Negotiating Heteropatriarchal Surveillance in Post-9/11 Taiwanese Women’s Educational Migration”

 

Marc Boucai

PhD Candidate in Performance Studies, UC Berkeley

2:00-3:30PM Afternoon Keynote Speaker (Multipurpose Room):

Beth Povinelli, Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies, Columbia University

●     Introduction: Kathleen Frederickson, Assistant Professor of English, UC Davis

3:30-3:45 Break

3:45-5:30PM Roundtable on the Occupy Movement (Multipurpose Room)

Moderator: Abbie Boggs, Ph.D. Candidate, Cultural Studies, UC Davis

●     Beth Freeman

●     Benjamin Abbott

●     Miguel Espinoza

●     Members from Occupy Oakland

●     Members of Occupy Davis/Occupy UC Davis

5:30- 6:30PM The Stigmatization Act (Meeting Room D)

Moderator: Sampada Aranke, Ph.D. Candidate, Performance Studies, UC Davis

This play takes as its primary moment of interrogation the scene of the immigration interview. Our protagonists are a racially and sexually ambiguous ‘couple’. Their objective: to prove the emotional and sexual legitimacy of their relationship to the scrutinizing eye(s) of the U.S. government. Unable to answer any of the questions posed to them by means of realistic speech, the ‘couple’ employ a series of experimental performance tactics. Utilizing contemporary poetry, popular American song, and conceptual movement, the ‘couple’ make clear the ways in which the act of proving docile patriotic citizenship is always enmeshed with the stigmatization of certain parts of the race- and sex-blind American neoliberal subject.

Key themes: patriotism, surveillance, policing of queer/racialized bodies, politics of ‘passing’, immigration

Length: 20 minutes

Marc Boucai: PhD Candidate UC Berkeley Department of Theatre, Dance and

Performance Studies, Designated Emphasis in Women and Gender Studies. B.A. Theatre

and English, Swarthmore College; graduate studies with L’Ecole Internationale de Jacque le Coq: performer, movement specialist, director, and critic. His research interests include

American Studies, Arab American diasporas and subjectivities in experimental performance and popular culture, transnational feminist and queer theory, theories of genre (musicals, sitcoms, melodrama, and comedy), and theories of globalization and affect.His dissertation project, Identity Incorporated: Queering the Arab Question in Post 9/11 America bridges Queer Studies, Arab American Studies, and cultural studies.

Reya Sehgal is a recent graduate of the Interdisciplinary Studies and Theater departments at UC Berkeley, where she focused on Postcolonial Urbanism and the politics of Neo-Orientalism in the urban design of Delhi. She is also a trained singer and performer.

Paper Abstracts

 

Morning Session: Panel A:  Visible Sexualities

“Post IMF Anxieties: Retreat/Retirement of Single Gay Men”

John Cho

Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Korean Studies, UC Berkeley

This paper discusses the discourses of self-development and economic survival that began to pervade the lives of South Korean gay men after the Asian financial crisis (aka “IMF Crisis”) in 1997/8 through the lives of four men in their 30s  and 40s. If the 1990s were a time of great sexual and romantic experimentation, then the contemporary period of deepening neoliberal reforms can be seen as an era of self-control, diligence, and, paradoxically, risk-taking. Viewing a bleak economic future without the support of their own wives and children, many of these men who constitute the so-called first generation of gay men to resist marriage to women and lead part-time lives as “weekend gays,” regret the time that they had spent pursuing love and sex in the 1990s rather than studying. In order to secure their economic future, many retreat and some even “retire” from the gay community–now considering love a luxury–to focus on self-development.

“Punishing the Precluded: The Anti-Homosexual Bill and State Securitization in Neoliberal Uganda”  Daniel Hwang, Colombia University, Dept of Anthropology

The western media almost exclusively attributes Uganda’s Anti-Homosexual Bill to the missionary efforts of three American evangelicals and the alleged threat that homosexuals pose to the “traditional” heterosexual family. The problem, however, with this view of Ugandan policy being informed by American religious sentiment, is that advocacy stemming from this charge implicitly perpetuates Afro-pessimistic stereotypes of Ugandans as passive vessels into which western, religious narratives of sexual reparation are poured, and then ‘savagely’ distorted into provisions for the death penalty for cases of “aggravated” homosexuality. What occurs, therefore, is that the attempt to mitigate Uganda’s supposed barbarism rests on a disagentive characterization of Africans which is equally problematic—all of which precludes serious analysis into Uganda’s rationale (geopolitical and cultural) for the development of such legislation.

This paper proposes to analyze the Anti-Homosexual Bill as an articulation of Uganda’s particular governmental rationality and the production of the homosexual as a neoliberal subjectivity. With the discursive exteriorization of sexual deviance, punitive populism, and the scalar extension of African ‘kinship’ (redefined) and spiritual exemplarity to national proportions, we explore how religious and cultural affects promote the biopolitical formulation of deviant sexualities—whereby the ‘sanctity’ and ‘security’ of the heterosexual family, as the site of production of human capital, justifies queer eradication. In this way, we hope to examine more critically the relationships between Ugandan and American religions and political economies as complex sets of dialogical imbrications rather than merely one of monological neocolonialism.

“Project Army Wives”

Maria Faini

PhD Student, Department of Comparative Ethnic Studies, Critical Theory, UC California, Berkeley

In July of 2002, Fayetteville, North Carolina, journalist Tanya Biank covered five murder cases. All but one involved men in Fort Bragg’s “black operations” who had just returned from Afghanistan. Four of the victims were military wives.

US military bases are social microcosms. In the name of security, they mandate speech and practices that both normalize and make salient US race and national anxieties; the term “military spouse” itself traces the suturing of marriage and nation as they constitute citizen subjects. Through its move from news to interviews to nonfiction novel, Tanya Biank’s Army Wives: The Unwritten Code of Military Marriage commoditizes and adapts military wives’ personal narratives of daily life in the base communities. In doing so, the project circulates anxieties of race and kinship as it reinscribes white-heteropatriarchal national subjectivity. Focusing on Biank’s novel and the subsequent television drama of the same name, hosted on the women’s daytime network Lifetime, this paper argues that the project of Army Wives is formed and proliferated through what Lauren Berlant terms an intimate public, and that this intimacy makes recourse to and secures the military family imaginary. This paper also discusses how the (re)presentation of blackness within this intimate framework–as a realm into which pathologies and anxieties of race reproduction and violence are relegated–elucidates how military spouses are imagined in women’s literature and television to rearticulate and reproduce whiteness. And yet, this representation remains subversive; blackness in Army Wives demonstrates Frank Wilderson’s Black (non)subject, and in doing so, it challenges notions of white, patriarchal kinship.

 

 

Morning Session: Panel B: Rights Discourse in Security Culture

“Nappy Roots: Detangling the Policing and Criminalization of Gender Nonconformity”

Marvin Dumas (Gonzaga University Class of 2011)

Despite valiant efforts to make communities, campuses and state institutions secure places for sexual minorities through anti-hate, bullying, and discriminatory laws huge gaps still remain in policy that leave many queer individuals open to attack. The current trend in mainstream LGBT politics focuses on a generalized white homonormative identity that separates itself from all activity deemed criminal and disowns gender non-conformists including, but not limited to: quares, punks, welfare queens, bulldaggers, transpeople, and any individuals hegemonically deemed impure. The goal of current LGBT politics is assimilation into American citizenry, but in doing so it ignores the flaws inherent to the criminal justice system that many LGBT individuals of color experience. This “justice” system routinely employs archetypes that criminalize gender nonconformists in the name of protecting a “quality of life” which subjects quares and gender non-conformists to racial, class, and gender oppressions rooted in racism, homophobia, transphobia, and hatred. What is needed is a restructuring of the multiple institutions that oppress these individuals like the racism and archetypes in the criminal justice system, stereotypes and over-policing in racial and ethnic minority communities, and cultural narratives that criminalize queers of color. If these issues are not addressed, politics will continue to perpetuate the myth that “It Gets Better” for queer youth simply by increasing anti-bullying laws and attaining marital equality while simultaneously continuing to ignore the intersecting systems of oppression against those outside of homonormativity threatening their security at home, in their communities, and in the public sphere.

“”Naked” Security—Re-imagining Full-Body Scanners”

Angelo Haidaris, BA Feminist Studies, UC Santa Cruz

My presentation will consider post-9/11 security technologies within the U.S. as (re)formative of normalized bodies. Through focusing on the airport and full-body scanning (FBS) technology, I discuss FBS’s against its most common contention as an invasion of privacy. In resituating the argument away from privacy narratives I explore the ways techniques of security exist prior to the space of the airport while reiterated within it. Largely, security functions on the notion of a “stranger-danger” discourse, inscribing the “stranger” as a racialized figure of national (in)security.

FBS moves beyond metal detectors through its invasive imaging but also in predicating the “anomaly” to biological versus non-biological components. Consequently, FBS assumes that one’s body can be reduced to its anatomical-semiotic representation, or simply that what is wholly part of the body can only be that which is biologically substantiated. The “attachment” marks the individual as “dangerous” through the assumption of the biological body as accurately representative of what bodies are, effectually relegating some queer/trans subjects as “dangerous,” via their “attachments.” While focusing largely on FBS technology, I also discuss the racialized knowledges of pre- & post-9/11 security and how they impact queer/trans bodies while also marked by Puar’s elaboration of homonormativity. In doing so I draw from authors such as Barad, Puar, Ahmed, and Foucault to articulate the intricacies of securitized culture.

“Calculating (Against) the Incalculable: Queering Apocalyptic Rhetoric in Political Deliberation”

Jim Sydnor, California State University, Fullerton

This paper analyzes the way apocalyptic rhetoric in deliberations over national policymaking conceals anti-queer violence, even though such rhetoric produces and is only intelligible through militarizing against queerness.  Politics evokes the specter of extinction in the form of terrorism, economic collapse, environmental destruction, proliferation, and many other threats.  Through utilitarian analysis, the nation-state focuses on threats to that it deems human; yet “humanity” in nationalist discourse is constituted through the exclusion of the queer body.  National security is a simultaneous process of rendering entire peoples and bodies queer, while necessitating militarization against their threatening queerness.  This threat is always posited as one against humanity even though its rhetoric privileges the interests of only a particular citizenry.  Since statistical analysis of anti-queer violence is measured to be a much smaller concern than the risk of global annihilation, issues relating to domestic queer bodies are shoved aside for matters considered more pressing.  Yet even liberal attempts to calculate the prevalence of hate crimes and curb them can never master reality because the nature of queerness makes those numbers incalculable and elusive to social scientific study.  Evoking extinction anxiety ensures that citizens never contemplate the way social norms and values produce that which is outside the citizenry, which is the very exclusion necessary for a normalized citizen-body.  Rather than confronting the anti-queer grammar of suffering undergirding daily life, liberal politics maintain anti-queerness through homonormative assimilation and distancing from others those also excluded by the social and political order because of their queerness.

 

Afternoon Session: Panel A: Critical Anarchisms

 

“We Must Love Each Other and Protect Each Other: A Critical Examination of Safety in Direct Action Spaces”

Elliot Fukui, The New School Eugene Lang, Urban Studies

The recent occupy movement has been hailed as a widespread political movement which is representative of all disenfranchised people. However, we find that in many of the “occupied” spaces, non-normative and marginalized populations continue to experience violence and microaggressions, which impact their capacity to exist and work within these spaces. My paper attempts to explore notions of safety in direct action spaces as they relate to non-normative or marginalized populations. Through conducting interviews with organizers and activists from several different organizing traditions and frameworks combined with researching different models of community accountability and transformative justice, I aim to explore how social positioning and power dynamics limit and/or encourage particular bodies to participate and engage in direct action spaces. I also attempt to pull out the different ways that communities and organizers work to develop their own safe(r) spaces and security strategies within the larger context of direct action spaces. I will be focusing specifically on the recent Occupy movement and the Battle for Seattle as case studies, with emphasis on the New York City “Occupation” of Zuccotti Park. My secondary research will be heavily centered in transnational feminism, queer theory, disability theory, radical consent and community accountability/transformative justice practices of different community based organizations. The final product of my research will be compiled in a Zine format, and will include 5 maps visualizing ideal security and safety precautions that marginalized and non-normative people can use to aid in developing safer and more inclusive direct action spaces for future actions.

“”These People are Savages”: Anarchism, Rationality, and the Violence of Property”

Benjamin Abbott, University of New Mexico, American Studies PhD Program

Using Chris Hedges’ recent denunciation of black bloc anarchists as point of departure, this paper explores the continuity of anti-anarchist rhetoric since the late nineteenth century. In presenting anarchists as senselessly violent, driven by primal passions, opposed to all organization, and bent only on destruction, Hedges taps into a long-standing discourse with considerable cultural resonance. Drawing on Chandan Reddy’s Freedom with Violence as well as the work of critical legal geographers like David Delaney, I argue that their material and theoretical challenge to bourgeois property serves as the foundation for the construction of anarchists as irrational, premodern others. As the Occupy movement continues to highlight, liberalism relies on force in the form of police batons and tear gas to control space. Because anarchists deny the legitimacy of state violence and act on their principles, liberal ideologues cast them beyond the pale of civilization. My reading of turn-of-the-twentieth-century popular texts details how these condemnations make an explicit equation between the assumed-European anarchists and racialized colonial subjects on the basis of property. A similar logic operates in the state’s subjugation of the Apaches, suppression of anarchism, and war against so-called terrorists from the Muslim world. By emphasizing these connections, I seek to promote radical and decolonial politics that reject the stranglehold liberalism has placed on our social imagination. The anarchist critique valuably exposes the colonialist nature of the U.S. nation-state, undermines claims of exceptionalism, and suggests novel methods of sharing this planet we all inhabit.

 

 

Afternoon Session: Panel B: The Logics of Neoliberalism and the Legacies of Colonialism

 

 

“Queering the Bomb: Nuclear Weapons, Resistance and Failure”

Eileen Shaughnessy, University of New Mexico, Masters student in American Studies

The specter of failure haunts the nuclear landscape like a bad dream.  From nuclear accidents to “unsuccessful” anti-nuclear activism, the nuclear industrial complex complicates simplistic narratives of success and failure.  How do concepts like success and failure shape the discourse surrounding the nuclear weapons industrial complex and the resistance to it?  How are notions of security and insecurity/vulnerability bound up with nuclearism, power, and the nation-state?  Indeed, how do nuclear weapons themselves create a queer relationship with security and insecurity within the nation-state?  I aim to foreground these questions in this paper and to situate my analysis at the intersections of militarism, feminism, and queer theory.  Ultimately, I argue that Queer Studies and Queer Indigenous Studies have much to offer critiques of both the nuclear weapons industry and the nation-state.

 

Marc Boucai, PhD Candidate in Performance Studies, UC California, Berkeley

This paper examines the scene of child rape in contemporary literature about the Middle East and the neoliberal narrative of redemption and inclusion that comes as a result of this scene of abjection. In this chapter, I argue that the narrative of rape to redemption found in Sulieman X’s young adult novel Bilal’s Bread and Khaled Hosseini’s successful The Kite Runner is emblematic of larger questions and tensions concerning American fears about both the Middle East and alternative sexualities.  The narrative contrivances found in both novels are not only inline with dominant American interests but also demonstrate how the pairing of the melodramatic coming of age novel with a Middle Eastern setting and explicit homosexual content results in a text that is decidedly reductionist and indeed, Salvationist, in its ideological underpinnings.  By this, I mean that the sort of redemption on offer for the Middle Eastern heroes of these tales involves them evolving into of a very particular kind of neoliberal multicultural subject.  This subject post 9/11 can be of color or queer or even both as long as they make clear a commitment to normative democratic and family values. At the heart of all these texts, is a persistent and disorienting anxiety about the role of the child, specifically the queer and/or Muslim/Arab child at our contemporary moment.  How is this child both an emptyremnant of Oreintalist literature and the new symbol of an all-inclusive liberal society? How does the act of rape and the narrative of redemption that stems from it help to solidify these young children as “good subjects” and “docile patriots” who can be folded into the American nation?