Lorenze 1

Shall We Gender: Where? Who? When?

By Ewa Plonowska Ziarek. »»» Drawing on Arendt’s political philosophy, this essay redefines the meaning of gender in terms of action, as a modality of power and relations to others, and in terms of temporality or what Arendt calls the “gap between past and future.” It contests the erasure of Eastern-European feminisms, evident for instance in the First/Third World, Global North/Global South, West/non-West distinctions in transnational feminisms.

Lorenze 3

Los Huecos Negros: Cannibalism, Sodomy and the Failure of Modernity in Tierra Firme

By Marcia Ochoa »»» To tunnel into the black hole of modernity and the coloniality of gender: this essay proposes time travel between early contact texts in the Americas and the contemporary life world of Yhajaira, a transformista from Caracas. I engage a chronopolitics that works against the developmental logic of modernity to inhabit and embody queer forms of pleasure, though I will attach these to the quotidian violence lived by transformistas in Caracas in the early 21st century rather than to a queer existence.

Lorenze 5

"Viral’s Undiscriminating Spiral”: An Intersectional, Feminist, and Ludic Approach to Animal Rights

By Rachel Lee »»» Treating Larissa Lai’s poem “ham” — titled after the NASA space chimpanzee — this essay addresses the blackening and Orientalizing of the non-human animal and develops a method attentive to the advancement of high-capital science through transforming non-white human races and non-human animals into experimental laborers. Additionally, it explores the ludic energies of microbiological and primate pleasures as portrayed by Lai — queer proliferations that exceed efforts to channel sex and intimacies toward productive ends.

Lorenze 7

Splay: Moving From Incursion in New Orleans and Kingston

By Nadia Ellis »»» This essay explores the impact of militarized presence in two cities not often thought together: New Orleans and Kingston. In both cases communities that were perceived as hyper-autonomous, culturally problematic, and politically unmanageable were subject to military-style incursion. By tracing similarities between the events in New Orleans and Kingston as well as recent electronic musics and dance cultures there, the essay imagines splayed kinesthetic as a metaphor for diasporic movement from/against incursion into these two black cities.