Gender and Politics
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.
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.
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.
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.