Rihanna, Intimate Violence, and Feminist Rage

There is this post, by Ann Powers, on the Rihanna/Chris Brown collabs, that’s worth quoting, and worth reading in its entirety:

The songs Rihanna has chosen to record, and has sometimes co-written, are not ones I play for my own daughter (though yes, she’s heard them on the radio, and we’ve talked about them). They’re rarely, if ever, feel-good anthems encouraging self-empowerment. Rihanna has basically abandoned such efforts, ceding that ground to her friends Katy Perry and Beyonce. Instead, she’s entered into a space previously occupied by many blues women, country singers and girl groups, where women attempt to uncover the truth behind emotional violence, without necessarily comprehending ways to escape it.

The outrage over this one particular, very public reminder that folks who have experienced intimate violence don’t always fully disown, eschew, or even (gasp!) stop eroticizing their abuser has a whole lot more to do with the psychic boundary maintenance, experiential naivete, and forced/faux moral propriety of those engaging the decrying than it does with any kind of feminism.

A feminist response to this phenomenon? The phenomena of domestic violence more generally? Call me old-fashioned, but that might have something to do with, first off, providing some space outside of a Manichean moral system to think about the affective intricacies of the experience. This might be a cultural moment wherein things pop are prompting us to reconsider our collective refusal to engage the common, quotidian nature of abuse that occurs in contexts wherein the ‘victims’ rarely have the luxury to refuse to dignify the existence of their abusers; Rihanna might have the economic means to do this, but apparently not the psychic armor or access to structures of feeling that would enable her to do so. I don’t think many of us do – this is why there’s a little thing called ‘recovery’ that is a) a complex process and b) never complete.

Radical feminist thought, for me – particularly those inappropriate, outrageous feminisms Jack Halberstam has termed “shadow feminisms”, the kind disowned by liberal, mainstream instantiations of feminism on account of their antisocial, politically negative refusal “to remake, rebuild, or reproduce” conventional modes of femininity (The Queer Art of Failure, 138) – has been, through its vociferous refusal of these conventional modes of femininity coupled with a commitment to grappling with affective messiness, intimate horror, and everyday violence, one of the only sources capable of prompting an alternative structure of feeling – one of feminist rage – that could potentially counter the multivalent forces that normalize intimate violence. These discourses on abuse are a far cry from the hackneyed, conventional, condemnatory response all sorts of mainstream music journalists, and informal commentators, are doling out to Rihanna, responses wherein she’s being chastised for not definitevely estranging herself from Brown, responses that echo, in an only mildly modified register, what I’ve heard so many times before re: victims of domestic violence: “why doesn’t she just leave him?”

As for Chris Brown: man, my footwork is almost as good as yours, and I ain’t even famous.

–HJM

Filed under: Gender Thangs, The Anti-Jam, Ann Powers, Chris Brown, domestic violence, Rihanna

Short Article at Telos

The paper that I presented at the annual Telos Press conference, “Toward a Virtual Topography of the Manifesto,” is now up on the Telos blog, TelosSCOPE.

Comments are appreciated at the Telos site!

–MLA

Filed under: Everything's Political, Manifestos, Matt Applegate, Telos

Songs for Wednesday Night

Titus Andronicus, “A More Perfect Union”

At the Drive-In, “One Armed Scissor”

Refused, “New Noise”

–MLA

Filed under: Everything's Political, At the Drive-In, Refused, Songs for, Titus Andronicus

State Science, Nomad Science, Trans/Intersex Coalition, + the Deleuze Studies Conference

Folks! I’m heading to the Deleuze Studies conference in New Orleans this June (the 25-27). If you’re going, holler. We can meet up/travel together/crash in each other’s hotel rooms/explore cemeteries/drag each other through humid streets searching for adventures.

I’m super psyched for it, in part on account of the fact that my lifelong best friend will be my date for the trip, but also because I’ve been craving more dialogue that links up the politico-theoretical worlds of radical continental philo and critical trans studies. I’ve just finished working through the bulk of Mille Plateaux with folks in the grad course I’m teaching, and it was an intense and gratifying experience being able to collectively consider the relevance of that set of concepts for folks working in gender studies/queer theory; I’m hoping this conference continues that trend, at least in part.

To be honest, though, I’m also craving veganized Creole dishes, bad.

That said – here’s my abstract for the conference:

The Royal Science of Gender Transition: Deterritorializing the Medicalization of Gender Non-Conformance

In the well-known “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage,” queer historian and critical trans theorist Susan Stryker offers a striking assertion pointing up a radical distinction between medico-scientific epistemologies regarding the aims and effects of gender transition and phenomenological, affective, lived experiences of transition, writing that

though medical techniques for sex reassignment are capable of crafting bodies that satisfy the visual and morphological criteria that generate naturalness as their effect, engaging with those very techniques produces a subjective experience that belies the naturalistic effect biomedical technology can achieve. Transsexual embodiment, like the embodiment of the monster, places its subject in an inassimilable, antagonistic, queer relationship to a Nature in which it must nevertheless exist (243).

This epistemic investment in the production of gendered ‘naturalness’ is attested to across the archives of scientific sexology concerned with developing diagnostic and treatment protocols in instances of sex/gender non-conformance. Primarily concerned with the surgical and hormonal restructuration of the flesh of transsexual, transgender, and intersex folk, the writings of mid-to-late 20th century specialists in the pathologization of gender non-conformance repeatedly assert the psychic necessity of achieving this ‘natural’ effect, tacitly positing sex atypical or sex/gender non-congruent morphologies as a corporeal foundation for psychic imbalances ranging from mild anxiety to debilitating depression.

Utilizing a schizoanalytic approach, this paper positions the practical medico-scientific investment in the production of naturalness as a key component of statist regulation of processes of gender transition. Situating key sexological writings on gender transition as instantiations of what Deleuze and Guattari, in the twelfth plateau of Mille Plateaux (“1227: Treatise on Nomadology – The War Machine”) dub State (or Royal) science, I interrogate the emergence and maintenance of the disjunctive space Stryker points to, that rift between the production of the natural as effect and the “unassimilable, antagonistic, queer relationship to Nature” experienced by many trans and intersex folk. Deleuze and Guattari clarify the reliance of State science on a pronounced hylomorphism; in medico-scientific epistemologies of transition, this hylomorphic emphasis engenders the production of ideally gendered templates – ideal forms, as it were – that force desires for corporeal becoming to submit to the a neatly binary form/matter hierarchy. The growing movement to demedicalize trans and intersex treatment protocols stakes its primary contestatory claims specifically against this binaristic hylomorphism. It is my argument that, in so doing, activists, academics, medico-scientific professionals and theorists engaged in this mode of counter-attack are fomenting what can be thought of as a nomad science of sorts, one that 1) stresses a hydraulic model of sexual difference attentive to flows and flux (something akin to what Claire Colebrook has theorized as ‘queer vitalism’); 2) emphasizes minoritarian becomings over sedimented, molar identities; and 3) focuses on pragmatic issues of livability rather than the teleological attainment of the ‘nature effect,’ thus taking a problematic rather than a theorematic approach to cognizing the entwinement of corporeality and technologies of transition.

–HJM

Filed under: Gender Thangs, The Jam, Deleuze Studies Conference, intersex issues, New Orleans, Nomad Science, queer, Susan Stryker, trans issues, Transition

My Dissertation Prospectus: A Short Introduction

With a draft of my dissertation prospectus now complete I thought I would post a short introduction here.

This dissertation poses the question, “what is the relation between social and political antagonism and the temporalities through which they are thought to function in the praxis of radical and domestic terrorist organizations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries?”

Thinking questions of social and political antagonism and the temporalities in and through which they are thought to function is not, for the purposes of this project, necessarily orchestrated in and through a series of thinkers but in and through a constellation of political movements, partisan formations, and their modes of articulation. What unites the primary literature and theory to follow is twofold. First, the dissertation will be organized around a set of conceptual linkages concerned with the failures of liberal democratic projects to operate in opposition to imperial logics on the one hand, and the failures of dialectical materialism to adequately address and revolutionize social, political, and economic disparity on the other. Second, where my dissertation is focused on the thought and praxis of radical and domestic terrorist organizations, the theory and literature to follow is loosely organized around the basic premise that violence is not only a possible and necessary mode of resistance, but that passivity inhibits and poses an impossible project for resistance against state power and capitalist sovereignty. The fundamental argument of this dissertation given these two points of focus is that contemporary modes of resistance comprise a multiplicity of times and spaces—a heterogeneous field of potential outcomes and tactics that are not governed by a progressive or linear synthesis. Indeed, the praxis of each organization, as it stands opposed to state power and capitalist sovereignty, theorizes the conditions of antagonism within agonistic and even conflicting temporalities.

That being said, the political movements, partisan formations, and modes of articulation to be examined in this dissertation center around the praxis of four groups: BPP (The Black Panther Party), the WUO (Weather Underground Organization), the RAF (Red Army Faction), and the ELF (Earth Liberation Front). To a lesser degree, and insofar as it relates to the politics and trajectory outlined above, I might engage the thought and practice formative of the BLA (Black Liberation Army) with the dissolution of the BPP, Up Against the Wall/Motherfuckers, the Yippies, ANTIFA (Anti-Fascist Youth in Nazi Germany), arguments formative of contemporary anarchist movements in the U.S., the anti-globalization movement after the WTO, the dissolution of the Environmental Life Force and the formation of the Earth Liberation Front, and, definitive of our current political moment, OWS (Occupy Wall Street).

Where the primary radical and domestic terrorist organizations identified above operate either directly or tangentially within a Marxist heritage, they affirm that social and political antagonism derives, at least in part, from the capitalist exploitation of labor. The theory and practice of each group is not, however, reducible to nor is it often fully associated with workerism. In this way, where Marx identifies the origin of social and political antagonism within a relation of capitalist exploitation, as in Capital, where he claims that

The driving motive and determining purpose of capitalist production is the self-valorization of capital to the greatest possible extent, i.e. the greatest possible production of surplus value, hence, the greatest possible exploitation of labour-power by the capitalist. As the number of co-operating workers increases, so too does their resistance to the domination of capital, and, necessarily, the pressure put on by capital to overcome this resistance. (449)

I will situate the theory and practice of the BPP, WUO, RAF, and ELF within a broader theoretical landscape. Indeed, this is the proposed focus of the first chapter of the dissertation and what will here serve as a sketch of the arguments and stakes of the dissertation.

–MLA

Filed under: Everything's Political, the Weather Underground, The Black Panthers, The Red Army Faction, The Earth Liberation Front, Dissertation

Songs for Saturday Night

And promises of substantive blog posts…

Misteur Valaire, “Ave Mucho”

Pretty Lights, “Empire State of Mind Remix”

–MLA

Filed under: Everything's Political, Songs for

Banning Camping in City Parks

Last night the City of Binghamton discussed, and to my knowledge passed, a ban on camping in city parks. While, for Binghamton, this is an issue stemming from the Occupy Movement, it hadn’t occurred to me that this would become a hot-button issue. So I am simply interested, does anyone know of similar civic measures being taken where live?

–MLA

Filed under: Everything's Political

On Being Made to Kiss the Ring

The semester has begun with a swift fist to the face.

Currently I am preparing for my qualifying exams and there is no other process as effective at reinforcing the student/professor divide. After meeting with 2/3′s of my committee this week, it is clear to me that this entire process is supposed to make me feel like I haven’t read or prepared enough for the task at hand, that I know less and cannot be as smart as a Ph.D. until I have a Ph.D., and that I should have written half of my dissertation yesterday.

As I continue to prepare to kiss the ring, here is “Summit” by Skrillex:

–MLA

Filed under: Everything's Political