Arts and Humanities Commons^™

When Are You Going To Catch Up With Me? Shu Lea Cheang With Alexandra Juhasz, Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

“Digital nomad” Shu Lea Cheang and friend and critic Alexandra Juhasz consider the reasons for and implications of the censorship of Cheang’s 2017 film FLUIDØ, particularly as it connects to their shared concerns in AIDS activism, feminism, pornography, and queer media. They consider changing norms, politics, and film practices in relation to technology and the body. They debate how we might know, and what we might need, from feminist-queer pornography given feminist-queer engagements with our bodies and ever more common cyborgian existences. Their informal chat opens a window onto the interconnections and adaptations that live between friends, sex, technology, …

“9/11 And The Collapse Of The American Dream: Imbolo Mbue’S Behold The Dreamers”, Elizabeth Toohey

Publications and Research

Behold the Dreamers follows a Cameroonian couple who, as newcomers to America, harbor dreams of success unavailable to them back home. Undocumented immigration, the widening gulf between rich and poor, and the thinly veiled racism of an avowedly "post-racial" culture converge in this new generation of immigrants' painful encounter with the American dream. I consider the ways Mbue's novel shares themes with a "second wave" of post- 9/11 literature—first, in centering the disillusionment of a protagonist aspiring to the American dream; next, in its representation of New York as a space haunted by 9/11, but also of resistance to the …

Consuming Poppy Cannon, Claire Stewart

Publications and Research

Poppy Cannon was a food writer whose prominence was most felt in post-World War II America. Within the pages of her books and syndicated food columns, she positioned the use of newly available processed foods as uniquely modern. Cannon’s recipes, featuring packaged food, were not intended for the lazy cook looking to cut corners. Her use of manufactured food was instead meant to create gourmet meals, while all the while harnessing the power of an ongoing industrial phenomenon. Cannon assumed her readers were smart and literate, and in virtually all of her many cookbooks, she prefaced her recipes with references …

Watching And Talking About Aids: Analog Tapes, Digital Cultures And Strategies For Connection, Alexandra Juhasz, Theodore Kerr

Publications and Research

This paper is a conversation between activist videomaker Alexandra Juhasz and writer and organizer Theodore (ted) Kerr that explores the contemporary role of AIDS activist videos from the past.. Key to the text are ideas around history, technology, time, and community. Together they discuss and enact intergenerational dialogue, what to do with the imperfection of archives, and strategies for shared looking at the history of HIV through epochs. Their conversation is focused on a community created tape from, Bebashi — Transition to Hope, a Philadelphia non-profit.

A New Twist On The “Un-African” Script: Representing Gay And Lesbian African Weddings In Democratic South Africa, Michael W. Yarbrough

Publications and Research

This essay examines the media coverage surrounding two African weddings of lesbian and gay couples in South Africa, as a lens onto the evolving cultural politics of black queerness in that country. Two decades after South Africa launched a world-leading legal framework for LGBTI protections, I argue that these media representations depict the growing inclusion of black LGBTIQ people as a process of bridging the supposed “gap” between homosexuality and African culture. This new “bridging the gap” script seemingly rejects the older, dominant script portraying homosexuality as intrinsically “un-African.” But I argue that it instead reproduces the “un-African” script in …

Brand Personality And Sexuality Levels Of Luxury Advertisements, Alyssa Dana Adomaitis, Diana Saiki

Publications and Research

This study examined perceived brand attractiveness of and identification with fashion luxury brands given different levels of sexuality in advertisements. Sex in advertisements has become increasingly more common to generate attention and interest in fashion luxury products with limited research on its influence on the consumer. A sample of 1266 males and females completed a survey on brand attractiveness and identification after examining an advertisement of a luxury fashion product. Participants were assigned an advertisement that featured a same-gendered model at one of four levels of sexuality (fully clothed to nude). The results indicated less sexuality in luxury advertisements was …

Aids Normalization, Alexandra Juhasz, Theodore Kerr

Publications and Research

Review of On Our Backs: The Revolutionary Art of Queer Sex Work, curated by Alexis Heller for New York’s Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, which was on view from September 2019 to January 2020, and other contemporary AIDS culture.

Sartorial Subversion: Eliza Haywood’S Fantomina And The Literary Tradition Of Women’S Community, Ruth Garcia

Publications and Research

This article locates Fantomina in a literary tradition that proposes all-female communities, such as convents and monasteries, as liberating and empowering spaces. I argue that the novella implies a virtual community rather than an actual one, as the heroine collectively embodies many different women, all of distinct social ranks: the heroine is both one woman and a variety of women brought together under the auspices of a single body, much the way discrete individuals together compose a community. Then, too, Beauplaisir, the object of the heroine’s desire, treats all the personae the same, no matter their social station. This emphasis …

What Would A Covid 19 Doula Do Zine, Alexandra Juhasz, Theodore Kerr, Pato Hebert, Jih-Fei Cheng

Publications and Research

This zine is a snapshot of a time from the WHAT WOULD AN HIV DOULA DO? (WWHIVDD) community, responding in words, actions and images to the unfolding, unprecedented, global crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic. The first half of the zine is rooted in the exhibition, Metanoia: Transformation through AIDS Archives and Activism curated by WWHIVDD for the ONE Archives Foundation (ONE) . The second half are responses from our Metanoia and WWHIVDD communities responding to the prompt: What Does a COVID-19 Doula Do? Many of the entries were submitted the second week of March as people in the US were …

Fascist Aesthetics From 1940 To Contemporary Times, Anna M. Gellerman

Publications and Research

Movies and literature all over the world share some common aesthetics: militarization, romanticization of death, beauty of perfection, and even purity. What most don't think about is how these tropes rose to popularity due to Nazi Germany's propaganda films. This work describes these fascist aesthetics, and uses famous publications from the 1940s until now to paint just how common these themes are.

Twelve Dispatches From The Futures Of Aids, Alexandra Juhasz, Emily Bass, Pato Hebert, Elton Naswood, Margaret Rhee, Jessica Whitbread, Quito Ziegler

Publications and Research

A Dialogue between Emily Bass, Pato Hebert, Elton Naswood, Margaret Rhee, and Jessica Whitbread, with Images by Quito Ziegler and an Introduction by Alexandra Juhasz

Feminist Pedagogy In A Time Of Coronavirus Pandemic, Alexandra Juhasz, Laura Wexler, Liz Losh, Sharon Irish

Publications and Research

FemTechNet, a network of scholars, artists, and students working on, with, and at the borders of technology, science, and feminism, has a great deal of experience thinking about pedagogy and technology. We have produced real intimacy, vibrant classes, and insurgent pedagogy since 2012. The principles of our signature Distributed Open Collaborative Courses (DOCCs) are crucial (see below). In this time of crisis, we believe we need to think again, drawing the most power possible from the radical knowledges, tactics, and commitments of feminist pedagogies of past experience. We write while schools, colleges, and universities have closed in a cascade of …

Setting The Terms Of Our Own Visibility A Conversation Between Sam Feder And Alexandra Juhasz On Trans Activist Media In The United States, Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

In the summer of 2016, I sat down at my computer and Skyped with my friend and fellow queer media activist Sam Feder about their film, Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen. What follows is a highly edited transcript of our conversation, paying particular attention to Sam’s core research findings about trans representational history and how their findings might align with their processes and goals as a trans activist media maker committed to telling this complex story.

Aids And The Distribution Of Crises: Foreword, Preface, And Introduction, Alexandra Juhasz, Nishant Shahani, Jih-Fei Cheng

Publications and Research

AIDS and the Distribution of Crises engages with the AIDS pandemic as a network of varied historical, overlapping, and ongoing crises born of global capitalism and colonial, racialized, gendered, and sexual violence. Drawing on their investments in activism, media, anticolonialism, feminism, and queer and trans of color critiques, the scholars, activists, and artists in this volume outline how the neoliberal logic of “crisis” structures how AIDS is aesthetically, institutionally, and politically reproduced and experienced.

Translator Of Soliloquies: Fugues In The Key Of Dissociation, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

Chu, Seo-Young. “Translator of Soliloquies: Fugues in the Key of Dissociation” (chapbook). Black Warrior Review 46.2, Spring 2020.

Relationships Between Dress And Gender In A Context Of Cultural Change, Alyssa Dana Adomaitis, Diana Saiki, Kim K. P. Johnson

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Rethinking Early Modern Sexuality Through Race, Mario Digangi

Publications and Research

When English Literary Renaissance launched in 1971, early modern sexuality studies did not exist. Then again, neither did the feminist, new historicist, post-colonialist, or other “political” approaches that have significantly reshaped early modern literary studies (and the humanities) over the last forty years. Yet whereas feminist and new historicist essays began thickly to populate the pages of Renaissance journals in the early 1980s, studies of sexuality—and of lesbian, gay, or queer sexualities in particular—were slow to arrive. During the 1980s, ELR published only a handful of essays that centered on sex or eroticism. The first explicit treatment of homoeroticism in …

William W. French. Maryat Lee's Ecotheater: A Theater For The Twenty-First Century (Book Review), Carole K. Harris

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Fake News Poetry Workshop As Radical Digital Media Literacy: It’S For The Thing We’Re Not Yet,, Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

One of 17 saddle stitched pamphlets + custom designed box

What does pedagogy mean to your writing practice? How do your poetics intersect with your pedagogy and education commitments? We invited participants to join together to think about the inventive and urgent possibilities of intertwined poetic-pedagogical work. What might emerge differently when we bring them together?

Urgent Possibilities, Writings on Feminist Poetics & Emergent Pedagogies grew out of the Feminist Poetics, Emergent Pedagogies Symposium organized by Andrea Quaid and Margaret Rhee. The publication collects work by symposium participants with documents and elaborations, including poems, poetic tracts, essays, workshop plans, and …

The Making And Silencing Of “Axé-Ocracy” In Brazil: Black Women Writers’ Spiritual, Political And Literary Movement In São Paulo, Sarah S. Ohmer

Publications and Research

In this article, I will focus on two influential writers from the south of Brazil, Cristiane Sobral who currently lives in Brasília, from Rio de Janeiro, and Conceição Evaristo who currently lives in Rio de Janeiro state, from Minas Gerais. I got to know them in São Paulo in 2015 at a public event: the “Afroétnica Flink! Sampa Festival of Black Thought, Literature and Culture.” I will include references to some of their younger contemporaries such as Raquel Almeida, Jenyffer Nascimento, and Elizandra Souza, all of whom reside in São Paulo, in order to illustrate the Black Brazilian women writers’ …

Contemporary Stories Of Female Development And The Outer Limits Of Maternal Sexuality In Susan Choi’S My Education And Amy Sohn’S Prospect Park West, Christa Baiada

Publications and Research

While liberal sexuality has been integrated into contemporary discursive understandings of female possibilities, barriers remain to representing mothers as sexual beings. This essay explores maternal representations in Choi’s My Education (2013) and Sohn’s Prospect Park West (2009) that challenge cultural ideals of good motherhood and invite scrutiny of normative paths and goals of female development. These 21^st-century American novels confront and even embrace active maternal sexuality but retreat at the boundary of the maternal/sexual breast to allow protagonists in contemporary alterations of female stories of development to achieve maturity through acceptance of the ideal of good motherhood .Each …

Rape At Bergdorf's, Marleen S. Barr

Publications and Research

This article provides a feminist analysis of E. Jean Carroll's description of being raped by Trump in Bergdorf Goodman's lingerie department.

The Words And Worlds Of Carolee Schneemann And Barbara Hammer With Two Thoughts By Agnes Varda, Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

Complied past interviews as a memorial

Suburban Captivity Narratives: Feminism, Domesticity And The Liberation Of The American Housewife, Megan Behrent

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Where Were The Lesbians In The Stonewall Riots? The Women’S House Of Detention & Lesbian Resistance, Polly Thistlethwaite

Publications and Research

Where were the lesbians in the Stonewall Riots? They were jailed in the House of Detention for Women in Greenwich Village, New York City, two blocks away from the Stonewall Inn. Lesbians in the Women's House of Detention shouted from the windows to the rioters in the streets below, fueling the momentum of the Stonewall uprising. The women's prison was a site of lesbian confinement and resistance that inspired the 1969 uprising in Greenwich Village.

Polly Thistlethwaite is Chief Librarian at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She volunteered at the Lesbian Herstory Archives 1986 – 1997.

Are Postmodernism And #Metoo Incompatible?, Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

If postmodernism renders the replicant Rachael legible as a glossy simulacrum, then #MeToo renders her brutally legible as a victim of sexual violence.

Making It New And Keeping It Old: Recasting Frameworks And Contexts In Georgia O’Keeffe Studies, Linda M. Grasso

Publications and Research

Three recent Georgia O’Keeffe exhibition catalogues devise new interpretative frameworks and situate O’Keeffe in new contexts that are especially relevant to American Studies scholars interested in visual culture, material culture, gender studies, reception studies, and modernism. One places O’Keeffe in the company of other white women making modernist art in the early decades of the twentieth century; another provides critical interpretations that acknowledge and reject previous views that were skewered by monolithic gender and sexual lenses; and a third moves O’Keeffe into popular culture domains such as fashion, consumerism, and interior design. Raising questions about how curators present and shape …

Tracing Trans Bodies In Neobaroque Literature, Huber David Jaramillo Gil

Publications and Research

This document briefly explores the ways in which trans people have been written through Baroque aesthetics in the social and cultural imaginary of Latin America, despite the various unjust forces that have attempted to make them invisible and exclude them from the national narrative. The differences between Severo Sarduy’s Neobaroque, Néstor Perlongher’s Neobarroso, and Pedro Lemebel’s Neobarrocho are analyzed, while exploring their individual limitations and potentialities for voicing the joys and pains of being trans in an exclusionary society.

The Pedagogies Of Sex Trafficking Postcolonial Fiction: Consent, Agency, And Neoliberalism In Chika Unigwe's On Black Sisters' Street, M Laura Barberan Reinares

Publications and Research

Amnesty International’s 2015-16 push for the decriminalization of sex work sparked yet another international debate on sex trafficking, with the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW), together with a long list of celebrities and iconic feminists such as Gloria Steinem, claiming that such measure will only worsen sex trafficking, among other problems, and myriad pro-sex work feminists vouch-ing exactly the opposite.1 This dispute is by no means new-as of 2018, it remains at an impasse-but, interestingly, while sociologists and women’s studies scholars have been discussing sex trafficking issues for decades now, and despite its intimate relation to postcolonialism and globalization, …

Honey, I Teleported The President Or When Trump Changed: The Feminist Science Fiction Justice League Quashes The Orange Outrage Pussy Grabber Fights Horror Fiction With Horror Fiction, Marleen S. Barr

Publications and Research

The science fiction subgenre Marleen S. Barr defines as “Trumppunk” provides the best textual means to diffuse the prevarication which profusely emanates from what Stephen Colbert calls Trump’s “mouth hole.” With this point in mind, Barr wrote When Trump Changed: The Feminist Science Fiction Justice League Quashes The Orange Outrage Pussy Grabber, the first single-authored Trump-focused short story collection. Her intention was to fight Trump's misogynistic horror fiction with satirical feminist horror fiction.