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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Feeling Transparent: Trans Parenthood And The American Family System, Miles Feroli Jan 2022

Feeling Transparent: Trans Parenthood And The American Family System, Miles Feroli

Theses and Dissertations--Gender and Women's Studies

This dissertation explores the contemporary lived experiences and representations of people who are transgender and parents (trans parents) in the United States. I employ an intersectional framework that primarily uses trans theory, motherhood studies, and affect theory. After conducting 36 semi-structured interviews with trans parents across the US and critically analyzing the series Transparent (2014-2019), I found that enmeshed discourses and practices of family and motherhood, or what I dub the American family system, affectively shapes who gets greater access to material and social capital. This process primarily occurs through the ways the American family system mobilizes affects like …


Volume 28: Affect, Robby Hardesty, Alina Hechler Dec 2019

Volume 28: Affect, Robby Hardesty, Alina Hechler

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

The 2018-19 Editorial Collective is pleased to present the 28th volume of disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory. Our inspiration for this odd bundle of pages is rooted in the aesthetic of the self-printed zine. While we regret that we couldn't sneak into Miller Hall in the middle of the night to guerrilla-copy the entire issue on a late-80s black-and-white Xerox, we are proud to say that each page of this volume was assembled entirely by hand. Every page is bordered or backgrounded by collages: these are pages that peel and flake, assembled from bits and pieces cut up …


Feminist Friendship As An Affective Engagement Through The Arts: A Decolonial And Posthuman Becoming-With Rebeca Lane's Alma Mestiza, Miguel Ángel Blanco Martínez, Paola Mendoza Téllez-Girón Dec 2019

Feminist Friendship As An Affective Engagement Through The Arts: A Decolonial And Posthuman Becoming-With Rebeca Lane's Alma Mestiza, Miguel Ángel Blanco Martínez, Paola Mendoza Téllez-Girón

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

This paper considers friendship as an affective terrain of feminist alliance among subjects that belong to territories with a colonial record responding to the colonial/modern gender system (Lugones 2007) through the arts. Friendship is here conceptualized as an engagement of feminist solidarity unfolding within theoretical and practical models of change and resistance against the logics of cultural imperialism (Lugones and Spelman 1983). Turning friendship into a polyphonic feminist reaction, this work is conducted by acknowledging the need to foster dialogues where different authorial voices and feminist positionalities meet, reflect, and speak. The paper settles the encounter between its authors in …


Feel-Sad Tv: Sadness Pornography In Contemporary Serials, Blake K. Beaver Dec 2019

Feel-Sad Tv: Sadness Pornography In Contemporary Serials, Blake K. Beaver

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

This article develops a theory of sadness pornographies in contemporary feel-sad television. Under the sad porn category, the essay explores a key sub-genre in contemporary serial dramas: trauma porn. The article is anchored in an affective analysis of two contemporary serials: Amazon's Transparent and NBC's This Is Us, both of which center multigenerational, familial trauma. Through a combined Berlantian and Spinozist optic, the essay attends to various episodes from the two serials to illuminate the phenomenon of trauma porn in current feel-sad media. In this reading, the essay considers how Spinoza's understandings of the temporality of affect relate to the …


Recovery After The Rupture: Linking Colonial Histories Of Displacement With Affective Objects And Memories, Aarzoo Singh Dec 2019

Recovery After The Rupture: Linking Colonial Histories Of Displacement With Affective Objects And Memories, Aarzoo Singh

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

The notion of home and belonging, specifically in the context of South Asian postcolonial diasporas, is connected to past traumas of colonization and displacement. This paper addresses how trauma, displacement, and colonialism can be understood through and with material culture, and how familial objects and items emit and/ or carry within them, emotional narratives. I turn to the affective currency that emit and are transferred on and down from objects, by diasporic subjects, to access the possible reclamation of otherwise silenced narratives within colonial and postcolonial histories. By following the events of the Partition of India in 1947 as a …


Dispatches From Queer Potluck: [Extra]Ordinary Affects As A Project Of Belonging, Greg Niedt Dec 2019

Dispatches From Queer Potluck: [Extra]Ordinary Affects As A Project Of Belonging, Greg Niedt

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

This essay takes an approach that is part autobiography, part meditation on theory, in order to engage with the tension between "ordinary affects" (Stewart 2007) and the queer extraordinary. Drawing on my own experiences as part of an intentional community in Philadelphia, I consider what it means for me to experience affect in queer space. How does that manifest in the body, and the world in turn? How do these experiences fit into a larger desire for kinship and belonging? My purpose here is not to make broad claims about what affect is (or is not), but to provide a …


Nineteenth-Century Pets And The Politics Of Touch, Valerie L. Stevens Jan 2019

Nineteenth-Century Pets And The Politics Of Touch, Valerie L. Stevens

Theses and Dissertations--English

Nineteenth-Century Pets and the Politics of Touch examines texts of the era in which both humans and animals find empowerment at the point of physical encounter. I challenge contemporary perceptions of human-pet relationships as sweetly affectionate by focusing on touch. I uncover an earlier interest in the close reciprocal relationships between human and nonhuman animals, arguing that these nineteenth-century thinkers presented what I call a “politics of touch,” in which intimate and often jarring physical encounters allow for mutuality and autonomy. I first turn to Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849) and protective violence, a condoned ferocity that frequently unites and guards …


Straight Time And Scandal: Travesti Urban Politics In São Paulo, Brazil, Christine L. Woodward Jan 2016

Straight Time And Scandal: Travesti Urban Politics In São Paulo, Brazil, Christine L. Woodward

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

São Paulo, Brazil is currently pursuing a project of creative urbanism. Though city rhetoric insists this project is rooted in tolerance of sexual diversity, I suggest that city policy effectively perpetuates normative conceptions of family and respectability. Using data gathered through a series of qualitative interviews with transgender and travesti individuals living in São Paulo, I argue that the straight time of São Paulo’s creative urbanism generates exclusionary temporalities and spatialities in the city that render travestis out of time and out of place. Furthermore, I argue that travestis use their capacity to enact shame through scandals to generate temporalities …