As someone who has been writing about food and eating for a long time, I am most intrigued with Cruel Optimism‘s engagement with eating in the third chapter, “Slow Death: Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency.” My sense is that food exists … Continue reading “How Does It Feel?”
Lauren’s thought is fat: rich and extensive, spreading with pleasure. And I’m headed to murder, fat, and luxury as I seek to fete her. First, however, something in Lauren’s tone is moving. The sly, alluring sadism of optimism … Continue reading “Tone on the Range”
Dana Luciano: I’d like to start by pressing further on your comment (Cruel Optimism 21) about the need to invent new genres for theorizing, genres that can more effectively register, assess and imagine forms of response to the “new ordinary” … Continue reading “Conversation: Lauren Berlant with Dana Luciano”
We love our little objects. Perhaps you are reading this on yours, pinching and stroking the screen to enlarge the text. These physical interactions with the things themselves, with the actual media of media, are part of the history of … Continue reading “The Sixties in a Cube”
Click here to read. This dossier takes its cue from one of the Occupy movement’s bedrock slogans, “This Is What Democracy Looks Like” (though this was first nurtured, as were many Occupy paradigms, tactics and customs, in the global … Continue reading “Is This What Democracy Looks Like?”
Graduate Center, CUNY — Center for Humanities Nov 26, 2012, 6:30pm | The Skylight Room (9100) Ashley Dawson, Matthew K. Gold, Michael Mandiberg, Tavia Nyong’o What are the radical possibilities of open access publishing? This panel will bring together a … Continue reading “Digital Publishing Today”
The digital material presented here is meant to supplement the article “Hip Hop from ’48 Palestine: Youth, Music, and the Present/Absent” from the current issue of Social Text (30.3, Fall 2012). An abstract for the article can be read below.
Sex work, which I knew nothing about while standing with deep longing and trepidation moving in my body, was not what I intended to provide. No, I wanted to perform love work and traveling to the netherworld of ambiguity was, in my mind, well-worth it. I sought after liberation: freedom from the anxieties of heteronormativitity. And, if I am honest, I wanted to have boundless sex with another man in a “world” that did not create me, but in one that I created. And isn’t it the case that we, queers, are often in search of other worlds because we have been shamed in this one? Read more
Zone Books is pleased to announce the publication of Sensible Politics: The Visual Culture of Nongovernmental Activism, edited by Meg McLagan and Yates McKee. Political acts are encoded in medial forms–feet marching on a street, punch holes on a card, … Continue reading “Sensible Politics: Book Release”
“Apophatic Sovereignty Before the Law at Guantanamo”
Allen Feldman
Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication
New York University
Date: Tuesday, October 16, 2012
Time: 6-8 PM
Location: 6 East 16th Street, Room 1103
SPONSORED BY THE POLITICS DEPARTMENT, NSSR
Under review: J. Jack Halberstam. Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal. Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press, 2012. The stardom of Lady Gaga has stimulated academic studies in ways that few celebrities typically have (aside from icons like Madonna and … Continue reading “Occupy, Gaga”
In January 2012, a delegation of scholars and teachers working in the United States went on a week-long investigative trip to Israel/Palestine organized by the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. The trip resulted in a … Continue reading “Palestine”
Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex (AK Press, 2011), Nat Smith and Eric A. Stanley (eds.) Even though it was over 30 years ago, I remember well the anxiety about entering the penal system: how would I … Continue reading “Transforming Society”
Of interest to Social Text readers: Sep 14, 2012 3:30 PM – 6:00 PM 20 Cooper Square, New York, NY | NYU Journalism 7th Floor Commons The Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia at NYU and the Arthur L. Carter … Continue reading “Pussy Riot: Performance, Politics, and Protest”
Originally published in Agos (Istanbul), May 2011. Armenians in the U.S. consistently hear–because so many of us constantly insist–that “Turkey is silent about the Genocide and the Armenians.” Meanwhile, so many of us in the U.S. speak incessantly about the Genocide and … Continue reading “On Sound and Silence, "in a place I’d never been before"”
