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"”
A friend of Occupy recently passed away: Michael Nash, head of the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at NYU. I had only a passing personal acquaintance with Michael, but this is not untypical of the ways we … Continue reading “The Generosity of the Archivist”
All skinfolk ain’t kinfolk — an ole and fitting saying from my long-ago Red, Black & Green Liberation upbringing that could be well applied to the Sixth Annual installment of the New York City-based Afro-Punk Festival. Last week, there were … Continue reading “Afro-Punk 2012: Apocalypse”
Detail of massive ferry, while still in Piraeus port All but two of the dozens of flat-screen TVs on the many upper decks of the giant ferry E. Venizelos (now en route from Piraeus to Chania) were tuned to the … Continue reading “Notes from Europe: Rosa Nera”
In Thessaloniki: This bank is French-owned. Stand-off: police attack social center (video still). Heat conspired with exhaustion to make the train ride from Thessaloniki to Athens seem cruelly extenuated. We could only blame ourselves. We’d stayed up all the previous … Continue reading “Notes from Europe: from Thessaloniki to Athens”
This special issue of Social Text will examine discourses of physical debility and social mobility in concert with social movement politics, broadly construed. The broader rubric of disability is an especially apt lens through which to launch a political agenda, if only … Continue reading “CFP: Movement Politics”
One of the members of my working group, The People’s Think Tank, recommended me as a good person to speak to young activists last week at the Civil Rights Student Summit in New York organized by Teaching Matters. The folder they gave to the set of people they brought in to speak to the students, most of whom were in eighth grade, said “community activist” on the front. Reading that brought me back to a discussion facilitated by the Think Tank on May Day, where we got to talking about what it meant for us to be activists. When it was my turn to speak, the only words on offer were something like “I really don’t like to think of myself as an activist. I kind of want to think of myself as a normal person.
Note the flag above. In Berlin each morning we woke to the improvisations of little Domingo in his cage ringing changes from the basic canary songbook. Was Danny’s pet canary a genius? We couldn’t pretend to know why this caged … Continue reading “Notes from Europe: Berlin”
Appearing not once, but twice in Facebook’s Securities and Exchange Commission-mandated IPO Registration document is a beautiful map by Paul Butler. It is not hard to see why the map plays a large role in the document. It symbolizes the global reach … Continue reading “Mapping and Counter-Mapping Facebook”
We are a group of scholars and academics who teach at universities in the United States who were part of a January 2012 delegation sponsored by the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, which was … Continue reading “Statement of USACBI Delegation to Palestine”
Reconstruction in the US after abolition, whether it knew it or not, was following the pattern established by Haiti during its revolution. So it seemed like a good time to take a look and see how reconstruction after the disastrous … Continue reading “Reconstructing Haiti 1801/2010 and on”
