Gender Studies MA

Wendy Chun, 'Othering Space' The Visual Culture Reader . Edited by Nicholas Mirzoeff. London/New York: Routledge, 2002 243-252 "Like all explorations, charting cyberspace entailed uncovering what was always already there and declaring it 'new.'" p.243 "Cyberspace lies outside of all places and its location cannot be indicated definitively, yet it does exist." p.243 "The jacked-in computer screen enables one to see oneself - or at the very least one's words or representations - where one is not." p. 245 - Like with Instagram - one places photos of oneself on there, edited and photoshopped to become what one would like the world to see, a false representation, but you are not there, you are not the image you post. "virtual passing promises to protect our 'real' bodies and selves from the consequences of such public participation, from the glare of publicity." p.245 "Such a passing enables a flight to a sim...

Lisa Nakamura: “Afterword: “Blaming, Shaming, and the Feminization of Social Media,” Feminist Surveillance Studies, Shoshana Magnet and Rachel Dubrofsky (editors), 2014. “We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice according to race, economic power, military force, or station of birth....Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are based on matter, there is no matter here. Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion.”—John Perry Barlow  “A Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace”  1996 Race as a technology of control - how are we surveyed, how are we monitored, how are tabs kept on us "There is no form of surveillance that is innocent." p.1 "pre-digital and digital technologies have enabled new and more comprehensive forms of dataveillance that disproportionately target women and minorities." p.1 "For w...

Lisa Nakamura: “Cyberrace”, in PMLA, 123.5, 2008, pp. 1673-1682. Jerry Kang outlined three strategies for dealing with racism online: Abolitionist approach: "users take advantage of the Internet's anonymity as a means of preventing racism by hiding race" Integrationist approach: "race is made visible in online social discourse" Transmutation approach: "racial pseudonymity, or cyber-passing, in order to disrupt the very notion of racial categories. By adopting multiple racialized identities in cyberspace, identities may slowly dissolve to the one-to-one relationship between identity and the physical body" Jerry Kang, "Cyber-race."  Harvard Law Review  113 (2000) 1126 (1130-1208) "The notion that racial passing is good for you an, what's more, good for everyone else since it works to break down the rigidly essentialist notion of the body as the source and locus of racial identity legitimated a widespread practice in the pregraph...

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun: “Race and/as Technology or How To Do Things To Race”, in: l. Nakamura and P. A. Chow-White (eds.) Race After the Internet, London/Routledge: New York, 2012, pp. 38-60. ""race as technology" shifts the focus from the  what  of race to the  how  of race, from  knowing  race to  doing  race by emphasizing the similarities between race and technology." p.38 "Race has never been simply "biological" or "culutral"; it has rather been crucial to negotiating and establishing historically variable definitions of "biology" and "culture.""p.39 "race historically has been a tool of subjugation." p.40 Eighteenth-century taxonomy of human races in  Systema Naturae  by Carl Linnaeus Early twentieth-century "documentation" of the disastrous effects of miscegenation (inter-breeding between races) Holocaust in Nazi Germany from 1941-1945 where a 'superior' race's success m...

Eva Hayward (2013). “Lessons from a Starfish” in The Transgender Studies Reader 2.0 (ed. by S. Stryker and A. Z. Aizura). London/New York: Routledge, 178-188. "How does re- assignment define transitioning for some trans-subjects?" p.180 "Is transsexual transformation also re-generative?" p.180 " Trans- , a prefix weighted with across, beyond, through (into another state or place), does the now-familiar work of suggesting the unclassifiable. To be trans is to be transcending or surpassing particular impositions whether empirical, rhetorical, or aesthetic." p.181 ""Trans" is meant to disturb purification practices; the well defined is confounded at multiple material and semiotic levels. Psychical and corporeal experiences are blended." p.181 "The cut enacts trans-embodiment - to cut is not necessarily about castration, but an attempt to re-cast the self through the cut body." p.182 "To cut off the penis/finger i...

Humanism - androcentric research project Human exceptionalism - privileging human over other beings Equality of all humans - but who counts as human? - the mind becomes the ruling symbol of human exceptionalism - the mind is the container of the human subject - obstacle of human mind development Separation of mind and body Mind, rationality, progress Secularism Criticism of Humanism - leaves no limitation to what the human wants Humanism is ideology - Althusser "Man" = power-knowledge construct; product of it's time (17th-19th Century) (Foucault) "It is comforting to know, however, and a source of profound relief to think that man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet to centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form" (Order of Things, p.26) The notion of the human is something that can be replaced by another social construct or stratification The human h...

EMBODYING Ava Hayward - Lessons from a Starfish - connects to Transgender Rage Displacing a topic from the immediate self, to bring up imaginary spaces, to re/create and embody Metonymy - a new way of thinking for how one embodies something i.e transness, and how can someone else understand in light of their own situation Butler - gender and drag and performativity developed through the idea of metonymy Drag and embodiment via her examples How does Hayward think about embodiment? Drag/performativity/embodiment is material, carrying subversive/bolstering meaning Hayward - metaphor of regeneration of the starfish and the cat as metonymy for different ways of embodiment There is no separation between mind and body - embodying requires the body Butler - embodying standards can lead to death/success - Hayward to navigate the world as who you are Butler - performance and performativity as embodiment, Hayward - becoming as embodiment Butler - do you understand the material...

Race/Technology The development of race through history Scientific categorizations of race Up until 15th century race signified a group of people from a common descent i.e. famiily, noble house or kin 1500- The era of exploration - Race came to define those who were geographically marked by supposedly common characteristics (e.g. the English race) 1800- Race categorises all of humankind in distinction to animals. Including sub species i.e Standing resolve theory - the body is read in a way that is reductive - enframed in the setup of the resolve - technology that changes the very essence of the being Blackfishing - remaking of bodies through social media leads to fetishisation of marginalised bodies - white women passing - not just an avatar, it is taking on a body (transformation) - touristing, appropriating without the risks of being a racial minority - identity tourism (cosplay) - boundary crossing (online world is on the cusp of public/private, race/gender) - inhabiti...

Ahmed, Sara (2004). “Shame Before Others.” In: The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 101–22. "Shame becomes crucial to the process of reconciliation or the healing of past wounds. To acknowledge wrongdoing means to enter into shame; the 'we' is shamed by its recognition that it has committed 'acts and omissions', which have caused pain, hurt and loss for indigenous others." p.101 "Wouldn't 'shaming' individuals show how this past injustice lives in the present?" p.102 "Despite its recognition of past wrongdoings, shame can still conceal how such wrongdoings shape lives in the present. The work of shame troubles and is troubling, exposing some wounds, at the same time as it conceals others." p.102 "Recognition [of shame] works to restore the nation or reconcile the nation to itself by 'coming to terms with' its own past in the expression of 'bad feeling'. But in allo...

Lisa Nakamura: “Gender and Race Online”, in: Mark Graham and William H. Dutton, Society and the Internet: How Networks of Information and Communication are Changing Our Lives, Oxford University Press, 2014. "Because overt acts of racism have become less common in recent years, there is always a troubling tendency to view racism as disappearing, if not in fact completely eradicated." p.81 Post-racial ideology: "racism manifests itself most commonly as isolated incidents of hateful speech directed from one person to another... that it is ultimately personal rather than culturally systemic." p.81 The gaming workplace is female- and family-unfriendly: "The institutional environments ensure that game production culture remains male, and this plays a role in perpetuating racist and sexist game content (Huntermann 2010)." p.83 A "blackless fantasy": Where black avatar characters and images of blackness are excluded. Video Games as "Racial...

Judith Butler [1993] (2011). “Gender is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion” in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York/London: Routledge, 121- 140. Interpellation - when someone hails you and therefore binds you as the one that is being hailed "This "one" who appears not to be in a condition of trespass prior to the call... is not fully a social subject, is not fully subjectivated, for he or she is not yet reprimanded." p.81 "The reprimand does not merely repress or control the subject, but forms a crucial part of the juridical and social formation of the subject." p.81-82 "In the reprimand the subject not only receives recognition, but attains as well a certain order of social existence, in being transferred from an outer region of indifferent, questionable, or impossible being to the discursive or social domain of the subject." p.82 For example, the stop and search policy hails the black male body f...

Time - complicated through new digital media e.g. ongoing activity in social media even as we sleep when stuff happens - we are (differently) in many places (and times) at once Space - networked space transcends geography; the everyday affect is transformed as   space is crossed literally navigating with maps Public/private - Chun: "new poetics of being public" (Davis quote) - beyond just leaks that make private data public - how are these constructed to begin with - e.g. GDPR: still just putting our information in places where we're trusting something are someone to keep our data private Scale - number of followers = reducing people to sheer numbers High-tech orientalism, William Gibson - imagining the internet Deadline 28 December  - Essay, research question, development and answer use course material - 5 texts - Methodology short but in depth In social media or cyberspace when the body is not visible there are no other markers – (in)visibility How are online ...

Whip it good - On the art of overcoming cultural trauma. Nancy Jouwe Who's emotion is felt when and how, is deeply related to one's gender, race, class, nationality and other axes of difference. Race: a harmful fiction - yet very real in its consequences. "A socially constructed rather than inherently meaningful category, one linked to relations of power and processes of struggle, and one whose meaning changes over time. Race, like gender, is "real" in the sense that it has real, though changing, effects in the world and real, tangible, and complex impact on individuals' sense of self and life chances" (Frankenberg) Body Politics Black women and body politics The body as commodity: from slavery to the present day, black female bodies clothed and unclothed, have been bought and sold (bell hooks, 2016) Rendered invisible and hyper visible at the same time Stereotypes in US: Mammy, Jezebel, Sapphire - essentialisaiton Black female body as, the...