A Tranifesto for the Dolls: Toward a Trans Femme of Color Theory | The Weekly Read

The Weekly Read for May 11, 2024, is “A Tranifesto for the Dolls: Toward a Trans Femme of Color Theory,” a roundtable with Erique Zhang, Julian Kevon Glover, Ava L. J. Kim, Tamsin Kimoto, Nathan Alexander Moore, æryka jourdaine hollis o’neil, and LaVele Ridley. The article appears in “The Shape of Trans Yet to Come,” a recent special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly (10:3-4), edited by Abraham B. Weil, Francisco J. Galarte, and Jules Gill-Peterson.

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On November 12, 2022, a group of trans women and femme scholars of color held a roundtable session titled “For the Dolls: Toward a Trans Femme of Color Theory” at the annual meeting of the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) in Minneapolis. Organized by Erique Zhang and featuring Julian Kevon Glover, Ava L. J. Kim, Tamsin Kimoto, Nathan Alexander Moore, æryka jourdaine hollis o’neil, and LaVelle Ridley, the roundtable sought to intervene into the growing field of trans studies to carve out a space that centers, rather than marginalizes, trans femme of color perspectives and experiences. The panelists represent various academic traditions and disciplinary backgrounds: Black studies, Asian American studies, literary theory, performance studies, philosophy, women and gender studies, queer and trans studies, and media and communication studies.

In this written dialogue, the authors build on the initial roundtable discussion to articulate what a trans femme of color theory might look like, one that positions trans femmes of color not only as objects of study but also as producers of knowledge and subjects central to the field of trans studies. While there are numerous overlaps, the authors do not theorize in unison or reach a consensus on the topics discussed. These divergences reveal the individual and collective intellectual strengths of the contributions without rendering the differences and distinctions to be threatening or antagonistic. Furthermore, the multiplicity of the authors’ theorizations reflects their ongoing commitment to tethering theory with praxis to reflect the boundless embodied knowledge that characterizes trans of color communities.

TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly offers a high-profile venue for innovative research and scholarship that contest the objectification, pathologization, and exoticization of transgender lives. It publishes interdisciplinary work that explores the diversity of gender, sex, sexuality, embodiment, and identity in ways that have not been adequately addressed by feminist and queer scholarship. Its mission is to foster a vigorous conversation among scholars, artists, activists, and others that examines how “transgender” comes into play as a category, a process, a social assemblage, an increasingly intelligible gender identity, an identifiable threat to gender normativity, and a rubric for understanding the variability and contingency of gender across time, space, and cultures.

The Weekly Read is a weekly feature in which we highlight articles, books, and chapters that are freely available online. You’ll be able to find a link to the selection here on the blog as well as on our social media channels. Enjoy The Weekly Read, and check back next week for something new to read for free.

Transnational Queer Materialism | The Weekly Read

The Weekly Read for April 27, 2024, is “Transnational Queer Materialism” by Rana M. Jaleel and Evren Savci. The article is the introduction to a recent special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly edited by the authors.

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The introduction to this special issue takes up the narrations and values produced by the travels of words like queer of color, race, and racial capitalism to both comobilize and retheorize queer of color critique and the content and contours of global racial capitalism. With and beyond the story of US empire and the transatlantic slave trade—from peripheral European engagements with Africa to the circulation of caste in Africa via Indian Ocean worlds—in this special issue the authors examine some of the histories and present modes of capitalist accumulation that are relevant to telling global stories of race and capitalism. A queer/trans lens keeps the authors’ attention trained as well on the arrangements and estrangements of the sex/gender systems that power such narratives of race and capitalism. So positioned, the authors enter ongoing debates on the geopolitics of queer studies, the import of queer materialism, and theorizations of racial capitalism by asking (1) What is the “racial” of racial capitalism?, and (2) What is the “of color” in queer/trans of color critique? The questions form a method for thinking global racial capitalism and queer/trans of color study together—what the authors call transnational queer materialism.

The South Atlantic Quarterly, founded amid controversy in 1901, provides bold analyses of the current intellectual scene, both nationally and worldwide. Published exclusively in guest-edited special issues, this award-winning centenarian journal features some of the most prominent contemporary writers and scholars tackling urgent political, cultural, and social questions. Some issues grow out of current academic debates, concerning, for example, the growing power of finance, narratives of black leadership, and the politics of austerity.

The Weekly Read is a weekly feature in which we highlight articles, books, and chapters that are freely available online. You’ll be able to find a link to the selection here on the blog as well as on our social media channels. Enjoy The Weekly Read, and check back next week for something new to read for free.

“If You’re Going to Be Beautiful, You Better Be Dangerous”: Sex Worker Community Defense | The Weekly Read

The Weekly Read for April 20, 2024, is “‘If You’re Going to Be Beautiful, You Better Be Dangerous’: Sex Worker Community Defense” by Heather Berg. The article appears in “Feminists Confront State Violence” a recent issue of Radical History Review.

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Abstract
Refusing both sex workers’ state-produced vulnerability to violence and the state’s monopoly on protection, sex worker radicals articulate community defense as a practice of care. Grounded in interviews with thinkers of the sex worker Left and in sex workers’ cultural production, this article explores sex worker community defense with an eye to its relationship to past struggles and contributions to future ones. Chief among those is the abolitionist struggle for a world beyond prisons and policing. Sex worker abolitionists identify a tension between a vision of transformative justice that rejects violence and the understanding that transformation might not come without injury to those who do violence on behalf of the state. Sex worker abolitionists seek resources for navigating this tactical ambivalence in Black radical, decolonial, and queer and feminist traditions. Many wonder if building new worlds will require a transitional program of militant community defense, even retribution.

For more than forty-five years, Radical History Review has stood at the point where rigorous historical scholarship and active political engagement converge. The journal is edited by a collective of historians with diverse backgrounds, research interests, and professional perspectives. Articles in RHR address issues of gender, race, sexuality, imperialism, and class, stretching the boundaries of historical analysis to explore Western and non-Western histories. RHR includes sections devoted to public history and the art of teaching as well as reviews of a wide range of media—from books to television and from websites to museum exhibitions—thus celebrating the vast potential for historical learning in the twenty-first century.

The Weekly Read is a weekly feature in which we highlight articles, books, and chapters that are freely available online. You’ll be able to find a link to the selection here on the blog as well as on our social media channels. Enjoy The Weekly Read, and check back next week for something new to read for free.

Smallpox and the Choctaw Civil War | The Weekly Read

The Weekly Read for April 13, 2024, is “Smallpox and the Choctaw Civil War” by Matthew J. Sparacio. The article appears in “Indigenous Responses to Disease: Ethnohistory Inspired by COVID” a recent issue of Ethnohistory.

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Abstract
The presence of chilakwa (smallpox) in Choctaw villages between 1747 and 1748 complicated factionalism and civil war. Utilizing Sharla Fett’s approach to health culture—defined as “the social relations of healing”—this article outlines how eighteenth-century Choctaws arrived at acceptable contingency plans when faced with illness and argues that community responses to smallpox helped ease factional tensions. Iksa (moiety) obligations for funeral rites—embodying the notion of iyyi kowa (generosity)—bridged political differences, accounting for a period of collaboration between groups best understood as the “smallpox peace.” Smallpox, therefore, surprisingly did not immediately contribute to political instability, although its indirect consequences proved significant during later stages of the civil war. Choctaw health culture informed individual and communal responses to chilakwa, which in turn shaped Choctaw factionalism.

Ethnohistory, the journal of the American Society for Ethnohistory, reflects the wide range of current scholarship inspired by anthropological and historical approaches to the human condition around the world, but with a particular emphasis on the Americas. Of particular interest are those analyses and interpretations that seek to make evident the experiences, organizations, and identities of indigenous, diasporic, and minority peoples that otherwise elude the histories and anthropologies of nations, states, and colonial empires. The journal welcomes a theoretical and cross-cultural discussion of ethnohistorical materials and publishes work from the disciplines of art history, geography, literature, archaeology, anthropology, and history, among others.

The Weekly Read is a weekly feature in which we highlight articles, books, and chapters that are freely available online. You’ll be able to find a link to the selection here on the blog as well as on our social media channels. Enjoy The Weekly Read, and check back next week for something new to read for free.

POEM OF THE WEEK

In continued celebration of National Poetry Month we are featuring a weekly poem on the blog. This week, a poem by Yokota Hiroshi, and a corresponding research article by Andrew Campana, published in positions: asia critique, volume 30, issue 4.

Hieru kokoro 冷える心 (Cold Heart)

“Today was so nice out
I could see Mt. Fuji, clear as day”
said my aunt, who just came back from an outing
“Oh, it’s not just today!
You can see it all the time around the end of fall.”
It was in the mid-afternoon
with a late November chill
I do not know the real Fuji
so when someone says Fuji
the prints of Hokusai are what immediately come to mind
but in my head
even though there’s Fuji through Hokusai’s careful eye
there is no form left to its own nature
even though there’s the beauty of his deformed ridges
there is no joy in following smooth slopes with a naked eye
and I
came to believe that was the real thing
convinced that this was the real Fuji
my heart
is always full
of these deformed things

“I want to climb Mt. Fuji, even just once”
said my cousin
me too even just once
I think I want to see the real Mt. Fuji
I think I want to know the real world

Further Reading:

“You Forbid Me to Walk: Yokota Hiroshi’s Disability Poetics” by Andrew Campana.

This article, published in positions: asia critique and made freely available through May 31, explores the work of the poet Yokota Hiroshi, a leader in Japan’s disability rights movement, and how he used his experiences of having cerebral palsy to create a new kind of disability poetics. Like in much of the world, Japan in the 1970s saw the emergence of disability movements that aimed to challenge the inaccessibility and cruelty of a society made by and for nondisabled people. Yokota was involved with two key groups of this kind—the literary coterie Shinonome and the activist group Aoi Shiba no Kai—and over several decades published multiple books about the ideologies that justified killing disabled people and the construction of disabled society and culture, as well as several books of poetry. In his poems, he aimed not only to shed light on the oppression and dehumanization of disabled people but to rethink dominant conceptions of embodiment and “able‐bodiedness” itself.

Adorno’s “Urbanism and Societal Order” and the State of Rebuilding West Germany, 1949 | The Weekly Read

The Weekly Read for March 30, 2024, is “Adorno’s ‘Urbanism and Societal Order’ and the State of Rebuilding West Germany, 1949” by Lynnette Widder. The article appears in the recent “Visual Culture Issue” of New German Critique.

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Less than a month after his return to Frankfurt in the winter of 1949, Theodor Adorno gave a lecture at the Technical University of Darmstadt at the invitation of the urban designer Karl Gruber. Titled “Urbanism and Societal Order,” the lecture is noteworthy as one of the very few Adorno texts that addresses architecture. It might be considered a minor text if not for the fact that each issue Adorno raised in it has a corollary in the early postwar practice and discourse of architecture in West Germany. The qualities of urban beauty, the legitimacy of historical and historicizing urban fabric, the nature of housing worthy of a free citizenry, the importance of self-determinacy and participation in the planning of cities: these are among the topics that Adorno’s text interrogates. Each consideration is discussed relative to specific contemporaneous texts, debates, and projects by the architects who ultimately rebuilt West Germany’s cities.

Widely considered the leading journal in its field, New German Critique is an interdisciplinary periodical that focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century German studies and publishes articles on a wide array of subjects, including literature, mass culture, film, and other visual media; literary theory and cultural studies; Holocaust studies; art and architecture; political and social theory; and intellectual history and philosophy. Established in the early 1970s, the journal has played a significant role in introducing US readers to the Frankfurt School and remains an important forum for debate in the humanities and the social sciences.

The Weekly Read is a weekly feature in which we highlight articles, books, and chapters that are freely available online. You’ll be able to find a link to the selection here on the blog as well as on our social media channels. Enjoy The Weekly Read, and check back next week for something new to read for free.

Dancing and Rapping the Good Life: Sharing Aspirations and Values in Vietnamese Hip-Hop | The Weekly Read

The Weekly Read for March 23, 2024, is “Dancing and Rapping the Good Life: Sharing Aspirations and Values in Vietnamese Hip-Hop” by Sandra Kurfürst. The article appears in “the good life in late-socialist asia: aspirations, politics, and possibilities” a recent issue of positions: asia critique.

Read this article for free through May 31, 2024.
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Abstract
Rap and hip-hop’s diverse dance styles have been practiced in Vietnam since the 1990s, shortly after the country’s integration into the world economy. What started out as a sphere of popular culture dominated by men was soon appropriated by female artists. The female rapper Suboi, Vietnam’s “Queen of Rap,” is internationally renowned, and more and more young women are engaging in dancing on the streets. This article investigates the aspirations of female hip-hop practitioners in Vietnam’s major cities, Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. What does leading the good life mean to them, and how do they navigate the ambiguous moral landscape coproduced by authoritarianism and liberalism? Drawing on Aihwa Ong’s (2008) concept of self-fashioning and AbdouMaliq Simone’s (2019) practices of crafting, harvesting, and detachment, this article examines how young women use hip-hop as a creative device to achieve personal freedom and make a career for themselves. Carving out spaces for themselves in the male-dominated rap industry and dance community, they negotiate existing gender norms in both the music genre and Vietnam’s urban society.

Offering a fresh approach to Asia scholarship, positions develops theoretical, philosophical, historical, and critical approaches in a forum open to debate. In expansive scholarly articles, commentaries, poetry, visual art, and political and philosophical debates, contributors consider a broad variety of pressing questions. Thematic issues tackle new, sometimes pathbreaking areas of concern (or traditional areas from a fresh vantage point) and are interspersed with general issues offering scholarship that calls our scholarly assumptions into question and expands our various archives. The breadth and pace of the journal ensure that readers seeking to add “Asia” to their areas of critical competency are included in our debates, challenged and informed.

The Weekly Read is a weekly feature in which we highlight articles, books, and chapters that are freely available online. You’ll be able to find a link to the selection here on the blog as well as on our social media channels. Enjoy The Weekly Read, and check back next week for something new to read for free.

Dropping the Bond or Dropping the Act? | The Weekly Read

The Weekly Read for March 16, 2024, is “Dropping the Bond or Dropping the Act?” by Elizabeth Stewart. The article appears in “Social Bonds and Catastrophic Acts” a recent issue of differences.

Read this article for free through May 31, 2024.
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Throughout the United States, in 2020 and 2021, the Trump presidency and the covid-19 pandemic brought to light clashes in shared and lived realities among Americans and displayed them in jarring and perplexing scenarios—with a deadly toll. Strange martyrdoms and enacted oaths of loyalty to Trump in the form of people not getting vaccinated, not taking precautions, often attacking those who did, and throwing themselves away by (simply) dying are collective examples of what Jacques Lacan called the passage à l’acte and are symptoms of a profound decay of political culture. Radicalization of what Timothy Snyder has called “sadopopulism” and Chris Hedges has called “corporate totalitarianism” have led to a pervasive sense of impotence among large swaths of global populations who have been, and are being, abandoned and discarded, made victims of radical neglect, disappearance, and silencing—the covid martyrs a category among them.

differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies first appeared in 1989 at the moment of a critical encounter—a head-on collision, one might say—of theories of difference (primarily Continental) and the politics of diversity (primarily American). In the ensuing years, the journal has established a critical forum where the problematic of differences is explored in texts ranging from the literary and the visual to the political and social. differences highlights theoretical debates across the disciplines that address the ways concepts and categories of difference—notably but not exclusively gender—operate within culture.

The Weekly Read is a weekly feature in which we highlight articles, books, and chapters that are freely available online. You’ll be able to find a link to the selection here on the blog as well as on our social media channels. Enjoy The Weekly Read, and check back next week for something new to read for free.

“Criminalization is the Antithesis of Care”: Contextualizing the Dobbs Decision with Black Queer Abolitionist Feminism | The Weekly Read

The Weekly Read for March 9, 2024, is “‘Criminalization is the Antithesis of Care’: Contextualizing the Dobbs Decision with Black Queer Abolitionist Feminism,” a conversation with Sarah Haley, Andrea Ritchie, and Emily Thuma. The discussion is included in Q², a new editorial section in GLQ.

On June 13, 2023, Sarah Haley and Andrea Ritchie discussed the long histories of gender violence, anti-Blackness, and state repression and the strategies and resources of abolition feminism for responding to the post-Dobbs moment, with Emily Thuma as moderator. This is a lightly edited transcript of that conversation.

Read this article for free through April 30, 2024.

Providing a much-needed forum for interdisciplinary discussion, GLQ publishes scholarship, criticism, and commentary in areas as diverse as law, science studies, religion, political science, and literary studies. Its aim is to offer queer perspectives on all issues touching on sex and sexuality.

The Weekly Read is a weekly feature in which we highlight articles, books, and chapters that are freely available online. You’ll be able to find a link to the selection here on the blog as well as on our social media channels. Enjoy The Weekly Read, and check back next week for something new to read for free.

How to Build a Hybrid: The Structure of Imagination | The Weekly Read

The Weekly Read for February 24, 2024, is “How to Build a Hybrid: The Structure of Imagination” by Yeshayahu Shen and David Gil. The article appears in “Visual Hybrids” a recent issue of Poetics Today.

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Abstract
How do we conjure up novel and unfamiliar entities in our imagination? Thomas Ward and others have suggested that we do so by deriving such entities from ordinary familiar ones. Hybrids, however, pose a challenge to this view since they are not derived from any one single familiar entity. Nevertheless, we argue here that the construction of hybrid entities is indeed governed by principles forming part of our structured imagination. These principles refer to a set of five abstract schemas, defined in terms of properties such as parts, symmetry, and spatial orientation. These schemas, alongside the absence of a schema, together constitute a schematological hierarchy: humanoid (e.g., man) > canoid (e.g., dog) > carroid (e.g., car) > culteroid (e.g., knife) > arboid (e.g., tree) > other (e.g., sponge). When forming a hybrid out of two or more entities, or parents, the overall shape of the hybrid is selected in accordance with the following three principles: (1) coherence: presence of a schema is preferred to absence of a schema; (2) accessibility: a schema corresponding to that of one of the parents is preferred to some other schema; and (3) height: a schema higher on the schematological hierarchy is preferred to a schema lower on the schematological hierarchy. To test these principles empirically, we conducted a large-scale experiment, in which art and design students were given pairs of words denoting familiar objects and asked to draw images of hybrid entities formed from these word pairs. The resulting corpus of 356 hybrids was found to provide strong empirical support for the above three principles. In doing so, it showed how human creativity is not unbound, but rather subject to substantive cognitive constraints, constituting our structured imagination.

Poetics Today brings together scholars from throughout the world who are concerned with developing systematic approaches to the study of literature (e.g., semiotics and narratology) and with applying such approaches to the interpretation of literary works. Poetics Today presents a remarkable diversity of methodologies and examines a wide range of literary and critical topics. Several thematic special issues are published in each volume, and each issue contains a book review section.

The Weekly Read is a weekly feature in which we highlight articles, books, and chapters that are freely available online. You’ll be able to find a link to the selection here on the blog as well as on our social media channels. Enjoy The Weekly Read, and check back next week for something new to read for free.