Summer Shorts
Tiny Knives, or Right Wing Manhood Under Duress; Queering the Barbie Binary; The Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism; Unwriting the Anthropocene at Brown's Pembroke Center
Comrades! It’s been a really up and down summer so far. Still rehabbing from physical injuries, but well enough to go to Iceland with friends. Then got Covid for the second time while trying to finish the fascism book. Then both my TV and A/C died. Trying to work now while awaiting August trip to Cherry Grove. Fun! Taking a break now to post some summer short notices on a very random range of topics……
Tiny Knives, or Right-Wing Manhood Under Duress
Dakota Adams, the son of Oathkeepers’ honcho Stewart Rhodes, has a substack called Deprogram where he recounts all the truly weird things that happened around him growing up. His most recent post, "Killing Chuck Schumer: Stewart’s Truck Stop Fantasy,” is a revealing account of the projective fantasy life of the far right. You see, Rhodes once worked in Congress for Ron Paul. When he encountered the newly elected Chuck Schumer in the bathroom, he yearned to strangle him at the urinal. Adams says Rhodes recounted his bitter failure to carry out the plan many times. In the wake of that failure, Rhodes began hiding tiny knives all over his person, in part to defend himself in case anyone ever tried to strangle him at a urinal. Psychoanalytic readers, have at it!
Queering the Barbie Binary
I went to see the Barbie movie with a bunch of friends and I confess I loved it. Loved. It. Not because I applaud the brand commercialism, the white feminism 101 with token diversity, the superficial and throw away critiques of consumer capitalism. No. I loved it for the way it put the hierarchical gender binary on steroids, and blew it up into a giant bubblegum cartoon. And kids. It has a soundtrack with Lizzo, Dua Lipa and Billie Eilish, and makes a road trip anthem out of the Indigo Girls’ “Closer to Fine.” Trans actress Hari Nef plays Dr. Barbie and Kate McKinnon plays Weird Barbie (who looks like all the Barbies I deliberately maimed and mangled as a kid). The opening scene is a hysterical take on “2001: A Space Odyssey” with little girls smashing baby dolls. There are killer one liners, like—when Barbie sees a billboard of the Miss Universe pageant in the Real World she shrieks, “The Supreme Court!” And Ryan Gosling is an absolute smash hit as himbo Ken (I’m Kenough!). So, even though this movie is all the bad things left critics say it is, it includes enough utter excess and sneaky subversion to be very queer (like the Village People, etc.)—and inspire conservative effusions spilling out over all media at the moment. And there are enough actors and musicians of color (America Ferrera, Issa Rae, Simu Liu, Ncuti Gatwa, Alexandra Shipp, Kingsley Ben-Adir, Lizzo) at the center of the action to counter the otherwise overwhelming whiteness of Barbie world (but not any real counter to the settler/imperial Americanness of it all). The world of commerce is lampooned as well as reproduced. Etc. But take my take with a grain of salt. I also loved Millionnaire Matchmaker—because it exaggerated the conventions of hetero courtship so effectively that it became an irresistible joke (to me). [Example: Patti the matchmaker says to the assembled cis ladies, there to date her millionnaires, “I will not tolerate gold diggers!”] And I obsessively hate watched The Ultimatum: Queer Love, the queer woman/non-binary marriage reality show from hell.
The Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism
A former graduate student who worked with me at NYU in American Studies, Emmaia Gelman, not only produced a fantastic dissertation—a critical history of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL)—but now is the primary force behind the new Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. The Institute’s first major project is an October 2023 conference, “Battling the IHRA Definition: Theory and Activism.” There will be fellowships, more conferences, and publications to expand the reach scholars’ and activists’ work. I am proud to be a member of the Founding Collective! An advistory board is in formation. Find them here and sign up for the email list! Here’s the description:
The Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism aims to support the delinking of the study of Zionism from Jewish Studies, and to reclaim academia and public discourse for the study of Zionism as a political, ideological, and racial and gendered knowledge project, intersecting with Palestine and decolonial studies, critical terrorism studies, settler colonial studies, and related scholarship and activism.
The Institute approaches Zionism as a broad set of colonial and repressive work and solidarities, efforts to curate knowledge and identities, and to dismantle movements that resist it. In other words, Zionism’s project extends beyond the borders of Palestine.
Many scholars and activists are working to illuminate such “other work” of Zionist institutions and discourses, historically and in the present, to shape the material conditions of life, the movement of capital, the construction of racial identity, and more.
The Institute supports this expansive work with fellowships to support academic and activist work, conferences, and publications that expand the reach of scholars’ and activists’ work into political culture.
Contact: info@criticalzionismstudies.org
Join the email list for updates. And please circulate the links and info!
Unwriting the Anthropocene at Brown’s Pembroke Center
My friend and comrade Macarena Gómez-Barris will be leading the 2024-25 Pembroke Center seminar at Brown. There are fellowships to apply for! Here is the info (please circulate!):
"Unwriting the Anthropocene: A Call to Experiment" will be led by Macarena Gómez-Barris, Timothy C. Forbes and Anne S. Harrison University Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Chair of Modern Culture and Media.
Seminar description:
During walks near his home in exile, Manchester, Sebald witnessed the toxicities of an industrial era deeply imbricated with European fascism. In After Nature, Sebald wrote,
I rambled over the fallow
Elysian Fields, wondering
At the work of destruction, the black
Mills and shipping canals,
the disused viaducts and
warehouses, the many millions
of bricks and, the traces of smoke,
of tar and sulpuric acid…
Writing from the heart of European modernity, Sebald wrote poetry and subsequent work that chronicled the details and scales of mourning of all that had been lost. The fallows of biodiverse diminishment. The violent traces of the carbon era. Hollowed-out infrastructures ladened with the refuse of global capitalism.
In this yearlong seminar, we experiment with form to think about writing and poetics as a mode of embodied observation and experience. We ask a series of questions that proliferate rather than resolve:
What are the ways to trace the presences and absences of the colonial Anthropocene? Is it possible to experiment with form to move deeper into, and towards the other side of, catastrophe? What are the scales of intimacy, affinity and imaginary that engage not only disaster but also the pleasure of our environments? How do we write, visualize, engage with the disappeared and extinct, but also the processes of metamorphosis, metabolics, desire, and queer and trans ecologies that are entangled with anthropogenic crisis? How can we foreground perspectives and analyses grounded in gender/sex to unmake the Anthropocene?
We pay close attention to Indigenous, Africana, Latinx, Asian, Arab, and Global South perspectives, modes of narration, visuality and experimentation asking throughout how gender and sexuality shift what we know and how we write about it. What forms of human and inhuman life find sustenance as ways to inhabit the planetary outside of predictive timelines of extinction? How do the elements of environmental writing underscore the means by which to enliven forms of care, repair, and belonging towards a post-extractive world?
Throughout the year, we study with the land, whales, black light, octopuses, trees, icebergs, boulders, subduction, tidelectics, and more. These figures, materialities, and earthly processes remake knowledge production and methodologies, changing perception and forms of writing to visualize planetary changes. With and beyond scientific discourse and disciplinarity, we attend to new/old forms from across the globe, such as the eclogue, Haiku, experimental video, speculative documentary, queer cinema, and climate fiction, as forms by which to inhabit the earth on both intimate and planetary scales. What can we learn from these forms to chronicle and unwrite the colonial Anthropocene now?
We begin with Sebald and quickly move to those who aim to write and visualize the brutalities of the racialized and gendered earth and its peoples, considering gender and sex throughout. Readings include the work of Sylvia Wynter, Saidiya Hartman, Amitav Ghosh, Renee Gladman, Wu Tsang, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Dionne Brand, Karim Aïnouz, Christina Sharpe, Rita Indiana, Joanne Barker, Natalie Diaz, John Akomfrah, and Kathryn Yusoff, amongst others. What forms exceed the dualistic precepts of the Anthropocene? Are poetics, whether written, sonic, visual or performative, ever enough? What are the non-binarized geo-choreographies that move us further into the space of affinities, comraderies, and reflective action?
Seminar participants may come from interdisciplinary fields, the arts, the humanities, social sciences and sciences. Across disciplines we attend to hybrid forms of writing, artmaking, filmmaking, and performance practices that unwrite to create new narratives and anti-narratives. To unmake anti-blackness and anti-Indigeneity, xenophobia, the extractive gaze, speciesism, and gender/sex normativity, we experiment with new models of workshopping and pedagogies that recycle and upcycle from the wastelands. In the creative storm of experimentation that un-masters to allow for cacophony, that differently crafts to make anew. Through refining our literary and visual arts, frequencies, and embodied engagements, we address collective practices that erode and unwrite the Anthropocene.
The Pembroke Seminar meets on Wednesdays from 10:00 am – 12:30 pm EST.
For more information contact: Pembroke_Center@brown.edu or phone 401-863-2643.