This journal entry is on space and place.
Pick one of the following prompts: 1) Identify one or more spaces/places in your academic life. Write about how these space/places inform your intellectual and political orientation. How do these spaces inform how you think about your academic work (this can be in relation to your papers in this class, or your work in other classes)? How do your movements in these spaces interact with your research/ interpretations of texts (these texts can be from this class or from other classes)? 2) Identify one or more of your personal "home" spaces/places. Remember, this can be a physical space (like the queer family table that Sara Ahmed describes), or a metaphorical/spiritual space (like the body for Eli Clare). Write about how and why you consider this space/place your "home." How did it become home for you? What are the contradictions in this homeplace? What does feeling at home mean to you? [use these questions as a jumping point, but please remember that you do not have to answer or address all these questions-- they are simply meant to stir your thinking]
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Space, Place, and Identity in Shani Mootoo, Eli Clare, and D’Lo’s work
03/29/18 Shani Mootoo’s “Out on Main Street”
Eli Clare’s “The Mountain”
D’Lo’s poetry and poetics statement
Discussion Questions
Sara Ahmed and Bo Luengsuraswat 03/27/18
Pick one creative text that we have read so far (Zami, Trumpet, Bodhran and Salah's Poetry, Owomoyela's short story), and read it through the lens of one of the theoretical readings we have encountered. I encourage you to pick a passage or two from the creative text, and close-read it through the lens of a theoretical piece. For example, you can read Bodhran's "Cycle Undone" alongside Snorton and Haritaworn's notion of trans necropolitics. Or you can read a passage from Zami through Munoz's theory of disidentifications, showing how Lorde disidentifies with the dominant (white) gay and lesbian culture around her. Or you can read a passage in Trumpet about the funeral director through the lens of Dean Spade's arguments about how gender is administered. Some theoretical readings (like Butler's) can be applied to most texts. You can also put the creative text in dialogue with a theoretical piece (for example, you can argue that Owomoyela's story complicates or problematizes Butler's theory of gender performativity).
Your essay needs to have a thesis statement. Your thesis will be about your argument about your chosen creative text, using ideas from a theoretical text. There should a close engagement with the texts you choose, with frequent textual evidence for your claims and sub-claims. The paper should be 3-4 pages long. Part I
1) We have talked in class about the surveillance that trans people experience from the medical industry and the state. This surveillance usually performs a forced stripping of the body, an act that can allow cis people to consume and make sense of trans bodies. The novel opens with Millie being surveilled by reporters. How does the cisgaze of journalists surveil Millie in the opening? How does Doctor Krishnamurty surveil Joss? How does Kay show Millie surveilling Joss through her remembrance of him? How are we as readers kept from surveilling his body or at times, encouraged to surveill Joss? Pay attention to how Joss’ identity is slowly revealed through different perspectives. 2) Thinking back to Snorton and Haritaworn’s idea of the afterlife, why do you think Kay presents Joss only in death? How do Millie and Colman regulate his afterlife? How do the journalists or the registrar regulate Joss’ afterlife in this world? Why do you think Kay made the choice to present his story through the perspectives of others, and never through his own voice? 3) Time is important to the form and content of this novel. For example, as Millie grieves, she reflects that the “only thing that feels authentic to me in my past” (37), and Joss distances himself from his past, referring to his past self only in third person. What is the significance of remembering the past in this novel? 4) Joss’ bandages appear again and again in the novel. We encounter them first through the perspective of Millie, and then through the perspective of the doctor. How are they presented during these two instances? Why are they such an important trope to this novel? Part II 1) Throughout the novel, certain characters are shocked/surprised by Joss’ body [“But today something did shock Albert Holding. Today, Albert Holding did gasp” (108)]. Others, like Sophie Stones, urge people to display shock and disbelief for the purposes of journalistic sensationalism. Why does the novel emphasize the affective power of shock again and again? What do you make of Stones’ obsession with the shock of the news? What does this emphasis on affective gasps do for the reader? 2) In the chapter on the funeral director, Kay describes Joss’ naked body intimately for the first time: “He started to get the body ready for the embalmer… the first thing he noticed was that the man’s legs were not hairy. Then Holding noticed that he had rather a lot of pubic hair. A bush. The absence of a penis did not strike him straight away...When he did notice after a few moments that there was no visible penis, he actually found himself rummaging in the pubic hair just to check that there wasn’t a very, very small one hiding somewhere” (109). Even though this chapter is narrated through the voice of an omniscient narrator, the invasive curiosity here reflects Holding’s interiority. It does not seem to be an “objective” narratorial voice. How can we as readers prevent ourselves from voyeuristically gazing upon Joss’ body? What kind of ethical reading practice can we enact as we read descriptions of Joss’ body? 3) What is the value and purpose of clothes in this novel? Think about Joss’ suits, how he is stripped, and his body “transforms” (110) for Holding when his clothes are taken off. 4) The chapters that depict Sophie Stones’ interiority and intentions highlight the violence that goes into producing “tantalizing” trans narratives. Why do you think Kay inserts this metacommentary on trans narratives inside her own novel, which is also about a trans person? What is the purpose of the internal critique of Stones’ biography of Joss? Millie also meditates on how a “story with a price tag” can never be true (154). What does this reflection suggest about linear trans life-narratives (autobiographies and biographies)? 5) What is the importance of music to race, gender, and identity in this novel? Why is jazz so important to Kay’s black scottish re-writing of Billy Tiption’s story? How does musical performance intersect with gender performance/presentation in the novel? Snorton and Haritaworn: Trans Necropolitics
“...trans women of color act as resources-- both literally and metaphorically-- for the articulation and visibility of a more privileged transgender subject” (71). Key terms: Necropolitics (Achille Mbembe) Biopolitics (Foucault) Homonationalism (Jasbir Puar) Homonormativity (Lisa Duggan) Visibility politics Transnormativity Methodology: Examination of the “discursive and representational politics of trans death and trans vitality” (66) through a “transnational and intersectional” lens (67). Discussion questions: 1) Snorton and Haritaworn are working through a transfeminist lens. When they argue that “dominant trans subjects are rarely held accountable and remain awkwardly frozen in positions of analogy and equivalency with other “diversely diverse” locations” (74), how are they urging us to consider a feminism that is not only “inclusive” of trans women, but thought through the experiences of trans feminine people? How are trans women and trans femme/ feminine people “frozen in positions of analogy” in social justice movements that we see around us? 2) Discussing trans and queer complicities, Snorton and Haritaworn “resist the easy ascription of these complicities to neoliberalism.” Rather, they argue that “the homonormative narrative of the creative-class member, who ventures into hitherto ungentrifiable territory and performs himself as a productive citizen and consumer in contrast to those whose unproductiveness and excessive reproductiveness mark their intimacies as disposable in the current diversity regime, is sprouting transgressive offshoots that equally need addressing” (73). On the next page, they contend, “like many of its globalizing predecessors, the Berlin TDOR thus incited a trans community into life whose vitality depends upon the ghosting of poor trans people, trans people of color, and trans people in the Global South” (74). How are certain trans people in the contemporary moment being “ghosted” as others get celebrated for their “colorful difference”? How can we apply this framework to the production of trans celebrities, particularly trans of color celebrities? How can we analyze contemporary trans politics as they produce certain “good” victims, while also replicating the idea of racialized trans monstrosity? Ahimsa Timoteo Bhodran and Trish Salah’s poetry:
Pick one reading from the second module on Trans Life/Death. This can be a theoretical or creative piece. Write about how this reading helped you re-imagine or re-conceptualize a personal/social/political issue that you encounter or witness in your life. For example, you may write about how Snorton and Haritaworn's piece allows you to critique or examine #TransTerps. Or you could write about how Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhran's poetry allows you to think through your own trans being/becoming/coming-of-age. Or you could write about an everyday conversation you may have witnessed recently about trans rights or hate crime laws that you want to explore through the lens of Dean Spade's arguments.
This journal entry does not have to be personal, although you are welcome to explore personal questions/issues/experiences. Please pay attention to grammar and punctuation. Proofread your work before submitting. The assignment should be 1- 2 pages long. |
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