Outside the Government, Beyond the Police: On the Queerness of Torchwood
Much is often made of the queerness of the (Dr) Who-niverse’s Captain Jack Harkness. Sure, he’s played by an openly gay actor, been in same-sex and inter-species relationships, and in the new Starz/BBC collaboration the character is allowed to have…
Schenker and “The Soar”: Modifying tonal conventions for not-really-tonal music
“Rhythm” and “Harmony” are often offered as contrasting, if not opposed, ways of organizing pieces of music. As the famous diagram attests, Western music uses harmony (chords) as its way of organizing pieces of music: all you need to start…
Foucault and Feminist Art — or, how to subvert the biopolitical administration of populations
As you know, I’ve been thinking—not primarily, but sort of in the background—about how we subvert or resist Foucaultian “biopower.” I’m not talking about the “disciplinary” aspect—I think Butler gives us a good account of how to subvert discipline (i.e.,…
Shannon Sullivan on White Affect—Approaching White Hipness
Now, it’s been a month or so since the conference, but I did take some decent notes. I’m going on these notes, so any and all errors are the fault of my secretarial skills and poor memory. Shannon completely re-thought…
Thoughts on philoSOPHIA 2011 #3: Nietzsche, Beauvoir, and Repetition
Elaine Miller gave a super-interesting paper on repetition in Nietzsche and Beauvoir. She finds in both a contrast between inauthentic, lazy conceptions of repetition (I’ll call this lazy repetition), and rigorous, accurate accounts of repetition (I’ll call this real repetition)….
Freedom Sounds and The Conjectural Body: Some (more) intersections between my work and Ingrid Monson’s
I am a huge admirer of Ingrid Monson’s work, and find it hugely influential on my own work (see, for example, my article on hipness in Contemporary Aesthetics). I recently completed Freedom Sounds, her book on the racial politics of…
White d00ds Posing as Queer WOC—or, postmillennial hipness strikes again
In this post, I want to talk about several recent phenomena that I think are, if not best, at least usefully interpreted through the lens of my concept “postmillennial (black) hipness”. These phenomena include the “Gay Girl in Damascus” fiasco,…
Beyonce confirms my read of “Run the World (Girls)” is right
In a recent interview, summarized here at Bust, Beyonce was asked if girls really did run the world. She had a fairly long response, but the kicker is: Sometimes there are certain things that we have to work harder for,…
London’s Burning: Delete Yoursef, You Got No Chance to Win
As regular readers of the blog know, I’ve been working on several projects related to the role of music in the queer futurity/relationality debates. I’ve been thinking specifically about the use of punk and the gestures toward acid house. This…
Thoughts on philoSOPHIA 11 #2: Race, Technology, and the Body
Alia Al-Saji’s keynote was, as usual, all-around fabulous. One aspect of it particularly stood out to me, because it responded to this open question that I’ve been carrying around with me this semester. The question is about Falguni Sheth’s Towards…
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