Blogging my way through Grosz’s “Chaos, Territory, Art”: part 2, more thoughts on ‘music’ and (algo)rhythm

Signal & Noise Why does a chapter nominally about “vibration, animal, music, sex” begin with a long discussion of philosophy, what it is and what it does? Is this evidence that “music” is really just philosophy’s other, its negative? Are…

Sexual Difference, Indeterminacy, & Open Works: a few thoughts on Grosz

I’m starting work on my third book, which I am tentatively calling “Signal & Noise”. This involves a lot of reading; I am going to try to post short reflections on what I’m reading as I work my way through…

Is neoliberalism’s becoming-woman also a becoming-sound? (and some thoughts on listening, social media, and feminized labor)

This will be cross-posted at Cyborgology later this week. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari argue that “music is traversed by a becoming-woman” (272). By this they mean that Western systems of musical organization evoke and confront the very…

The Financialized Girl

The Financialized Girl

This is from the Girl Scouts website. This is a cross-post from Cyborgology.  In an earlier post, I asked what happens to femininity when the kind of second-shift care work traditionally assigned to women is increasingly a feature of all work, especially conventionally…

Anti-Social Practice Against Communicative Capitalism?

Political philosophers often use terms like “having a voice” or “legibility” to describe an individual’s or group’s relationship to power and to hegemonic institutions. But these terms, “voice” and “legibility,” they’re aesthetic terms used to describe political phenomena. Why, in…

Notes On A Theory Of Multi-Racial White Supremacist Patriarchy, aka MRWaSP

Multi-Racial White Supremacist Patriarchy, or MRWaSP, is my term for early 21st-century globalized Western race/gender/sexuality/capitalist hegemony. I put a lower-case “a” in the acronym to both make the acronym something pronounceable to English speakers, and to echo the older acronym…

Phased Out: Resilience, Melancholy, & Feminist “Bad Vibes” (aka my 2013 SPEP talk responding to Ewa Ziarek)

Even though this is specifically targeted as a response to Ewa Ziarek’s fabulous new book Feminist Aesthetics & The Politics of Modernism, this paper will be of interest to those of you who have been following my work on resilience,…

a different kind of buzz: harmony, white femininity, and multi-racial white supremacist patriarchy

[this is a little rough; i may come back and edit it if i have time this weekend. that said, i’d love any thoughts or feedback you might have.] When I first heard Lorde’s single “Royals” on Charlotte radio, all…

Seeing Music For What It Really Isn't

Seeing Music For What It Really Isn’t

or, “‘Reality’ is the only word in the language that should always be used in quotes” This is cross-posted from cyborgology. __ I get really nervous when people start making claims about what is and isn’t “real” music. Like Princess Leia in The…

Wibbly-Wobbly Women for a Timey-Wimey Universe

I’ve got another post up at Cyborgology. This one is about the role of women/feminine compositional elements in “irrational” contemporary media formats and neoliberal political economy. It’s also about the season finale of Doctor Who.Here’s an excerpt: But the MPDG,…