This is an excerpt from the introduction to the manuscript I’m working on. Here, I’m discussing Jasbir Puar’s reworking of Foucaultian biopower into her notion of “superpanopticism.” She argues that superpanopticism operates not just in space (i.e., in 3D) but…
This week in my feminist theory class we’re reading Jack Halberstam’s new book The Queer Art of Failure. This book builds on Halberstam’s earlier work, In A Queer Time and Place. Both texts argue that discourses and models of “maturity”…
You’ve gotta give Madonna credit: she always keeps up with the trends, and has her finger on the hot new thing. As her new song and video, “Give Me All Your Luvin,” shows, Madge knows the new, postmillennial language of…
Or “Stupid Hoe” is not just stupid I’m still thinking through all that’s going on in Nicki Minaj’s “Stupid Hoe” single/video. It’s complicated. It’s REALLY complicated. I don’t think anyone can rigorously analyze the piece and give a uniformly, one-sidedly…
I’ve been reading Carole Pateman’s and Charles Mills’s Contract & Domination, prepping it to teach later this term in my graduate Feminist Theory class. Here, I want to talk about Mills’s discussion of the early, Discourses-era Rousseau, because I think…
Mainstream Feminism’s Demand for Realism: On “Fotoshop by Adobé,” aesthetics, and posthuman feminism
This video has been making its rounds on feminist social media: Fotoshop by Adobé from Jesse Rosten on Vimeo. The video critiques, via parody, the standard practice of ‘shopping female images, both in the mainstream media, and in individuals’ own…
This week, my graduate feminist theory class read Gayle Rubin’s classic article “The Traffic In Women.” We considered whether and how men could be trafficked—i.e., how men might be used as the medium for relations among other men. Rubin argues…
I want to take a minute to reflect on the representations of race, specifically, the representations of African-American blackness, in US pop culture in 2011. In several blog posts, and a few of my published works, I’ve argued that stereotypical…
[This week I’m going to attempt a few “year-end” type posts. Being on semester break, now’s a god time for me to collect some thoughts that have been rattling around in my head all term, but I haven’t had time…
I’m making my way through Alexis Shotwell’s really well-written Knowing Otherwise, and I must say I generally agree with the project: in addition to being extremely well-written (it easily passes my “Can I read it on an airplane?” test), I…
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