Youth Workshop at Femina Potens
I’m so happy to be facilitating a workshop on Political Systems, via Theater of the Oppressed, performance and poetry, at Femina Potens next week in their series of workshops for LGBTQ youth. Here’s their announcement about the series that my workshop will be a part of.
Femina Potens is thrilled to announce that our FP Family & Youth Program will be pairing up with queer youth organization LYRIC to teach art, film, and writing courses every monday starting October 17th – May 2012. Our course will consist of 7 queer youth ages 17 – 19 and will conclude with a screening of a documentary on the program, a gallery exhibit, and written works created by the youth during the program. We will be updating you monthly on our youth’s progress. For more information on LYRIC visit LYRIC.org
Performing at RADAR Reading Series in SF on February 7th
I’l be up in the bay area again in February, ahh the bay, how I love you… I’m doing a reading of poetry from my new book The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities, forthcoming from Atropos Press. Below is the book cover (click to enlarge) and the reading details. See you there!
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
San Francisco Public Library, Main Branch Latin@ Reading Room
Free, 6pm sharp!
Ellyn Maybe, Nick Krieger, Morgan Bassichis, and Micha Cardenas ! Hosted by Michelle Tea who trades cookies for questions!
The Place of the Personal in Art/Theory Interdisciplinary Scholarship?
repost from my HASTAC blog.
As an artist/theorist, I find myself thinking a lot lately about the place of the personal in my work, and I wonder how other HASTAC scholars and readers think about these issues.
A major part of my aesthetic as a performance artist has been a choice to place personal risk and intimacy at the core of my art practice. This choice is inspired by artists such as Carollee Schneeman, Sophie Calle, Marina Abramovic and Ulay, Linda Montano and Hannah Wilke, who have chosen to make their personal lives and the intimate relationships the subject of their work. Often, this is a feminist strategy of making the personal political. As Chris Kraus writes in I Love Dick, an intensely personal and theoretical book of memoir/fiction:
Let a girl choose death — Janis Joplin, Simone Weil– and death becomes her definition, the outcome of her “problems.” To be female till means beng trapped within the purely psychological. No matter how dispassionate or large a vision of the world a woman formulates, whenever it includes her own experience and emotion, the telescope’s turned back on her. (196)
In another part of the book, on the work of Hannah Wilke, Kraus says that Wilke’s work was focused on the question “If women have failed to make ‘universal’ art because we’re trapped within the ‘personal,’ why not universalize the ‘personal’ and make it the subject of our art?” (211)
I am very seriously interested in these questions as they pertain to scholarship and in my role as, or performance of, an artist/theorist. As I write my essay the upcoming Marxism and New Media conference at Duke, I am not sure how much, if any at all, personal experience to include. Does my role as a performance artist stop when I am writing academic papers, in the drive for legitimacy? Does personal experience and emotion somehow necessarily devalue scholarly work? As a performance artist, I am not sure if the personal cost of using my life in my work is worth the outcome, or if I would be satisfied not including my personal experience in my work.
These questions also apply to other people who create personal artwork as part of their scholarship, including poets and writers. Here I am thinking ofJeanne Jo in the iMAP PhD program at USC as well as Margaret Rhee and her current project on queer love poems. It seems queer theory in general, as well as feminist theory, has a major stake in one’s personal relationship to one’s material, as much as many scholars attempt to have an “objective” approach. How are reviewers, for journals or for tenure, supposed to be “objective” when evaluating work of mine that deals with intimate details of my life?
I find that academic frequently supports and perhaps encourages certain categories of people to do certain categories of work, like the queer people doing queer theory, indigenous people writing indigenous theory, mixed race people studying critical mixed race theory, the list goes on. What are the implications and limitations of this? Is it something we should support with our own scholarship or break away from?
Additionally, as digital media scholars and artists, the lines between personal and scholarly are often blurred in online contexts. While I could choose to do things differently, and visitor to my Flickr page may see images of my artwork or images of my personal life, and similarly with Facebook. How do you deal with these issues?
How Many Sexual Assaults Happened at #OccupyLA?
[trigger warning]
Repost of my original post from OccupyEverything.org. Please read, RT and comment.
I just got back from having dinner with a friend of mine who spent many nights at OccupyLA. This is a person who I think has a good understanding of gender politics and of what happened at OccupyLA. I was shocked to hear him tell me that there were probably over 10 or over 20 or more cases of sexual assault at OccupyLA. As someone who has been following the tweets, articles, blog posts and when I can the live feed for OccupyLA very closely since it began, I was incredibly disheartened to hear these numbers. My understanding was that there was one case. This says to me that people have been keeping these incidents out of public discussion to protect the movement, which is incredibly upsetting because if the Occupy movement thinks that sexual assault is tolerable in any way than I will be so ashamed that I ever supported them in any way. Clearly, a movement that is so multiplicitous and with such fuzzy boundaries as the Occupy movement can’t be said to hold many or possibly any opinions or priorities, but I would say that it seems like there may have been an effort by many Occupy organizers to keep the number of sexual assaults a secret.
Why is this such a problem? Don’t the people experiencing assault have the right to their privacy? Yes, of course they do, but as a woman and a trans person, I feel like I would have not been safe sleeping at OccupyLA and I wouldn’t have known it until I was there, possibly until it was too late because the issue was kept so well under wraps that someone following the news every day and talking to everyone they knew, including participants, organizers and scholars following the occupations didn’t know at all how prevalent the issue was.
I felt unsafe from my first time at Occupy LA, the first march to City Hall. That day, I was with my girlfriend and two men tried to hit on us and one even grabbed her arm with no invitation at all to do so. I knew from that first moment in the bright daylight that this was not a safe place for me to sleep.
I was so sad to hear these words come from my friend’s mouth, he said that every night you could hear someone yelling “get out! get the fuck out of my tent!” and that there was so much booze and drugs. He also said that the claim that there were many assaults was being used as a right wing “troll” tactic, but that is no excuse for hiding the problem if it exists. He also said that even at the General Assembly, where the issue of assault was discussed two nights, that while many people came to the mic to say that the issue should be discussed (for 10 minutes) that still many others came to the mic to say that the camp is about wall street and not about this issue. Additionally, my friend said that very few women were staying in the camp towards the end near the eviction.
I have also had numerous people ask me, when I bring up the issue of sexual assault at occupations, if this is above the usual number of assaults that happen. As if it mattered? That response is clearly a way of minimalizing and normalizing the issue of sexual assault instead of taking responsibility for the fact that as people who support this movement, even by writing and tweeting about it, we may be supporting the creation of a space where people are sexually assaulted. Now we have to certainly distinguish between different occupations, but if organizers are keeping this issue a secret how can people even know?
I am so incredibly disheartened by this news and I think that as participants in this movement, which I consider myself having been to many rallies and events, and as supporters, we need to understand the extent of this problem. Perhaps this is something that the #OccupyData hackers can try to find, a number of cases of sexual assault at different occupations? How can people accept this? I refuse to participate in a movement which would attempt to create intentional space to envision a new world in which sexual assault is acceptable and should be kept quiet.
To those who would say this is a peripheral issue, I absolutely disagree. I propose that the question as to whether we can create spaces which challenging existing institutions of violence, such as economic inequality, without reproducing and even worsening other institutions of violence, such as a patriarchal rape culture, must be central to the occupation movement. Whose liberation and equality is this movement about?
UPDATE: 1:49pm: I want to add, to be clear, that I am fully in support of prison abolitionist and community based strategies for responding to and preventing sexual violence which increase community autonomy and do not depend on police. That is precisely why the handling of this issue in these autonomous spaces is so important to me. Additionally, I want to add that I am in no way trying to reproduce a gender binary, white centered, class privileged analysis, I fully acknowledge that people of all genders are affected by sexual violence and the most affected groups are transgender women of color and sex workers.
Calling All Hacktivists! #OccupyData Hack-A-Thon Dec 9-11, 2011 #occupyla #ows #occupywallst
The HASTAC Community, Standards and Seeing Interdisciplinary Connections
This year, I’m a HASTAC Scholar, which means I’m blogging both on this site and on theirs. Actually, since this site is mostly for announcements, I do most of my blogging over at HASTAC nowadays. I’m posting part of this entry here to help spur more discussion about these topics.
http://hastac.org/blogs/michacardenas/2011/11/26/hastac-community-standards-and-interdisciplinarity
The recent discussion in the thread Community Standards for Virtual Spaces was spurred by, among other posts, my post of Elle Mehrmand’s performance fauxlographic. The post contained an image from the performance which contained nudity, and therefore the HASTAC site admins edited my post to remove the image and link to the UCSD Visual Art Department‘s website which is hosting the image. I wish that this wasn’t two weeks before the end of the semester and I didn’t have two papers to write, on top of conference papers, publisher deadlines and deadlines for galleries for spring shows, so that I had more time to respond. Still, I am eager to post a few thoughts in response to the very rich discussions which have taken place in the standards forum.
First, I want to state in response to Fiona’s self described “disjointed” comment, which was actually very compelling and apparently very heartfelt, that I love HASTAC. I have met some of my nearest and dearest colleagues in academic thanks to HASTAC, as well as developed sone wonderful friendships. I even met my current PhD advisor, Jack Halberstam, in the HASTAC forum on Queer and Feminist New Media Spaces. I am joining in this discussion with the best of intentions, in order to participate as a HASTAC scholar in making HASTAC as amazing, participatory and transformative as I believe it can be. I am so grateful to the HASTAC scholars, to Fiona and Cathy and everyone who makes HASTAC possible and holds open this space for artistic, academic and theoretical experimentation.
Second, I am very concerned about the suggestion that the legal Terms of Service be used as the basis for the Community Standards document. Among other things, the Terms of Service prohibits posting any material which is “offensive… vulgar, obscene, profane, or is racially, ethnically or is otherwise objectionable;… (iii) Content that is pornographic, sexually explicit or contains nudity; … Content which contains software, software viruses… links to other websites that contain Content not in compliance with the Terms of Service” These restrictions, as I understand them, could be easily interpreted to disallow Critical Code Studies discussions of software code for computer viruses, The Queer and Feminist New Media forum’s discussion of Monica Ong’s skin whitening remedy for asian women, Alexis Lothian’s vidding discussion which links to erotic (possibly pornographic) vid remixes of Battlestar Galactica, and a whole host of other very important discussions on HASTAC regarding the intersections of digital culture with art, race, gender, sex and ability and how those intersections inform our understanding of comtemporary power and social control.
The point made by John Carter McKnight is central, I think, in that the real problem here is self-policing at the risk of preventing important discussions of contemporary issues. I cited Ai Weiwei’s recent tweet saying ”if they see nudity as pornography then china is stuck in the Qing dynasty” not to be snarky, but to point to the fact that these issues are very contemporary and global. The removal of Elle Mehrmand’s poster for fauxlographic cannot be separated from the fact that her performance is about Iran and Wikileaks. Her body parts as covered or uncovered in that flyer are a direct response to the headscarves worn by Muslim women and the perception of certain types of bodies as terrorist bodies, the agency of women to choose to over or uncover themselves and the rhetorics of American exceptionalism which would present the US as a rational place of democracy in contrast to an oppressive regime which forces women to cover their bodies in order to justify military action against Iran.
By removing her flyer, HASTAC is reproducing the act of forcing women’s bodies to be covered up which Iran and other middle eastern countries are accused of as a justification for war, and doing so under a heteronormative rhetoric of protecting the children.