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Dancing with Ghosts & Premonitions: Ballroom as a queer anticapitalist liminal utopia & counterpublic
A paper exploring Drag Ballroom Culture as a queer culture and space, might exist as a liminal utopia with vague promise of futuirity through potentiality and performance. I argue that Ballroom culture exists as a space to re-define and subvert social norms as a counterpublic, offering an inside within the larger public while existing precariously as the outside pushes against the inside and vice versa. The paper also addresses the performance of capitalist aesthetics in an anti-capitalist space as a means of reclamation and subversion of heteronormative nuclear family classist and racist norms.
Melancholic Masochism: Using Racial Melancholia & BDSM as a framework for resistance
This essay hopes to explore how racial melancholia and masochism together can offer insight into power dynamics and resistance to societal norms for the subjugated. Social meanings get mapped onto bodies, and they embody theory, so when bodies come into contact skin presses against skin, theory pushes against theory, and politics meet pleasure and even pain. In his text, The Sense of Brown Muñoz offers a metaphor from a colleague on affect and touch, “To touch something is to make contact with it even while remaining separate from it because entities that touch do not fuse together. To touch is to caress a surface that belongs to something else, but to never master and consume it.” In other words, touch can inform our understanding of self through juxtaposition in a way that does not claim ownership, but rather an exploration of flesh and borders. I want to question this metaphor by asking what happens when one party desires to master and consume the other and then this touching becomes touching the other back.
​Visual Riposte: Gaze in
Ousmane Sembène's La noire de…
Here I connect Paula Amad’s “Visual Riposte: Looking Back at the Return of the Gaze as Postcolonial Theory's Gift to Film Studies'' to Osumane Sembène's film La noire de… to analyse how the acknowledgement of the colonial gaze opens the possibility for resistance and rejection for post/colonial subjects specifically through his characterization and posturing of Diouanna in the film. I briefly touch on the history of ethnofiction and voyeuristic nature of films by filmmakers such as Jean Rouch that dehumanize the subjects. The main forms of resistance in the film I address are: spoken narrative agency, temporal manipulation through narration and the image of the mask, the use of anti-gaze and politics of privacy, and mirror shots.
​& Julia: a Disability and PTSD reading of Maria Irene Fornes' Fefu and her Friends
In the absurdist play Fefu and her Friends, Maria Irene Fornes utilizes the form/setting of the play surrounding Julia to embody Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (from gender based trauma). I’ll be focusing on Julia's bedroom scene in part two, though this happens throughout the play. In this scene we see three main experiences/symptoms of PTSD, temporal dissonance, dissociative actions, and increased stimulation. This paper explores how a disability reading of Julia’s presentation/performance illuminates the embodied trauma of women of color and the politics of an “invisible” disability.
Writing for Survivance: Resistance Strategies in Native North American Literature and Tradition
This research paper aims to explore writing and language as a space for resistance for Native people, specifically looking at the written forms that might be considered white forms/spaces and how Indigenous creatives have reclaimed as a space for agency, home, and expression. I also hope to understand how the racialized space of literature may further impact the dynamics of both the writing and reception of Native literature including an analysis of the colonial gaze. I intend to analyze literary modes of resistance such as motivated signifying, mirroring, parody, satire, and subversion of tropes or myths within the genre of Indigenous resistance literature and understanding how these strategies are commonly employed or subverted. In order to do this work, we must establish what constitutes the Native Tradition (and canon), critiques of the Tradition, and what work is laid before the field currently. It should be noted this paper is attempting only to survey literary critique and theory of Native writings and not asserting definitive answers, definitions, or opinions.