"No Church in the Wild: Queer Anarchy and Gaga Feminism."

The PSU Dept. of English Presents: The 2013 Kellogg Awards Ceremony. Featuring one of the world's leading gender and queer theorists, Jack Halberstam. whose talk is entitled, "No Church in the Wild: Queer Anarchy and Gaga Feminism."

In a new book on "The Wild" I turn to anarchist thought to elaborate a queer politics for this particular moment of crisis and renewal. As many thinkers have proposed recently, a turn to anarchy makes sense at this time precisely because people's faith in the state and in a politics of inclusion and assimilation is wearing thin, particularly in leftist circles; and, anti-hegemonic, anti-state and anti-assimilationist positions have been rendered thinkable by Occupy movements and other global expressions of radical dissent. My recent book, Gaga Feminism, in that it both calls for and describes an end to "the normal," or that form of state power that manages people by disciplining them in relation to a fantasised norm, could be called anarchist. And my book on failure, in that it breaks with the all or nothing logics of success driven by capitalism, could be characterized as anarchist critique. In this new project, I seek to make explicit the stakes of a queer investment in anarchy that both reaches back to punk movements from the 1970's for inspiration but also seeks other traditions of anarchy globally.

Co-sponsored by Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Jack Halberstam is Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. Halberstam works in the areas of popular, visual and queer culture with an emphasis on subcultures. Halberstam's first book, Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (1995), was a study of popular gothic cultures of the 19th and 20th centuries and it stretched from Frankenstein to contemporary horror film. The 1998 book, Female Masculinity (1998), made a ground breaking argument about non-male masculinity and tracked the impact of female masculinity upon hegemonic genders. In the book, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (2005), Halberstam described and theorized queer reconfigurations of time and space in relation to subcultural scenes and the emergence of transgender visibility. This book devotes several chapters to the topic of visual representation of gender ambiguity.  Halberstam is currently working on several projects including a book titled THE WILD on queer anarchy.

In The Queer Art of Failure (2011), Halberstam wrote about "about finding alternatives to conventional understandings of success in a heteronormative, capitalist society; to academic disciplines that confirm what is already known according to approved methods of knowing; and to cultural criticism that claims to break new ground but cleaves to conventional archives."

Halberstam's latest book is Gaga Feminism (2012), is "a provocative manifesto of creative mayhem, a roadmap to sex and gender for the twenty-first century, that holds Lady Gaga as an exemplar of a new kind of feminism that privileges gender and sexual fluidity."

Alter Bahnhof Video Walk; 2012; Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller

Here is an attempt to document our 2nd piece made for dOCUMENTA (13). Viewers are given an ipod and headphones and asked to follow the prerecorded video through the old train station in Kassel. The overlapping realities lead to a strange, perceptive confusion in the viewers brain. Hard to document and harder to explain. We only present the recorded audio here, but when doing the walk the real sounds mix with the recorded adding another level of confusion as to what is real and what is fiction. Wear headphones to get the full effect of the original binaural recording.

This is a 6 minute clip of a 26 minute piece. Credits for the entire piece follow.

HABITUS: Objects, Behaviours, Rooms by Justin Ascott

Habitus' explores - through a creative dialectic - the way human consciousness is shaped by the compartmentalised structures of the places we inhabit -- primarily the home and workplace - and the habituated behaviours we perform within these various nodes. The mechanical actions we carry out each day -- lead to feelings of disillusionment and disengagement with social reality. The only objects and 'tools' that have the transformative power to expand consciousness are those commonly used by shamans in ritualised contexts - to induce altered states of perception for the purposes of healing, transcendence and revelation.

Habitus refers to lifestyle, the values, the dispositions and expectation of particular social groups that are acquired through the activities and experiences of everyday life. Perhaps in more basic terms, the habitus could be understood as a structure of the mind characterized by a set of acquired schemata, sensibilities, dispositions and taste. The particular contents of the habitus are the result of the objectification of social structure at the level of individual subjectivity. The habitus can be seen as counterpoint to the notions of rationality that are prevalent within other disciplines of social science research. It is perhaps best understood in relation to the notion of the 'habitus' and 'field', which describes the relationship between individual agents and the contextual environment.

Pierre Bourdieu elaborates on the notion of Habitus by explaining its dependency on history and human memory. For instance, a certain behaviour or belief becomes part of a society's structure when the original purpose of that behaviour or belief can no longer be recalled and becomes socialized into individuals of that culture.

Recent Images

The Sonic City

On Monday at 1.15 pm in HUMlab at Umeå University Shannon Mattern, Associate Professor at New School, New York will give a seminar on “Hearing Urban Infrastructures: A Sonic Archaeology of the Media-City”. The abstract is:

Abstract: For over a century, scholars and designers have acknowledged the existence of a spatial form commonly known as the “media city,” which encompasses both the modern city as represented through photographs, film, and digital technologies; and the city as shaped by those same technologies. In this seminar I argue for the need to acknowledge the longue durée of the “media city,” and to move beyond ocularcentric models of urban history. Drawing on the growing body of research on infrastructure that’s emerging from across the design fields, and on work in “media archaeology” within my own field of media studies, I’ll argue that we need to “excavate” the deep history of urban mediation, and I’ll take as an example an aspect of the media city that wouldn’t seem to lend itself easily to excavation. I’m referring to the “sonic city” – the city of public address and radio waves and everyday conversation. How does one dig into a form of mediation that seemingly has no physical form? What can we learn about how our cities have functioned as material sounding boards, resonance chambers, and infrastructures for various forms of sonic communication?

I have heard Shannon speak before, have been following her work and have met her as well. This will be a killer presentation for anyone interested in urban space, audio studies, transmediality,  digital media and media archeology. If you are in Umeå or within 500 kms of it I suggest attending in person. For others there will be a live stream open upon the hour; http://live.humlab.umu.se/

Shannon Mattern is an Associate Professor at New School, New York. Her research interest include relationships between the forms and materialities of media and the spaces -- architectural, urban, and conceptual -- they create and inhabit. Additional areas of interest include, generally, media and design history and theory; and, more specifically, media form and materiality; media reception (especially reading) and the spaces in which we store, access and consume media; textual theory; and media and spatial poetics. Shannon keeps a lively blog here: http://www.wordsinspace.net/wordpress/