Suchergebnisse

There are few sartorial ensembles as heavily signified as masculine as a suit. This article focuses on the suit within queer fashion digital cultures and spaces to explore how butch of colour digital fashion suits up to offer us different ways to think about masculinity. Intervening in the erasure of women of colour in histories of fashion – including menswear – and histories of sexuality – butch, dapper, tomboy, dandy – I argue that butch digital fashion works as a site and composition of flesh, fabric and feeling that reworks masculinity as a project of embodiment. I look at three interwoven dimensions of butch digital fashion – aesthetic process, texture as feeling and spatial imaginations – attending to the themes of fantasy, desire and pleasure. I situate butch within and between fashion studies and media studies to offer butch as a relation, practice, orientation and site of embodiment to think about being and becoming, about the body politics of space and feeling, as matters of race, sexuality, class and gender – and the materialities of race, sexuality, class and gender, mediated by the global, and as the global by the digital. Digital butch fashion is, at once, a visual culture, a creative visual space, a resource of queer fantasy and an aesthetic process. It is messy, tense and fraught with the politics of race, colonialism and class, yet at the same time, dense with possibility, pleasure and eroticism. Butch of colour fashion offers frames and forms for rethinking and remaking masculinity as a sign of a body, as a category of personhood, as a set of practices and feelings made coherent by processes of embodiment.

Jordache Ellapen's Queering the Archive: Brown Bodies in Ecstasy (2018) is a visual art project that explores erotics as an epistemological and methodological frame to think through race, diaspora, memory, history and desire in/of contemporary South Africa. I argue that Queering the Archive is invested in beauty as a project of sensuous memory, pleasure, movement and relation that works through and against geohistorical logics and conditions of race, diaspora and coloniality. Through a photo essay based on a close reading of the visual art, and a companion piece of an interview with the artist, I argue that Queering the Archive challenges our logics of the legacies of indentureship by centring those bodies who were used as labour and raw matter for global racial sexual capital. Ellapen re-imagines and re-images brown bodies as alive and beautiful in motion and in relation with erotic energy, playful desire and intimate joy. Ellapen crafts relations between colours, textures, forms and genres through mixed media practices, including layering and juxtaposing family photographs with staged photographs. These relations put the photographs in intimate tension and contradiction with one another as much as in beautiful, sensuous motion together, the edges of each highlighted as much as blurred through these relations. I read these relations as evocations and provocations of the histories and memories the photographs are dense with and made fragile by. These histories and memories include indentureship, colonialism and migration as structures and processes of power that shape intimate relations between peoples in South Africa. Ellapen's focus in this project on different brown bodies in relation to one another through erotic feeling and touching is embedded within these histories and memories, but these erotics are not determined, bound or regulated by the colonial and imperial infrastructures of power. In Queering the Archive, hegemonic colonial and postcolonial aesthetic regimes are disrupted and the brown body becomes a brown body in desiring and joyful movement and relation, re-imagined and re-imaged as elegant, beautiful and sensual towards different futurities.

This paper will look at the disruption of the heteronormative organization of resistance and protest caused by selected collective actions by women from Liberia, Nigeria and Kenya. I will use feminist critiques of the construction of the political versus the personal and theorize about 1) the definitions of what is sexual and sexualized in the realm of the private; 2) the contradictions in the formations and inscriptions onto bodies, of these definitions; and 3) the inscription of these definitions onto bodies and experiences themselves, which determines what is considered valid resistance. I will then look at the multiple and simultaneous disruptions caused to these processes by the examples of women's collective actions in this paper.

Since 2001, Pakistan has become a highly visible location for the US-led War on Terror. This visibility is based on, and has produced, a transnational circuit of representations of Pakistan. Pakistan is either condemned as an exceptional failure of the nation-state, or redeemed through exceptional nationalist figures of courage and resistance. Such representations have material consequences for Pakistanis, including elisions between anti-state struggles due to injustice and inequality, sectarian violence, and transnational war machines based in Pakistan.This dissertation explores the transnational politics of class, gender, and sexuality of these representations. The tropes deployed by these narrations attempt to manage an epistemological, emotional, and material excess of lives that cannot be contained by the categorical structure of the Pakistani nation-state.I analyze the 2012 film "The Reluctant Fundamentalist," by Mira Nair, based on Mohsin Hamid's 2007 novel; the 1998 film, "Jinnah," by Jamil Dehlavi; and the 2008 novel, A Case of Exploding Mangoes by Mohammed Hanif. "Jinnah" focuses on the partition of India in 1947. A Case of Exploding Mangoes is set in 1988 during the last days of General Zia-ul-Haq's military regime. "The Reluctant Fundamentalist" is about the attacks on New York City on September 11, 2001.Through a methodological combination of literary and cultural studies, I situate the texts in the historical context of each moment of crisis, and examine their international circulation amongst wider representations of Pakistan. My theoretical framework is based in transnational, postcolonial, feminist of color, and queer of color scholarship. I use this scholarship to locate excess in genealogies, bodies, emotions, practices, and communities which contest nationalist narrations of Pakistan.This dissertation is part of transnational Pakistani scholarship which tries to imagine Pakistan differently, through neither condemnation nor redemption. Such scholarship elucidates transnational politics of gender, sexuality, and class that undergird nationalist claims on the idea and space of Pakistan. Excess is a moment in the stakes and consequences of these representations are illuminated, at which one can choose to turn towards transnational, postcolonial, feminist, antiracist, and queer of color practices of responsible and responsive solidarity between communities.