R-3 Repository :: Browsing by Author "Howe, Cymene"

Browsing by Author "Howe, Cymene"

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A Bog Approach: An Ethnography, Or, An Anthropology Of Climate Emergency
(2021-12-03) Storer, Eliot; Faubion, James; Boyer, Dominic; Howe, Cymene
This dissertation investigates contemporary human, social, and cultural responses to climate emergency. My ethnographic field research localizes vanguardist “solutionist” discourses where marginalized environments and aspirational state actors intersect on “The Flow Country” blanket bogs in the far north of Scotland. The Flow Country is the premier site of the UK’s large scale “forest-to-bog” peatland restoration project, one of the few “natural climate solutions” enacted and institutionalized. My fieldwork (2017-2018) approached a boggy, yet “neutral,” “Net Zero” discourse that might confound traditional environmentalist positions. My findings characterize a local Net Zero cultural form with 1) a latent construction of future uncertainty that manages to reproduce the “estate” of land ownership regimes; 2) a rhetorical imaginary of “plausibility” dominated by positive scenario construction over religious or scientific politics; and 3) a lyrical model of ethnography that enjoins a more open strategy of accountability and interlocution. I describe my findings in four chapters approaching: 1) the marginal imaginaries of bogs; 2) the relationship of experts and elites to apocalyptic and climate solution discourses; 3) the “extra-human” sensorial experience and erotic politics of environmental monitoring; and, 4) the parallelism of expositive and narrative strategies in corporate, public, and individual climate accounting.
Aeolian Extractivism and Community Wind in Southern Mexico
(Duke University Press, 2016) Howe, Cymene; Boyer, Dominic
The conditions of the Anthropocene, and the relative novelty of renewable energy forms, demonstrate the experimental plasticity of our era. Existing infrastructures of energy, political power, and capital can resist the more revolutionary ambitions of renewable energy to mitigate climate change and promote collaborative energy production, such as community-owned wind parks. Even when states adopt bold energy transition targets, as Mexico has done, the methods of transition can be deeply problematic.
Aeolian politics
(Taylor & Francis, 2015) Howe, Cymene; Boyer, Dominic
Our project in this article is to unwind ‘wind power’ as a consolidated conceptual object and to consider the ventifactual arrangements of its political materiality. In a time when carbon incineration has been exposed as among the greatest ecological threats to humanity and other life on the planet, renewable energy forms, like wind power, are commonly assumed to have a clear, logical, and obvious salvational purpose: a path away from fossilized resources and toward sustainable sources of energy. Mexico has established some of the most far-reaching and comprehensive climate legislation in the world, including mandates for renewable energy production. The Isthmus of Tehuantepec, in the Southern state of Oaxaca, now hosts the densest concentration of on-shore wind development anywhere on the planet. We find, however, that the ‘good’ of wind is differentially felt. The power of the wind is not singular, but rather as multiple as the world it inhabits. We thus develop an argument against a singular interpretation of ‘wind power’ and toward a surfacing of wind's manifold effects and ways of mattering. We call this domain: aeolian politics. In this article, we take several snapshots of aeolian politics to help articulate its multiplicity, showing how wind power becomes contoured by land and desire and by infrastructure and technological management. We also see aeolian political life entangled with cosmologies and subjectivities and implicated within the ethical domains of sustainable development.
Anthropocene Unseen : A Lexicon
(punctum books, 2020) Howe, Cymene; Pandian, Anand
The idea of the Anthropocene often generates an overwhelming sense of abjection or apathy. It occupies the imagination as a set of circumstances that counterpose individual human actors against ungraspable scales and impossible odds. There is much at stake in how we understand the implications of this planetary imagination, and how to plot paths from this present to other less troubling futures. With Anthropocene Unseen: A Lexicon, the editors aim at a resource helpful for this task: a catalog of ways to pluralize and radicalize our picture of the Anthropocene, to make it speak more effectively to a wider range of contemporary human societies and circumstances. Organized as a lexicon for troubled times, each entry in this book recognizes the gravity of the global forecasts that invest the present with its widespread air of crisis, urgency, and apocalyptic possibility. Each also finds value in smaller scales of analysis, capturing the magnitude of an epoch in the unique resonances afforded by a single word. The Holocene may have been the age in which we learned our letters, but we are faced now with circumstances that demand more experimental plasticity. Alternative ways of perceiving a moment can bring a halt to habitual action, opening a space for slantwise movements through the shock of the unexpected. Each small essay in this lexicon is meant to do just this, drawing from anthropology, literary studies, artistic practice, and other humanistic endeavors to open up the range of possible action by contributing some other concrete way of seeing the present. Each entry proposes a different way of conceiving this Earth from some grounded place, always in a manner that aims to provoke a different imagination of the Anthropocene as a whole. The Anthropocene is a world-engulfing concept, drawing every thing and being imaginable into its purview, both in terms of geographic scale and temporal duration. Pronouncing an epoch in our own name may seem the ultimate act of apex species self-aggrandizement, a picture of the world as dominated by ourselves. Can we learn new ways of being in the face of this challenge, approaching the transmogrification of the ecosphere in a spirit of experimentation rather than catastrophic risk and existential dismay? This lexicon is meant as a site to imagine and explore what human beings can do differently with this time, and with its sense of peril.
Anthropocenic Ecoauthority: The Winds of Oaxaca
(George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research, 2014) Howe, Cymene
This article analyzes the development of wind parks across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec (Oaxaca, Mexico) and, in turn, how a politics of resistance and local perceptions of environmental peril have challenged renewable energy transitions. In the fraught debates surrounding the massive Mareña Renovables wind park, dramatic distinctions have emerged between local perceptions of ecological conditions and forms of environmental knowledge calibrated to global climate remediation. These divergences indicate distinct ways of imagining and articulating “anthropocenic ecoauthority”—a series of experiential, scientific, and managerial truth-claims regarding ecological knowledge and future forecasting in an era of global anthropogenic change. Whether enunciated by resident communities, state officials, corporate representatives, or environmental experts, ecoauthority gains its particular traction by asserting ethical claims on behalf of, and in regards to, the anthropogenically altered future of the biosphere, human and nonhuman. The article concludes with a discussion of how biopolitical and ecoauthoritative positions coincide, suggesting that although the original sites of biopolitical intervention have been population and the human species, the energic, atmospheric, aquaspheric, and lithospheric shifts that have been dubbed the Anthropocene demand that we account for life in its local dimensions as well as on the scale of the greater planetary bios.
Cooperation and Co-optation in Transnational Activism
(2010) Howe, Cymene
Cooperation and co-optation, despite their shared prefixes, seem to suggest very different approaches to establishing coalitions, politics and sociality. Where cooperation suggests prioritizing collective knowledge - shared ways of thinking, being and doing - co-optation is often understood as a kind of political thievery, usurping the politics, ideologies and practices of one collective in order to advance the goals of another. The cooperative impulse to create a synergy of skills, seems to find its reverse when we talk of co-optation; it is instead the appropriation of those synergic skills, or put differently: hitching one’s political wagon to another’s in order to reap the benefits therein. While co-optation is often invoked in the negative as an inappropriate, or at least uninvited, form of borrowing, I would like to recast the notion of co-optation in a more positive register as that “process of placing one’s political goals within a larger rubric of political success.” What I would like to elaborate here, based on my anthropological fieldwork among sexual rights activists in Nicaragua, is what I am calling the “strategic co-optation” of lesbian and homosexual identity. While Nicaragua is a country likely still remembered for the Sandinista Revolution, what is less well known is that following the end of the Sandinista regime in 1990, the country instituted Latin America’s most repressive anti-sodomy law (Article 204), which mandated that “anyone who induces, promotes, propagandizes or practices in scandalous form sexual intercourse between persons of the same sex commits the crime of sodomy and shall incur 1 to 3 years imprisonment.”[1] My research has been an attempt to understand how advocates of sexual rights in Nicaragua, and their cooperantes (often in the form of feminists) have worked—discursively and practically—to overturn their country’s anti-sodomy law. Many activists have indeed wed their struggles to the categories of “homosexual” and “lesbian” subjectivity. However, I will argue that we ought not see this as an example of colonial discursive dispersions where Southern subjects are victims of an assimilationist logic handed down from the North. Rather, I want to suggest that as activists invoke these political terms—ones that certainly have traction in the transnational [2] world of human rights advocacy—they have done so in ways that allow for creative and flexible appropriations of the terms themselves. These categories are, in other words, spacious signs with political teeth that are being strategically co-opted to address locally relevant concerns, both political and cultural. First, let me outline some of the scholarly concerns about transnational gay and lesbian rights and identity before I then turn to the work of Nicaraguan sexual rights advocates.
Creating Emergency: Hierarchy, Ideology, and Competition in the Humanitarian Network of (Post-)Disaster Port-au-Prince
(2015-11-10) Mantel, Rebecca; Georges, Eugenia; Faubion, James; Howe, Cymene; Duno-Gottberg, Luis
I assert that in the months and years following the January 2010 earthquake, the humanitarian ecology in Port-au-Prince was neither a singular apparatus, as it is often called, nor a scattered and uncontained chaos of uncoordinated NGOs (James 2010). I argue that instead of these two extremes, the humanitarian actors collected into groups distinctive in characteristics such as size, funding mechanisms, and interactions with the attempted humanitarian oversight structure. These factions, internal to the aid apparatus, at once shaped aid workers’ perceptions of urgency and their subsequent views on the needs of the urban Haitian population at a given time while they were shaped, themselves, by the internal logics of competition underlying the inflated population of aid agencies and organizations. In the protracted setting of emergency and crisis in Port-au-Prince, need was based on often opposing analyses of in what particular stage of need lay the imagined state of emergency. These temporal analyses defined the form and function of aid offered to different communities, and the aid apparatus was rarely, if ever, in consensus about where on the continuum of need lay the residents of Port-au-Prince. Multiple contradictory analyses led to discordance within the overall aid effort: some were firmly rooted in the relief timeline typical of an immediate post-disaster temporality, while other took actions reflective of a longer-term development mindset. These contradictory analyses were especially evident in medical settings, wherein the efforts that aid workers took in assisting individual patients often reflected their organizations’ overall attitude concerning the temporality of need of Port-au-Prince as a whole. While aid workers constructed their analyses in part through their daily routines, their interactions with and observations of the medical structure as it existed in the post-earthquake months, these attitudes were also fueled by a broader, underlying internal competition that played out in the hyper-saturated ecology of aid in Port-au-Prince. This dissertation is divided into five chapters. The first chapter lays out the background of each of the three major sets of humanitarian actors that will be the focus of this work: the UN and its military arm, MINUSTAH; Cuban medical aid and its relatively recent Venezuelan-Bolivarian influence; and what I call micro-NGOs, the small-scale organizations that did not fall under the radar or command of the UN humanitarian coordination agency, OCHA. Chapter two focuses on a singular geographic space, the Pétionville tent camp, where I conducted my first months of field research in 2010. By focusing on particular projects implemented within the camp by its managing NGO, I use this camp space to describe how NGOs dealt with the often hazy period of transition between emergency relief and development aid. Chapter three takes a step away from Port-au-Prince and back in time to look at the development of the relationships between Venezuela and Cuba, Cuba and Haiti, and Haiti and Venezuela. This chapter discusses the making of the “fragile state” in contemporary development policy research, and explains how the alliance between Cuba, Venezuela and Haiti marks a turning point in both Latin American regionalism and the oft-referenced “South-South aid” collaborations. The fourth chapter discusses two very disparate ways in which revolution and its identities and ideologies played out in the setting of post-earthquake Port-au-Prince. The first section looks at revolutionary ideology in Chávez’s political and economic campaign as it joins Cuba and Haiti into his Bolivarian movement, while the second section looks at the reasons for which MINUSTAH armed forced have failed to connect with the local populous and has, in fact, come to signify a newfound revolutionary enemy by certain political and geographical factions within Port-au-Prince. The fifth and final chapter looks more closely at the relationship between micro-NGOs and the UN oversight structure. Here, I finalize the argument that I began above wherein competition between the “uncoordinated” NGOs proved to be an integral part of the post-earthquake humanitarian structure, the many disparate pieces actually forming an ecology and an economy that supported the continued presence of all levels of foreign interventionist actors.
Ecologics
(Duke University Press, 2019) Howe, Cymene
Epistemic Engineering and the Lucha for Sexual Rights in Postrevolutionary Nicaragua
(Wiley, 2013) Howe, Cymene
From 1992 to 2007, Nicaragua had the dubious distinction of maintaining the most repressive antisodomy law in the Americas. Based upon several years of field research with activists involved in what they have called the lucha for sexual rights, this article considers the “epistemological engineering” of Nicaragua's sexual rights struggle. It discusses two distinct frameworks that have informed the work of advocacy: “Orgullo Lésbico-gay” (Lesbian and Gay Pride) and “Una Sexualidad Libre de Prejuicios” (Sexuality Free from Prejudice)—both of which have different ideological origins and epistemological purposes. As managers of political logics and strategists of social struggle, activists have utilized political performances and publicly disseminated discourses in order to craft the way in which the struggle will “come out,” and ultimately how sexual rights will be understood by the larger Nicaraguan body politic. Through this process, activists have developed the epistemic dimensions of sexual rights in multiple registers, including those of universal liberation and minority rights, as well as earlier iterations of a communitarian ethos, including Sandinismo.
Funding Disability: Ambivalences in Nonprofit Fundraising in the United States
(2021-04-30) Vainker, Ellie; Howe, Cymene
This ethnographic study discusses the ambivalences, complexities, and contradictions involved in nonprofit fundraising practice, based on three and a half years of fieldwork in a disability-focused nonprofit and CDFI in the United States. I show how Loans for Independence (LFI) must balance competing pressures in delivering services and in securing funding for those services. Chapter One discusses the legacies LFI emerges from, including the Independent Living Movement as well as postwar rehabilitative medicine and barrier-free design. Chapter Two explores how LFI balances different portrayals of disability in order to reach people who qualify for services but who do not recognize themselves within the rubric of disability and considers the ramifications of this individual framing of access. Chapter Three focuses on client stories in fundraising and the challenges of meeting the conventional form of telling client stories while avoiding the charity model of disability; I link the discussion to humanitarian imagery and urge for a greater attention to the field of action open to nonprofits. Chapter Four addresses the marketization of nonprofits through reference to two institutional forms that LFI occupies, which carry competing demands and best practices; I show how LFI carves a line through this space that satisfies the form but exceeds what is imagined within it. Chapter Five analyzes how LFI depicts disability in grant applications in order to meet funding conventions and expectations; I draw attention to the creative practice involved in this endeavor of incorporating disability into a space where it is not imagined to belong. Throughout I frame the dynamics in terms of friction (Tsing 2005) and note the fraught lines that LFI follows, seeming to bend toward logics of rehabilitative medicine and cure (Clare 2017) to secure the necessary resources to pursue a different kind of project. I argue through this dissertation that we cannot talk about NGOs without talking about NGO funding and we cannot fully engage in critique regarding NGOs without attending to this central problematic that NGOs face: the fact they need to secure resources in order to deliver programs.
Hyperanimals: framing livestock and climate change in Danish imaginaries
(2020-05-08) Winter, Drew Robert; Howe, Cymene
The IPCC and UN FAO have both suggested a global reduction in meat consumption to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But how do nations and citizens resolve tensions between ecological stewardship and meat consumption? What is implied in eating meat and raising livestock in a country where the historical imaginary yokes national values to the pig-producing countryside? To answer these questions, this dissertation examines how climate change is affecting meat consumption and production logics in Denmark. Though the country has a reputation for progressive environmental policy, its formerly large agricultural sector continues to exert disproportionate political influence, and many citizens consider pork its most "traditional" food. In 2016, a publicly-funded advisory council issued a report suggesting that parliament pass a beef tax to reduce consumption and reflect its environmental impact. The report was the most controversial the council had ever issued, with members receiving angry phone calls and politicians arguing the council should be disbanded. The proposal put national tensions between sustainability and agriculture in full view, and it became clear that such a tax would not be passed. Based on 16 months of fieldwork with meat industry workers, food innovation NGOs, environmental activists, and animal rights advocates, this dissertation explores how stakeholders in the meat-climate debate produce and enact knowledge; while industry scientists used quantification as a stand-in for making ethical claims, NGOs attempted to make new environmental subjects through educational eating programs and pressure campaigns to increase availability of plant-based foods. These efforts are contrasted with activists who work directly with animals, whose work is biopolitical and affective. All actors claim to be in favor of "environmental sustainability" but are governed by conflicting internal regimes and motivations. What emerged was a hydra of anxieties not just about climate but human-animal relationships in general, that I call "hyperanimal."
Justice and Transformation: Houston Women on Climate Action
(Rice University, 2020-10-28) King, Denae; Howe, Cymene; Dinn, Amy Catherine; Gonzalez, Iris; Fondren Library; Rice's Center for Environmental Studies
From fires to floods, the consequences of climate change are increasingly evident, and underserved communities often face the most severe impacts. Inspired by Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Dr. Katharine Wilkinson’s All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, this virtual panel discussion brought together four Houston women whose work addresses climate justice: Dr. Denae King (TSU), Dr. Cymene Howe (Rice), Amy Catherine Dinn (Lone Star Legal Aid), and Iris Gonzalez (Coalition for Environment, Equity & Resilience (CEER)). Co-sponsored by Rice’s Fondren Library Green Team, Rice’s Center for Environmental Studies, Houston’s Citizens’ Environmental Coalition (CEC), and Rice Environmental Society. This event took place on Zoom. Fondren Library hosted this event as part of its participation in the ALA's Resilient Communities: Libraries Respond to Climate Change grant.
Latin America in the Anthropocene: Energy Transitions and Climate Change Mitigations
(Wiley, 2015) Howe, Cymene
Energy creates both possibilities and liabilities. Plentiful, inexpensive energy has long been a cornerstone of modernist dreams of never-ending expansion. While this may be a fantasy, the truth—at least according to overwhelming scientific evidence—is that our use of fossil fuels has led to distressing global consequences. In May 2013, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that the average daily level of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels had exceeded 400 parts per million, a density of heat-trapping gases that has not existed for at least three million years, long before humans evolved (Gillis 2013). The Holocenic conditions in which we developed as a species have expired, and the Anthropocene, an epoch defined by the advent of urban-industrial society as a geological force, seems to have taken its place. Human landscape transformation now massively exceeds natural sediment production and ocean acidification and the destruction of biota are the new norm, meaning that evolution itself has been “forced into a new trajectory” (Davis 2010:31). The reality of increased global energy consumption and its concomitant climatological effect has meant that local practices are now universal concerns. In this special issue of the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology each author works within this spirit of currency, recognizing that we—as social subjects, as a species, or as inhabitants of a planet shared with other biotic life—are living in a time of decisions that will echo for centuries to come. In this collection, we examine the complexity of renewable energy transitions in Latin America and we analyze the related processes of its twin (or perhaps its impetus): the policies and projects intended to address global climate change. While anthropological work on petroleum has been important to our better understanding of the social, economic, and environmental consequences of hydrocarbons (Behrends et al. 2011; Breglia 2013; Coroníl 1997; McNeish and Logan 2012; Sawyer 2004), this volume maintains a critical focus on forms of renewable energy and climate mitigation efforts. Our understanding is that, first, “renewable” energy and sustainability are categories that must remain bracketed (in the case of hydroelectric dams, for example)[1] and second, that many renewable energy projects succumb to the habits of hydrocarbon extraction in their financing and production processes if not in their cumulative environmental consequences. The articles collected here are committed to engaging questions of extraction and generation, implementation policies and reactions to them, as well the cultural, social, and scientific intersections of energy, political power, and climatological warming. Ultimately, we ask how it is that the Anthropocene2 is being experienced, negotiated, and remapped in Latin America.
The Legible Lesbian: Crimes of Passion in Nicaragua
(Taylor & Francis, 2009) Howe, Cymene
This article considers a precedent-setting murder case in Nicaragua that rendered a conviction based upon the victim's ‘sexual option’ and status as a ‘lesbian.’ A significant achievement for advocates in Nicaragua, the case was also a victory for sexual and human rights proponents globally. This article queries how the sexualization of culture can be viewed through the spectacle of Aura Rosa's life, death and symbolic resurrection. Analyzing the discourses and practices of Nicaraguan activists, international rights campaigns, the state, and local media, I argue that the post-mortem process of re-figuring the victim as a ‘lesbian’ is imaginable only within a discursive field saturated with human rights paradigms including those of sexual rights. Central to these practices are notions of vulnerable bodies, ascriptions to particular models of modernity and an emerging ‘epistemology of the hate crime.’
Life Above Earth: An Introduction
(American Anthropological Association, 2015) Howe, Cymene
This began as a wondering about wind, how it mattered, how it materialized across lives, and how it seemed to refuse to be represented—only becoming visible through its effects on other beings and other things: branch, bird, cloud, kite, sail, smoke. Wind finds itself with no terrestrial home, no borders to maintain, no ownership to be claimed.1 Its pressured and oscillating gases are the kinetic energy of the sky. Wondering into the wind leads us upward. It is an invitation to lose one’s footing. The curatorial force behind this first Openings and Retrospectives is to release our discipline from the earthly domains it has historically occupied, to float us to new ethnographic spheres and spaces untethered to worldly surfaces. If Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2014) has called for a “decolonization of thought,” this collection is meant as a deterrestrialization of thought. Life Above Earth is an exploration of vitalities, materials, and movements that are skyward, spacey, and atmospheric.
Paradoxical Infrastructures: Ruins, Retrofit, and Risk
(Sage, 2015) Howe, Cymene; Lockrem, Jessica; Appel, Hannah; Hackett, Edward; Boyer, Dominic; Hall, Randal; Schneider-Mayerson, Matthew; Pope, Albert; Gupta, Akhil; Rodwell, Elizabeth; Ballestero, Andrea; Durbin, Trevor; el-Dahdah, Farès; Long, Elizabeth; Mody, Cyrus C.M.; Center for Energy and Environmental Research in the Human Sciences
In recent years, a dramatic increase in the study of infrastructure has occurred in the social sciences and humanities, following upon foundational work in the physical sciences, architecture, planning, information science, and engineering. This article, authored by a multidisciplinary group of scholars, probes the generative potential of infrastructure at this historical juncture. Accounting for the conceptual and material capacities of infrastructure, the article argues for the importance of paradox in understanding infrastructure. Thematically the article is organized around three key points that speak to the study of infrastructure: ruin, retrofit, and risk. The first paradox of infrastructure, ruin, suggests that even as infrastructure is generative, it degenerates. A second paradox is found in retrofit, an apparent ontological oxymoron that attempts to bridge temporality from the present to the future and yet ultimately reveals that infrastructural solidity, in material and symbolic terms, is more apparent than actual. Finally, a third paradox of infrastructure, risk, demonstrates that while a key purpose of infrastructure is to mitigate risk, it also involves new risks as it comes to fruition. The article concludes with a series of suggestions and provocations to view the study of infrastructure in more contingent and paradoxical forms.
Push the Button: Interactive Television and Collaborative Journalism in Japan
(2015-04-27) Rodwell, Elizabeth Ann; Boyer, Dominic; Faubion, James; Howe, Cymene; Ostherr, Kirsten; Allison, Anne
As viewing habits have been transformed globally by on-demand services, and viewership has lagged due to competition from social and interactive technologies, television professionals have struggled to articulate a vision for their medium’s future. In Japan, a strong decline in ratings among critical under-40 demographics had already created tension within the dominant broadcast model when the Fukushima disasters ushered in a crisis of confidence in the nation's journalism. While some Japanese media professionals used the incident as an occasion to engage in self-critique, others largely circumvented the delicate questions of self-censorship, reporters’ clubs (kisha kurabu), and sponsor coercion– and focused instead on restoring audience engagement through the development and testing of pioneering interactive television technology. Meanwhile, the technological rather than ethical focus of post-Fukushima changes inspired a new journalistic movement to create alternative digital spaces for informational exchange and political expression, with the intent of harnessing interactive digital technology in a way that bypasses the government controls and self-censorship characteristic of mainstream Japanese media. Despite a common idealism and intellectual curiosity, the two groups are hindered by divergent structural limitations; television industry insiders are fighting a conservative and imitative corporate climate whose content decisions are governed by the interventions of two monolithic advertising firms, while the independent media are profoundly alienated from this system. Engaging contemporary anthropological conversations concerning the evolving nature of mass media and media professionalism in the digital era, my work tracks the Japanese independent media's epistemic project to reform public culture in Japan and dismantle longstanding barriers to freedom of the press, as well as the mass media's more subtle application of interactive technology to TV content. Thus, I argue that analysis of these Japanese media innovations prompts new theoretical consideration of the divide between expert and amateur production, the use of media to constitute social change, and the nature of television itself.
Reconsidering a Politicized Erotic: Lesbian Feminism, Mis/recognition, and Identity Practices
(2014-10-03) Slattery, Molly; Roof, Judith; Wolfe, Cary; Howe, Cymene
This genealogical study examines the ways in which the discourse of identity shapes lesbianism activism as it surfaced in response to the misogynistic lesbophobia inherent to US feminist and homophilic identity political groups in the mid to late 20th century. In particular, the dissertation focuses on identity politics models that are premised upon theories of social inclusion, where recognition and visibility are presumed to signal social integration. In this register, inclusion proves to be a problematic trope because it gave rise to the demand for authenticity and the democratic prioritization of the majority stakeholders’ needs in identity political groups. In the spirit of accommodation, political lesbians capitulated to heteronormative pressures and disavowed desire, reinstating a feminist hegemony that masqueraded as “lesbian” resistance. Accordingly, this research endeavors to ascertain why lesbianism was open to critiques from other identity political groups and what mechanisms allowed lesbianism to be subsumed within those discourses. The identity politics models described herein are premised upon the assumption that visibility equals power. Because lesbian desire is not visibly inscribed on the body, lesbians may deploy strategies of misrecognition that make risk-aversive behaviors such as passing commonplace for the lesbian. Yet, identitarian groups used political models based upon the necessity of honesty, transparency, and visibility, making identity politics a hostile terrain wherein the lesbian activist found herself enmeshed. Contemporary theorists, however, have picked up on the importance of misrecognition, play, and performativity, but, when executed within the discourse of identity, critical responses reproduce hegemonic strategies of containment that normalize difference. This analysis documents moments of strategic misrecognition that operate successfully because of a conscious acknowledgement of lesbian exclusion from the social. While this research holds that identity political groups are excluded from the social to their detriment, the dissertation looks into the possibility that systemic exclusion may entail freedom and may produce novel counteralignments to the regime of identity, focusing, instead, on important “differences that make a difference.”
Sexual adjudications and queer transpositions
(John Benjamins, 2014) Howe, Cymene
Each of the articles included in this special issue of the Journal of Language and Sexuality asks us to imagine queer im/migration, asylum and sexual citizenship in multiple dimensions and to probe the discursive operations that establish the parameters of sexual subjectivity. This review article argues that these processes are illustrative of “sexual adjudication:” the discursive coordinates, legal logics and linguistic sensibilities that produce the category of the sexual migrant, the sexual refugee and the sexual asylum seeker. The discussions featured here engage questions of how sexual epistemics work in both sending and receiving countries, as well as the role of borders in constituting narratives of sexual subjectivity. In addition to analyzing the theoretical overlaps and reciprocal conversations between the articles included in the special issue, this essay provides a historical, comparative context by situating these discussions within larger theoretical and terminological questions regarding queer im/migration, asylum and subjectivity.
Sexual borderlands: Lesbian and gay migration, human rights, and the metropolitan community church
(Springer, 2007) Howe, Cymene
This article considers several questions surrounding sexual migration, binational same-sex couples, legal precedent, and the role of religious communities in lesbian and gay migration to the United States. With theoretical aspects of human rights serving as a starting point, the article then moves to a consideration of the legal dynamics of migration, the history of U.S. (im)migration law in relation to lesbian and gay asylum claims, and the Uniting American Families Act (2005). Drawing from the concept of sexual migration, the article proposes that religious or spiritual communities may provide important networks and ideological resources for lesbian and gay migrants who subscribe to religious values, particularly in a context of politically incendiary claims surrounding homosexuality and immigration. The analysis centers on the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC), suggesting that with its socially legitimatized status, MCC may provide philosophical foundations necessary for effectively addressing human rights for lesbian and gay migrants.

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