differences

@differences.bsky.social

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a journal of feminist cultural studies | https://differencesjournal.org

Cover of For Whom Do We Read, a special issue of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, volume 7, issue 1. A yellow cover with black text.
Screen capture of an empty page with an error message that displays the blockage of facebook.com by the Great Firewall.
This image is a poster for a colloquium titled "Limits of Legibility: History under Siege." White and yellow text on black background. The description reads: "How does critical history address the impasse between conventional history, on the one hand, and aggressive authoritarian rewriting of history, on the other? Given critical history’s theoretical critique of the positivist understanding of facts, what is its response to the assertion of 'alternative facts'? And what impact, if any, can it have on current battles as to what counts as history?" Below this description is a list of participants: Joan W. Scott (Insitute for Advanced Study), Omnia El Shakry (Yale University), Gary Wilder (CUNY Grad Center), and Korey Williams (University of Chicago). The event will take place on March 6th from 2pm to 6pm at Brown University in Pembroke Hall 305.
Cover of Lyric beyond Containment, a special issue of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, volume 36, issue 2–3. A yellow cover with black text.
An excerpt from the linked article, which reads: "My argument is not for a body emptied of its social markers, as these come to the fore in and thorugh Ibarra’s performance. As she tends toward the edge of meaning, Ibarra’s racialized and gendered body becomes resignified in multiple and sometimes surprising ways. Indeed, Ibarra herself has described the origin of the piece as an attempt to grapple with the ongoing burden of white womanhood that women of color must bear. Yet, as I will show, the ways in which laughter taxes and exhausts the body move beyond this intention to produce another set of meanings that have become apparent as Ibarra has continued to perform the piece. In other words, Nude Laughing also reveals how the fraught social relations of race and gender are reproduced and perhaps inevitably made abject. So even if the ways in which a laughing body exceeds the limits of subjectivity are at the heart of this essay, the social world we inhabit reveals that attempting to think beyond the violence of sociality is itself fraught and impossible."
An excerpt from the linked article, which reads: "Rather than attempt to make a case for identifying with ghosts or being able to feel their trauma, I am interested in how the feeling of being immersed within such uncanny spaces produces its own sense of distance and proximity—a critical as well as an emotional understanding—without creating a form of individual subjectivity. In the case of Kim’s trilogy, this is an uncomfortable type of thinking-feeling, one that makes us grasp what both the South Korean and U.S. governments have tried so hard to render invisible: the patron-client relationship between South Korea and the United States, the relation of prostitution to military and global capital, and the historical silencing of women forced into sex trafficking and prostitution."
Cover of differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, volume 35, number 3. A pale yellow bar with the journal's title in black crosses over the top quarter. Below the title, black text on a yellow background offers the issue's subtitle: "Dossier: Limits of Legibility—Questions of Blackness and Sexuality."
An excerpt from the linked article, which reads: "The 'I' is not something rhetorically convenient. It is a first-person register one cannot do without. There are disturbances in that register. It is at once utterly personal, if not existential, and linguistic, and the gap between those two registers is precisely the difficulty that the book meant to address: the abyss into which we sometimes fall, but also an opening that allows others to try out the same 'I' or substitute another one for mine. I do not know myself perfectly, but I sense that I am neither hiding behind abstraction for purposes of privacy nor am I fleeing into abstraction to escape a problematic embodiment. I am actually trying to connect with those who also tend to fail when they seek to give an account of themselves in a language that, strictly speaking, belongs to none of us."
An excerpt from the linked article, which reads: "Generally, antinarrative theorists define queerness as a force of negativity that ruptures the illusory structures of identity (see Edelman, No and Bad). Narrative perpetuates these structures by promising a satisfying closure that will never arrive. Butler similarly challenges the desire for 'narrative closure for our lives' (Giving 64). They are especially critical of those who idealize a coherent, definitive life story as key to a healthy psyche. In fact, they go so far as to suggest that 'something we might tentatively call the truth of the person [ . . . ] might well become more clear in moments of interruption, stoppage, open-endedness—in enigmatic articulations that cannot easily be translated into narrative form.' While they embrace the enigmas that exceed narration, Butler nonetheless refuses 'to celebrate a certain notion of incoherence' as a queer ideal. Rather than opposing incoherence to identity, Butler defines incoherence as the existential price of our relational being. In their words, '[O]ur ‘incoherence’ establishes the way in which we are constituted in relationality: implicated, beholden, derived, sustained by a social world that is beyond us and before us.' We simply cannot do without incoherence. But too much incoherence can lead to painful or even unlivable states of fracture, and as Butler cautions, '[T]he suffering that belongs to conditions of dissociation should not be underestimated' (52). We need some measure of coherence to survive.
Poster for a colloquium titled "Limits of Legibility: The Climate of Critique." White and yellow text on black background. Logos in the bottom corners indicate that the event is sponsored by differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies and the Pembroke Center at Brown University.
An excerpt from the linked article, which reads: "Yet, as a historian, I doubt that self-determination through a radical politics of gender genuinely bonds people ontologically across time, geography, race, class, language, kinship, and religion, precisely because gender’s sovereignty is the historical product of colonial, anti-Black, and settler projects of domination. A multitude of colonial and capitalist histories remind us that the wish to kill ontological transness and its built-in failure do not produce a symmetrical, common condition worth affirming. In fact, histories of state power suggest the opposite."
Cover of "Unaccountably Queer" a special issue of differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies, volume 35, number 3. Yellow background with black text. A pale yellow bar with the journal's title in black crosses over the top quarter.
An excerpt from the linked article, which reads: "Trapped in the hold—surrounded by the dead and dying, perhaps, too, dead and dying—Blackness, Black women, and Black women’s sexualities were alive. In some ways, reading for that aliveness, that ongoingness inside Black female sexualities, is a question of method."
An excerpt from the linked article, which reads: "If maritime metaphors grapple continuously with how to map Blackness’s trajectories—our relationships to space, the environment, our history, and each other—spacetime metaphors may be more interested in sensing and, thereby, elaborating new ways of knowing: they press on the ways we fail to adequately know and name the fullness of Blackness’s meanings, locations, enactments, and possibilities."
A list of the new advisory board members, which includes Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman, Eugenie Brinkema, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Anne Anlin Cheng, Rey Chow, Joan Copjec, Penelope Deutscher, Mary Ann Doane, Lee Edelman, Mike Fortun, Alexander R. Galloway, Leela Gandhi, Lynne Huffer, Lynne Joyrich, Wendy Allison Lee, Elissa Marder, David Marriott, Emily A. Owens, Thangam Ravindranathan, Denise Riley, Jacqueline Rose, Darieck Scott, Joan Wallach Scott, Jared Sexton, Sara-Maria Sorentino, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, Peter Szendy, Samo Tomšič, Jean-Thomas Tremblay, Robyn Wiegman, and Alenka Zupančič.
An excerpt from the linked article, which reads: "This requires, as with black hole space-times, seeing what is not always obvious in a colonial academy: science is already part of Black thought. Black scientists are not a figment of Afrofuturist imagination. We are an Afrofuture, already arrived and still arriving. There is no need to transform the cosmos into a Black aesthetic. The cosmos is a Black aesthetic, has long been so, and will continue to be so. Using the framework provided by Hammonds in “Black (W)holes,” I write now to urge us to read ourselves where we already are, lovingly, as a story that never stopped unfolding. We are, as Sylvia Wynter has declared us, homo narrans, bios and mythoi (Wynter and McKittrick)."
An excerpt from the linked article, which reads: ""For my work, both in this essay and elsewhere, the questions that Hammonds asks throughout her remarkable essay on the unfathomable 'Black (W)hole' pinpoint not a political problem (though the exclusion of “us” would be considered as a political one for the better part of a decade), but a theoretical one, or a problem for queer thought. The construction of bodies outside of queerness proliferated popular theoretical paradigms like queer of color critique as an interventionist strategy—one that for all of its rigor and charm still produced itself in opposition to a vacant space masquerading as an impenetrable brick wall. There was simply no there, there. There is no 'queer theory,' no talk of sexuality without the imprint of centuries of commerce in bodies that mattered."
An excerpt from the article linked above, which reads: "Grasping the impact of 'Black Africa' on her gender reveals that there is no schism between gendering and ungendering. Ungendering scaffolds Morris's transition by wielding Blackness as the architecture of gendered progression, intimating precisely how 'antiblackness itself is sexuating' and how anti-Blackness is 'essential rather than subsidiary' to any notion of gender or sexual coherence (Jackson 8–9). The gendered indeterminacy Morris transfers to the Orient is inextricable from what Morris extracts from Africa. The fungibility of Africa endows Morris with the capacity to decide to be feminized in and by the Orient."
An excerpt from the linked article, which reads: "The femme alter ego, then, emerges not only as an agent of retribution but as a kind of ressentiment to racist intimacy. By reassigning the sense of hostility produced by Orientalist desire so that the frustration is endured by the femme alter ego, an artist can acknowledge racialized femininity’s presumed inferiority without ever succumbing to it. Furthermore, the artist can maintain a spotlight on the figure of the white man, reversing the value system and power dynamic that favors white masculinity while staging and directing an erotic scene with an encounter less to do with the erotic than with the affective contours of revenge. The Asian American spectatorship made possible through the femme alter ego becomes yet another method for contending with the fraught terrain of racial stereotyping."
An excerpt from the linked article, which reads: "But how, at least in the humanities, do you effectively apply a key term that acts as a building block for more noteworthy affective states—a term that describes a structure of feeling so vital, required, everywhere at the seat of it all, and yet so milquetoast it deadens your sentences? Interest gets indexed in the gesture before more extravagant gestures. It offers up a tell we can detect everywhere once we know how to suss it out: the glance or shift toward, the explorative reaching for; testing a whiff of air; tightening a focal lens; the refrain of curiosity as to 'where things will lead'; or the sense that we’re inhabiting that ever-so-slight antonym to boredom. Interest is perhaps the most taken-for-granted of the classic affects, the ignored proton, because after all, what can we do with a catchall not yet connected to an explicit politics?"
An excerpt from the linked essay, which reads, in part: "What does it mean for a filmmaker to see, in and through a text, a way of seeing? What does it mean for him to read a critical theorist’s arguments not for this claim or that insight, but rather for the practice of seeing, the ocular and intellectual exercise, that they model or afford? I will argue that Europa ’51 suggests provisional answers to these questions and that both the questions and the answers are not of merely local or regional interest, because Europa ’51 is not only about a continent at midcentury. In the film, Rossellini asks us to traverse and not merely to look past or lock away what is called 'madness'—to stay with the patient’s warning—and this demand remains scandalous. It runs counter to the still-influential program of reparative reading formulated by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Indeed, it may bring about a version of the critical condition that Sedgwick calls 'paranoia.'"
The five scholars featured in the "Limits of Legibility" colloquium pose for a photo. From left to right: Elizabeth A. Wilson, Joan Copjec, Lee Edelman, David Marriott, and Selamawit D. Terrefe.
An excerpt from the linked article: "Yet following Spillers, if the making of peoples into flesh depended on making them susceptible to a certain kind of touch, then intimacy might need reconsideration, as the flesh is both less susceptible to hegemonic categorizations and more susceptible to intimate physical violation. Consider Moonlight’s opening scene. Viewers first catch a glimpse of Chiron’s running body, as school-aged boys chase him. This scene could appear playful, a scene indicative of boyhood innocence, but the film’s dialogue makes such an interpretation nearly impossible. As the boys’ voices become more audible, audiences realize that Chiron is being hounded. 'Get him'; 'Get his bitch ass'; 'He’s scary'; 'Get his ass'; 'Get his gay ass,' the boys yell out, chasing Chiron into an abandoned drug den. Might it be appropriate to consider pursuit as nothing other than desire manifested as movement? Perhaps, under this light, smear the queer undergoes a queering itself."
An excerpt from the linked article, which reads, in part: "If the structure of the address that founds the social link constitutes the Other as the guardian of the limits of the receivable, then there is an important part of the subject’s experience that cannot pass through language and is not receivable in culture. The characterization of the psychotic’s delusion as 'insane,' and as a danger to the social bond that necessitates involuntary treatment or even arrest, would here be paradigmatic. But we can also think about the experience of the child, whose reality—peopled by imaginary friends and monsters under the bed—is much more capacious than that of the family or society in which he lives. When the child enters into the language of the social link, these experiences undergo censorship: the child literally stops seeing and hearing certain things. And when this censorship does not occur—as in the case of the psychotic—participation in social life can become difficult."
Jonathan Goldberg sits on a bench outdoors in Bloomsbury, London. Courtesy of Michael Moon, who took the photo in 2017.
An excerpt from the linked article, which reads, in part: "If psychoanalysis has managed to survive fads, the twists and turns of history, and even the vicissitudes of the psychoanalytic movement itself, it is due to three main reasons: first, the structural impossibility of establishing any kind of alliance with the mechanisms of power, whatever they may be; second, its unavoidable will to protect the truth as a singular event, never extrapolated, in no case extensible to the universal, and above all separate from any moral pretension; and third, its determined orientation toward the Real, the Real of the speaking being’s suffering. [...] Because a therapy that makes disease the prodromal sign of the human condition, a therapy that seeks not to cure the human being of his essence but rather to confront him with his incurability, a therapy that neither promises nor consoles, is at the very least a particular therapy."
An excerpt from the linked article, which reads, in part: "Returning to Spillers, we can think of this hieroglyph as a historical-traumatic force: not necessarily an object a, but a collective, unrepresentable marking resembling the psychoanalytic object in its transfer between black generations. It constitutes a singularity that, indeed, might be untreatable but that shares similarity across deep space and time. Spillers considers such resemblance (or 'poaching,' in her words) a psychoanalytics, a project that 'unhook[s] the psychoanalytic from its curative framework and [tries] to recover it in a free-floating realm of self-didact possibility that might decentralize and disperse the knowing one.' This poaching experiment is distinct from psychoanalysis proper in that the hieroglyph is not completely consigned to the unconscious but occupies an interstice between conscious/unconscious, requiring a protocol that psychoanalysis might not recognize as legitimate or efficacious."
Poster for "Limits of Legibility: Questions of Blackness and Sexuality." White and yellow text on black background. Above the text, Renee Gladman's artwork "Prose," a drawing in white pigment, fills the top two thirds of the image. Logos in the bottom-right corner indicate that the event is sponsored by differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies and the Pembroke Center at Brown University.
Cover of "Social Bonds and Catastrophic Acts," a special issue of differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies, volume 34, number 3. Black background with white text. A blue bar with the journal's title in yellow crosses over the top quarter.
An excerpt from the linked article, which reads: "Thinking with Saidiya Hartman’s insight that the 'demands of the slave on the present have everything to do with making good the promise of abolition, [which] entails much more than the end of property in slaves,' I contend that mobilizations of abolition in the main operate through a constitutive disavowal of slavery’s ongoingness (even, and perhaps most especially, as they avow the prison as historically linked to the trans-Atlantic slave trade). More specifically, I argue that a brutal empiricism, constituted in abolitionism’s originary iterations, authorizes contemporary abolitionist politics. I do so by interrogating how the insistence on and focalization of the prison rather than slavery symptomatically reveals political-libidinal investments in the reproduction of antiblackness. In short, I argue that to assert the prison as the object of abolition is to both presume and reify an antiblack historiography..."
An excerpt from the linked article, which reads: "More nuance about what (the idea of) religion means and does will be key to understanding the workings of racialized and sexualized power in the context of ongoing right-wing campaigns to dismantle reproductive freedoms using the courts. The legal proceedings in Hobby Lobby, as well as the forms of popular cultural production that surrounded this case and the ones that have followed, trafficked in public performances of religious personhood that, in turn, achieved their coherence through racial analogy. One side construed an arts and crafts chain store company as analogous to Native people bearing up against the violent assimilationist regimes of the U.S. settler state. The other presented an elderly, white, Jewish, feminist celebrity of the Supreme Court in the persona of a Black hip-hop musician whose murder remains unsolved. This article asks: what was it about religious freedom that elicited these performances?"
An excerpt from the linked article, which reads: "Parasymptomatic is a play on parasympathetic, which names the slow, quiet, 'rest and digest' aspects of the nervous system, the opposite of paranoia’s fearful, fight-or-flight response: both, it might be noted, are deep rather than surface structures. But the parasympathetic nervous system is involved in sexual arousal, salivation, tears, urination, digestion, and defecation, and so parasymptomatic reading might name an interpretive method or stance that allows for more surface-level bodily responses to a text—arousal, laughter, drowsiness, goosebumps—as part of its meaning, as well as countering Emily Apter and Elaine Freedgood’s vision of Marxism and deconstruction as 'hypersymptomatic reading.' 'Para,' a prefix that interested Sedgwick, too, signals an analogical/parallel relationship that foils surface and depth (as in parataxis, the placing of words side-by-side without coordinating or subordinating elements)."
An excerpt from the linked essay, which reads: "Confusing the object of psychoanalysis with the drive and reducing sexuality to a particular kind of relation, asexuality scholars fail to observe that sexuality is precisely the failure of the sexual relation—what Shakespeare, in Venus and Adonis, likens to a kiss. The mouth of Venus kisses insatiably because it kisses an absent object, precisely what Adonis, the object of the poem, cannot give, yet gives anyway. This, the absent object of Venus’s desire, accords nicely with Lacan’s definition of love (it is also Shakespeare’s): giving the other what we do not have to give and what they do not want. Adonis gives Venus nothing, precisely what she does not want, and that, Shakespeare shows, is plenty."