CRITICAL & VISUAL STUDIES : Sex Politics

Challening Perceptions: The Future Is Trans

Alumni/ae 11:00 AM

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Kumru Toktamis: Old Questions to New Beginnings; FunHome, Good Person of Szechwan, Julius Caesar forever [Review]

Allison Bechdel 7:01 PM

Kumru Toktamis

Old Questions to New Beginnings:

FunHome, Good Person of Szechwan, Julius Caesar forever

Of all the plays I have seen in 2013, three of them seem to have left lasting impact on me. While everyone prefers to talk about new beginnings, of all the inspiring productions I had the opportunity to witness, I want to retain what I experienced as I watched FunHome at Public Theater, Julius Caesar at St Ann’s Warehouse and Good Person of Szechwan, again at Public Theater for as long as possible. These plays do not have much in common except maybe the universal quality of the questions they pose regarding human existence and experience.

FunHome (based on the graphic novel by talented and wise Allison Bechdel, rewritten as play by Lisa Kron) is the everlasting battle every individual seems to have to go through as we try to achieve adulthood and maturity; who am I in relation to my parents? Good Person of Szechwan (one of the master pieces of great Bertolt Brecht, the ajit-prop genius) explores the chances of becoming a good, moral and just person as we survive amidst corruption, discrimination and inequality; can I indeed survive and flourish if I insist to keep my moral compass intact? Julius Caesar (of who else but the Bard) is obviously the perennial question of what becomes of us as we engage in power struggles; is there a way out from the corrupting nature of power?

Of course the ways in which these masters (yes I do not mind naming Bechdel alongside Brecht and Shakespeare) tackled with the particularities of these universal questions is the inspirational craftsmanship that help us through with our own lives. Therefore what Lisa Kron, Lear deBessonet –director of Good Person- and Phyllida Lloyd, -director of Julius Caesar- managed to create are almost equally instrumental in engaging the viewer into these questions. And hey, I have already read FunHome as a book, and seen Good Person and Julius Caesar stagings in three continents almost a dozen times, but it may be the contributions of these re-interpreters that have moved me so much so that I want to retain the memories of these plays forever.

Funhome, is not about fun, it is a FUNeral home run by a closeted gay father, distressed and voiceless mother as told by a now proudly gay daughter. The big question of who am I with respect to my father has often been presented as a father son battle, but this time we are witnessing it as the daughter is coming to terms with adulthood tries to connect with her father’s secrets and shame. She is the healthy one (aren’t we all), it is the parent who was supposed to be all mighty and all loving that is deeply damaged (aren’t they all?) He is angry, he is a brute, he is bossy but in the end Bechdel (and Kron) invites us to empathize with him. After all that is the only chance for the daughter to achieve an effective and meaningful adulthood. Understanding the father is not only a morally meaningful affection; it is also instrumental, i.e. useful. By witnessing her father going through an oppressively irate life not knowing any better, the daughter discovers herself, gains her integrity and grows. See, we are not talking about a particular sexual identity here. We are talking about every Body.

Yes, for many political reasons we like to hear about particular troubles of gay individuals. But at the same time such narrative has the danger of ghettoizing, compartmentalizing these life experiences, let alone the voyeurisms that may be involved in gawking into the lives of the marginal, the weird, the oh-so-different. With the help of Bechdel and Kron, we notice the lack of such difference; no one is weird, no one is queer, we all share such wounds of humanness. How similar we all are; we all have to come to terms with our parents, the damages they bring upon themselves and thus open us, and most importantly we can all only grow if we manage to transcend these wounds by acknowledging them as who they are and realize how they actually helped us. It is painful but it is so much fun. See, FunHome is not a gay-coming to age story. It is the story of all humanity and becoming an effective human being, particulars notwithstanding.

Once we manage to grow-up, can we become a good and moral individual? Is it really possible, or is such a quest all together meaningless given the harsh inequalities and injustices we have to struggle through in life. Bertolt Brecht invites us (literally, his plays demands active audience participation) to think together with his main character and three gods (who were goddesses in their most recent Public Theater re-incarnations) if goodness is maintainable. Given the fact that he wrote most of his play while he was living in exile in NYC during the years of Nazi regime in Germany, it still is a relevant question, for us here and now, under the shadows of the lower Manhattan skyscrapers. How far we can continue being moral and just individuals as we try to survive, find shelter and feed ourselves.

Frankly, coming from the 20^th century struggles of the old world, I was (and still am) pretty doubtful about contemporary American interpretations of Brecht. He wrote for working-class whereas in general “Americans” do not like to think of themselves as working class, they are, as Steinbeck says, millionaires in temporary distress! ("I guess the trouble was that we didn't have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Esquire, June, 1960) He wanted powerless people to express themselves in and through his plays, whereas this is not the age of suppressed-self anymore, for better and worse “americans” express themselves plenty via all kinds of modern outlets. And finally, he believed the educational quality of art whereas many “americans” go to theater for entertainment. As an evidence of this maybe-biased impression of mine, I can talk about the last Brecht play I saw many years ago in Broadway; the disastrous Three Penny Opera where even the glorious Alan Cumming could not save the day. So I had sworn not to see one more contemporary US production of Brecht and I am glad that I changed my mind for Good Person of Szechwan at Public Theater.

The play, as in many other works of Brecht, has so many opportunities for re-interpretation. And this production made a great point by re-creating the main character, the prostitute Shan-Te, as a drag queen, who, as the play dictates, had to re-identify herself as her evil cousin, Shui-Ta in order to survive. And it is the evil cousin who becomes the winner, the survivor as the kind and good Shan-Te has to go through life as the loser. Then, at the end of the play, one actor (again talented Lisa Kron-I’ve just noticed that she left her mark in both of my best plays!) breaks out of character and with a very powerful statement asks the audience what the solution is. I don’t know if the actors ever got any response from the audience in other times, but that night as a well-trained Brecht spectator, I wanted to yell out “Mike Check!” In my mind, there was an opportunity for a solution right there in the “mike check!”… Brecht would be proud of me, he would be proud of this dialog and dialectics between his style performance and the repertoire of activism of the Occupy movement… and we ought to find ways to maintain and appropriate the symbolism of “mike check”…

But I could not. There and then I turned into a bad Brecht audience. I don’t know if it was the stiffness of the crowd that night, or maybe the actors did not make the audience comfortable enough to participate (I doubt that) but I could not bring myself to yell out, as Brecht would have wanted me to, “mike check.” So, I contributed turning Brecht into an entertainment, spectacle, rather than an experience of active engagement. It was not so much the embarrassment of possible awkwardness that might have followed, but mostly, I was not sure about the possible connections we had as audience and actors. We are now people of virtual connections, such as facebook and twitter. Do we really know how to act in concert in real time and space? We are now so used to act upon illusionary connections, is it really possible to elicit substantive reactions from an actual crowd of human beings? Brecht expects us to think together and act in unison; are we still capable of doing that? We did it at Zuccotti Park and we cannot even symbolically re-enact it at a Brecht play? As 21^st century denizens of internet and global connections, we were just sitting there with that bourgeois stiffness of 19^th century Brecht so much despised and tried to overcome. I was not proud of myself, as powerlessness crept up on me. Are we doomed to be silenced, now that we live under the illusion that we continuously express our free will online?

Speaking of power, freedom and fate, many speeches in Julius Caesar have always been in the forefront of my mind, as a student of political sociology. “Men at sometimes were masters of their fates. / The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” As many folks go back to their sacred books, I often go back to Shakespeare to help me understand workings of power. I have seen very talented, world famous actors playing these men of power, uttering words of freedom, but none of them, now, compares to the soulful production of an all-female casting of this play by Donmar company at the St.Ann’s warehouse. (sidenote: I myself had a tiny role in another all-female staging of the same play when I was in middle-school; it was a private british colonial girls’ school in Istanbul, we were pretending to be men, we hated Shakespeare, I hated Anglo-Saxon cultural imperialism, it was a disaster!)

No other Shakespeare, no other play had ever had such a forceful impact on me. At the end of the play when Harriet Walter, who played Brutus and who should have died a few minutes ago declaring that what Caesar represented was still alive, turned around and looked at the audience with her mournful eyes, I was paralyzed, in tears, unable to clap and soon discovered not even able to stand-up and walk.

They were, as the play was re-interpreted by Phyllida Lloyd, a bunch of unruly, unsophisticated inmates of a female jail house (the director made sure that we, as audience had a firsthand experience of the walls of a prison) who happened to be staging Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. As they were acting, they grew as individuals; as individuals, they questioned absolute power, demanded freedom, expressed their free-will, tried to change destiny, displayed certainty, compromised wilfully and failed disastrously, even when the most innocent of them all, Octavius, played by a pregnant inmate,- started showing signs of absolute grasp of power, denying all forms of limitations to her/his reign, as much as, her precedent did and died for. After all that bloodshed (war scenes were carried out by a trash metal band, music composed by the musicians themselves), guardians marched in and ordered the inmates to go back to their cells. And guess what, Caesar, who was supposed to be dead very early in the play and who was obviously hanging around throughout the performance, was not even an inmate. She was one of the guardians reminding us the difficulty to answer the time-honored question: Quis custodiet ipsos custodies, who is going to guard us from our guardians?

What becomes of us when we try to take our destiny into our own hands and fight against power? Can we really get rid of power from our lives? Isn’t she omnipresent? Isn’t she all mighty? Those of us who band together to fight power, how long can we maintain our acting in concert before we turn our swords to each other in the name of freedom? Is it possible to keep up just and ethical fight against power without falling into the cracks of power struggles? And after all, at the end of the day, aren’t we all supposed to go back to our own cells, with the mournful eyes of great warrior sealed in our minds?

Yet, growing is still possible…quest for moral self is still valid and yes, power can be limited and controlled by mature ethical individuals… That is why I want to keep these three plays with me in 2014 and in many years to come. Whatever new beginnings new years may bring these questions and quests will stay with us.

Kumru Toktamis

December 31, 2013

Brooklyn, NY

Pratt Institute

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Lisabeth During and Ross Poole on "Rape and the Republic" - Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies Speaker Series, March 19th

Augustine 2:50 PM

Department of

Social Science and Cultural Studies

Speakers Series
Presents

Lisabeth During

Associate Professor of Philosophy, Pratt Institute

and

Ross Poole

Professor of Political Science, New School for Social Research

Rape and the Republic:
Lucretia, Livy, Augustine, Machiavelli

March 19th, 5pm
Dekalb Hall
Seminar Room 208
Pratt Institute
Brooklyn, N. Y.

http://thedeathofcarthage.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/lucretia-first-wife-of-lucius-colatinus-tarquinius-xx-ambrosius-benson.jpg

Please join us for the next installment of the Social Science & Cultural Studies Speaker Series for a talk by our own Lisabeth During and the New School's Ross Poole on "Rape and the Republic: Lucretia, Livy, Augustine, Machiavelli" at 5pm on March 19th.

"RAPE AND THE REPUBLIC"

The story of Lucretia is well known. She was the virtuous wife of a Roman nobleman who committed suicide after being raped by Sextus Tarquinius, the son of the king. Her body was displayed in the forum and the enraged citizens, led by Junius Brutus, expelled the Tarquins and established the Roman Republic. Slightly less well known is the story of Virginia. Fifty or so years after the rape of Lucretia, Claudius Appius, a patrician with tyrannical ambitions, attempted to enslave the daughter of a respected plebeian in order to have his way with her. When all seemed lost, her father seized a butcher’s knife and killed her -- to ‘make her free,’ as Machiavelli had it. After Virginia’s body was displayed in the forum, the citizens and the army forced Claudius Appius into exile, and the republican order was restored.

What do these stories tell us? What is it about rape that demands a political response? Why is republican rule established – and then re-established – through the death and display of a woman? Do these stories tell us something, not merely about republican forms of political order, but about the nature of sovereignty as such? In addressing these questions, we will consider, not merely the canonical account of Livy, but also the interpretations of later writers, especially St. Augustine, Machiavelli, and Lessing.

We will also consider, though more briefly, whether these ancient stories have anything to say to contemporary liberals anxious to keep the state out of their bedrooms, or to fathers ready to murder daughters in the name of honor.

Lisabeth During is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Pratt Instittue. She studied theology at Cambridge University, taught for many years in the Philosophy Department at the University of New South Wales, and now works at Pratt Institute of Art and Design in Brooklyn. She has published on Hegel, Artaud, George Eliot, Surrealism and André Bazin. Most recently, she co-edited with Lisa Trahair a special issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities on Belief in Cinema which revisits themes from André Bazin (17.4, December 2012). Her “The Book of Chastity: Studies in an Ascetic Ideal” will be on the shelves soon.

More Information: http://www.pratt.edu/academics/liberal_arts_and_sciences/social_science/faculty_and_staff/bio/?id=lduring

Ross Poole is the author of Morality and Modernity (Routledge, 1991), Nation and Identity (Routledge, 1991) and many articles and book chapters. Recent work includes 'Two Ghosts and an Angel,' Constellations 16(1) (2009) and 'Misremembering the Holocaust: Universal Symbol, Nationalist Icon, or Moral Kitsch?' in Memory and the Future, ed. Amy Sodaro et al. (Macmillan Palgrave, 2011). He teaches philosophy and politics at the New School for Social Research.

More information: http://www.newschool.edu/nssr/faculty.aspx?id=10380

Pratt Institute

Main Brooklyn Campus
200 Willoughby Avenue, Brooklyn, NY

Campus Map & Directions:
http://www.pratt.edu/about_pratt/visit_pratt/

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Matthew Carlin - An Interview with Silvia Federici, Jan., 2013 (excerpt).

Autonomist 2:50 PM

On October 23, 2012, the Department of Social Science & Cultural Studies was pleased to host a talk by Silvia Federici on "Witch-hunting past and present in the global political economy.” The following is an excerpt from an interview with Prof. Federici with Matthew Carlin. Prof. Carlin is an Assistant Professor in our department and one of the organizers of the Speakers Series.

Interview with Silvia Federici

January, 2013

Matthew Carlin and Silvia Federici

Q1. Much of your work has centered around clarifying the link between the establishment and subsequent expansion of capitalism, and the degradation of women-specifically how the reproduction of labor inherently depends on the exploitation of women's bodies. In spite of your work on this topic in the books Caliban and the Witch, as well as your collection of essays in Revolution at Point Zero, the issue pertaining to the relationship between capitalism and the exploitation of women has (at best) remained ancillary, and (at worst) been completely neglected within the vast majority of contemporary analyses of global capitalism.

First, how might you explain this omission? Secondly, why do you think it is imperative for any effective resistance to global capitalism to understand the gendered dynamics of the accumulation of capital and the reproduction of labor today?

A. There are several feminists writers who have analyzed the relationship between capitalism and the exploitation of women. Think of Maria Mies, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Ariel Salleh, and many others including many eco-feminists who have shown that there is a connection between the way women has freely appropriated women’s labor and the way in which it has appropriated the wealth of nature, lands, seas, forests==all treated as free resources to be used, destroyed, even exhausted without any thought of the social and ecological cost involved.

It is important to bring special attention to the exploitation of women in capitalism because women still are the main subjects of the reproduction of the work-force. This means that by analyzing how capitalism exploits women we gain insights concerning the changes in the reproduction of the work-force, the needs of the labor market, the models of family and femininity this (re)production requires, and the struggles that women are making on this terrain. Looking at capitalism from the viewpoint of ‘women’ we can see the profound crisis of social reproduction which is confronting us, in every part of the world, how important it still is for capital and the state to control women’s sexuality and reproductive capacity; why the state needs to regulate women’s bodies. We also understand the relation between women’s resistance to procreation (in some countries) and the politics of immigration. Most important, perhaps, is that by looking at the exploitation of women we can see (a) the political meaning of the neo-liberal program—its destruction of the means of livelihood of millions which is immediately reflected in the pauperization of women, especially in Third World countries, its attempt to create populations without rights providing labor-power at a minimal cost, its relentless destruction of people’s lives and the environment, the sense of hopeless and rage these politics generates—hopelessness and rage that translate into more violence against women and against children. (for example The second cause of death for unborn children is violence against their mothers). (b) by the same token, it is women today who are best responding to these new forms of primitive accumulation.

Precisely because their means of reproduction are being destroyed and because they are those most responsible for the reproduction of their communities women are leading in the effort to create new communal form of life. Cooperative forms of reproduction, enabling them to survive despite their very limited access to monetary income. I am not alone recognizing that women are leading the way in the construction of the commons and the transformation of daily life starting from the terrain of reproduction.

Q2: In your answer you refer to reproduction. In fact, reproduction is a theme that runs throughout your work, and serves as the point around which you analyze both the history of capitalism and its current neo-liberal form. In your answer above you seem to pose two forms of reproduction against one another: the capitalist reproduction of the workforce and the concomitant exploitation of women's bodies, and women's reproduction in terms of the workforce and communal forms of socio-cultural life.

Can you explain exactly what you mean by "reproduction" and how it relates to capitalism and the exploitation of women?

A. By “reproduction” or better by reproductive work I refer to the complex of activities, relations, and institutions that in capitalism produce and reproduce labor-power, that is people capacity to work, and in particular procreation, domestic work, and sex work. However, labor power does not have an independent existence. It subsists in living individuals. Therefore reproductive work has a double character; it is at the same time the reproduction of the individual and the reproduction of labor-power and this duality is often the site of a conflict, which has been very important for women to recognize. As I have often pointed out, it was important to recognize that in capitalism the reproduction of individuals has been subsumed (though never completely) to the production of workers for the labor market. This has enable us to disentangle activities that are necessary for the development of our capacities from activities that are instrumental to the preparation of workers for exploitation. This distinction, this disentanglement has allowed women to see that they can refuse “housework” without necessarily undermining the well-being of the people they care for, because much domestic work is the work of being a disciplinarian, the work of reducing expectations. From this point of view the challenge is to transform reproductive work, from work that reproduces people for the market to work that reproduces them for the struggle.

Recognizing that reproductive work in capitalism is work that reproduces labor-power also enables us to see that domestic/ family/sexual/ relations are ‘relations of production.’ That is, they are shaped by the logic of capitalist production, which means that a particular type of worker requires a particular type of family etc. This recognition too has had a liberatory effect, as it has enabled us to understand that much of the misery of family life is generated by the constraints under which it operates, its function in the social assembly line.

*The complete interview will be published in the coming months and made available to Critical and Visual Studies students upon its completion.

Silvia Federici

Professor Emerita and Teaching Fellow at Hofstra University

Silvia Federici is a long time feminist activist, teacher and writer.
In 1972s she was a co-founder of the International Feminist Collective, the organization that launched the international campaign for wages for housework in the United States and Internationally. In 1990 she was a co-founder of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa and from 1991 to 2003 she was one of the editors of the CAFA newsletter. In 1995 she helped found the Radical Philosophy Association Anti-Death Penalty Project.
She has taught at the University of Port Harcourt (Nigeria) and she is now Emerita Professor at Hofstra University (Hempstead, New York).
Federici has authored many essays on feminist theory, women’s history, political philosophy and education. Her published books include: Revolution at Point Zero. Housework, Reproduction and Feminist Struggle; Caliban and the Witch. Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation; Enduring Western Civilization: The Construction of the Concept of Western Civilization and its Others (editor); Thousand Flowers: Social Struggles Against Structural Adjustment in African Universities (co-editor).

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Sex + Money

Community Organizing 4:11 PM

I went to see this film, Sex + Money, last Monday in my hometown. So many people showed up they had to open a second theater to accommodate the overflow! I was also very pleased to find that we had about eight representatives, senators, and judges in attendance (I would also like to note that not a single one of them was a Republican or Tea Party member). This documentary film was made entirely by a group of students who are investigating the state of modern slavery and human trafficking in the United States. By no means is it the greatest documentary there ever was, but it is fairly informative and the topic is one that is all too often glossed over in discussions of civil liberties and sex and labor politics. While the film provides a few insights on what potential factors make human trafficking and modern slavery possible and what is being done to put an end to it, they leave a lot of loose ends. But those loose ends provide several excellent starting points to start pursuing these issues and ideas further. Doing so can ultimately draw more people into exploring the ways sexuality and labor is treated both at home and around the world socially, politically, and economically.

The students who produced this film are now taking it on tour in all 50 states. If you peruse the website you'll see that they are still venue-less in many states. So, if you do live somewhere near where the film is showing, I encourage you to go. If you know someone who lives in a said venue-less state, give them a call and tell them to do something about it. If you feel like a one time showing just isn't enough for the people in or around your community, you can order a copy of the film and organize a screening. A considerable portion of the proceeds will go towards rehabilitating rescued victims of human trafficking and enslavement in America. The bottom-line is bring a friend to go see the film--you'll only have something to gain from it.

And for those of you who are interested in looking for a little extra inspirational mojo, check out The Education of Shleby Knox (2005). Watch a good, southern, Baptist girl rile up her town when she begins to openly oppose abstinence-only sex education in Lubbock, Texas--a school district with one of the highest rates of teen pregnancy and contracted STDs in America.

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Pages

Challening Perceptions: The Future Is Trans

Kumru Toktamis: Old Questions to New Beginnings; FunHome, Good Person of Szechwan, Julius Caesar forever [Review]

Lisabeth During and Ross Poole on "Rape and the Republic" - Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies Speaker Series, March 19th

Matthew Carlin - An Interview with Silvia Federici, Jan., 2013 (excerpt).

Sex + Money

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