Fake Mustache- posted on Sept 23rd- Thinkaboutit

On October 31^st 2011, I decided that I would dress like a man for my first Californian Halloween party. All excited, I slicked my hair back, wore a suit, borrowed a tie, and bought a mustache on a stick. Appropriating a masculine look had always a certain appeal to me and it was not the first time that I traded my gender for a costumed party. The article Engendering: Gender, Politics, Individuation by Erin Manning reminded me of this experience. It is interesting how the author formulated the possibility to create a system of multiplicity that promotes a consciousness reaching beyond culturally constructed selfhood. However during that specific night, I remember noticing how my interactions with both male and female were affected due to my gender performance. I was already well aware about the sexist and racist stereotypes engendered by the Halloween costume market. Young women are encouraged to adopt popular porn tropes such as sexy cops, seductive secretaries, French maids, defrocked nuns, luscious nurses, you name it, whereas young men preferably tend to impersonate strong male archetypes or fearsome characters. Dressed as a man, it occurred to me that the ways in which people approached me verbally or physically were differing from customary day to day interactions. Most of the girls I encountered were embracing Halloween as a time to dress sexier than usual. On a cultural level many have seized this occasion to show more breast and legs without fearing conventional disapproval looks, or “slut-shaming.” As a male, I became the date by excellence for the sexy nerds, Cleopatras, and alluring witches and I was more popular than masked creepers and guys in their disgusting morphsuits. What struck me was not the role I performed by the side of my female partners, but the relations that were imposed by other men. I believe that the connections that I had with the women present at the party was predictable, perhaps even the ones that I had within the masculine circles. But I was still baffled by the persistence from other males to undo my performativity on many levels. The presence of an alternative masculinity could not be taken seriously. It was perceived as intriguing because of its contrast with the rest of the female presence but not necessarily acceptable. This systematic fixity of gendered identities is so deeply rooted that even during an event such as Halloween, gender perfomativity is questioned. My chosen identity was challenged physically and verbally. Instead of creating the space to possibly break away from genderized social patterns, commonly shared cultural ideologies obstructed openings to a multi-layered experience. Several attempts of sensual approaches or interrogations about my motivations to impersonate a man produced blockage for other readings. These exchanges were counterproductive since it perpetuated linear dynamics and predictable turns of event. There was no way for me to go beyond the locatedness of my body and I was constantly remembered of my “transgression”.

Work cited

Manning, Erin. “Engenderings: Gender, Politics,Individuation” Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnisota Press. 2008. pp.84-109. Proquest Ebrary. Web. September , 2014.

The Awkward Embrace- Introduction Originally posted on Thinkaboutit. Sept. 2014.

In order to introduce myself in relation to Erin Manning’s essay Engenderings: Gender, Politics, Individuation, I decided to explore touch as a tangible affect of my positionality as a French-Canadian woman. Touch and language occupy different but parallel roles in connecting and interacting with our immediate environment. Touch as well as language acts as an articulation of difference, and in this case of cultural differences. I was born and raised in Montreal and my mother tongue is French. It is easy in Montreal and even easier in other parts of Québec to lead a lifestyle that is strictly francophone with only brief encounters with English speaking individuals. In fact, it was my own experience before I enrolled in Art History at Concordia University. Although my hometown fosters a bilingual environment, there is a felt separation between the two communities. I chose to discuss the act of hugging versus kissing as greeting forms with the purpose of investigating the experience of touch as a point of contact which generates flexible spaces for production of knowledge. This new acquired knowledge, which is tactile and communal, permits the self and the body to be removed from pre-set nonverbal communication mechanisms. Manning suggests in her article that touch implies a movement of reaching toward, and that this process is never completed before it reaches the other. ( Manning,86) Therefore, the time and space generated by this movement allows both individuals to assimilate touch as something that is yet to become. During my time as an undergrad, I realized that there was a disparity regarding notions of intimacy between the French and the English students. The moment I started my bachelor, I was conscious that for the first time I was connecting with ‘Canada’. Despite the fact that in the past I went on vacation with my parents outside of Québec, as tourists/outsiders our encounters with the locals were superficial. Thus, by sharing an educational space, I felt that I was connecting not only geographically but culturally with people from other provinces. In addition, Québec always has been politically and culturally in the margins of a cohesive national identity, which also explain a dissociation from the Québecois to the broader Canadian metanarrative. Thus, on an interrelation level my experience at Concordia was a pivotal moment where I was getting in touch with another culture through bodies. Consequently, passing from a Québecocentric/ French multicultural social life to building bilingual and interprovincial relationships came with its uncomfortable moments. For the longest time, when I met someone I would automatically shake hands or give a closed mouth kiss on the cheeks. To french speaking individuals (and I believe that this description can be applied to other communities) this kiss is perceived as a friendly greeting or a way of saying goodbye to people you love or just encountered. Nevertheless, the hug as the kiss is socially and culturally determined but sometimes assumptions can play a role in blurring these constructions.

A good case study would be my first encounter with my friend Guillaume Peterson (I chose to use a fictional name, since I don’t feel it is necessary to reveal his identity). I met Guillaume during my third year at Concordia through Jacob (also a fictional name). Guillaume has a French mother and an English father which explains the origin of his name. As Jacob, Guillaume is bilingual, did his schooling in English, and most of his friends were Anglophones. However, when I met him, I assumed by his first name that his manners would be similar to mine. At that time, I was still not really inclined to hug as my greeting gesture of choice. So, Guillaume leaned for a hug, and I reached for a kiss and it clashed. Not only our attempt to familiarize with one another failed miserably, but we were left confused. Thus the disparity of nonverbal communication that arises when meeting someone might engender non-reciprocal gestures which create a blockage to the initiated ‘reaching toward’. We abruptly distanced ourselves, then, we looked at each other in order to evaluate what just happened. I recall that at first, he looked at me surprised and I could see that his confusion was triggered by two factors: this new physical proximity and my gender. I felt the same way and I wondered what it meant from his part to be inclined to hug me instead of kissing. My background informed me that a kiss on the cheek, which actually becomes more of a cheek to cheek contact, involves far less than a hug (both physically and emotionally). But for him, kissing was read as a way of nonverbally communicating physical attraction. After processing this physical encounter and its effects, we smiled. And Guillaume said: right, you are French, and then we shook hands. Shaking hands became our middle ground for mutual understanding. It was another other way of acknowledging our presence and navigating cultural differences. After a while though, I became accustomed to hug and engage physically with others in a different manner. I believe that the way I touch people at first contact is now influenced by two cultures. Currently, I reside in Toronto and sometimes I do have moments were I mix the two when I meet people whether it is here or home. Whenever, I get caught up in an awkward embrace, my body positions me as a transcultural but primarily French-Canadian.

Work cited

Sporting Exclusion

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/belgium/11250948/Pakistani-family-face-deportation-after-their-son-is-labelled-a-terrorist-for-carrying-a-cricket-bat.html

“We’ve lost the privilege of living in Belgium. I’ve lost my education. I’ve lost everything.” Assim Abbassi, 22 years old

Butlers and Athanasiou’s piece on transborder affective foreclosures speaks of pre-carity. The fear of the unknown. The feeling of vulnerability and unpredictability of what is to come. In my opinion it boils down to society surrendering agency to a what may be considered a more paternal role of the state. The state becomes responsible for carving out a legible path and a sense of security perhaps through this much feared precariousness. This in turn creates the problematic space ripe for abjection to take place or as mentioned in the essay, state racism abjecting bodies to living in a state of precariousness. Take the Pakistani family for instance (in the attached article), the boy was carrying a cricket bat wrapped in fabric (to protect it from getting wet in the rain). Yet he was profiled, witnesses took pictures tagging him an “anti-semite killer”, a terrorist carrying a concealed weapon on the loose. All this occurred in the context of four murders that took place in a Jewish museum in Brussels over the summer. If the Abbassi incident is to be considered a mistake, the preposterous refusal of the Belgian state and the Pakistani embassy to remedy this ‘mistake’ goes to show how this will affect a larger number of the population that fits a similar profile. The Belgian government wants the family to leave Belgium and the Pakistani embassy fired the boys diplomat father for allegedly defaming Pakistan. Devastated, the boy and his family claim to have lost “everything”.

Exclusion of a tragic degree.

Umar

Black Lives Matter

Since I had the intention to discuss about Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou’s Trans-border Affective Foreclosures and State Racism, I wanted to write about the implementation of the anthropometry as an “objective” science that nowadays is highly regarded for its use in forensic practices. However during the Victorian era, it was as a tool that served to support racist and classist theories which legitimized governmental enterprises such as penal servitude and slave trade. I believed that the questions asked by the co-authors could open other discussions leading to the history of profiling practices sustaining biopolitics and its systems of governance. Butler and Athanasiou underscore significant concerns in relation to what ideas of the human versus the inhuman are at the core of laws regulating the protection of some and the death of others. Who are the ones that have to accept precarity not only as an economic situation, but as a condition of being? This evening, as I scrolled the Dashboard of my Tumblr profile, I saw multiple infuriated posts about the verdict from Missouri’s grand jury clearing police officer Darren Wilson of all charges in the shooting of the unarmed Black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson in St-Louis County (Missouri, United-States). An easy parallel to George Zimmerman’s trial for the murder of Treyvon Martin in 2013 could be made; what has been demonstrated was an entrenched regulation that ensures white supremacy through the preservation of exclusionary and violent practices towards certain communities,more specifically people of color. The accumulation of unfair trials and biases on which the penal system is constructed, are forces that work to solidify ideals of cultural heterogeneity and white privileges. The Bill of rights does not protect African- American families from losing a member in the hands of the police nor foster any viable options to sue the state for injustice. It has not been long since the news about the decision of the grand jury to not lay charges against officer Wilson broke out online. A flood of protest images from the civil rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s depicting police brutality are juxtaposed to the current social climate have taken over tumblr’s interfaces (at least the blogs that I follow). The hastag #Blacklivesmatter has been initiated a year ago and has gained more popularity since this summer with the reports of other murders of unarmed black men such as Eric Garner, 43 years old in New York. Black lives matter…. it saddens me, it distresses me, it is painful. The reality is that Black lives will never matter if political structures that are presently shaping judicial and extrajudicial infrastructures are not dismantled. Black lives will never matter if human rights violations and re-evaluation of law enforcement training are not reconsidered, or bills such as the No True Bill are still protecting individuals like Darren Wilson. Athena Athanasiou mentioned that “(…) normative governmentality interweaves with the sovereign decree, and the disciplinary ordinariness of life-affirming welfare protection is coextensive with the selective suspension of the law and the lethal disposability of bodies. (Butler and Athanasiou,168) The black body has been stripped from its humanness and proved “scientifically” unworthy of it for colonial and capitalist purposes. These systems of exceptions are still in place and have adapted to current sociopolitical spheres, locally and globally. Black lives do not seem to matter and African-Americans are part of the individuals that have to supposedly accept their precarious life condition as a state of being. NO, BLACK LIVES MATTER.

Work cited

Butler, Judith, Athanasiou, Athena. ” Trans-Border Affective Foreclosures and State Racism” Dispossession; The Performative in the Political. Cambridge:Polity. 2013. pp. 164-172. Print

Disaster Is Incubating

“CAE’s opinion is a simple one. We believe that biowarfare “preparedness” is a euphemism for biowartech development and the militarization of the public sphere. Preparedness, as it now stands, is a madness that continues because it gets votes for politicians, audiences for media venues, profits for corporations, and funds for militarized knowledge production. If there is any real threat to our bodies and health, it is not coming from weaponized germs, but from the institutions that benefit from this weaponization.” (CAE, http://www.critical-art.net)

Critical Art Ensemble is a renown collective that explores intersections between art, critical theory, technology, and political activism. It is via interactive performances and the creation of science-theaters that CAE aims to close the gap between contemporary biotechnological research, cultural specific knowledge and the public domain. Fear and lack of information are crucial elements to the general acceptance of preemptive measures recently implemented by the U.S. government. The internal transformation of military practices has slowly taken space into the public affairs from germ warfare to humanitarian relief. Since 9/11 the American population has gradually given up certain services and individual freedoms because of an unshakable fear of an external and unpredictable threat that can strike at anytime. As a result, the State has taken the responsibility to be prepared and ready to respond fast and effectively to any crisis, and even perhaps, when needed counterstrike. Moreover, following the anthrax attack in 2001, being ready did not seem to be enough; if possible the unknown threat has to be stopped before it has the chance to hit. Consequently, the Bush administration has injected the largest funds for biodefense research projects in its military history

“The legislation, going under the name of the Project Bioshield, authorized $5.6 billion for the purchase and stockpiling of vaccines and drugs against bioterrorist threats, granted the government new authority to initiate research programs, and gave it special dispensation to override drug regulations in the face of a national emergency.”

(Cooper, 74)

The allocated resources were taken from money normally directed to public health services and this initiative blurred the frontier between the collective well-being and its development, bioterrorism, war, and microbial life. The fear of an emerging threat from unknown biological weaponry fueled by the media and political campaigns, has built new allegiances between biomedicine and the military. These ties have long existed prior the “War on Terror”; indeed concerns about the role of biological weapons in modern warfare have been debated since the First World War, however, it took a dramatic turn since the last decade or so. Critical Art Ensemble’s performance Target Deception (2007) in Leipzig, Germany, is the reenactment of a mock open-air biological attack on San Francisco conducted by the U.S. Army in the 1950s. This experiment was part of a series of secretive initiatives which consisted to spray harmless bacterial agents over urban areas in order to investigate its dispersal and formulate contamination scenarios. The CAE decided to use the American Consulate building as the point from which they would attempt to spray the city with their own harmless biological agent. For the purpose of the performance they also recruited a marching band and a horde of identifiable human guinea pigs. The unpredictability of future geopolitical conflicts has fostered a culture of emergency that keeps civilians on a relentless state of urgency. Current propaganda practices that keep on nurturing the spectacle of fear have bound the population to the state apparatus without questioning the price paid for “security”. Target Deception underscores the deficiencies of the ” successful” tests ran by the Army and the “economy of uselessness” engendered by germ warfare and bioterrorism.

GW.

Works Cited

“Bodies of Fear in a World of Threat”, Critical Art Ensemble. nd. Acessed on November 18^th 2014. http://www.critical-art.net/mp.html

Cooper, Melinda. Life as a Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era. Seattle WA, USA: University of Washington Press. 2008. Proquest Ebrary. Web November 7^th 2014.

A Video Dialogue: Precarity and Biopolitics

neutral

Harding argues the standpoint where science has been considered absolutely neutral- sans gender, sans race, sans culture/geographical boundaries as highly inaccurate. International sciences or Western science, is eurocentric hence colonial. This absolute neutrality refuses to acknowledge difference and these differences exist. I think of Nobel Prize winning Physicist Dr. Abdus Salam from Pakistan, whose work earned him the Nobel Prize, as a building block ultimately leading to the recent discovery of Higgs-Boson Particle, claimed most of his work inspired by the Islamic holy book the Quran. To have an absolutely neutral science means that you consciously ignore the permeation of culture into the questions researchers may ask (or choose not to ask). Being key, Hardings description of culturally contextual ‘local’ knowledge systems working in tandem, metaphorically described as a jigsaw puzzle where spaces left by the insufficiency of one piece can be filled by another. Harding proposes a means of advancement in scientific knowledge by way of efficiently adopting from various sources globally.

Umar

Ai Wei Wei’s long standing battle

The Chinese artist and activist Ai WeiWei is worldly known for his complicated relationship with the Chinese government. Despite the termination of his blog in 2009, his arrest and confiscation of his passport in 2011, the artist kept on sustaining his activities. His political identity made him one of the most controversial leaders of the international art scene. This eager he has to remain in a state of hyper-visibility strategically enables him to openly criticise government policies as well as reinforcing his stand. In 2013, Ai WeiWei had a retrospective show entitled According to What? presented at the Art Gallery of Ontario. On the occasion of this exhibition, he was interviewed by the Director and CEO Matthew Teitelbaum (on September 5^th, 2013) via Skype, and the circumstances shaping this exchange was very revealing. His absence highlighted the tensions created by Chinese’s recent commercial opening to the West. As a result, the internet has been adopted as a tool that would work toward the country’s global advancement. However, the embrace of new communication platforms was perceived as a threat to governmental control over dissemination of information and centralized political resistance. Thus, with the introduction of internet came the ability to produce spaces of encounters and communality which have the power to destabilize entrenched political systems. In an article for the Guardian, Ai Wei Wei eloquently explains the aforementioned anxiety and the push for censorship in China; “Even though we had reform and opening, ‘opening’ didn’t mean ‘openness’; it meant opening the door to the west. (…) At the very beginning, nobody – even in the west – could predict the internet would have so much to do with freedom of speech and that social media would develop in the way it has. (…)The internet is a wild land with its own games, languages and gestures through which we are starting to share common feelings. (Wei Wie, the Guardian) Live streaming on AGO’s First Thursdays, the Chinese artist discussed about his condition and aspirations from an office situated in the Canadian embassy in China. I believe that Ai WeiWei’s skype interview talks to the issues discussed in Aihwa Ong’s Boundary Crossing; Neoliberalism as a Mobile Technology. Within her article Ong investigates new perspectives on the effects of neoliberal practices in non-western sociopolitical contexts. The author specifically describes cases in Asia where the nature of neoliberalism intervention works in contradiction with the political systems in which it operates. She looks at what she describes as “[an] interplay between neoliberalism as exception and exceptions to neoliberalism [which] shape an emerging milieu where the free co-exist with the unfree.” (Ong, 6) China’s market reform is one of the examples she used to illustrate calculated freedom based on practicality rather than ideology. Ai WeiWei’s position as an international artist fits within those lines because of the limits imposed on his production of knowledge while functioning in the art’s free market.Despite the bad press from the artist’s long standing battle against censorship, his positionality does promote and create a commercial interest for contemporary Chinese art. The propulsion of his artistic practice and activism was possible due to China’s openness to the West, and the state of exception conditioning his life and by extension his work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuIbggnwQf4

Works Cited Ong, Aiwa. “Crossing Boundaries: Neoliberalism as a Mobile Technology” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographies New Series 32.1 (2007): 3-8. Print. WeiWei,Ai. “China’s Censorship Can Never Defeat the Internet” Battle for the Internet. The Guardian, 16 April 2012. Web.3 Nov. 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/libertycentral/2012/apr/16/china-censorship-internet-freedom – Geneviève Wallen

When Pregnancy Gets Instagramed

Thinking about cyber feminism and biosocial intersections, I started reflecting on the technological spaces I engage with that use gendered narratives. Turning to Instagram, as a space to examine the dialogues that occur around women and their bodies, I started to track and map the various terminologies and imagery that emerged within discussions on pregnancy.

One of my main questions was how women (and men) were presenting their experiences of expecting a child. Focusing on images that depicted sonograms, I was curious about the choice to disseminate this experience with an unknown public as well as with the gendered associations positioned alongside these postings.

#sonogram has 28,964 postings. Often included in these images were how many weeks the baby was, the gender, and some feelings about the impending child. Hashtags such as blessed, sohappy, myjoy and cantwait were often used; these descriptors acting as a means of presenting a certain type of parental rhetoric that solidified their position as good standing parents.

Often personal, I was taken by how forward people were with displaying pictures of themselves while pregnant. The hashtag “babybump” has over a million postings, many of them consisting of women posing with their enlarged belly’s. Going through the images I found myself clicking on the hashtags and being taken on a journey through Instagram. Starting in one place and ending up in an entirely different one, I was interested in the number of postings each hashtag received. Seeing the number of posts as tied to the popularity of the term I was surprised to see that #babygirl had 9,342,061posts while #pregnant only had 1,881,955. One would presume that being pregnant would be the primary descriptor for expectant parents; however, the widespread use of babygirl, my princess, mommyslittlegirl left me wondering about the gendered ways we regulate our experience of being pregnant.

The cultural impact of Instagram has affected how people choose to represent their experiences and how they share their lives. Having this platform to view others has altered how we define ourselves. Disseminating a gendered narrative then is part of this culture, it feeds a network of people who desire not only to see but to demarcate women’s bodies and their experiences through their reproductive bodies. No longer able to engage with ones body on their own terms women now self regulate through social media, presenting a particular form of motherhood that has been deemed acceptable. Where cyber feminism lies within this discussion I don’t know, what I do know is #cyberfeminism only has 24 posts.

Miranda

Painting Identity

by Umar Amanullah

What I took away from our previous discussion was the question posed to me about exclusion….what do we feel we are being excluded from? This was in context of an incident in Greece where I considered myself a Canadian and a colleague pointed me out as a Pakistani, unleashing questions about what it takes to be a Canadian. I decided to approach the question of exclusion via the need to employ master-signifiers such as Canadian, Pakistani, Asian etc as labels used to categorize others and ourselves.

As the first step, I dove headfirst into Edward Said’s Orientalism. Said refers to the white privileged scholars (or Orientalists) for having had the tendency of taking the greatest amount of variety and ‘always restraining, compressing downwards and backwards to the radical terminal of generality” (Said, 1978;p231). In his book, Said refers to Thomas Edward Lawrence (of Arabia) and Gertrude Bell, both highly influential British spies known for having sway in the Middle East policy of the British government in the World War I era, based on their knowledge of the local populace. According to Said, what mattered to Lawrence and Bell was any references made in observations into the Arab and the Oriental should belong to “a recognizable and authoritative convention of formulation” (Said, p231) as laid out by the earlier Orientalists. The generalization and formulation Said refers to, where an Oriental Man is first an Oriental and only second a man is reinforced by the sciences; being an Oriental was categorized as a species and the generalizations of Orientalness were ultimately an ontogenetic explanation for every member of the species to be applied universally barring any individual instances to the contrary. Therefore no member of the species could escape the “organizing claims on him of his origins” as laid out in the “radical terminal of generality” (Said, 1978;p231).

It does not require a great stretch of imagination to consider who assumes the role of the orientalists today, taken over by communicative technologies; content producers in film and news organizations that have control of the radical terminal of generalizations painting global identities.

Said, Edward W.. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1978. Print.