query gallimaufry: an archive of research questions

lots of questions, very few answers

[querygallimaufry]

The Witch-Hunt by Hannah Black

Excerpt:

“In the 16th century, mouth restraints that prevented the wearer from eating or speaking were used both on European women who transgressed socially and on enslaved African and indigenous people elsewhere. This stopped-up mouth signals a war on communal forms of life, eventually pacified and institutionalised. The image of love dwindles from the community of women to the couple and their offspring. This remains the pretext for the ongoing ultraviolence of capitalism: the bold executive husband, his appropriate partner and their appropriate children stand like figurines on a wedding cake atop a giant edifice of shit. “Hard-working families!” “Families not felons!” And not an extensive family, but family as an extension of the individual.”

[nativenews]

… [O]ne can begin with the context set by ‘The Black Radical Tradition’. Scholars have argued that enslaved African peoples have transferred and edited 'historical, cultural, and moral materials’ as an ongoing shared resource. Cedric Robinson argues in 'Black Marxism’ for the self-conscious development of those materials into a political project that he calls 'The Black Radical Tradition.’ Familiar Marxists fill the ranks of the Tradition, namely W. E. B. DuBois, CLR James, and (more recently) Angela Davis. Generalizing the problematic out from individual thinkers, we can think the Lukacsian spirit of the challenge posed by the project of The Black Radical Tradition: how can [B]lackness overcome the self-aware fact of shared condition to become a self-aware political force? Or in the elegant Marxian terms: the transition from a class-in-itself to a class-for-itself (commonly derived from 'The Poverty of Philosophy’). Afro-pessimism offers a stark assessment of the Black Radicalism’s project of coming into being through such transcendence. Persuasively, both approaches begin with a similar approach to alienation – because even if reality is not dialectical, at the very least, colonialism was. The colonial gaze simultaneously cast [B]lackness as infinitely Other but precisely objectified. After silently acknowledging their agreement, the two approaches part ways. On the one hand, the Tradition searches for itself by dialectically negating colonial negation. Black Radicalism plumbs this shared subjection to find the conditions for transforming object into subject recognized by history. And history has spoken back through the self-affirmation of négritude’s poets, the forceful propaganda of Detroit’s League of Revolutionary Black Workers, and the many global tongues of political hip-hop. As for Afro-pessimism? Jared Sexton convincingly argues that both positions agree that there in the ongoing attempt to reduce [B]lack social life to [B]lack social death – in that ’[B]lack life is lived in social death’ (Ante-Anti-Blackness). The disagreement revolves over a question of strategy. Against [B]lack optimism’s attempt to 'negate [B]lack social death by vitalizing it,’ Afropessimism puts 'double emphasis, on lived and on death’ (Ante-Anti-Blackness). Such a doubling-down does not extend [B]lack life as an addition to the multicultural rainbow but offers access to social death’s terrifying 'economy of violence’ (Sexton; Patterson).

Culp, Andrew. ‘Afropessimism as aesthetic Blackness? [Putting the pessismism in Afropressimism]’. 1/8/16. (via nativenews)

[cuntext]

What frustrates Naomi [Jaffe] is that she does not find feminists organizing where the most damage is being done. She gives an example: “I was in a courtroom when prisoners, one of whom is a friend of mine, had brought a federal civil suit against the prison system for punitively transferring them out of Comstock [a maximum-security prison in upstate New York] as a result of a petition they had done and gotten to the outside about racist beatings. The lawsuit is that they were retaliating by exercising their constitutionally protected rights. It was in the federal courtroom in downtown Albany. I walked into this courtroom with big high ceilings and wood paneling and upholstered chairs and a white judge in black robes and a bunch of white men in business suits standing around. These three guys were brought in in shackles and sweatshirts. There they are. There it is. A white courtroom. And three Black men who were the defendants. They weren’t even the plaintiffs in this case, shuffling in shackles. This is really not any different than slavery. This is what slavery was. We are in it. This is the power of the criminal justice system and the only three Black people in the room are in shackles. It is like that when you are in prison all the time…Something we are doing has to make it harder for them to do that. Not sometime down the line, but right now. And I don’t see it. It is not happening. I don’t know exactly how to make it happen.

Becky Thompson, A Promise and a Way of Life: White Antiracist Activism, 218-219 (via cuntext)

[whentherewerebicycles]

The shape of a life can feel like a past tense; something we sense only after it has been acquired. But we might also know this: we can leave a life. It is not too late to leave a life…I think one of the reasons that I became interested in the very question of direction was because in the middle of my life, middle as muddle, I made a dramatic redirection. I left a certain kind of life and embraced a new one. I became a lesbian. I had tried heterosexuality. Rather like Mrs. Dalloway’s description of her relation to her own body, heterosexuality was something I was wearing. When you have to try hard to convince yourself of something, it usually means you are not convinced. Heterosexuality did not fit. When I was wearing it, I found it wearing… But this is what leaving heterosexuality felt like: leaving a life, a life that is supported; leaving a world where your being is supported. You have to create your own support systems. Queer and feminist worlds are built through the effort to support those who are not supported because of who they are, what they want, what they do.

Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (via whentherewerebicycles)

[querygallimaufry]

“At the end of the majority of popular narratives the woman is disfigured, dead, or at the very least, domesticated. And her downfall is seen as anything but tragic. There are other ways in which male texts work ti insist implicitly on their difference from feminine. Sometimes this is done through language: for instance, through rigorous suppression of ‘flowery’ descriptions or the tight-lipped refusal to employ any expression of emotion other than anger.”

- Tania Modleski, “Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women” (1982)

[querygallimaufry]

“The ordinary white subject is a fantasy that comes into being through the mobilisation of hate, as a passionate attachment closely tied to love. The emotion of hate works to animate the ordinary subject, to bring that fantasy to life, precisely by constituting the ordinary as in crisis, and the ordinary person as the real victim. The ordinary becomes that which is already under threat by the imagined others whose proximity becomes a crime against person as well as place. The ordinary subject is reproduced as the injured party: the one that is ‘hurt’ or even damaged by the ‘invasion’ of others. The bodies of others are hence transformed into ‘the hated’ through a discourse of pain. They are assumed to cause injury to the ordinary white subject, such that their proximity is read as the origin of bad feeling: indeed, the implication here is that the white subject’s good feelings (love) have being ‘taken’ away by the abuse of such feelings by others.”

- Sara Ahmed, from “Facism As Love” [https://feministkilljoys.com/2016/11/09/fascism-as-love/]

[querygallimaufry]

“Tropes, however, are literary devices with provenances, biographies with points of origins and paths of development that can be traced. Tropes are created in particular contexts and kept in use by individuals and groups for whom they serve identifiable purposes. Tropes, in other words, help tell stories and yet have their own story to tell.”

- Jerry Lembcke, Hanoi Jane: War, Sex, and Fantasies of Betrayal

[querygallimaufry]

“In the U.S. polity and cultural imagination racial blackness is most often far from being taken as a term of value. To make such a proposal is most often to leave oneself open to being perceived as having impaired, unreliable, or faulty judgment. The aim of this project, however, is precisely to see double in these ways. In considering value, this study attempts to formulate answers to three questions: In what ways does an interrogation of value as an abstract principle bear productively on the anatomization of the violence and oppressive force of racialization? In what specific ways can a critical discourse on value reveal peculiarities of race? In short, does value redact race, and vice versa?” 

- Lindon Barrett, Blackness and Value: Seeing Double

[godknowssaidroseonedidnot]

I WOKE UP and it was political. I made coffee and the coffee was political. I took a shower and the water was. I walked down the street in short shorts and a Bob Mizer tank top and they were political, the walking and the shorts and the beefcake silkscreen of the man posing in a G-string. I forgot my sunglasses and later, on the train, that was political, when I studied every handsome man in the car. Who I thought was handsome was political. I went to work at the university and everything was very obviously political, the department and the institution. All the cigarettes I smoked between classes were political, where I threw them when I was through. I was blond and it was political. So was the difference between “blond” and “blonde.” I had long hair and it was political. I shaved my head and it was. That I didn’t know how to grieve when another person was killed in America was political, and it was political when America killed another person, who they were and what color and gender and who I am in relation. I couldn’t think about it for too long without feeling a helplessness like childhood. I was a child and it was political, being a boy who was bad at it. I couldn’t catch and so the ball became political. My mother read to me almost every night and the conditions that enabled her to do so were political. That my father’s money was new was political, that it was proving something. Someone called me faggot and it was political. I called myself a faggot and it was political. How difficult my life felt relative to how difficult it was was political. I thought I could become a writer and it was political that I could imagine it. I thought I was not a political poet and still my imagination was political. It had been, this whole time I was asleep.

- Jameson Fitzpatrick

[lesbianartandartists]

Why is it so difficult to see the lesbian – even when she is there, quite plainly, in front of us? In part because she has been ‘ghosted’ – or made to seem invisible – by culture itself. It would be putting it mildly to say that the lesbian represents a threat to patriarchal protocol: Western civilization has for centuries been haunted by a fear of ‘women without men’ – of women indifferent or resistant to male desire. Precisely because she challenges the moral, sexual, and psychic authority of men so thoroughly, the 'Amazon’ has always provoked anxiety and hatred. As the lesbian philosopher Monique Wittig has put it, 'The refusal to become (or to remain) heterosexual always meant to refuse to become a man or a woman, consciously or not. For a lesbian this goes further than the refusal of the role 'woman’. It is the refusal of the economic, ideological, and political power of a man.’ Under the circumstances it’s perhaps no wonder that so many men (and some women) have sought to see the lesbian 'disappeared.’

Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 4-5. (via lesbianartandartists)

[querygallimaufry]

“It’s awful to see the process by which various gender and sexual eccentricities that have been sites of resistance and disruption are rehabilitated through liberal equality, recognition, and inclusion rubrics to become fertile spaces for calls to criminalization, standardized family formation, and military occupation. It is painful to watch various sites of grassroots mobilization eclipsed by funder-driven nonprofits articulating “LGBT” politics as a site for building white power. It is complex work that queer and trans scholars and activists engage in the face of these losses, work that must also occur while we navigate the impact that imprisonment, deportation, unemployment, loss of public benefits, the destruction of public education, and other conditions are having on the day-to-day lives of queer and trans people. Part of that work is to account for how the incorporation and deployment of sexual and gender excesses occurs, to analyze the investments in whiteness and capitalism that already belonged to various gay and lesbian ways of life and to gay and lesbian studies and politics that make them available for such adoptions.

Another part is to interrogate our alternatives, to examine how they also produce politics of truth that require standardization, normalization, and the identification of internal enemies. This requires producing methods of self-critique and perpetual reflection best modeled by women of color feminism and visible in some prison abolition—focused queer and feminist work today as well. When practices of stateness centered on slavery and genocide perpetually emerge as an exile logic that is constitutive of our very psyches, thinking outside it may in fact be impossible. The impossibility of the other politics and ways of knowing we propose, the attempt to hold them lightly yet practice them urgently, is the struggle of this work. There is something about the practices of marginal queer and trans life that informs this work in all its impurity, something in the grief that has always been central to queer and trans life that is one of the most necessary tools. A queer hermeneutics gives us a depth of field for comprehending these pervasive reiterations of stateness and its regimes of violence, even those articulated in the name of the queer.”

- dean spade

[querygallimaufry]

ani-mater-iality

“...this book is an attempt to describe the material reproductivity of black performance and claim for this reproductivity the status of an ontological condition. This is the story of how apparent nonvalue functions as a creator of value; it is also the story of how value animates what appears as nonvalue. This functioning and this animation are material. This anmateriality—impassioned response to passionate utterance—is painfully and hiddenly disclosed always and everywhere in the tracks of black performance and black discourse on black performance.”

- Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition

[querygallimaufry]

the object resists

“In the meantime, every approach to Marx’s example [of the commodity’s impossible speech] must move through the ongoing event that precipitates it, the real event of the commodity’s speech, itself broken by the irreducible materiality—the broken and irreducible maternity—of the commodity’s scream. Imagine a recording of the (real) example that anticipates the (impossible) example; imagine that recording as the graphic reproduction of a scene of instruction, one always already cut by its own repression; imagine what cuts and anticipates Marx, remembering that the object resists, the commodity shrieks, the audience participates.”

- Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition

[so-treu]

Since before Emancipation, when slaves mounted several organized armed rebellions and countless spontaneous and individual acts of violent resistance to overseers, masters, and patrollers, black men and women consistently demonstrated a willingness to advance their interests at the point of a gun. In the year following the Civil War, black men shot white rioters who attacked blacks in New Orleans and Memphis. Even the original civil rights leadership publicly believed that, as Frederick Douglass put it in 1867, “a man’s rights rest in three boxes: the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box.” During Reconstruction, all-black units of the Union Leagues organized themselves as militias and warred against such white terrorist organizations as the Men of Justice, the Knights of the White Camellia, the Knights of the Rising Sun, and the Ku Klux Klan, whose primary mission was to disarm ex-slaves and thus was one of the first gun-control organizations in the United States. With the rise of Jim Crow segregation at the end of the 19th century, civil rights leaders continued to advocate meeting fire with fire. “A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home,” the famed anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells-Barnett wrote in 1892, when on average more than one black person was lynched every three days in the South, “and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give.” In 1899, after a black man named Henry Denegale was accused of raping a white woman in Darien, Georgia, armed black men surrounded the jail where he was held to prevent lynch mobs from taking him. Instead of being hanged from a tree or burned at the stake, Denegale was tried and acquitted. Though blacks tended to consider Georgia the most lethal of all the Southern states, the coastal area, where Darien was located, “had the fewest lynchings of any place in the state.”

How ‘Crazy Negroes’ With Guns Helped Kill Jim Crow (via so-treu)

[bemusedbibliophile]

From Hobbes to the slaveholders to the neoconservatives, the right has grown increasingly aware that any successful defense of the old regime must incorporate the lower orders in some capacity other than underlings or starstruck fans. The masses must either be able to locate themselves symbolically in the ruling class or be provided with real opportunities to become faux aristocrats themselves in the family, the factory, and the field. The former path makes for an upside-down populism, in which the lowest of the low see themselves projected in the highest of the high; the latter makes for a democratic feudalism, in which the husband or supervisor plays the part of a lord. The former path was pioneered by Hobbes, Maistre, and various prophets of racism and nationalism, the latter by Southern slaveholders, European imperialists, and Gilded Age apologists. (And neo–Gilded Age apologists: “There is no single elite in America,” writes David Brooks. “Everyone can be an aristocrat within his own Olympus.”) Occasionally, as in the writing of Werner Sombart, the two paths converge: ordinary people get to see themselves in the ruling class by virtue of belonging to a great nation among nations, and they also get to govern lesser beings through the exercise of imperial rule. 

Corey Robin, “Introduction,” The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin, pg.35 (x)

[watchoutforintellect]

Winning or losing an argument, receiving an acceptance or rejection, is no proof of the validity or value of personal identity. One may be wrong, mistaken, or a poor craftsman, or just ignorant - but this is no indication of the true worth of one’s total human identity: past, present and future!

Sylvia Plath - from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (via watchoutforintellect)

[querygallimaufry]

“I can’t remember a time when I was not writing. The original impulse was to try to do things that we were not encouraged to do in the language arts programs in the schools, namely, to use writing as a tool to get in touch with the self. In the schools, for example, writing, one of the few crafts we’re taught, seems to be for the purpose of teaching people how to plagiarize from the dictionary or the encyclopedia and how to create as much distance from your own voice as possible. That was called education. I’d call it alienation. You had to sift out a lot, distort a lot, and lie a lot in order to jam the stuff of your emotional, linguistic, cultural experience into the form called the English composition.”

- Toni Cade Bambara, in conversation with Beverly Guy-Sheftall (1979)