The Rise of the Asian American YouTube Star Wong Fu Productions’ breakout short film Yellow Fever revolves around a single question, posed in the film’s beginning minutes by actor/producer/director Philip Wang: “Man, why are all the white guys taking our girls?” The fifteen-minute clip, produced in 2005 while the three members of Wong Fu were … Read more
In the summer of 2009 Golbarg Bashi and I had an online conversation about a set of photographs that she had assembled of Iranian women in protest: 1953 in Tehran, on the heels of the nationalization of the Iranian oil industry by Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, which resulted in the CIA-engineered coup that ousted him; … Read more
The present essay has three parts. All three parts present the critique of the spatializations of Europe in the context of global neoliberal discourse on one side and the completely intertwined discourse of postsocialist/post-Cold-War Europe on the other. The first part conceptualizes a possibility to think socially, politically, and culturally about a space once known … Read more
In 1969 in a symposium on schizophrenia and the double bind at the National Institute of Mental Health, the cybernetician and ethnographer Gregory Bateson stood before an audience of some of the most prominent psychiatrists and psychologists in the world and proceeded to discuss the mental life of animals. This was not a question of … Read more
Curatorial practices around film, video, and new media technology carry the potential to repossess and radicalize the heart of cinema. This article posits New Frontier, a program of the Sundance Film Festival, as one manifestation of contemporary feminist curatorial and artist work redefining the terms of our engagement with cinematic technologies and storytelling practices. Senior … Read more
There was once a painter who one day painted a landscape. It was a beautiful valley with wonderful trees and with a winding path leading away toward the mountains. The artist was so delighted with his picture that he felt an irresistible urge to walk along the path winding away towards the distant mountains. He … Read more
Taking a chapter from Jacqueline Goldsby’s brilliant and disturbing book, A Spectacular Secret: Lynching in American Life and Literature, entitled “Through a Different Lens: Lynching Photography at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century” as a starting point, I would like to pursue a point made by Goldsby about the role of these atrocious photographs of … Read more
This platform/paper is a multimedia bibliographic essay with an argument: working out in a posthumanities multiverse of articulating disciplines, interdisciplines, and multidisciplinarities requires a feminist practice of transdisciplinary inspection. Such inspection actually allows us to enjoy these many flavors of details, offerings, passions, languages, and things encountered while traveling the bibliographic among knowledge worlds, even … Read more
There is no ontology that does not legislate for its own empowerment technologically in the sense of prescribing the means for its own enablement and … there is no technology that is not an expression of ontology, of presumptions concerning the fundaments of existence said to enable technology to be technological.—Michael Dillon The concerns expressed … Read more
In the best parts of our tradition as LGBTQ people for liberation, we have resisted assimilation. We have held die-ins, we have risked our lives at pride celebrations, we have been willing to be part of spectacle and even to be hated—in the hope that our work would mean motion towards liberation. We have witnessed … Read more
