The third meeting of the Wits Queer Theory Reading Group will take place on April 25th from 5pm to 6:30pm in the Graduate Center Seminar Room in the SW Engineering Building.
We will read and discuss Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s article entitled “Waking Nightmares”, published in GLQ: A journal of gay and lesbian studies in 2005 [13(2-3), 357-363]. Haley, who chose the article, will give a brief introduction.
The article can be found HERE.
The second meeting of the Wits Queer Theory Reading Group will take place on April 4th from 5pm to 6:30pm in room SH3176 (3rd floor, Senate House).
We will read and discuss Stephen Valocchi’s article entitled “Not yet queer enough: the lessons of queer theory for the sociology of gender and sexuality”, published in Gender and Society in 2005 [19(6), 750-770]. Themba will give a brief introduction of the article.
The article can be found HERE.
(Sent by Mehita I.)
Call for Papers:
“All Hail the Queenz: A Queer Feminist Recalibration of Hip Hop Scholarship”
A Special Issue of Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory.
Issue Guest Editors: Shanté Paradigm Smalls (University of New Mexico) and Jessica N. Pabón (New York University)
Submission deadline: May 1, 2013
Women and Performance invites submissions for a special issue, “All Hail the Queenz: A Queer Feminist Recalibration of Hip Hop Scholarship.” The editors welcome scholarly articles and performative texts that foreground feminist and queer performance studies approaches to hip hop culture, consumption, and production.
Contemporary rap music, as a stand-in for hip hop culture and production, is virtually synonymous with misogyny and homophobia in the mainstream US and academic imaginary. We want to explore the range of understandings and theories that inform how women and queers experience hip hop culture and performance; this issue underscores the multiplicity of hip hop culture and rejects a myopic totalizing view of what “the culture” does and is. We seek to engage with the wide range of hip hop scholars and practitioners working at the intersections of various methodologies not always associated with scholarly considerations of hip hop (including psychoanalysis, feminist and queer theory, and performance theory), as well as methods typical to hip hop studies—sociology, Black studies, literature, history, musicology, and urban studies. An emerging class of hip hop scholars pressure the givens of race, gender, performance, sexuality, region, nationality, artistry, and iconography—as a culture that has been in a state of constant development for the past forty years, hip hop scholarship is more than due for a queer feminist remixing and reimagining.
As coeditors, we challenge the readers of Women & Performance to ask:
What would a specifically queer feminist performance studies approach to hip hop’s culture and production generate in terms of scholarship? How does a queer feminist experience and critique revise hip hop studies?
Why has performance studies had so little to say about hip hop, what interventions does performance studies yield? The issue’s focus on producing knowledge about hip hop culture that centralizes women, girls and queer people will include a range of elements, both popular and
subcultural: DJ culture, dance, graffiti, human beat boxing, rap music, as well as fashion, media and print, organizing, and other forms of knowledge production. No matter the genre, hip hop is often conceived and misrepresented as a male-dominated culture which casts women and girls as an addendum to hip hop rather than as primary producers, critics, and consumers. Within the pages of this issue, contributors revisit the centrality of feminist and queer artists to the production of all elements of hip hop culture and of feminist and queer critique to hip hop scholarship. “All Hail the Queenz” intends to tease out the nuanced negotiations women, girls, and queer people develop as hip hop artists, critics, and consumers participating within this climate.
Through re-centering feminist and queer critiques and female and queer performance, “All Hail the Queenz” recalibrates hip hop’s center. By recalibrating the center, contributors to this issue refashion hip hop historiography and hip hop aesthetics beyond the art of rapping by the cisgendered male body. In a kind of textual reperformance, this issue takes its title from Queen Latifah’s lyrical demands for respect on her first womanist rap classic album, “All Hail the Queen,” and reminds readers once again that “stereotypes, they got to go!”
Potential Topics:
* Alternate Hip Hop historiographies
* Artist Scholars
* DJing, technology, gender, sexuality
* Feminist, queer, trans* aesthetics
* Feminist, queer, trans* pedagogy
* Graffiti and gender/sexuality
* Hip Hop culture and dis/ability
* Hip Hop diasporas
* Hip Hop fashion
* Hip Hop feminism
* Hip Hop festivals
* Hip Hop’s hybridity
* Human Beatboxing
* Media culture and social networking
* Nation, Empire, and hip hop
* Queer feminist hip hop critique
* Queerness and/in/of hip hop
* Trans* in/and hip hop
Article submissions should be 6-8,000 words in length and adhere to the current Chicago Manual of Style (CMS), author-date format. Performative texts should be 2-3,000 words and in any style the author chooses (same CMS style as above if using citations). Photo essays are welcome.
Questions and abstracts for review are welcome before the final deadline.
Complete essays and texts for consideration must be submitted by 11:59 PM EST, May 1, 2013.
Please send all work to both Shanté Paradigm Smalls and Jessica N. Pabón via email (MSWord attachment): shantesmalls@gmail.comand jnp250@nyu.edu.
Further submission guidelines may be found at:
www.womenandperformance.org/submission.html. Women and Performance is a peer reviewed journal published by Routledge, Taylor & Francis.
“In this post I hope to provide a critique of ‘love’ (or at least how our society understands it). I want to draw from lessons from post-colonialism, lessons from asexuality theory, and lessons from queer activism to generate a politic of Singlehood. I will show you how ‘Single’ is actually a site of radical queer resistance and I will deconstruct the methods of power that make us feel what we do today. This is not my attempt to justify myself (okay maybe it is). This is really an attempt to make you (and me) reconsider the systems of power that have come to enforce this dreadful day on us. This is an attempt to show you that you are capable of being loved (in fact, that you already are).”
THE REAL SIGNIFICANT OTHER: THE QUEER POLITICS OF SINGLEHOOD
“I’ve recently given significant thought to how faith, religion and spirituality can impact and shape the idea of sexual liberation, and reached out to a few people of different faiths and sexual identities to get a sense of their thoughts and experiences for a broader perspective.”
SEX AND THE SACRED: HOW RELIGION IMPACTS OUR SEXUALITY
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
“Recently, the media has exploded with news of a Twitter battle between rapper Azealia Banks and gossip blogger Perez Hilton. After Hilton inserted himself in an altercation between Banks and fellow female rapper Angel Haze, taking Haze’s side, Banks denounced him as a “messy faggot”. She then went on to say that she used the word to describe “any male who acts like a female”. Rumours have since abounded that Banks is being dropped from her record label as a result of her speaking out against Hilton. Rather than taking sides, I believe it is most important for us to examine the context within which this media escalation has happened. Instead of writing off Azealia Banks, herself a queer woman, as homophobic, we should instead be exploring the femmephobia and racialized sexism at play in the public’s response to this debacle.”
ON AZEALIA BANKS AND WHITE GAY CIS MALE PRIVILEGE
(Articles recommended by Gilles B.)
“I feel compelled to make it known that I do not move through the world as sometimes black, sometimes disabled, sometimes queer, sometimes femme, sometimes male and sometimes Afropolitan. I move through the world embodying all of those identities at the same time, all of the time.”
MUSINGS FROM A QUEERCRIP FEMME MAN OF COLOR
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
“I am often loathe to engage in debates of labels, left only to re-hash arguments, choose a position of righteousness, and dig in my heels. The snares of identity politics entrap even the most careful of thinkers.”
“MASCULINE-OF-CENTER” AND WHITE QUEER THEORY
(Articles recommended by Lerato M.)
Wits Queer Theory Reading Group 