I've been MIA here, mostly because my writing mojo is all directed at either the manuscript or Threadbared. Most recently, I wrote about this photograph from a recent NYLON editorial featuring The Gossip's Beth Ditto. It just bums me out to no end, but I'm glad I finally figured out how to articulate why.

I am posting a lot over at Threadbared.

Minh-ha and I are reviving our collaborative blog on the politics of fashion and beauty! Check it out here Threadbared and tell all your friends.

The Transnational/Transoceanic Networks: Histories and Cultures Project presents "Fashion, Consumer Cultures and Muslim Diasporas" in Women's Studies, at UC Irvine, on June 3, 2008, 4-6 p.m.. I'm super thrilled to be a part of this panel with Reina Lewis and Emma Tarlo. Come say "hi" if you like!

Check out event details here.

Does anyone have The Brat's "Swift Moves," "Attitudes," and "Starry Night" in MP3 form, and can upload it for me to download? Fiona needs it for class, but our university internet connection seems to be blocking our, er, efforts.

The second weekend of Jordan Crandall's exhibition "Showing" brings Mimi Nguyen from Chicago and John Paul Ricco from Toronto, along with a selection of videos curated by Robert Summers called "Showing Shame: Shameless Showing." Mimi's talk focuses on the circuit between star and fan, using the work of JJ Chinois; John will give a performance with Eleanor Kaufman and then a theoretical presentation about the event of mutually shared exposure between bodies.

Please visit the online catalog for "Showing" at http://www.telic.info/catalogs/showing for more information and an upcoming schedule.

Saturday, 9/22
Noon - 4pm
"Showing Shame: Shameless Showing" screening program curated by Robert Summers (see description below)
4pm
JJ Chinois music video and selections by Mimi Nguyen
5pm
Presentation by Mimi Nguyen (see description below)
7pm
Performance by Eleanor Kaufman and John Paul Ricco
Presentation by John Paul Ricco (see description below)

On Friday, September 21, a screening program called "Identity Masquerades" will run during the normal gallery hours of 12-6pm, including clips from Busby Berkeley, Gold Diggers of 1933 and 42nd St (1933); Kenneth Anger, Puce Moment (1949) and Kustom Kar Kommandos (1965); Alan Calpe, Perfidia (2006); Jack Smith, Flaming Creatures (1963); and Paul Morrissey/Andy Warhol, Flesh (1968).

TELIC Arts Exchange
975 Chung King Road
Los Angeles, CA 90012
T: 213.344.6137
http://www.telic.info
info@telic.info

SHOWING SHAME: SHAMELESS SHOWING
curated by Robert Summers
Artists/Videos:
Lee Adams, Porca Miseria (2007)
Hoang Tan Nguyen, Forever Bottom (1999)
Vaginal Davis & Billy MIller, Tom Cruise Loves Women (2005)
SUPERM (Slava Mogutin & Brian Kenny), "TBA" (2007)
(New video by SUPERM will be its US premiere)

The selected videos show various enactments of the artists and/or their friends performing themselves in acts of shame. With regard to "queer" subjectivity and shame, I draw on the work of Eve Sedgwick who argues that shame can be understood in relation to "queer" - as she pointedly states, "queer" is a term that "might usefully be thought of as referring in the first place to [persons who are tied to shame] ... those whose sense of identity is for some reason tuned most durably to the note of shame". But, I argue that even though there is shame there is also the shameless, it is never far behind, which I think is important to examine in relation to "queer/-ness" - which would push Sedgwick's argument. Indeed, I see no reason to disconnect shame from shameless - after all they are but a suffix apart. All in all, I hope these films show something valuable: I hope they show something shame/less.

MIMI NGUYEN's presentation will focus on technologies of the self and of the star (assembling a desirable commodity body), using the work of JJ Chinois - the transgendered persona of artist Lynne Chan. As an aspirant to celebrity, JJ Chinois critiques and appropriates the pleasures of pop stardom in global culture in the early 21st century and does so by sexing up Bruce Lee's star image in ways that we haven't seen before. Overall Nguyen's presentation will explore the circuits between star and fan, and issues of performance, embodiment, and identity.

Mimi Thi Nguyen is Assistant Professor of Gender and Women's Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Previously, she was a Mellon Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Rackham School of Graduate Studies and Assistant Professor in Women's Studies at the University of Michigan. She earned her PhD. in Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, with a Designated Emphasis on Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She is currently completing her first book, Representing Refugees, which examines the historical production and mobilization of refugee affect for varied political and cultural projects (such as commemoration, humanitarianism, consumption and multicultural nationalism).

She continues to situate her work within transnational feminist cultural studies with her next project, focusing on fashion, citizenship and transnationality. She is co-editor with Thuy Linh Tu of Alien Encounters: Pop Culture in Asian America (Duke University Press, 2007) and author of multiple essays on Asian American, queer, and punk subcultures, digital technologies, and Vietnamese diasporic culture, published in academic collections, on-line publications and popular magazines.

JOHN PAUL RICCO's presentation will draw from Jean-Luc Nancy, Gilles Deleuze, Judith Butler, and Leo Bersani, to focus on "the event of mutually-shared exposure": the separating-connecting spacing that exists between, amongst, and around any one or more bodies, in varying degrees of intimacy or closeness. He will look at the ethical and political questions this provokes, involving social bonds formulated through a "non-identitarian narcissism": a space, cutting transversally across the circuit of voyeurism and exhibitionism, in which one performs neither solely for oneself nor for some objectified other, but for any number of other ones in the virtual-corporeal networks of distance and connection.

John Paul Ricco is a theorist, curator and performance artist, and is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art, Media Theory, and Criticism at the University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada. He is the author of The Logic of the Lure, and a number of essays on contemporary artists. Currently, he is organizing a three-part exhibition of contemporary queer video, to open at V-Tape in Toronto in January 2008, and working on his next book: The Decision Between Us: aporetic aesthetics and the unbecoming community. For "Showing," Ricco is premiering a body-based performance installation and artist talk, on narcissism and the space of bare naked exposure.
TELIC Arts Exchange is a platform for events and discussion.
With an emphasis on social exchange, interactivity, and public participation,
we set out to produce a critical engagement with new media and culture.

TELIC Arts Exchange is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization.

A friend of mine wants to actually download videos from YouTube.com for her class (so that access is not contingent on the videos staying up on YouTube.com or internet access). Is that possible?

My good friend and colleague Minh-ha Pham (a postdoctoral fellow in the Asian Pacific American studies program in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University) have started a new fashion commentary blog, Threadbared! Come check us out. So far, Minh-ha is on a roll and I'm, well, not, but hopefully I'll be contributing very, very soon!

Today's semi-related tangent in Intro to Feminist Theory was about 1980s hair metal, and how to think about men with big hair and spandex shorts.

I love this closing dedication in Ann Laura Stoler's edited collection Haunted by Empire:

This book is dedicated to my children, Tessa and Bruno, who enter adulthood at a moment when U.S. empire continues to bear down deftly and crudely, in so many places, with enduring force. Let us hope that their generation recognizes the rhetorical and material forms in which U.S. empire sustains itself, that they don't confuse imperial stretch for compassion, that their understandings of empire's intimacies confront its tortures, and that their working vocabularies can identity those gradations of intervention and sovereignty that call themselves by so many nonimperial names.

MCRTW SEMINAR SERIES
FALL 2006

The McGill Centre for Research and Teaching on Women is pleased to present:

MIMI THI NGUYEN
Assistant Professor, Gender and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies,
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

who will speak on

“BEAUTY AND THE BURKA: MAKEOVERS AND GLOBAL FEMINISMS”

Thursday, November 9, 2006
4:00 P.M.
Wilson Hall, Room 103
3506 University Street

I love YouTube for giving me the video to my most favorite song ever.

I want to eat all the Halloween candy I bought for the children.

AMERICAN INDIAN STUDIES/GENDER & WOMEN STUDIES, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
JOINT TENURE LINE--ASSISTANT PROFESSOR

The American Indian Studies (AIS) and Gender and Women Studies (GWS) programs at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign invite applications for a joint full-time tenure track faculty position at the rank of assistant professor. The successful candidate will hold a tenure track percentage position in both units with the tenure home in either AIS or GWS. This position demonstrates an exciting collaboration between AIS and GWS. We seek colleagues whose teaching, research, and scholarship will contribute to curricular and program development in both units and whose work provides critical perspectives on the intersections of gender, race, sexuality, and indigeneity – including American Indian, First Nations, Indigenous, and Hawaii/ Pacific perspectives—in a global/transnational context. Field open: Applicants in fine arts, humanities, and social sciences are encouraged to apply. Special consideration will be given to candidates whose work is clearly centered within indigenous and feminist studies. Applicants will hold a PhD by start date of August 2007. (ABD applicants with PhD completion by August 2007 will be considered.)

To ensure full consideration, applications must be received by December 1, 2006. Salary is competitive.

Applicants should submit application letter, C.V., two writing samples, and three reference letters to: Professor Wanda Pillow, Director AIS/NAH Professor Cris Mayo, Director GWS Native American House University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 1204 W. Nevada Urbana, IL 61801 (217) 265-9870

The University of Illinois is an Affirmative Action, Equal Opportunity Employer.

Wendy Brown's latest monograph, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire is going to be electrifying.

Tolerance is generally regarded as an unqualified achievement of the modern West. Emerging in early modern Europe to defuse violent religious conflict and reduce persecution, tolerance today is hailed as a key to decreasing conflict across a wide range of other dividing lines-- cultural, racial, ethnic, and sexual. But, as political theorist Wendy Brown argues in Regulating Aversion, tolerance also has dark and troubling undercurrents.

Dislike, disapproval, and regulation lurk at the heart of tolerance. To tolerate is not to affirm but to conditionally allow what is unwanted or deviant. And, although presented as an alternative to violence, tolerance can play a part in justifying violence--dramatically so in the war in Iraq and the War on Terror. Wielded, especially since 9/11, as a way of distinguishing a civilized West from a barbaric Islam, tolerance is paradoxically underwriting Western imperialism.

Brown's analysis of the history and contemporary life of tolerance reveals it in a startlingly unfamiliar guise. Heavy with norms and consolidating the dominance of the powerful, tolerance sustains the abjection of the tolerated and equates the intolerant with the barbaric. Examining the operation of tolerance in contexts as different as the War on Terror, campaigns for gay rights, and the Los Angeles Museum of Tolerance, Brown traces the operation of tolerance in contemporary struggles over identity, citizenship, and civilization.

For the nerds, listen to a recent lecture by Wendy Brown, Professor of Political Science, at UC Berkeley, called, “American Nightmare: Neoconservatism, Neoliberalism, and De-democratization.” ("Abstract: The lecture explores convergences between American neo-conservatism--a fierce political and moral program--and neo-liberalism--an economic and political rationality formally free of moral dress. It explores how these convergences extend the clear-cutting of liberal democratic institutions and the transformation of democratic subjectivity already underway from other sources in the past half century.")

I thought I was leaving Wednesday, but no, I'm leaving tomorrow for the Bay Area! I don't know what to wear! Eep! In any case, I'll be in town for a week, and will be giving a talk on Monday at UC Santa Cruz. Hopefully I'll get to see everyone I missed last time!

icki is selling a set of postcards of live band shots! Featuring The Kills, The Hives, Miami, Supersnazz, Thee Mighty Ceasars, Teengenerate and more! Help him save for my birthday present and buy a set or, if live band shots aren't your thing, a print of one of his other photographs found at either his website (http://www.ickibod.com/action), his blog (http://icki.blogspot.com), or his flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/icki/). I happen to think he's a genius, so buy a print from him before he becomes uber-famous. He has other postcard series in mind, too, so give him feedback on what you might like to see!

As a part of the UC Santa Cruz sociology colloquium series on "Social Justice, Social Movements, Social Science," I will be presenting "Napalmed Girls Go to Washington City: Image, Affect, and Historical Justice in Transnational Feminist Critical Practices." Come check me out on May 15, 12:30-2 p.m., College Eight Red Room!