Blow It Up: Sites, Sights, Sighs

While Reading Jasbir Puar's Terrorist Assemblages:
Homonationalism in Queer Times

Jackie Salloum's films: Who's the terrorist? and Planet of the Arabs

Free THe P:
Listen to Invincible (queer, anti-zionist jewish activist): "No Comprise"
Listen to Suheir Hammad's "In American"

Iron Sheik's "Affirmative Action, Affirmative Action"

Nancy Ajram

Timz's Iraq, produced by Ron Najor

Dam's BORN HERE

Haifa

Make/Shift

An Interview with Nadine Labaki on her film Caramel
In this interview Love and War are oppositional subject. The Filmmaker wants to 'humanize' the Lebanese people by demonstrating their ability to laugh, love, and mostly, to be exhibit affinities with "Western" (French culture in particular) heteronormative values.

CARAMEL// official website
"OPENS FEBRUARY 1 IN SELECT CITIES. In Beirut, five women meet regularly in a beauty salon, a colorful and sensual microcosm of the city where several generations come into contact, talk and confide in each other. Layale loves Rabih, but Rabih is married. Nisrine is Muslim and her forthcoming marriage poses a problem; she is no longer a virgin. Rima is tormented? by her attraction to women and especially to a lovely client with long hair. Jamale is refusing to grow old. Rose has sacrificed her life to take care of her elderly sister. In the salon, their intimate and liberated conversations revolve around men, sex and motherhood, between haircuts and sugar waxing with caramel."

OPENED IN LOS ANGELES: FEBRUARY 1, 2008.
Landmark Theatre on Pico

Rima is not "tormented" in the film. Rima is left out of the various pix and Labaki's film downplays the Arab femme..... interesting in the context of Kara Keeling's book The Witch's Flight.

also check out PERSEPOLIS based on the graphic memoirs by Marjane Satrapi

Lebanese film: Caramel

Would love to hear reviews...... Please post them here!
i am going to try and see it and not wait for netflix.

Let's Bounce

The Flight Backward, or Witch feelings count?

When friends speak of ‘lesbian drama,’it evokes, for me, purposeful, hardcore misrepresentation and strategic (denial of pain) misunderstanding of trauma narratives or ways that violence (past and present) recreates itself in sometimes petty re-enactments and in re-evoking the affect of a prior time and experience (temporality that might transcend a particular moment in one’s history), we might get somewhere less petty and probably less pretty.

Heather Love’s book intentionally forces her readers revisit sites of pain and sites that have already been inscribed with ‘set’ meaning. Coming out is not quaint; it is still dangerous and fraught with anxiety. Most people have a level of investment in that paradigm because there seems to be no outside, regardless of any our level of awareness or level of disdain toward the larger hegemonic hetero-normative paradigms that rule our social identities. Mourning and loss seem to be part of the shame paradigm. It does not mean that the shame should exist, but that in rejecting heterosexual models and ways of being, we will destroy certain ties that are emotional, cultural, and intellectual while creating new bonds. There are lessons to be learned. Love harkens us to Odysseus (via Horkeimer & Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment): “One might argue that Odysseus survives his encounter with the Sirens: though he can hear them singing, he cannot do anything about it. What saves him is that even as he looks backwards he keeps moving forward. One might argue that Odysseus offers an ideal model of the relation to the historical past: listen to it, but do not allow yourself to be destroyed by it” (Feeling Backward, 9). In essence, Love tells a cautionary tale as central to her argument: “…we need to pursue a fuller engagement with negative affects and with the intransigent difficulties of making feeling the basis for politics” (14).

I wanted to read Love’s chapter on Radclyffe Hall (“Spoiled Identity”) and her novel The Well of Loneliness. I always stayed away from that book because of the bad rap it received as being dated and politically embarrassing. I knew that Hall would say something productive though. Love takes up Hallberstam’s reading of the novel in Female Masculinity while creating her own reading: “I argue that in her portrait of Stephen’s ‘loneliness’ Hall offers us a portrait of a complex and historically specific structure of feelings…As a result, loneliness is not primarily a question of epistemology in the novel but of ontology. Loneliness afflicts Stephen’s being; it is deeply inscribed in her body” (107). I want to take this idea and connect it with the loneliness of transgender identities within a queer context. The Policing and politics of identity politics is clearly a site of fissure for those who want to navigate genderqueer spaces. Many are subject to judgmental reactions when they don’t ‘fit’ the codes/coding inscribed in queer spaces. Dean Spade, for example, in “Undermining Gender Regulation,” often finds people “disappointed” and “aghast.” They thought ze would be “older, taller, more confidently looking, look like a lawyer, and, more importantly look like a man” (Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity 65). Spade ends the story with this cautionary tale from within: “Folks were concerned that the legitimacy of trans identity in the eyes of a transphobic culture is frequently tied to how normal and traditionally masculine or feminine trans people appear. I was ruining it for everyone” (65).

Kara Keeling’s The Witch’s Flight sustains an intellectual engagement as a means to spoil, ruin, or disrupt the linear narrative of hegemonic ‘common sense’—we are asked to engage the cinematic representations of the black femme as a counter-narrative and counter sense-making strategy. In setting up her ‘theoretical scaffolding,’ Keeling “generates the witch’s flight, because the witch—the black femme I desire and pursue throughout this study—takes her raison d’etre from the very mechanisms and conditions that sustain the cinematic, even as her existence is part of a collective will to destroy it”(10). In Set it Off, Keeling argues that the “black femme’s femininity is made visible insofar as she serves as the currency that secures Cleo’s masculinity” (119). Cleo dies in a dramatic scene that valorizes her bravery and her resistance to (white) power structures embodied in the police state. The film silences the black femme and the only way we know how she feels in the end is seeing her watch the televised death scene with tears streaming down her face. The sole survivor of the four women is Stony who escapes with all the bank robbery money; her survival is contingent on her leaving LA, leaving home, her anonymity being exemplified by her hair cut. She now is almost bald. Her tears, at the close of the film, exemplify sadness and triumph over all the socially inscribed violence in her life.

The sad truth is that the L-Word seems more violent and vile in its portrayal of butch-femme identities in comparison to any of the other cinematic examples Keeling analyzes. This Showtime series needs some serious intersectional analyses. The portrayal of women of color, transgender identities, bisexuality are so off the mark. Keeling rightly sees Kit, Pam Greer, as the only person, the femme, the heterosexual foil to the group of lesbian friends, as the only one challenging the show’s hetero-normative precepts (114-117). If this is the present or the future, let’s definitely go back.

Race, Sexuality & the Law: Abercrombie, Imus & Beyond

Date/Time :	03/07/08 8:30 AM - 5:00 PM
Location :	UCLA School of Law
Organizer :	Saul Sarabia
Sponsor :	Critical Race Studies in conjunction with the Williams Institute
Website :	www.law.ucla.edu/crs
Address :	405 Hilgard Avenue Los Angeles California 90095
Description :

Moderated by faculty members of CRS Program at UCLA, "Race, Sexuality & the Law: Abercrombie, Imus & Beyond," will feature interdisciplinary academic panels exploring the role of law, culture, media and communities in shaping representations of race, gender and sexual orientation. Sponsored in conjunction with the Williams Institute, the nation's leading think tank on sexual orientation law and policy, the symposium will foreground current events and questions including:

· What are the connections between homoerotic and racially exclusionary images used by retailers, such as Abercrombie & Fitch, and prevailing conceptions of masculinity and beauty?

· How do employment laws permit, reproduce or challenge these exclusionary practices?

· How do media framings of controversies such as Don Imus’ attack on the Rutgers’ women’s basketball team obscure the intersectional nature of discrimination against women of color?

· How do stereotypical representations of people of color and their sexuality in media and entertainment influence interracial interactions and opportunities in workplaces, universities and public spaces?

Launched in April 2007, the CRS Program Symposium is an annual event that brings together academics, practitioners, students and community members to examine leading research on racial justice in an interdisciplinary and intellectually rigorous forum. The Symposium is free to the public and convenes over 300 people from law schools, ethnic studies and race-related research centers, graduate and undergraduate programs, law firms, legal services organizations and community-based social change agencies from across the country.

Confirmed Speakers:

Keynote Address: Dr. Dr. Dwight A. McBride, Dean, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Professor of African-American Studies, English, and Gender & Women's Studies, University of Illinois at Chicago.

Commentary By: Professor Russell K. Robinson, Acting Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law

Panelists:
Mary Ann Case, Arnold I. Shure Professor of Law, University of Chicago Law School
David L. Eng, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Program in Asian American Studies, University of Pennsylvania
Cheryl I. Harris, Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law
Phillip A. Goff, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Penn State
Sonia Katyal, Associate Professor of Law, Fordham University School of Law
Mignon R. Moore, Assistant Professor of Sociology, UCLA
Dean Spade, Law Teaching Fellow, UCLA School of Law, Williams Institute

Moderators:
Devon W. Carbado, Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law
Kimberle W. Crenshaw, Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law

To register for the event, please click here.

University of California, Los Angeles, Box 951476, Los Angeles, California 90095-1476, (310) 825-4841. Contact Webm