Paris_298

This Week:

Today: Discussion of Assignment 2 and short lecture on Paris is Burning

Wednesday: Lecture and in-class discussion of Paris is Burning

Friday: Lecture and group discussion of Nicole Fleetwood's article

Changes to syllabus

• Reduced reading load
• Class cancelled

03/23: NO CLASS! Beth at conference (reading cancelled)

04/04: Gosine reading removed. Discussion of Melissa Nelson article on both days

Assignment #2

The purpose of this assignment is to allow you to demonstrate your individual literacy in and mastery over the course materials in unit two (“Racialization, Colonialism, and Transnational Reproduction”). This means the ability to elaborate, clarify, formulate, compare, contrast, and evaluate key concepts, arguments, and frameworks from readings, discussions, screenings, and lectures.

Your response in this assignment must therefore have a thesis. A thesis is a statement with which someone could disagree. It makes a claim to something— it offers a reading, an interpretation, or a disagreement.

Write a roughly four-page paper that responds to ONE of the following prompts.

1. From Amrita Pande and Sophie Lewis’ respective explorations of transnational surrogacy to Jennifer L. Morgan’s analysis of images of women whose children can “suckle over her shoulder,” to Nicole Fleetwood’s discussion of the reproductive labours women perform for their incarcerated family members, a number of texts in this unit take up the relation between labour and the gendered body. Drawing on TWO texts from this unit (not necessarily those just mentioned), explain—using specific passages from each text— what each means by labour and how they understand labour to intersect with gender. Your answer should elaborate on what you understand as the most important points of convergence and/or divergence between these authors, and evaluate what is at stake in the different understandings of labour that these two texts yield.

2. In “Right of Death and Power Over Life,” Michel Foucault argues that starting in the seventeenth century a new form of power emerged “whose highest function was perhaps no longer to kill, but to invest life through and through” (139). He refers to this form of power as biopower and argues that one technique or “pole” of biopower is “biopolitics.” Explain what Foucault means by both biopower and biopolitics and how these terms relate to the concept of reproduction. THEN, address how and to what extent ONE of the following engagements with reproduction is compatible and/or incompatible with Foucault’s discussion of biopolitics. In your answer, you should evaluate what is at stake in the compatibilities and/or incompatibilities that you illuminate:

a. Jennifer Morgan’s account of depictions of African women within European travel

narratives

b. Chris Andersen’s exploration of Métis peoples as a mixed-race population

c. Amrita Pande OR Sophie Lewis’ discussion of transnational surrogacy

3. Many authors in this unit approach reproduction in terms of a relationship between family/kinship/community and race (e.g. Saidiya Hartman, Amrita Pande, Sophie Lewis, Chris Andersen, Nichole Fleetwood, Paris is Burning). Select TWO texts from this unit that you find most intriguing, and explicate and evaluate how each engages questions of kinship/family/community and their intersections with race. Your answer should elaborate on what you understand to be at stake in the point(s) of convergence and/or divergence between these thinkers. This requires not simply listing thematic differences (e.g., “Pande writes about surrogacy” and “Hartman writes about slavery”) but rather assessing the underlying conceptions of “kinship/family/community” and “race” that these two texts yield.

4. Choose one of the documentary films screened in the second unit of the syllabus (either Made in India: A Film About Surrogacy OR Paris is Burning) and produce a critical argument about how the film represents and frames the reproductive issue it explores. In your response make sure to treat the film you choose as a text that makes an argument and that must be analyzed. No text is simply a carrier of information. In other words, attend both to what narratives the film constructs about its subject and consider how the film goes about constructing these narratives. THEN analyze this film in relation to ONE theoretical reading from this unit (drawing on specific passages from this text). How does the film you have chosen exemplify, complicate, or sit in tension with the theorist’s argument?

Since this paper is short, focus on a close reading of 1-2 key scenes from your film while also making sure to contextualize these scenes within the film as a whole.

Formatting Guidelines

Your paper should be roughly 4 pages, Times New Roman, 12-point font, and double-spaced.

You have very little space. Make your points as economically and lucidly as you can. No repetition of the prompt is necessary.

At the top of your assignment, place ONLY your name. No other heading information is required.

No extra spaces between paragraphs and indent first line of each paragraph.

You are required to use MLA-style parenthetical in-text citations. This means that the author’s last name and the page number(s) from which the quotation or paraphrase is taken must appear in the text.

Assessment Criteria

1. Understanding of Text #1

-explicates the materials lucidly and perceptively

-mobilizes text to construct an argument

-defines terms/implications

2. Understanding of Text #2

-explicates the materials lucidly and perceptively

-mobilizes text to construct an argument

-defines terms/implications

3. Strength of Argument and Analysis

-precise, substantive thesis

-bold and imaginative analysis

-insightful, precise, and meaningful connections

-answers the “so what?” question

4. Writing and Organization

-paragraphs are road-mapped through topic sentences that link to thesis

-error-free prose

-appropriate use of parenthetical citations

Due dates

Early: 3/19

Final: 3/28

Submit in word format via email to bcapper@ualberta.ca

"The most universal definition of the slave is a stranger. Torn from kin and community, exiled from one's country, dishonoured and violated, the slave defines the position of the outsider. She is the perpetual outcast, the coerced migrant, the foreigner, the shamefaced child in the lineage. Contrary to popular belief, Africans did not sell their brothers and sisters into slavery. They sold strangers: those outside the web of kin and clan relationships... In order to betray your race, you had first to imagine yourself as one. The language of race developed in the modern period and in the context of the slave trade" (5).

Kinship

• The production of bonds in the absence of a blood relation

-> Kinship among "strangers" (Obruni) and "outsiders"

-> race becomes a form of identity ("race was both a death sentence and the language of solidarity")

• The severing of new bonds forged under slavery

-> Partus sequitur ventrem

-> All enslaved people are property that can be sold

• The absence of lineage or locatable origins

Black Families and the Afterlife of Slavery

---> Black families have historically been excluded from the cultural, political, and economic privileges of the "domestic ideal" or the nuclear family

Spillers: The slave ship as a counter-narrative to domesticity (and the forms of feminine gender associated with the normative home)

"Redlining"

"Redlining"

• Between 1934-68, the Federal Housing Administration gave out loans to make homeownership more accessible
• These loans, however, we racially segregated -> they refused to give loans to black people or to those who lived near black people
• These loans depended on ratings -> areas were rated based upon colors
• Areas deemed worth investing in were marked as green
• Areas deemed to be risky investments were marked as red
• This meant that black communities were denied loans since they were deemed financially "risky"
• This practice was called "redlining"

The Moynihan Report (1965)

• Racist "report" authored by Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan on what he called "the pathology" of the black family

• Rewrote the long history of racial segregation in the domains of economic and political power as "cultural" differences

• African-American inequality, for Moynihan, is rooted primarily in family structure -> "single-headed households" and "matriarchy"

Moynihan's report depends upon an analysis of the black family as outside of the norms of gender and sexuality

* Discourse of "black matriarchy" (absence of a patriarchal family figure)

* Discourse of black women's hyper-sexuality and hyper-reproductivity

These histories have led many African American queer and feminist theorists to argue that the black family has always been marked as a queer formation

-> as outside the bounds of normative gender and as non-heteronormative

Heterosexuality versus Heteronormativity

Heterosexuality: "straight" people, couple forms, and sexual practices

Heteronormativity: localized practices and centralized institutions which legitimize and privilege heterosexuality

Cathy J. Cohen, "Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?"

"... a queer politics which demonizes all heterosexuals discounts the relationships - especially those based on shared experiences of marginalization - that exist between gays and straights, particularly in communities of color."

-> Race is as much a marker of nonheteronormativity as sexuality

-> Not all "straights" are heteronormative

What is a family? A house? A mother?

How are these defined in the film?