Slavoj Zizek at Occupy Wall Street

Check out parts 1 and 2 of philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek at Occupy Wall Street:





You can also read the transcript from his speech at VersoBooks.

Puar's "Paranoid Temporality" and the Occupy Movement

I had the choice to continue devouring Jasbir Puar's Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times or to watch the coverage of Occupy Wall Street and (gasp!) maybe even check into some regional meetups this weekend. For once, television seemed like the more productive option. It feels useful, though, even important, to personally situate her work in this present. Puar describes:

Paranoid temporality is. . . imbedded in a risk economy that attempts to ensure against future catastrophe. This is a temporality of negative exuberance -- for we are never safe enough, never healthy enough, never prepared enough -- driven by imitation (repetition of the same or in the service of maintaining the same) rather than innovation (openness to disruption of the same, calling out to the new).

A paranoid temporality therefore produces a suppression of critical creative politics; in contrast, the anticipatory temporalities that I advocate more accurately reflect a Spivakian notion of 'politics of the open end,' of positively enticing unknowable political futures into our wake, taking risks rather than guarding against them. (xx)

My entire recollection of an American political landscape has been characterized by this paranoid temporality that Puar introduces here. Fear-based everythings. Fear-based politics, fear-based consumerism, fear-based loving, eating, education, walking, traveling. Fear-based everythings that characterize actions of inactivity and paralysis. And I can't help but feel a sense that this could be the rare, expansive breach of that? I have to admit that I initially approached the Occupy movement with a dose of skepticism, an embarrassingly bourgie level of skepticism. Surely this wouldn't go anywhere. Surely this would be a bunch of hipsters and hippies that would give up after a weekend, and it would gradually dissipate until it was a funny little joke that only Democracy Now! covered.

Alas, this appears not to be the case. It's galvanized. It's spreading. It's laced with uncertainty and growing excitement. I don't have the energy tonight to address the relationship between Puar's work and the description of these protests as an "American Autumn," but there is much to be said and explored there, for sure.

More tomorrow. Now, bed.

While I Was Out. . .

Lazy Sunday mornings are by far one of my all-time favorite things. I realized on this particular Sunday morning, however, that I too have been a bit lazy. All wrapped up in the health care debate this week, I totally blanked out on the story of Caster Semenya of South Africa, who's thrust the issue of the gender binary smack-dab onto my lazy Sunday morning MSNBC. I skimmed past it in the New York Times and totally missed it in Feministing on Thursday, as my head was firmly planted up Rachel Maddow's behind. And though that is a place I'm quite, quite fond of being, I also like to try and remember that other things are happening all over. This week, I sort of fail.

Semenya's sex-determination testing is problematic on a number of levels. First of all, it presupposes that to demonstrate such athletic talent a woman must not a woman be. That's pretty obvious. Of course Semenya must really be a man. It also, however, has placed the gender and sexual binaries at the forefront of the discussion. The categories of "man" and "woman" simply do not in any way account for the ranges of sexual identities that exist. And though I was pleased to hear a sports writer discussing that the rigidity of the gender binary is reductive and inadequate, a topic I rarely get to geek out to outside of my queer theory and feminist circles, my delight that the subject matter was being mainstreamed in no way canceled out the sheer horror of the implications for Semenya. I most often discuss issues of gender and sex with others for whom its a matter of politics, either out of choice or necessity. But it's easy to forget that for many people it has nothing to do with a choice to politicize the issue. It's easy to abstract sex and gender, to theorize them to fetishistic deaths. And yes, it is validating to hear the words "gender binary" on Sunday morning MSNBC. But this should not eclipse what will inevitably be the long and likely traumatic experience of sex-determination testing for Semenya, casting a pall over what should be her time to just savor kicking major ass at what she does.

And the media has scarcely touched the issue of race as it plays into the story. It only begins to scratch at what is still a very real colonial legacy of racism wherein Western configurations of sex and gender dominate and marginalize on the basis of race and difference. Sandra L. Gilman creates a genealogy of the relationship between race, sex, sexuality, and Western Imperialism to medical science in "Black Bodies, White Bodies" that could prove very helpful to anyone interested in a concise exploration of the subject.

This aside, I wax all hopeful-like that the dialogue surrounding Semenya's story will expand mainstream cultural conceptions of sex and gender. Who knows? Maybe I'll catch Anne Fausto-Sterling chatting it up with ol' David Gregory on Meet the Press next week.