• Keeling, Flight: Intro, 1, 2, 5, 7
• Hayward, “Spider City Sex” & “Cut Sex Animal” (emailed)
Sensitizing, feeling, and laboring with materialities helps us acquire new body parts, new companions, new outlooks, as well as offering tools for reexamining pasts, critique itself, and processes for unlearning.
===KEELING'S WORK:
from KK's Lesbian Communities course sites: Keeling in transmedia & Keeling in black femme :
14: COMMON SENSE = both • common ways bodies' neurologically connect sensory perception as emotion and • common "set of memory-images that includes experiences, knowledges, traditions, and so on and that are available to memory during perception."
20: "By claiming that common sense is a shared set of memory-images and a set of commonly habituated sensory-motor movements with the capacity to enable alternative perceptions and, hence, alternative knowledges, I am challenging narratives of political struggle that reify Reason... [including] political organizing based on consciousness raising more generally. I am also insisting on a conceptualization of common sense in which shared conceptions of the world are inseparable from sensory-motor functions."
===
Keeling, 6-7: "each chapter corresponds with a song.... In 1971 the R&B group the Undisputed Truth released the enigmatic and haunting cautionary music notes of 'Smiling Faces Sometimes,' the song for chapters 1 and 2.... "The lyrics are cautionary. They educate. But a consideration of the meaning of the song is flat without an account of the music, especially its bass line, which gets caught in an endless repetition.... 'Smiling Faces Sometimes' raises many of the questions the theoretical frameworks elaborated in chapters 1 and 2 have been constructed to address.... providing The Witch's Flight with an affective register that simultaneously exceeds and yearns toward what the book's sometimes dense critical theoretical prose can achieve.... Work with me."
===
Keeling, 8: "In chapter 5 Nina Simone's distinctive voice redefines the optimism of the Five Stairstep's version of 'O-o-h Child,' pushing its smooth and reassuring claims that things will get easier in a different direction altogether. Simone thereby sets to work on the psychic dimensions of black life and survival, revealing the 'strange blending of love and helplessness' that 'O-o-h Child' offers."
===
03:17 - 11 months ago youtube.com
From The Album`Here Comes The Sun` 1971.
youtube.com
===
Ooh-oo child
Things are gonna get easier
Ooh-oo child
Things'll get brighter
Ooh-oo child
Things are gonna get easier
Ooh-oo child
Things'll get brighter
Some day, yeah
We'll get it together and we'll get it all done
Some day
When your head is much lighter
Some day, yeah
We'll walk in the rays of a beautiful sun
Some day
When the world is much brighter
Ooh-oo child
Things are gonna be easier
Ooh-oo child
Things'll get be brighter
Ooh-oo child
Things are gonna be easier
Ooh-oo child
Things'll get be brighter
Some day, yeah
We'll get it together and we'll get it all done
Some day
When your head is much lighter
Some day, yeah
We'll walk in the rays of a beautiful sun
Some day
When the world is much brighter
Some day, yeah
We'll get it together and we'll get it all done
Some day
When your head is much lighter
Some day, yeah
We'll walk in the rays of a beautiful sun
Some day
When the world is much brighter
Ooh-oo child
Things are gonna get easier
Ooh-oo child
Things'll get brighter
Ooh-oo child
Things are gonna get easier
Ooh-oo child
Things'll get brighter
Right now, right now
===
Keeling, 107: "In examining Pam Grier's blaxploitation films, one engages in a process that is consistent with that Ferguson attributes to capital: one is participating in the multiplication of surplus.... The multiplication of surplus... describes the context out of which nonheteronormative racial formations emerge. If one can understand mass-cultural forms such as blaxploitation and serial dramas on cable-television channels to be part of the way that capital valorizes itself, then one's participation and engagement with those mass-cultural products, one's affective labor on them, must be understood to be part of capital's processes of valorization as well. Reframed in this way, blaxploitation films, which were produced during a period of economic crisis for the film industry and that solicited the formation of surplus film-going populations recognizable as young, urban, and black, can be understood as both the site of the material production of nonheteronormative racial formations and a discursive locus of anxiety about that very production. ¶ In other words, blaxploitation films are 'queer,' if we can understand 'queer' to mark an antinormative positioning with regard to sexuality."
"For example, in Pam Grier's Foxy Brown, as in several of her other blaxploitation films, the image of a 'stud broad,' 'butch,' or 'masculine female' that threatens to result when one who is recognizably female claims masculinity...brings to the surface a number of internal tensions...."
108: "Invariably, the drive to enforce heterosexuality as the context for Grier's character's sexual circulation as constructed by the film's narratives is dramatized by her character's violent confrontation with an image recognizable as a 'butch lesbian'... Grier's characters emerge from these violent confrontations victorious, feminine, and heterosexual. Grier's films...are generative of surplus that has proven productive for contemporary transvaluations of femininity and sexuality, such as in the recent cable-television show, The L Word, a series in which Grier has a starring role."
===
===
114: "Because blaxploitation participates, by virtue of its own formal excesses, in the processes described by Ferguson in terms of the multiplications of surplus, the surplus value shaken loose by interactions with blaxploitation might support unpredictable coalitions. For instance, there is a long-standing affiliation between the images valorized by that portion of the mainstream audience available to be consolidated as 'lesbians,' and those valorized as adolescent and adult heterosexual males, even though it is not at all clear that these populations valorize those images in the same way."
114-5: "The [L Word] series certainly exploits this connection between what it presents as lesbian sex and male heterosexuality by frequently staging that version of lesbian sex for a male or presumably heterosexual gaze within its narrative, a tactic that raises complicated questions about the possibilities for the production of a feminine female sexuality that cannot be recuperated into heteronormative dictates of female sexuality. Without a butch masculinity or some other alternative to normative femininity present to complicate normative assumptions about gender, sexuality, and bodily expressions, the depictions of 'lesbian sex' in which The L Word traffics, raise serious questions...."
===
115-6: "Pam Grier's appearance in The L Word complicates this assimilationist project, because she reveals where, in its efforts to satisfy its own requirement for self-valorization, The L Word attempts to draw on Grier's prior accumulation of value as sexy blaxploitation heroine while remaining inattentive to the ways that value relies upon a nonheteronormativity that was simultaneously racialized, sexualized, and gendered. Pam Grier's presence in The L Word might introject into the series some of blaxploitation's surplus value and its surplus populations (and with them the potential for a critique of normative ideals of race, gender, class, and sexuality)."
===HAYWARD'S WORK:
from CAA talk "Cut Sex Animal; Or, Animals in Becoming" (Erika Rutherford images here & here):
"...I want to suggest, following queer/feminist investigations of the body and embodiment, that [Rutherford's] work explores transsexual becoming, how the changing of the body is not about loss or amputation, but producing the conditions of physical and psychical re-growth. And, what I find particularly interesting about Rutherford's later paintings is the way they extend these initial questions about transsexuality to consider the problematic of the category of 'human.' Indeed, the transsexual in Rutherford's work transitions through 'animal traffic,' constituting the self in opposition to humanizing efforts even when that opposition is not desired. I'm thinking here of not only her painted trans-species figurations, but the ways that horse urine -- literally through the prescription of Premarin (the hormone most often used in trans hormonal replacement therapy) -- shapes and reshapes the carnal density of perception. Through her work, I will argue, she retells becoming transsexual as a kind of trans-corporeality -- a convergence of corporeal-material being and its ongoing intra- and inter-relationality with space and its cohabitants -- that necessitates an un-becoming human (or posthumanity), suggesting that sexes and species are not yet done categories."
from essay forthcoming in Women & Performance "Spider City Sex":
"A neighborhood: people moving along streets on foot, or by car or bicycle; cell phones vibrating and ensuing conversations; pigeons shitting on the eaves of buildings; federal and state policies subtending urban plans; a hot day fills alleyways with the stink of urine, rotting food, vomit, and unimaginable things; traffic lights directing movements; city sounds building-out scale and volume; eateries and shops indulging the walker with window scenes. A neighborhood is a bumptious coherence of bodies (human and nonhuman), ecosystems, communities, buildings, and sensations."
"Bodies, according to Alphonso Lingis, are collectivities, constitutive materializations generated through movements and provocations. He writes: 'The form and substantance of our bodies are...coral reefs of polyps, sponges, gorgonians, and free-swimming macrophages continually stirred by monsoon climates of moist air, blood, and biles' (2000: 28).... bodies are also always bindings of excitations, affections, and sensations."
"...I offer that the transitional body is a reactivated, refreshed, and resourced sensuous body, a phenomenological topography of affects and percepts that are changed in order to feel transposed states of corporeality."
"...an environment, a zone, and its inhabitants are also re-inscribed into the body through its alteration of sensorium. For example, a body feels itself organized by the sidewalk, the speed of passing vehicals; or, I brush up against buildings, smelling and touching them, seeking shelter from the rain as I walk downtown. What about transitioning? How might hormones, for example, retool sensuousness in relation to the city, the neighborhood? Do surgeries and their healings impact the trans-self in space; that is to ask, does flesh re-meet the world?"
"Perhaps it seems an eccentric linking of transsexual transitioning and urban spaces with animality, or risky in that trans-people may appear animalized, or reducing the lived struggles of animals to make anthropocentric claims. However, for many who undergo hormonal and surgical alterations, the animal has always been present. Eugen Steinach studied 'Hormonal replacement therapy' through the surgical alterations of testes and ovaries in animals....transplantation techniques would inform later experimental surgeries on humans. The first documented mtf sex change (1921) was a non-human ovary implantation. Animal experimentation and instrumentalities are enmeshed in the genealogies of becoming transsexual."
Louise Bourgeois spider and cells series ; article on artnet here
"...[Myra] Hird [2004] enumerates a vast array of organisms such as fishes, marine snails, worms, and insects that change their sex in relation to environmental pressures, reproductive potential, or even the vagaries of taste. Not to propose that human transsexuals change for the same reasons, obviously the technologies of transitioning are at different scales and refrains, but that the enactment of sex change is in some way a bodily engagement with the world. It is the constitution of a relational milieu, an in-between site through which conductivities and energies form bodiliness, and expressiveness or responsiveness, the excitation of transfers, is what is at stake in species and sexual orders.... Trans-phyla exchanges of affects work to weave bodies together; that is to say, through a crossing of sensations, bodies merge, building out milieus, domains."
from Hayward 2008 "Starfish": "The cut is possibility. For some transsexual women, the cut is not so much an opening of the body, but a generative effort to pull the body back through itself in order to feel mending, to feel the growth of new margins. The cut is not just an action; the cut is part of the ongoing materialization by which a transsexual tentatively and mutably becomes. The cut cuts the meat (not primarily a visual operation for the embodied subject, but rather a proprioceptive one), and a space of psychical possibility is thereby created. From the first, a transsexual woman embodiment does not necessarily foreground a wish to 'look like' or 'look more like a woman' (ie. passing) -- though for some transwomen this may indeed be a wish (fulfilled or not). The point of view of the looker (those who might 'read' her) is not the important feature of trans-subjectivity -- the trans-woman wishes to be of her body, to 'speak' from her body."
===
===
Things are gonna get easier
Ooh-oo child
Things'll get brighter
Ooh-oo child
Things are gonna get easier
Ooh-oo child
Things'll get brighter
Some day, yeah
We'll get it together and we'll get it all done
Some day
When your head is much lighter
Some day, yeah
We'll walk in the rays of a beautiful sun
Some day
When the world is much brighter
Ooh-oo child
Things are gonna be easier
Ooh-oo child
Things'll get be brighter
Ooh-oo child
Things are gonna be easier
Ooh-oo child
Things'll get be brighter
Some day, yeah
We'll get it together and we'll get it all done
Some day
When your head is much lighter
Some day, yeah
We'll walk in the rays of a beautiful sun
Some day
When the world is much brighter
Some day, yeah
We'll get it together and we'll get it all done
Some day
When your head is much lighter
Some day, yeah
We'll walk in the rays of a beautiful sun
Some day
When the world is much brighter
Ooh-oo child
Things are gonna get easier
Ooh-oo child
Things'll get brighter
Ooh-oo child
Things are gonna get easier
Ooh-oo child
Things'll get brighter
Right now, right now
===
05:00 - 7 months ago youtube.com
Clips of Pam Grier from the movies "Coffy" "Foxy Brown" and "Jackie Brown" Not only are they my favorites, but I'm sure most of her fans would agree they are her best films ...
youtube.com
Keeling, 107: "In examining Pam Grier's blaxploitation films, one engages in a process that is consistent with that Ferguson attributes to capital: one is participating in the multiplication of surplus.... The multiplication of surplus... describes the context out of which nonheteronormative racial formations emerge. If one can understand mass-cultural forms such as blaxploitation and serial dramas on cable-television channels to be part of the way that capital valorizes itself, then one's participation and engagement with those mass-cultural products, one's affective labor on them, must be understood to be part of capital's processes of valorization as well. Reframed in this way, blaxploitation films, which were produced during a period of economic crisis for the film industry and that solicited the formation of surplus film-going populations recognizable as young, urban, and black, can be understood as both the site of the material production of nonheteronormative racial formations and a discursive locus of anxiety about that very production. ¶ In other words, blaxploitation films are 'queer,' if we can understand 'queer' to mark an antinormative positioning with regard to sexuality."
Definition valorize: from Answers.com
tr.v., -ized, -iz·ing, -iz·es.
- To establish and maintain the price of (a commodity) by governmental action.
- To give or assign a value to: "The prophets valorized history" (Mircea Eliade).
[Portuguese valorizar, from valor, value, from Late Latin. See valor.]
valorization val'or·i·za'tion (-ər-ĭ-zā'shən) n."For example, in Pam Grier's Foxy Brown, as in several of her other blaxploitation films, the image of a 'stud broad,' 'butch,' or 'masculine female' that threatens to result when one who is recognizably female claims masculinity...brings to the surface a number of internal tensions...."
108: "Invariably, the drive to enforce heterosexuality as the context for Grier's character's sexual circulation as constructed by the film's narratives is dramatized by her character's violent confrontation with an image recognizable as a 'butch lesbian'... Grier's characters emerge from these violent confrontations victorious, feminine, and heterosexual. Grier's films...are generative of surplus that has proven productive for contemporary transvaluations of femininity and sexuality, such as in the recent cable-television show, The L Word, a series in which Grier has a starring role."
===
05:21 - 1 year ago sho.com
The L Word Season 5 Video Podcasts Pam Grier talks about the conflict revolving around The Planet.
sho.com
===
03:22 - 7 months ago youtube.com
Nony Hendryx, Pam Grier and Betty singing "Transformation". This song is from "The L Word" I love it, so i uploaded it ^^ Here; if you want to download it: www.speedyshare.com
youtube.com
===01:32 - 2 years ago comcast.net
The L Word starring Leisha Hailey, Erin Daniels, Laurel Holloman, Pam Grier, Mia Kirshner, Jennifer Beals
comcast.net
114: "Because blaxploitation participates, by virtue of its own formal excesses, in the processes described by Ferguson in terms of the multiplications of surplus, the surplus value shaken loose by interactions with blaxploitation might support unpredictable coalitions. For instance, there is a long-standing affiliation between the images valorized by that portion of the mainstream audience available to be consolidated as 'lesbians,' and those valorized as adolescent and adult heterosexual males, even though it is not at all clear that these populations valorize those images in the same way."
114-5: "The [L Word] series certainly exploits this connection between what it presents as lesbian sex and male heterosexuality by frequently staging that version of lesbian sex for a male or presumably heterosexual gaze within its narrative, a tactic that raises complicated questions about the possibilities for the production of a feminine female sexuality that cannot be recuperated into heteronormative dictates of female sexuality. Without a butch masculinity or some other alternative to normative femininity present to complicate normative assumptions about gender, sexuality, and bodily expressions, the depictions of 'lesbian sex' in which The L Word traffics, raise serious questions...."
===
02:18 - 2 years ago youtube.com
A Cute Clip from The L Word season 1 episode 14 - Limb from Limb with Kit and Ivan. Visit the Twiddleberry Princess: www.myspace.com
youtube.com
115-6: "Pam Grier's appearance in The L Word complicates this assimilationist project, because she reveals where, in its efforts to satisfy its own requirement for self-valorization, The L Word attempts to draw on Grier's prior accumulation of value as sexy blaxploitation heroine while remaining inattentive to the ways that value relies upon a nonheteronormativity that was simultaneously racialized, sexualized, and gendered. Pam Grier's presence in The L Word might introject into the series some of blaxploitation's surplus value and its surplus populations (and with them the potential for a critique of normative ideals of race, gender, class, and sexuality)."
===HAYWARD'S WORK:
from CAA talk "Cut Sex Animal; Or, Animals in Becoming" (Erika Rutherford images here & here):
"...I want to suggest, following queer/feminist investigations of the body and embodiment, that [Rutherford's] work explores transsexual becoming, how the changing of the body is not about loss or amputation, but producing the conditions of physical and psychical re-growth. And, what I find particularly interesting about Rutherford's later paintings is the way they extend these initial questions about transsexuality to consider the problematic of the category of 'human.' Indeed, the transsexual in Rutherford's work transitions through 'animal traffic,' constituting the self in opposition to humanizing efforts even when that opposition is not desired. I'm thinking here of not only her painted trans-species figurations, but the ways that horse urine -- literally through the prescription of Premarin (the hormone most often used in trans hormonal replacement therapy) -- shapes and reshapes the carnal density of perception. Through her work, I will argue, she retells becoming transsexual as a kind of trans-corporeality -- a convergence of corporeal-material being and its ongoing intra- and inter-relationality with space and its cohabitants -- that necessitates an un-becoming human (or posthumanity), suggesting that sexes and species are not yet done categories."
from essay forthcoming in Women & Performance "Spider City Sex":
 |
| SF's Tenderloin |
"A neighborhood: people moving along streets on foot, or by car or bicycle; cell phones vibrating and ensuing conversations; pigeons shitting on the eaves of buildings; federal and state policies subtending urban plans; a hot day fills alleyways with the stink of urine, rotting food, vomit, and unimaginable things; traffic lights directing movements; city sounds building-out scale and volume; eateries and shops indulging the walker with window scenes. A neighborhood is a bumptious coherence of bodies (human and nonhuman), ecosystems, communities, buildings, and sensations."
"...I offer that the transitional body is a reactivated, refreshed, and resourced sensuous body, a phenomenological topography of affects and percepts that are changed in order to feel transposed states of corporeality."
"...an environment, a zone, and its inhabitants are also re-inscribed into the body through its alteration of sensorium. For example, a body feels itself organized by the sidewalk, the speed of passing vehicals; or, I brush up against buildings, smelling and touching them, seeking shelter from the rain as I walk downtown. What about transitioning? How might hormones, for example, retool sensuousness in relation to the city, the neighborhood? Do surgeries and their healings impact the trans-self in space; that is to ask, does flesh re-meet the world?"
"Perhaps it seems an eccentric linking of transsexual transitioning and urban spaces with animality, or risky in that trans-people may appear animalized, or reducing the lived struggles of animals to make anthropocentric claims. However, for many who undergo hormonal and surgical alterations, the animal has always been present. Eugen Steinach studied 'Hormonal replacement therapy' through the surgical alterations of testes and ovaries in animals....transplantation techniques would inform later experimental surgeries on humans. The first documented mtf sex change (1921) was a non-human ovary implantation. Animal experimentation and instrumentalities are enmeshed in the genealogies of becoming transsexual."
Louise Bourgeois spider and cells series ; article on artnet here
"...[Myra] Hird [2004] enumerates a vast array of organisms such as fishes, marine snails, worms, and insects that change their sex in relation to environmental pressures, reproductive potential, or even the vagaries of taste. Not to propose that human transsexuals change for the same reasons, obviously the technologies of transitioning are at different scales and refrains, but that the enactment of sex change is in some way a bodily engagement with the world. It is the constitution of a relational milieu, an in-between site through which conductivities and energies form bodiliness, and expressiveness or responsiveness, the excitation of transfers, is what is at stake in species and sexual orders.... Trans-phyla exchanges of affects work to weave bodies together; that is to say, through a crossing of sensations, bodies merge, building out milieus, domains."
from Hayward 2008 "Starfish": "The cut is possibility. For some transsexual women, the cut is not so much an opening of the body, but a generative effort to pull the body back through itself in order to feel mending, to feel the growth of new margins. The cut is not just an action; the cut is part of the ongoing materialization by which a transsexual tentatively and mutably becomes. The cut cuts the meat (not primarily a visual operation for the embodied subject, but rather a proprioceptive one), and a space of psychical possibility is thereby created. From the first, a transsexual woman embodiment does not necessarily foreground a wish to 'look like' or 'look more like a woman' (ie. passing) -- though for some transwomen this may indeed be a wish (fulfilled or not). The point of view of the looker (those who might 'read' her) is not the important feature of trans-subjectivity -- the trans-woman wishes to be of her body, to 'speak' from her body."
===
