Funk the Erotic

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. H. Stallings
Keyword(s):  
Sex Work ◽  
Human Subject ◽  
Black Studies ◽  
The Body ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
Black Artists ◽  
Black Bodies ◽  
Sexual Cultures ◽  
The Erotic

Funk, this book exclaims, is a multisensory and multidimensional philosophy used in conjunction with the erotic, eroticism, and black erotica. It is the affect that shapes film, performance, sound, food, technology, drugs, energy, time, and the seeds of revolutionary ideas for black movements. But funk is also an experience to feel, to hear, to touch and taste, and this book uses funk in all its iterations as an innovation in black studies. The book uses funk to highlight the importance of the erotic and eroticism in black cultural and political movements, debunking “the truth of sex” and its histories. Brandishing funk as a theoretical tool, the book argues that Western theories of the erotic fail as universally applicable terms or philosophies, and thus lack utility in discussions of black bodies, subjects, and culture. In considering the Victorian concept of freak in black funk, the book proposes that black artists across all media have fashioned a tradition that embraces the superfreak, sexual guerrilla, sexual magic, mama's porn, black trans narratives, and sex work in a post-human subject position. Their goal: to ensure survival and evolution in a world that exploits black bodies in capitalist endeavors, imperialism, and colonization. Revitalizing and wide-ranging, the book offers a needed examination of black sexual cultures, a discursive evolution of black ideas about eroticism, a critique of work society, a re-examination of love, and an articulation of the body in black movements.

Beneath Improvisation

2019 ◽  
pp. 759-780
Author(s):  
Vijay Iyer
Keyword(s):  
Social Relations ◽  
Black Studies ◽  
Queer Studies ◽  
Traditional Music ◽  
Institutional Racism ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
The West ◽  
Subaltern Studies ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Critical Model

Improvisation has been construed as Western art music’s Other. This chapter urges music theorists to take the consequences of this configuration seriously. The decision to exclude improvisation as inherently unstable is not neutral, but is bound up with the endemic racism that has characterized social relations in the West and that is being brought to the fore in Black Lives Matter and other recent social and political movements. Traditional music theory is not immune from such institutional racism—its insistence on normative musical behaviors is founded on the (white) phallogocentrism of Western thought. Does the resurgent academic interest in improvisation offer a way out? No, at least not as it is currently studied. Even an apparently impartial approach such as cognitive science is not neutral; perception is colored by race. To get anywhere, this chapter argues, improvisation studies must take difference seriously. Important impetus for a more inclusive critical model comes from such fields as Black studies, Women’s studies, subaltern studies, queer studies, and disability studies.

Customer Service Representatives

2021 ◽  
Vol 120 (3) ◽  
pp. 553-571
Author(s):  
Julian Kevon Glover
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Customer Service ◽  
Sex Work ◽  
Transgender Women ◽  
Average Life Expectancy ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Affective Labor ◽  
Murder Rate ◽  
Black Bodies ◽  
Customer Service Representatives

This article investigates sex work among Black transgender women in Chicago’s ballroom scene, drawing on ethnographic data to argue that Black transwomen engage in sex work as a practice of self-investment undergirded by an epistemological shift regarding the centrality of affective labor to their work. In so doing, interlocutors reap the benefits of deploying embodied knowledge—the harnessing and transformation of insight derived from lived experiences of racial, gender, and sexual subjection into useful strategies, tactics, and tools—to secure material and human resources necessary for survival. A focus on how Black transwomen live, despite continued physical, spiritual, socioeconomic, political, and cultural annihilation, remains critically important given the myriad indicators (low average life expectancy, low annual income, disproportionally high murder rate, etc.) that expose the world’s indifference to the plight of this community and Black bodies writ large. Further, the author places interlocutors in conversation with Black feminist historians’ and theorists’ discussions of sex work among Black women to expose points of convergence between Black cis- and transgender women. The author also complicates narratives that link sex work to “survival” and subsequently obfuscate explorations of limited and situated agency among Black women that have significant historical precedent.

The Inherent Link between Gender and Sexuality: A Queer View to the Portrayal of Women in Herland, Things Fall Apart, Bombay Brides, and The Winner Stands Alone

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-22
Author(s):  
Suparna Roy
Keyword(s):  
Women Characters ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
The Body ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
Symbolic Order ◽  
Helene Cixous ◽  
Cultural Perspectives ◽  
Things Fall Apart ◽  
Gender Trouble

Stevie Jackson and Jackie Jones regarded in her article- Contemporary Feminist Theory that “The concepts of gender and sexuality as a highly ambiguous term, as a point of reference” (Jackson, 131, ch-10). Gender and Sexuality are two most complexly designed, culturally constructed and ambiguously interrelated terms used within the spectrum of Feminism that considers “sex” as an operative term to theorize its deconstructive cultural perspectives. Helene Cixous notes in Laugh of Medusa that men and women enter the symbolic order in a different way and the subject position open to either sex is different. Cixious’s understanding that the centre of the symbolic order is ‘phallus’ and everybody surrounding it stands in the periphery makes women (without intersectionality) as the victim of this phallocentric society. One needs to stop thinking Gender as inherently linked to one’s sex and that it is natural. To say, nothing is natural. The body is just a word (as Judith Butler said in her book Gender Trouble [1990]) that is strategically used under artificial rules for the convenience of ‘power’ to operate. It has been a “norm” to connect one’s sexuality with their Gender and establish that as “naturally built”. The dichotomy of ‘penis/vagina’ over years has linked itself to make/female understanding of bodies. Therefore my main argument in this paper is to draw few instances from some literary works which over time reflected how the gender- female/women characters are made to couple up with a male/man presenting the inherent, coherent compulsory relation between one’s gender and sexuality obliterating any possibility of ‘queer’ relationships, includes- Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915), Bombay Brides (2018) by Esther David, Paulo Coelho’s Winner Stands Alone (2008) and Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall apart (1958).

scholarly journals Looking Like People; Feeling Like People: The Black Body, Dress and Aesthetic Therapy in the Caribbean

2014 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 857-872
Author(s):  
Marsha Pearce
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
New World ◽  
Black Body ◽  
The Body ◽  
Therapeutic Discourse ◽  
Black Caribbean ◽  
Black Bodies ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Bodily Practice ◽  
Instrumental Role

In the Caribbean, the practice of getting dressed matters because it is a practice of attending to the body. Under a colonial regime, black bodies were ill-treated and selves were negated. Clothing played an instrumental role in the abuse of bodies and the stripping of a sense of wellbeing. Attire was one key way of demarcating master and slave and rendering some members of society null and void. Enslaved Africans, who were forcibly brought across the Atlantic to the New World, were considered chattel or commodities rather than people and clothes functioned in a way that reinforced that notion. Yet, dress became a strategy of subversion – of making chattel, property or ‘non-people’ look like people. The enslaved recognised that, through clothes, it was possible to look and feel free. Today that legacy remains. Clothing is seen not only as that which can make a people ‘look like people’ but also feel like people – clothing sets up a specific structure of feeling. This paper pivots on notions of looking and feeling like people while deploying Joanne Entwistle’s conceptual framework of dress as situated bodily practice. The article locates its investigation in the Caribbean, examining the philosophy and practice of Trinidadian clothing designer Robert Young. The article establishes him as a source of aesthetic therapeutic solutions in the Caribbean. It argues that his clothing designs produce a therapeutic discourse on the Black Caribbean body – a discourse, which facilitates a practice of getting dressed that gives a sense of agency, self-empowerment and psychic security even if that sense is embodied temporarily; lasting perhaps only as long as the garment is worn.

scholarly journals The Body/Sex/Work Nexus: A Critical Perspective on Body Work and Sex Work

Body/Sex/Work ◽  
2013 ◽  
pp. 3-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Lara Cohen ◽  
Kate Hardy ◽  
Teela Sanders ◽  
Carol Wolkowitz
Keyword(s):  
Sex Work ◽  
The Body ◽  
Critical Perspective ◽  
Body Work

scholarly journals V. On the chemical analysis of the contents of the thoracic duct the human sub­ject

1842 ◽  
Vol 132 ◽  
pp. 81-85 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Chemical Analysis ◽  
Thoracic Duct ◽  
Human Subject ◽  
The Body ◽  
Old Bailey ◽  
The Subject

The contents of the thoracic duct in the human subject having never been obtained in sufficient quantity for the purposes of chemical analysis, I resolved to avail myself of an opportunity which lately presented itself in the execution of a criminal at the Old Bailey. Through the kindness of Messrs. Macmurdo and Holding, the medical officers of Newgate, and with the assistance of my friends Mr. Hilton and Mr. Samuel Lane, I was enabled to commence operating upon the body one hour and a quarter after death, and before it had become cold, although the thermometer stood considerably below 32° Fahr., and the body had been exposed on the scaffold during one hour. The subject was muscular and of the middle height, and the prisoner had not become emaciated during his confinement in jail. On the evening preceding his execution, he had partaken of some supper, consisting of about 2 oz. of bread and 4 oz. of meat; and the next morning, he drank two cups of tea, and ate a piece of toast made from the quarter of a round of a quartern loaf, and about a quarter of an inch in thick­ness. This breakfast was taken at seven o’clock A. M., one hour before death. He swallowed a glass of wine just before mounting the scaffold.

Lexicography, discourse and power

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 601-629
Author(s):  
Wenge Chen
Keyword(s):  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Postcolonial Studies ◽  
The Body ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
Power Dynamics ◽  
Power And Resistance ◽  
Ideological Struggle ◽  
Cultural Power ◽  
A Site ◽  
International English

Abstract This paper conceptualizes dictionary bilingualization as a recontextualizing practice and explores how ideology and power play out in the recontextualization of lexicographic discourse across languages and cultures to result in the transformation of meaning. It first proposes viewing the (bilingualized) dictionary as discourse and emphasizes bilingual lexicography as a site of an asymmetrical linguistic and cultural power dynamics. The paper then argues that a synergy of critical discourse analysis and postcolonial studies can reveal the inter-cultural ideological struggle implicit in the bilingualizing lexicographic practice. The body of the study is devoted to the analysis of those shifts taking place in the entries, definition, illustrative examples and pragmatic labels in a bilingualized English-Chinese dictionary, which, when viewed cumulatively, significantly reshape the ideological positioning of the dictionary. The paper discusses the implications for critical lexicographic studies and for research into the interplay between power and resistance between dominating and dominated cultures. It concludes that Periphery English dictionary compilers are able to negotiate the different subjectivities and ideologies inherent in dictionary making and to adopt a subject position favorable to their empowerment in the international English lexicography, although such resistance is far from capable of restructuring the order of lexicography.

Eugenic Nostalgia: Self-Narration and Internalized Ableism in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 437-452 ◽  
Author(s):  
Will Kanyusik
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Genetically Engineered ◽  
The Body ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
Cultural Norms ◽  
Cultural Narratives ◽  
Person Perspective ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Disability Identity

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has recently argued that Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go deconstructs ableism’s binary structure by postulating the existence of clone characters who occupy an abject position in a eugenic dystopia precisely because their genetically engineered, idealized able bodies exist to be used to “cure” the disabilities of others. The article builds on Garland-Thomson’s work, discussing the role of science fiction in Ishiguro’s book as a means to explore how ableist narratives contribute to cultural norms that enable an overt disciplining of disabled bodies that still occurs, despite it no longer being socially acceptable, and posits protagonist Kathy H.’s story as a narrative of disability identity that exposes the contradictory nature of a belief in the able body and its opposition to disability. Putatively able-bodied, Kathy narrates her experience of the world from a subject position that undermines a stable construction of the body within an ableist framework, ultimately showing these distinctions to be untenable. By discussing the role of first-person perspective in Ishiguro’s novel as a means to interrogate internalized cultural narratives that perpetuate ableist practices, the article examines how cultural notions of ability and disability function as terms that define through exclusion the citizen-subject in liberal democratic societies.

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