“We are prisoners, not inmates”: prison letters as liminal counter-carceral spaces

The question of porousness and liminality of prison has been the subject of a huge amount of research. This article focuses on the relationships, communications, and narratives that occur behind prison walls. It examines letter writing in relation to the construction of a bridge that connects the opacity of the inside with the outside, creating a counter-carceral liminal space. The article investigates the encounter between the outside, represented in OLGa (the political collective in which I participate), and the inside (the prisoners) through the process of letter writing. The article further draws upon my own positionality through an engaged discussion on the limitations of scholar activism and the problem of speaking for others.

Spring Continues To Blossom In The Valley : A Documentary Film

This paper is written in support of my 27-minute film, Spring Continues to Blossom in the Valley, a poetic-political journey film that documents the sufferings of ordinary people in Indian-administrated Kashmir. These people have been stuck between the history and geography, crushed by both Indian army and the militants, in one of the world’s longest-running conflicts. The historical-political context is provided in the first chapter. The documentary journey is discussed concerning structure, memories and hope for life along with the ethical issues regarding speaking for others, especially filming victims and their families. This paper also focused on the silent landscapes and signs of memory. The film’s social-political pertinence is relevantly set about biased discourses, global terrorism, and Kashmir conflict.

Spring Continues To Blossom In The Valley : A Documentary Film

This paper is written in support of my 27-minute film, Spring Continues to Blossom in the Valley, a poetic-political journey film that documents the sufferings of ordinary people in Indian-administrated Kashmir. These people have been stuck between the history and geography, crushed by both Indian army and the militants, in one of the world’s longest-running conflicts. The historical-political context is provided in the first chapter. The documentary journey is discussed concerning structure, memories and hope for life along with the ethical issues regarding speaking for others, especially filming victims and their families. This paper also focused on the silent landscapes and signs of memory. The film’s social-political pertinence is relevantly set about biased discourses, global terrorism, and Kashmir conflict.

Animal Studies

Animal studies is a rapidly developing interdisciplinary field. It has roots in both animal ethics and feminist philosophy. While mainstream animal ethics has not yet incorporated the insights from feminist philosophy, work in animal studies has increasingly drawn on and built upon feminist thinking. Feminist animal studies can, in turn, contribute to discussions in feminist ethics and feminist epistemology. In this chapter, three key connected issues that are central to feminist philosophy and important within animal studies are discussed: the centrality of relationships, navigating difference, and speaking for others.

Tricity Vogue’s ‘blueing up’ as sedimented resistance: Extravagant costume and the expanded field of dressing up

My focus in this article is to understand the way theatrical costume is performed in subcultural cabaret spaces, specifically The Blue Lady Sings Back by London-based cabaret singer Tricity Vogue. This show premiered at The Royal Vauxhall Tavern in the area of Vauxhall in South London that already has an embedded history of hedonistic pleasure. With reference to Dorita Hannah’s ‘expanded’ notion of costume as a ‘body-object-event’ and Jasbir Puar’s broader understanding of categories of race, gender and sexuality as events and bodily encounters, I seek to understand the way theatrical feminine costume enfolds dissident and marginalized histories of resistant urban space and site. In this show, Tricity Vogue undertakes multiple costume changes that embody various histories and contexts of cabaret performance: as Bollywood dancer Madhuri Dixit, as a European Marlene Dietrich-like cabaret singer and as a Josephine Baker-esque character in a banana skirt. All of this whilst wearing a blue stocking and blue body paint, effectively ‘blueing’ up. This steps into an uncomfortable territory in what could be seen as cultural appropriation, racial stereotyping and speaking for others. This concern also has currency within the contemporary burlesque community who are acutely self-conscious and politicized as regards this kind of costume and performative appropriation. Sara Ahmed’s conceptualization of feminist killjoys (2017) will be employed to better understand these difficult conversations about dressing up with Aoife Monks’ (2010) discussion of multiple costume changes being used as a strategy for ‘undoing’ stereotypes and rethinking a feminist ‘we’. By also drawing on diva studies, which builds on Lauren Berlant’s concept of ‘diva citizenship’, and postcolonial feminism, I will argue that the costumed cabaret body becomes a medium for women to politicize and reframe pleasure through the costumed spectacle of cabaret’s various erotic and exotic muses.