Ballerinas Dance with Machine Guns

DESTROY WEB 2.0

Empirical examples of the externalization of value production, of its extension into the sphere of circulation, are now abundant (of the most recent works on the consumer-as-producer phenomenon, see Marie Anne Dujarier, Le travail du consommateur. De McDo à eBay: comment nous coproduisons ce que nous achetons, La découverte, Paris, 2008). Ever since the first phase of company outsourcing (subcontracts to suppliers and external consultants), which, beginning in the 1980s, saw the emergence of atypical labor and of second generation autonomous labor (freelance, entrepreneurs of themselves, former employees who became self-employed) along the lines of the “Toyota model,” capitalist colonization of the circulation sphere has been nonstop, to the point of transforming the consumer into a veritable producer of economic value. Coproduction, where the individual is the coproducer of what he consumes, “is today at the heart of the strategies of public and private companies. They put the consumer to work in various phases of value creation. The consumer contributes to market creation, producing services, managing damages, and hazards, sorting litter, optimizing the fixed assets of suppliers and even administration. Coproduction concerns all mass services, specifically: retail, bank, transportation, free time, restaurant, media, education, health…” (Durajer, op. cit., p. 8).

[…]There are many […] examples: software companies, beginning with Microsoft or Google, habitually beta test the new versions of their programs on consumers, but also the programs belonging to so-called open source software are improved by a multitude of people, by “productive consumers.”

After the 2001 crisis, writes Tiziana Terranova, the new strategy of the new economy is “‘social web’ or ‘web 2.0.’ Web 2.0 businesses, O’Reilly says, all have something in common. Their success is based on their ability to attract masses of users who create a world of social relations on the basis of the platforms/environments made available by sites like Friendster, Facebook, Flickr, Myspace, SecondLife and Blogger. Nonetheless, O’Reilly underscores, the web 2.0 is not limited to these new platforms, but also involves applications like Google, in the extent to which they manage to harness and valorize user browsing; or other applications that again allow the extraction of surplus value from common actions like linking a site, flagging a blog post, modifying software, and so forth. […] Web 2.0 is a winning model for investors, since it harnesses, incorporates, and valorizes the social and technological labor of users. The frontier of innovation of the capitalist valorization process in the new economy is the ‘marginalization of waged labor and the valorization of free [user] labor,’ which is to say an unpaid and undirected labor, but which is nonetheless controlled.”
—Christian Marazzi, The Violence of Financial Capitalism 

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Maybe it explains why I spend all day basically every day reading/researching/writing and have never been paid for a single article/poem/story/essay/blog post—except a few dollars here and there for zines/chapbooks. It’s a model. Makes me want to delete this blog. Here we have the illusion of integrity that comes with the modern ethos of being a self-made creator, an illusion that tells us that we control the means of our intellectual/artistic production when actually, we are just induced to produce content for tumblr and other sites for free. Fuck you, internet. Makes me feel like a fool for scraping by on nothing for so long, to “focus” on my writing, channeling all my energy into outlets that offer little reward, living in semi-squalor in a space too tiny for me to even fit my clothes, let alone a dresser. Actually, there is the reward of connecting with people, but I don’t want to do it on here. This model would be great if I were rich as hell because I can share with a fuckload of people here. I like sharing with as many as possible and I am totally against commodifying my work but it is sneakily being commodified when it circulates like: this. I do not have a husband to support my endeavors and I think I’m done living like “this” for my work because the situation isn’t even conducive to doing work—it’s stressful being broke and I haven’t had the space to work. E always says, you should really just become an academic, tons of $$, just milk it, etc. Sad that that’s the only way to do it, to be an artist or intellectual. Institutionalization neutralizes but what other options are there these days?

.where it happen::THE FIELD.

It was pre-big bang and my task was to make myself born. No overstatement. I did not remember how to make movement happen. I had to pee but I could not move. It was the hardest thing in the world—to generate energy from within a sterile void, alone, pushing against the force of everything, the force of everything that has you pinned to the couch when your bladder is about to explode. A part of me did not understand why it was preferable to walk up the stairs and pee rather than just peeing my pants. I was already wet. What’s the big deal? Pee is mostly water anyway. When it was no longer necessary that I GET UP because I had rationalized not getting up—I GOT UP. That’s how it always happens, no? Movement always, somehow, when I feel weakest, when everything is impossible. That morning getting up to pee felt a little bit like being God, like being a creature endowed with the power to create something out of nothing, the origin of all things, causa sui. In that GETTING UP I also felt how lonely it is to be God, how alone I was in that moment because I secretly wanted someone to emerge and carry me, maybe a group of people, all the ones I’ve loved, to walk out of a room and lift me above their heads, up the stairs. But nobody was around. It was before 7am and I could not depend on anyone or anything to propel me. I know you are thinking—how dare you compare a bout of laziness to being God! But it wasn’t laziness. I had forgotten how to walk and there was no one to help me.

I don’t know. I’ve never felt I’ve had the power to do anything and yet it always happens, the words writing themselves. Somehow, a life made while I was asleep, or pretending to be asleep, or just keeled over in bed, bitching and whining about how I can’t do it, I’m just not strong enough. What is that part of me that does it intuitively? One night Ariana called it spirit. I like it though maybe it has Hegelian connotations.

 
[accidentally opened photobooth while writing this and was amused by the way the light in the background looked like it was coming out of my head.]

The other day, or night, I finished reading Alix Cleo Roubaud’s journal, and when it was over, at around 4am, when I read the last lines of the last entry I was filled with such sadness. But that sadness did not fully ripen until the next morning, when I stepped into the field at 6am, it was pouring rain, and I was stuck on this thought—was she at peace when she died? I did not believe she was afraid—such a thought was unthinkable to me, in that moment—it would have destroyed me. I am not projecting, though. In the last entries leading up to her death there was a change of tone. There was a period of calm that arose out of the ashes of the putrid colorless anxious blank hell of the suicidal days. There was a calm, a very religious calm, and while I was reading I thought, this lightness can only mean the coming of death. And in the last entry before dying she noted that all she every wanted was to die, that is, until she became deathly ill. It took a fatal illness for her to give up wanting to die. Now that I am outside it, it’s difficult for me to describe how my heart broke when I was standing in the field thinking of Alix, how much more tragic it was made by the rain. The feeling was welling up inside me, a formless melancholy was doing cartwheels in my gut, and then the first tears, the question, her death, was she at peace, the question, the thought. The string of thoughts kept making laps and every time the thought made its round it was larger, accumulating more and more force, revolving around a center point: her death, her dead body: the whole thing, a cyclone, a whirlwind gathering grass and splintered wood and sensation until the suffering was so large that I got swept up into the center of it and found myself bawling like crazy for reasons I did not fully understand. Wind and rain…I was unable to distinguish my tears from the rain. I felt like I had stepped into her lived-sadness and found myself, there, in what I saw. I made a textile tactile textured timeline of her life and it made me feel sick—thinking about how much energy she initially had, how much she perceived during those early days, her photographic sense of details and quiet moments, and then the turning point, when that all started to fade and everything flattened, there were huge gaps between entries because she could not longer access anything from the state she was in—not color, not ideas…just the wanting to die. And then, the brief sense of tranquility in the entries leading up to her death. Stepping into her sadness I found myself standing in the cyclone, and in the cyclone I remembered—I remembered that there was once a time when I knew how to trust my voice, like Alix knew how to trust her voice before the darkness set in and blotted out everything. I remembered how the SIGNIFICANCE of everything would rage inside me at all times, how sensitized I was to everything around me, and to things beyond me, how my mind would cross great distances to reach a phrase or strings of words or a thought so far from me or my life, such strange things. After reading Jacques Roubaud’s some thing black it seemed urgent that I write him a letter and tell him that I made contact with his dead wife, that I saw Alix, calm before death.

Alix Cleo Roubaud, “If Some Thing Black. 2.,” c. 1982

There was another morning. A couple mornings before this one. For the last several weeks I have stayed awake most nights sitting in an office reading and writing. A person I met through E had two offices at Hopkins and he gave me one of his offices to use. I’ve basically been living in it since he handed me the key. So on this other morning… I was not expecting it to be light out when I emerged from the windowless basement office. Down in the hole I was still thinking of it as night. But it was sunrise. I had stayed up all night writing and communing with Marguerite Duras. When I stepped out into the morning I was in such a state that I thought I had restored my life to its former joy. I walked home, still on the edge of everything, thinking about Duras—she cannot and will not narrativize the trauma, she lets it remain: a hole—how insane you feel after whole days of solitude, a song named “calm memory” came on, I listened to my headphones as I walked, stopped for a very long time at the edge of the field to observe the way the sun lit up the dew on the grass, to think about angles and different qualities of light and what it feels like to EMERGE after being enmeshed in your world for so long. The morning. Before 6am an old woman was already out in the world with a plastic bag of full of bird feed. She was standing next to the rosebushes, hot pink and red roses planted against a metal guardrail, tossing feed to the birds at sunrise. When I woke up the state I was in that morning was gone. It was as though sleep had completely neutralized me. When I woke up it was impossible to speak of what I had seen.

CeCe McDonald’s trial

Comrades—any updates on CeCe Mcdonald’s trial? 

(If you don’t know about CeCe’s case, here’s short zine: FREE CECE)
 

Day 1 summary:
http://www.prettyqueer.com/2012/04/30/day-1-summary/
http://freececemcdonald.tumblr.com/post/22170557631/today-monday-april-30-2012-at-the-cece-mcdonald
update on motions:
http://www.prettyqueer.com/2012/04/30/full-update-on-motions/
 

Feminist Culture/Feminist Politics: A Symposium on Gender and Difference @ NYU

PANEL: Feminist Culture/Feminist Politics: A Symposium on Gender and Difference  
May 4 at the NYU Kimmel Student Center, 60 Washington Sq South, New York, NY 10003. 6pm.

Katherine Boyce-Jacino, Humanities Center, Johns Hopkins University, “Birds of a Feather: Lesbian Flappers”
The Modern Girl appeared on the scene as World War I drew to a close. She sprang up in advertisements and fashion magazines — fast, loose, and daring, with short hemlines and shorter hair. But what was the relationship between this representation of the Modern Girl, and what women in the 1920s were actually doing? This paper examines the ways women both consumed and produced images of modernity in inter-war Britain. Through various modes of consumption — reading, buying, wearing, watching — women experimented with ways to put on and perform modernity. This modernity took form not only in the flappers’ clothing and their beauty practices, but also in their sexuality — like bright make-up or a daring dress, sexuality became yet another highly visible marker of the Modern Girl, one that she could both put on and take off. I examine in particular the relationship between increasingly androgynous styles that dominated the fashion scene, and the increasingly visible population of women who loved other women. 

Nancy Hoffman, Classics, University of Texas-Austin, “The Mother of the Gods: A Traveling Cult Circus of Eunuchs”
The people of ancient Turkey began leaving monuments to their mother goddess in the eighth century BCE. By the sixth century BCE, offerings to the same mother goddess were being dedicated as far away as Marseilles. A few centuries after this, the cult of the Great Mother of the Gods officially entered Rome and took a major place in Roman civic-religious life. The cult thrived for hundreds of years although important aspects of the cult, like a priesthood composed entirely of publicly-castrated eunuchs, generated dissonance with traditional Roman religion. Over the course of a millennium, the cult travelled from the mountains of central Turkey across the Mediterranean, inspiring outrage and curiosity everywhere it appeared.

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MARXISTS IN SPACE (-TIME) WARP

it was so hilarious to me that D. was trying to get rid of all his books to prepare for his cross-country move and yet on his bookshelf he had 2 copies of Capital, the heaviest book of them all. that night, the night i thought about D’s books, i dreamed that a doctor gave me a prescription for Capital, which i filled at a pharmacy that was actually a 7-11. the pharmacist was like, “is this prescription for volume 1 or 2?” I was all, “who reads volume 2?! 1 of course!” he printed out the book, which i already had but it was okay because the printout was nicer than my fucked up copy. the manuscript came with some pills that were for helping you understand Capital. pop 2 pills an hour before reading and you will comprehend everything. it’s not speed. it’s some trippy psychedelic shit—you comprehend Capital cosmically and psychically under the influence of this shit. so D and i were walking around the next day and i asked, why do you have 2 copies of Capital? he said he was thinking about hollowing one out to store his money. genius, i thought. who would look for money inside a book by marx? bunch o money-haters those marxists.

i kept laughing to myself thinking about the dream. D was like, what? and i told him about it, about getting the Capital prescription and the crazy pills. i kept laughing while i was touching this beautiful tree that was covered in beautiful bright purple flowers and i think he thought it was funny too—i told him, you should write a book that’s like, 101 Uses for Capital (Besides Reading It). we stood on the porch looking out at the clearing. we stood for a long time in silence staring at our surroundings and then a bird in a nearby tree let out this loud repetitive screeching mechanical noise that interrupted our meditations and made us both turn our heads toward the sound in unison. in the distance i could see a house. was it a witch’s cabin? you don’t want to know, he said. it’s a bourgeois housing development. at the edge of the hill we peeked over the fence and watched the rich people below milling about their cookie-cutter neighborhood.

stare out toward the mountains. halo of the grass started to lift toward the sky, all the trees were maddeningly bright, so colorful and it fired up my mind to see them there in their vernal glory. everything coalescing or in relation. the gray sky that was never going to be night. we went into the forest because it was never going to be night. the branches were very orderly and angular. it was the forest of spines. the notches like cartilage. it shocked us when night actually came.

Some business.

• I have a poem in the new issue of Aesthetix. While I was finishing Frank Wilderson’s Red, White and Black I had this horrible nightmare that may or may not have been based on Frank’s reading of Monster’s Ball—what he says about the necessity of the black boy’s death for the sake of the drama (civil society’s drama…but also, most narratives. If it’s not on the surface, it’s probably somewhere beneath). This was also before Trayvon Martin, though all traces of Trayvon’s story did not burn with the house—not like, say, Isaiah Simmons, who died in a juvenile facility when 5-7 counselors “restrained” him for hours and dumped his body in the snow after he stopped responding.
• “A STAIN ON SILENCE” is an essay I wrote for the all-essay spectacular issue of the journal DIAGRAM. It’s about bodies and flesh and channeling and refusing to master words and material poetics and Lispector and Taiwanese poetry and the largeness of death. But most of all, Samuel Beckett’s almost-nothing, his not-quite-zero (but close). “Every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.” —Samuel Beckett
• An essay I wrote on Fanon will be printed in Consequence Magazine soon. It’s a print mag, so maybe you can email me if you want to read it…?
• I wrote an essay called “The Spatial Politics of Sexual Violence: The Femicide Machine, Rape New York and the Architecture of Urban Abjection.” It will either be published in this awesome new militant feminist journal that’s starting up or another feminist journal.
• Adam Robinson asked me to edit Everyday Genius for the month of July, so if you have a piece you’d like to submit, or know someone you think I should solicit, let me know! I’m going to be prioritizing people who have not been published by EG yet—people who are not young white MFAs privy to the small press scene. I’ve always felt weird about being an editor because The Editor is often nothing more than a literary gatekeeper, a dam in the river of creative energy, a brita water filter on the tap of the world. But I trying to think of myself as a “bridge” in this context.
• This summer I’ll be a fellow at the Kundiman Asian American Poetry Retreat. They’ll be a reading or something in New York—will keep you posted. I’m so stoked to plug in with other Asian poets, and super appreciative that they gave me a grant to attend.
• Asian women, trans*, and genderqueer identified people should submit to the next issue of Moonroot!
• By day, I’m a writer…but by night, a rapper (also, a Bollywood dancer). This is my most famous rap. It begs to be played at bed bug support groups all over the country.
• I’m probably moving to Las Cruces, New Mexico in the fall. I didn’t think I would be going to grad school, but the day before the NMSU MFA deadline Lily Hoang told me to apply, and since she messaged me on gchat after I deliberately went from “invisible” to “available” just to see what would happen, the whole thing seemed too serendipitous to pass up. They also offered me an assistantship, which is perfect since I’m broke. So I’ll be teaching and writing, while trying to stay wild and un-institutionalized. 
• I just successfully made a delicious kimchi pancake.

BALTIMORE FEMINIST READING GROUP

Chelsey and I made a blog for the reading group!

You can check out our communiques or download pdfs of some of our past readings. Hopefully we’ll be able upload a pdf of our reader soon, and some more juicy content.

Here are some of the PDFs:

• Kimbele Crenshaw – Intersectionality
• Wilderson, Frank – Gramsci’s Black Marx
• Smith, Andrea – Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy
• Irigaray, Luce – Women on the Market
• Cixous, Helene – Laugh of the Medusa
• Miriam, Kathy – Towards a Phenomenology of Sex-Right
• Solanas, Valerie – SCUM Manifesto
  “SCUM will not picket, demonstrate, march or strike to attempt to achieve its ends. Such tactics are for nice, genteel ladies who scrupulously take only such action as is guaranteed to be ineffective. In addition, only decent, clean-living male women, highly trained in submerging themselves in the species, act on a mob basis. SCUM consists of individuals; SCUM is not a mob, a blob. Only as many SCUM will do a job as are needed for the job. Also SCUM, being cool and selfish, will not subject to getting itself rapped on the head with billy clubs; that’s for the nice, `privileged, educated’, middle-class ladies with a high regard for the touching faith in the essential goodness of Daddy and policemen. If SCUM ever marches, it will be over the President’s stupid, sickening face; if SCUM ever strikes, it will be in the dark with a six-inch blade.”
• Spade, Dean – Compliance is Gendered
  This article discusses the way the State—via the criminal justice system/carceral apparatus and welfare system—disciplines gender. Dean draws our attention to how poor people are more vulnerable to gender policing because they are more likely to be entangled in high gendered institutions (jails, homeless shelters, welfare offices, etc).
• Namaste, Vivian – Against Transgender Rights
• Roberts, DE – Privatization and Punishment in the New Age of Reprogenetics
• Shaylor, Cassandra – It’s Like Living in a Black Hole: Women of Color and Solitary Confinement in the Prison Industrial Complex
  This article discusses the racist, classist, and misogynistic dynamics of the use of solitary confinement in women’s prisons. 61.4 percent of the women at the prison Cassandra surveyed were women of color, 40 percent of whom were black. About 60 percent of women in prison are also survivors of sexual abuse, and solitary confinement can make them particularly vulnerable to assault by prison guards. The article explores the deep psychic trauma caused by being forced to live in a “black hole”—a hidden zone characterized by racist and patriarchal humiliation, social isolation, and sensory deprivation.
• Mills, Charles – The Racial Contract
  Traditional contract theory undermined by racial analysis– Mills describes an unwritten racial contract which can (must) violate the formal social contract developed during Enlightenment
• Support ZINE
• Butler, Octavia – Bloodchild
• glenn – From Servitude to Service Work
• Koyama, Emi – Transfeminist Manifesto
• Clark, Laurel – Beyond the Gay/Straight Split: Socialist Feminists in Baltimore
• Tuana, Nancy – The Speculum of Ignorance: The Women’s Health Movement and Epistemologies of Ignorance
• Dalla Costa and James – Women and the Subversion of the Community
  “These observations are an attempt to define and analyze the “Woman Question,” and to locate this question in the entire “female role” as it has been created by the capitalist division of labor.”
• James, Selma – Sex, Race, & Class
  “There has been enough confusion generated when sex, race and class have confronted each other as separate and even conflicting entities. That they are separate entities is self-evident. That they have proven themselves to be not separate, inseparable, is harder to discern. Yet if sex and race are pulled away from class, virtually all that remains is the truncated, provincial, sectarian politics of the white male metropolitan Left. I hope to show in barest outline, first, that the working class movement is something other than that Left have ever envisioned it to be. Second, locked within the contradiction between the discrete entity of sex or race and the totality of class is the greatest deterrent to working class power and at the same time the creative energy to achieve that power.”
  

MOONROOT: CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

moonroot:

DEADLINE: April 29, 2012
MOONROOT is looking for submissions to y/our second issue!  And, out of a desire to build this radical and loving community, we are asking YOU to submit your heart, your stories, your love and your aches.

WHO WE ARE:
MOONROOT is an ongoing collective project about race, gender, and bodies.  It is an evolving experiment in deep, loving community-building among self-identified womyn, trans*, and/or genderqueer persons of Asian descent (whether East Asian, South Asian, Pacific Islander, Southeast Asian, Central Asian, West Asian, hapa or mixed) living in diaspora, across borders and geographies. We believe that because our multiple and intersecting identities often render us invisible and misrepresented (even within our own communities), reclaiming our voices is a radical act of love and recognition.

We gravitated to each other to produce the first issue of MOONROOT in Fall 2011, which made its debut at the Baltimore Zine Bazaar. MOONROOT is a physical object, but most importantly, it is a community. We are building a visible, beautiful, and organic family.

OUR THEME for issue two is moonroutes.  Possible topics to explore may include:

• geographical and/or historical happenings
• place / space
• body as a landscape
• reincarnations / past lives
• diaspora / migrations / borderlands / uprooting
• queering the diaspora
• displacing biological notions of blood, home, and patrilineal descent
• movements / moments / motions
• historical memory / mind pathways
• home / belonging / origins
• thoughts on future lives
• shifting relationships to our identities / our identity journeys!!!!
• transformations / liminality
• relationships of the colonized and colonizer within a body/bodies
• where we want to go / our imagined and desired futures
• the racialization of space
• confinement / barriers to movement
• education and class mobility
• anticolonial temporalities
• circular patterns in histories
• resisting / changing harmful patterns & uncovering life-giving ones
• migration by moonlight / cycles / nocturnal migrations
• the mystery of the unknown through the lens of the past and present
• perpetual foreigner myth

GUIDELINES

• This will be a half-size zine. Submissions should be 1-4 pages.
• Along with your submission, please include a brief (one sentence) bio and contact information; submissions can also be made anonymously.
• Our crew will go through a consensus-based editorial process. If you send us a submission, we will be in touch with you to let you know if we have selected your piece.
• We welcome all kinds of submissions. Text-based submissions should be in .doc, .rtf, or .txt format, and artistic submissions should be 300-600 dpi .tiff or .pdf files. Make sure each page is 5.5” x 8.5” (half letter).
• Please send submissions by email to moonrootzine (at) gmail (dot) com with the subject line “SUBMISSION - [your name OR title of piece]”. If you have questions about format or if an email submission is not possible, please contact us.

MORE DETAILS: Please visit http://moonroot.tumblr.com. To see an example of our first issue, please visit http://issuu.com/moonrootzine/docs/moonroot.

QUESTIONS? Email moonrootzine (at) gmail (dot) com

NEW ISSUE OF MOONROOT COMING SOON! Please submit to us!

FILM SCREENING, READING, AND TALK IN ASHEVILLE, NC

I will be doing an event at Warren Wilson College in the Preston House at 6:30 on Thursday. If you are in the area, please come out. Maybe we can also go for a walk in the hills or along the Swannanoa River, swallow misty mountain spirits and kiss the ground while whispering, thank you, thank you.

At the event I’ll be showing 2 short films, reading poetry, and giving a talk on Frantz Fanon. Topics include the role of the “colonized intellectual,” cathartic violence, the psychic trauma of oppression, police brutality, embodiment and technology, contemporary readings of Fanon, and the meaning of changing the paradigm rather than trying to write oneself into the preexisting framework of intelligibility (in other words, destroying the world as we know it). It’s a lot, I know. We will have time to talk to each other. The discussion may or may not revolve around the question—can there be beauty when prisons still exist? It’s kind of about art but this talk probably won’t make you feel good if you’re an artist, especially if you’re an artist with a libidinal investment in the grandeur of your craft. Just joking you’ll feel great come, come

Derek planned this event. Maybe one day I will be able to post something on here about his research!

RESOURCES ON PRISONS

I upload some articles and linked to some books I’ve read recently (or somewhat recently) on prisons. Feel free to download and share the links with friends. We should have a conversation about this material sometime. Read it and let me know what you think.

Articles

• Asian American Studies in the Age of the Prison Industrial Complex — Dylan Rodríguez
  I think all Asian Americans, especially those that have never really thought about the prison-industrial complex, should read this article. It discusses how the production of model minority discourse makes possible the expansion of the PIC while also strengthening anti-blackness. Asian Americans who discuss model minorityism as a dehumanizing, white supremacist stereotype while ignoring model minorityism as a precondition of anti-black incarceration/state violence are often complicit in fortifying anti-blackness. The Asian model minority gives coherence to the notion of black criminality. Furthermore, Asians themselves often seek political solidarity with whites, especially on the issue of crime. Dylan discusses the example of the Korean-American community (especially small business and property owners) after the 1992 LA insurrection. Instances of “strategic and laboriously ritualized solidarities with the state” can be seen in the reactionary Korean American-LAPD coalition that generates such events as the 2002 “March Against Crime.” Campaigns against black and brown people have been led by the Korean Youth and Community Center, which is evidenced in the rhetoric used in a flyer they circulated that said, “10 YEARS AFTER THE L.A. RIOTS Our City comes together to CLEAN our Streets.” The article also challenges the way that conceptualizing of POC in terms of “shared oppression” creates and insidious multiculturalism that obscures power relations between POC. (That’s why I prefer Andrea Smith’s re-vision of WOC organizing as a type of organizing based on self-criticism rather than shared oppression. I was excited to see Dylan and Andie speak together on a panel about race in the 21st century.)
  
  Here is a quote from Dylan’s article:
  “The cultural production and statecraft of the Asian-American model minority, reproduced and institutionally inscribed by the administrative culture of dominant schooling institutions (and accentuated in higher education), is wedged in a peculiar symbiosis with this militarization and penal pedagogical shift in the war on poor urban Black and Brown youth. The Asian-American model minority, as a cultural fabrication situated within a particular historical conjuncture, is something even more than (as Prashad correctly asserts) a ‘weapon in the war against black America’: it is both the condition of possibility and embodied site of reproduction of this domestic war, a seminal move in the production of a national(ist) ‘multiculturalism’ that fortifies and extrapolates historical white supremacist social formations—including and especially the burgeoning U.S. prison regime. As such, the Asian-Americanist contestation of the ‘model minority myth’ as inaccurate, deceptive, (anti-Asian) racist, and/or an erasure of the material subordination of poor and disenfranchised Asian populations tends to elide critical confrontation with the militarized and hegemonic discursive and social structure through which the myth itself has been articulated.”

• It’s Like Living in a Black Hole: Women of Color and Solitary Confinement in the Prison Industrial Complex — Cassandra Shaylor
  This article discusses the racist, classist, and misogynistic dynamics of the use of solitary confinement in women’s prisons. 61.4 percent of the women at the prison Cassandra surveyed were women of color, 40 percent of whom were black. About 60 percent of women in prison are also survivors of sexual abuse, and solitary confinement can make them particularly vulnerable to assault by prison guards. The article explores the deep psychic trauma caused by being forced to live in a “black hole”—a hidden zone characterized by racist and patriarchal humiliation, social isolation, and sensory deprivation.

• Fear and Loathing: Public Feelings in Antiprison Work — Jessi Lee Jackson and Erica R. Meiners
  How is the the “safety” of women affectively deployed to support the prison-industrial complex? How are public “feelings” subtly manipulated to create a racist profile of “the criminal”? How can we use affect differently, by trying to envision affect-based antiprison work? How do groups like the Audre Lorde Project’s Safe Outside the System Collective use affective strategies to address violence against queer people of color without involving the police and criminal justice system?
  
  
• The Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal — Frank Wilderson
  I think this is one of Frank’s best articles, and a good distillation of the dominant themes in his work overall: his critique of Marxism, his exposure of the assumptive logic of civil society, his centering of anti-blackness as the primary global antagonism, his theorization of slavery as the necessary foundation for human subjectivity, his critique of multiculturalism, and his insistence on understanding slavery in terms of social death rather than labor. The paradigm of slavery never ended—it has just taken on new forms. The black prisoner, like the slave, is positioned as socially dead. What I find particularly interesting in his description of the way the US paradigm of policing structures subjectivity itself and permeates our beings at the level of ontology. He asks, what is the difference between bodies that magnetize bullets and bodies that don’t? How are white people deputized in the face of black people, consciously or not? He comes to the conclusion that “white people are not simply ‘protected’ by the police, they are — in their very corporeality — the police.”
  
  
• Compliance is Gendered — Dean Spade
  This article discusses the way the State—via the criminal justice system/carceral apparatus and welfare system—disciplines gender. Dean draws our attention to how poor people are more vulnerable to gender policing because they are more likely to be entangled in high gendered institutions (jails, homeless shelters, welfare offices, etc).
  
  
• Indefinite Detention — Judith Butler
  JB discusses Guantanamo Bay and the discourse of the US war on terror and its role in supporting indefinite detention. She re-thinks Foucault’s governmentalist theorization of the contemporary prison by describing the dual operations of sovereign and governmental/diffuse forms of power.
  
  
• From Slavery to Mass Incarceration — Loïc Wacquant
  I posted a brief discussion here.
  
  

Books

• The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness — Michelle Alexander
  We can have a long discussion about this book. I have some problems with it, but I think it’s moving the discourse on prisons in a better direction. I like that Michelle emphasizes that the criminal justice system is not just infected with racism, but that the institutions themselves are constituted by racist violence (in other words, institutional racism is not an aberration of the prison/legal system’s more noble protective role; its  function is racialized violence and social control). She also thoroughly debunks the idea that we live in a post-race society, and unpacks the hidden mechanisms of liberal, colorblind racism. I saw Michelle speak at Morgan State University soon after reading her book and asked her if she considered herself a prison abolitionist. She said she’s against prisons as they exist now, but not necessarily against removing people who are actually dangerous from society (????). It’s curious that she is trying to draw attention to the problematic nature of legalist attempts to address the racism of mass incarceration (because this form of racism is legalized), but fails to mention the work of grassroots organizations like Critical Resistance. The good thing about this book is that it’s armed me with all kinds of statistics to challenge those who defend prisons and police. I gave this book to my mom.
  
  
• Discipline and Punish — Michel Foucault
  We can talk about it sometime….
  
  
• Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex — Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith
  This anthology addresses the intersection between antiprison struggles and queer and trans* struggles. It offers an extended critique of the gaystream’s collusion with the carceral apparatus, as well as the rhetoric of accommodation (the way the liberal feminist and mainstream queer campaigns to create prisons/jails to accommodate queers, women, trans people, and youth actually just strengthen and expand the prison-industrial complex). The book includes essays on the history of police brutality against queers, the criminalization of queerness, and queer resistance to the police state (such as the Stonewall Riots). There are also essays by incarcerated queer and trans folk about their experiences inside prison. Other topics include the politics of AIDS and the isolation of prisoners with AIDS, access to hormones and medical treatment in prison, immigration, the criminalization of sex work, poverty, queer/trans vulnerability to being sexually assaulted by prison guards and other prisoners, the disciplining of masculine women and transmen inside prisons (denial of access to masculine clothing such as briefs and retaliation against lesbians/dykes), etc.
  
  
• Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles Of Incarcerated Women — Vikki Law
  The perception of women as passive and obedient has effectively obscured the the struggles of women against the prison-industrial complex. This book also discusses the conditions that have led to the massive growth of incarcerated women in recent year (conditions such as the feminization of poverty, racialized campaigns against the “welfare queen” and the reordering of the welfare state, the increase of punitive laws on nonviolent crimes, etc). Vikki Law is awesome—I wish Dylan would have talked about her in his article on Asian Americans and the prison-industrial complex.
  
  
• Marshall Law: The Life and Times of a Baltimore Black Panther — Eddie Conway
  Panther autobiographies always inspire me. This book is mostly about prison life and the work Eddie has done inside prisons. I’m thankful to have had the chance to teleconference with Eddie.

Film

• Bush Mama — Haile Gerima (1975)
  This film is kind of hard to find—maybe I can mail you a DVD if you really want to see it. Haile was part of the LA Rebellion School of Black Filmmakers (primarily active from 1967-1989). Here is a good resource on the LA Rebellion film movement. Plot synopsis: “Bush Mama is the story of Dorothy and her husband T.C., a discharged Vietnam veteran who thought he would return home to a ‘hero’s welcome.’ Instead he is falsely arrested and imprisoned for a crime he didn’t commit. Theirs is a world of welfare, perennial unemployment, and despair. To some, the film may appear bleak and nihilistic with its stark black-and-white photography, but its message is moving and distinct.”
  Here are some film stills:
  

the suicide of the other jackie wang, the world inside the moment, thurston moore, the sky bed, what is the meaning of this energy that we radiate

there was a girl with my name who died in 2011. she was a precocious 11th grader who committed suicide. it’s pretty weird to read things like:

Jackie Wang wowed us on a routine basis. She was so many wonderful things- zany, sweet, honest, profound, friendly, athletic, brilliant, beautiful, and much more. I would have never thought that things would come to a point for her that she would consider death as her final solution.

She’s the second Jackie I know to have died this year. The other one, about two years older than us, died of cancer last month after a two-year struggle. There are a lot of nuances between the two ways of dying, and it’s pretty impossible to list them out. Either way, there are people hurting because of a premature loss. This awful helplessness is unbearable.

when i first read it i thought, i am dead? and, am i really that athletic? i really thought for a second that i was dead. i was sitting on the floor at a computer lab on the new college campus and i had used the door recently so i couldn’t have been dead. according to the manchus doors are for the living—souls leave through the windows. i think the dead body exits through the window as well. i was still a competent user of doors, so clearly i was alive. the next thing i thought was, this girl must have googled her name at some point. since i am one of the more cyber-popular jackie wangs out there, it is possible she saw me. maybe i crowded her out, tarnished her name with my vulgar rants, the massive effusions of malodorous psychic gas that i spill into the internet. then i got the chills thinking about how i have no idea what i am transmitting. i have no idea how the things i do and write live in the bodies of the people who are not me. how do my emissions circulate, what imprints am i leaving in brains, whose brains, and what energy am i pumping into the atmosphere? how can i be more responsible to this energy once i have released it? does it even have anything to do with me once it’s out there? 

i remember reading, when i was a teenager, some statistic about the rates of suicides among asian-american women. but also the high rates of college completion. so i thought, great. i’ll either commit suicide or graduate from college! i don’t want to die. 

i had a series of marathon conversations with joohyun sitting by the ocean and around the kitchen table. we talked into the morning and while we were gyrating in the whirlwind of communicative electricity i felt that the transmission of energy between bodies was a touchable thing. i wondered about the things that were said—from where did this wisdom come? maybe the spark of 2 asian girls who think too much rubbing sticks together in a dark forest. what i know i only know through people. when i contemplate Great Men and their Spiritual Crises i think of the emptiness of mastery and how miserable it must be to be a man of letters who is only in dialogue with his own head.

yesterday i wrote something like 30 pages in my notebook. stayed awake scribbling into the morning. the last thing i remember before falling asleep was the image of dilapidated barn at sunrise. the barn was familiar but i could not tell if it was a dream i had had or the dream i was going to have. am i having that dream right now? then i became one with the bed that was also the mouth of a hungry sky. the last thing i wrote before passing out was, be sky! my headphones were still on my head when i woke up.

*

it’s so funny the way the moment becomes its own world. i can’t even enter the worlds that once housed me. the memory. my memory? i thought it was mine but now it excludes me. the truth of the moment becomes a truth that is almost impossible to access once it has passed. but it is also insoluble. that comforts me, to know that what happened will always have happened, that the event is immiscible. 

keeled over in a giant pile of clothes at the foot of my bed i remembered: the truth of the moment. it was after i had gotten back from massachusetts. a music track i made for a poem came on and suddenly i was transported to my last poetry reading. thurston moore was in the audience so he became my cosmic reference point. i wondered what i transmitted to him in that moment though i knew that whatever it was, it would not last. i’m okay with that. thurston moore was my reference point because i received transmissions from him as early as middle school, when i bought my first Sonic Youth CD. see he doesn’t even know that his daydream nation emissions touch the hearts of adolescent girl rockers who grow up to be fierce poets. (though i was never a SY fangirl—i was more of a Joy Division kind of girl.) after the reading i wrote a private essay about being a middle school rocker, loving music so fucking much, wanting to be a music journalist and watching Almost Famous with my dad. during the film he said, that’s you! rock kid journalist. i did actually interview bands. the night after the reading i had a dream about thurston moore. 

i dreamed of bereavement. the Chinese were spying on us, their helicopters flying sideways outside our window to get a better view. (not very subtle of them.) no doubt my unconscious was inculcated with the neo-yellow peril cold war-style paranoia i had absorbed from reading the New York Times every day. i was supposed to fight in a war but i was too afraid to die. in Chinese i asked the women in the cafeteria what was happening and—insulted by my debasement of their native tongue—they replied in irate english. i was with my friends and lovers in a building and it started to collapse. there was the horror of impending death, but what happened was worse than death—everyone died except me, including my husband thurston moore. i was beside myself with grief, and it didn’t help that there was Sonic Youth merchandise EVERYWHERE i went.

what was the meaning of the dream? i think that thurston moore was not thurston moore at all, that he was a cipher, that the death of thurston moore was actually the death of my youth—dare i say it, the loss of my sonic youth? once a wide-eyed rocker, now a domesticated writer! N said, when I saw you read poetry for the first time, you seemed like such a rock star. it didn’t seem like he was talking about me. i was always the fan.