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A Poem For Sarah Baartman

by Diana Ferrus

listen to her reading

I’ve come to take you home –
home, remember the veld?
the lush green grass beneath the big oak trees
the air is cool there and the sun does not burn.
I have made your bed at the foot of the hill,
your blankets are covered in buchu and mint,
the proteas stand in yellow and white
and the water in the stream chuckle sing-songs
as it hobbles along over little stones.

I have come to wretch you away –
away from the poking eyes
of the man-made monster
who lives in the dark
with his clutches of imperialism
who dissects your body bit by bit
who likens your soul to that of Satan
and declares himself the ultimate god!

I have come to soothe your heavy heart
I offer my bosom to your weary soul
I will cover your face with the palms of my hands
I will run my lips over lines in your neck
I will feast my eyes on the beauty of you
and I will sing for you
for I have come to bring you peace.

    In order to explore the intra-action of queerness and Puerto Rican-ness I have chosen to focus on two pivotal queer cultural productions by Puerto Ricans. The first is the 1995 film by Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Brincando el charco: Portrait of a Puerto Rican. The second is a poetic excerpt from Alberto Sandoval-Sánchez’ play Side Effects. These texts address many critical questions that intersect both querness and Puerto Rican-ness. Among these, the theme of passing, essential to both texts, particularly necessitates the interaction of queerness and Puerto Rican-ness. Passing is so critical to immigration and queer studies that the editors of the anthology on sexuality and immigration in which critical analyses of both of these texts appear, chose the title Passing Lines. In the introduction they argue that passing “can implicitly question not only the solidity of ethno-racial lines but of sexual lines as well” (Epps 5). I believe the Negrón-Muntaner film and the Sandoval-Sánchez play, as well as their authors' mediations on their respective works, illustrate through passing just how inter- and intra-connected queerness is with Puerto Rican-ness.

Images of "brincando el charco"

Brincando el charco

    When I read “Living the Good Lie” I was skeptical that any human could repress biological aspects of their being in favor of social ones. Could a gay man really choose a heterosexual lifestyle because he identifies more closely with his religion? It didn’t seem plausible, possible, or pleasant. And yet, there was something that drew me to closer examination. Was the distinction between the biological/social as clearcut as I had always assumed?  Biologically, I am female, and socially, I identify as a woman. But untangling the biological/social for sexuality proved more difficult than I had anticipated. The intersection of sexual orientation and society is as deeply entwined as Foucault’s theory of power/knowledge. Because we live in an era and culture that accepts a sexual spectrum from hetero to bi to gay, we assume these identities have always been. Subjectively, they are abstract cultural markers that precede us, making it feel as if they have always preceded us. When in fact personal identification on the basis of sexuality is relatively recent, and marks a shifting scientific obsession on sexual studies (Foucault).
    In America, (especially for men), we seem to subscribe to a”one-drop-rule” on the sexual spectrum. For a man, one sexual encounter with another man will (for some people) forever brand him as gay. We are easily and rigidly defined by our sexual choices. Which brings me to this picture.  

Dear friends,

Allow me to preface this web event with a brief description of what is to come, and what my motives are for presenting it.  I’ve always been fascinated by the idea behind the famous Aristophanes play Lysistrata, in which one woman convinces all the women of Greece to refuse their husbands sex until the men end the Peloponnesian War.  Would a plot like this work in the real world?  Has anyone ever tried such a thing?  I wondered how I could relate a real-world Lysistrata to this class, and in particular this class’s ideas of diffraction, enabling disability, and intra-actions of sex and gender with other social categories and events.

I will begin with a discussion of Lysistrata in real life, as it turns out there are several recent examples of sex strikes being used to end war.  I will then analyze these sex strikes in light of our class work and discussions.  Finally, I want to leave you with some questions.  I still have a lot of questions, and I intend for this web even to mark the beginning of a dialogue, not a lecture.  If you have any thoughts on anything I say, I would love to hear them.  Thanks for listening.

Cheers,

Ann

Voicing Rhetorics of Beauty

I. Rhetoric

            We talked in class about culture as disability, about how culture can disable individuals and groups. The qualities that are considered “abling” (or empowering or desirable) in a culture are only definable because of the absence of these qualities. Therefore, any created culture necessarily shuts some people out; it “teaches people what to aspire to and hope for and marks off those who are to be noticed, handled, mistreated, and remediated as falling short” (McDermott and Varenne). Modern Western culture is a culture of consumption; many of our abling judgments are based off the concept of consumption through vision (Garland-Thomson 29). Two valued abilities in our culture are the abilities to see, and the right, legitimizing ways to be seen; the ability to consume, and the ability to be consumed. In this essay, I’ll argue that beauty—as the standard to which the objects of vision and consumption are held—is disabling, that modern concepts of disability can be read as beauty, and that the conflation of these constructs can yield empowering results.

                                 Claiming the Stare: Jes Sachse and the Transformative Potential of Seeing

  We all love to look. While staring is most commonly thought of as an act to be avoided or ashamed of, Disability and Women’s Studies Scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson argues that the stare at its best actually has the potential to create new meanings and more open societies.  The stare as Thomson defines it, has the potential to help us redefine the language we use to describe each other and ourselves, create space for the often-excluded in communities, and craft our own identities. The stare is most dynamic and productive when the subject of the stare, the staree, is able to wield some control over the interaction and in doing so present their story to the starer.