Professor Sandra K. Soto Gets Jeered at University of Arizona Graduation

Queer Chicana Professor (and all-around awesome academic) Sandra K. Soto got booed at the University of Arizona's Social and Behavioral Sciences commencement.  Professor Soto was attempting to discuss the ways that the anti-im/migrant measures known as SB1070 would marginalize Latinos/as.  Before she could get a sentence out the crowd jeered her. Twitter drama ensued.  Most people said it was inappropriate for Professor Soto to use the event as a "political soap box" further highlighting the success of the conservative right in advancing the idea that Universities and institutions of higher education should be depoliticized places where one goes to learn objective truths.  Meanwhile, if you ask me, it's pretty inappropriate for an audience of presumably educated adults to boo a woman of letters.  

Of course, what happened to Professor Soto is just another example of what so often occurs to queers, women, and people of color (or people who inhabit all of those identities) within the academy, they get shouted down and told that they're advancing a narrow agenda or only telling half the story.  The events that transpired were truly shameful, but unfortunately are becoming more common than not on college campuses.  I applaud the stand that Soto and other educators in Arizona are taking despite the attempts to silence them.  As Professor Soto urges us...we must fight for public education.

Palante, Siempre Palante! 

*tip of the fitted to: The Arizona Daily Star

LA Queer Studies Conference 2009: The Queer Vicissitudes of Hip Hop Expressive Culture

Matt Lipps ©

As promised here are the panel and paper abstracts for a panel I'm participating in with Michael Ralph and Laurence Ralph on Queer Hip Hop at the UCLA Queer Studies Conference (October 9-10). If you're in the LA area the conference is free and open to the public and is a great chance to see some rising young queer scholars.

Anyway, without further ado...

The Queer Vicissitudes of Hip Hop Expressive Culture
This panel delves into hip hop lyricism, fashion, and imagery to explore the queer vicissitudes that structure this mode of expressive culture. A vicissitude is a variation, an alternation, a change in fortune, a mutation: a reversal, perhaps. At the very least, it captures the gap between what one is and what one has imagined oneself to be. The aporia signaled here is not the space between the perspectives of two different rappers— i.e. a gay rapper versus a straight one—but the tension between two different views of one’s self. We explore this phenomenon of doubling by discussing the musical and visual production of several hip hop artists that dominate the contemporary landscape, these include: R. Kelly, Kanye West, Lil’ Wayne, T Pain, T.I., Andrew 3000, and Common.


“No Homo": Racialized Sexual Surveillance in Hip Hop
Hip hop culture is increasingly constructed by scholars and detractors alike as a hypermasculine space of unabashed violence, materialism, misogyny, and homophobia. This concern with sexuality and bodily comportment in hip hop performance tends toward a reified a mode of analysis which places too much emphasis on dubious standards for respectable discourse. In this paper I focus on performances of queer masculinity in hip hop as spaces that contradict dominant depictions of hip hop sexuality as increasingly narrow and formulaic. Hip hop masculinity often straddles the contractions of sexuality, desire, and gender performance, revealing the artifice of its constructions. Performances of queer masculinity in hip hop simultaneously disrupt and reify existing structures of oppression in the process of articulating a complex sexual and gendered personhood that is vibrant, diverse, and complex. By charting the ambivalence of the fad phrase, “no homo,” I explore how hip hop artists speak homophobia as a way of enacting nonnormative intimacies that interrupt racial and sexual surveillance. In this paper, I examine two performances of queer masculinity and intimacy: the first is the phallocentrism of Jim Jones’ “Pop Champagne” music video. The second mode of performance surfaces in a series of advertisements that Lil Wayne did for Strapped Condoms. I demonstrate that these queer performances eschew “respectability,” in favor of a masculine persona that embraces conflicting conceptions of intimacy and desire. These performances do not merely expose the fissures of hip hop masculinity, they exploit them, reveling in their pretenses. By grappling with the complexity of these ambivalent performances, I believe we can establish a scholarly discourse on hip-hop sexuality and gender performance that is, if not quite feminist, undoubtedly queer.

Marisol Lebron
Department of Social & Cultural Analysis
New York University


“I’m a Flirt”
In centering their attention on the “down low” phenomenon, analysts of male same sex intimacy feed social paranoias that frame homosexuality as the principal source of death and disease in African American lived spaces. They also tend to conflate homoeroticism with homosexuality in a way that is both crude and imprecise. Given that male rappers are increasingly marketed as sex symbols for both men and women, and since some of the social contexts rappers draw from (like jails and prisons) are widely known as arenas where male same sex intimacy flourishes, there is sufficient evidence to consider how male homoerotics structure interpersonal relationships in music that draws upon prison culture, like hip hop/r & b. In the song, “I’m a Flirt,” for instance, one man’s claim that he is capable of stealing another man’s girlfriend is precisely what generates a male homoerotic episode—a narrative in which those activities that a man finds titillating become central to a dialogue with other men that evinces more intimacy between them
than with any of their purported female objects of desire.

Laurence Ralph
Department of Anthropology
University of Chicago


“Where I come from, gay people were like aliens …”
Photos that flooded the Internet while Kanye West and friends were visiting Paris Fashion Week in February 2009, ignited a firestorm of controversy. The sartorial decisions that had everyone buzzing concerned Mr. West and the motley crue of fashionistas that looked, by all concerned, “gay.” Kanye dismissed the rumors, explaining that “the way a man dresses doesn’t have anything with what he likes to do at night.” Still, he was more empathetic than angry. In fact, Kanye indicated that he considered it his duty to “educate” his brethren and attributed the prevailing homophobia to the hypermasculinist ethos that pervades street cultures like the one in which he was reared, “Where I come from,” he said, invoking his native land, the south side of Chicago, “gay people were like aliens.” It was an apt image, and not simply because Kanye has routinely cast himself as a space explorer. For his 2008, “Glow in the Dark” tour, ‘Ye cast himself as a protagonist who crash landed on an unidentified planet. This, after he had already featured the track “Spaceship” on his debut album The College Dropout. This paper explores how rappers who artists who are frequently branded as queer—Kanye West, Lil Wayne, Common, and André 3000—have cast themselves as aliens to explain the way they fit into the broader cultural phenomenon that we call “hip hop.” André is an ATLien, Lil Wayne is a Martian, and Common has deployed futuristic, space age sounds, and accoutrements to craft his own gender-bending persona. These are but a few of the examples this paper will explore toward a theory of queer vicissitudes in hip hop lyricism and performance.

Michael Ralph
Department of Social & Cultural Analysis
New York University

CFP: PRSA 2010 "Cuerpos vigilados y castigados: Resistance and Empowerment in the Body Rican"

Juan Sánchez, RICAN/STRUCTIONS: A MULTI-LAYERED LEGACY

Cuerpos vigilados y castigados:

Resistance and Empowerment in the Body Rican

Puerto Rican Studies Association 9th Biennial Meeting
Call for Papers, Panels and Presentations Hartford, Connecticut October 21-23, 2010

Please join us at the Puerto Rican Studies Association Conference.

For over three centuries, Puerto Ricans have been subject to—and involved in—various types and levels of surveillance and persecution, and have developed a variety of creative approaches to oppose, resist, engage or live with them. Going against the established juridical-political order; resisting socio-economic conditions; being poor and/or nonwhite; being positioned outside the law when trying individually or collectively to survive; not being an adult male, and/or not identifying as heterosexual; as victims of disease or as persons themselves seen as embodying disease (physiological, mental, or social); speaking the “wrong” language or speaking the “right” language the “wrong” way; having too many children or actively deciding when not to have a child; wanting to live in an unpolluted environment; playing and dancing to the “wrong” music; praying and speaking to the “wrong” God(s); being too loud or refusing to be a spectacle; being in the wrong place at the wrong time; or just simply being. Each of these, severally and
apart, have served as provocation, cause or justification for supervision, accusation, and penalty.

In 2010 our conference theme centers on these and other sites of discipline and punishment, as well as on strategies of coping, opposition and resistance. Carried out by foreigners and by our compatriots, by strangers and by our own kin, by others and by ourselves, these varied practices and instances of penalization have occurred both formally and informally, publicly and privately, overtly and covertly; with the use of force and/or by instilling efficient behavior and a lucrative obedience, episodically and in the historical long-term.

This year’s conference will also explore the ways in which Puerto Ricans have created and can continue to create critical, social, cultural, political and economic opportunities for civic action. Hartford offers us a privileged and critical space for reflection. Locale of the first Puerto Rican elected mayor of a capital city on the “mainland,” it is also home to the largest proportional population of Puerto Ricans residing in any city beyond the confines of the island of Puerto Rico itself. Following President Barack Obama’s historic nomination to the Supreme Court of the Hon. Sonia Sotomayor, the first Latina and Puerto Rican to be so appointed, this year’s Conference's exploration of empowerment as a conduit for civic action seems particularly timely and assumes even greater salience. Not only the first Latina to be appointed to the Court, Judge Sotomayor is also the first Puerto Rican ever to serve in one of the highest public offices available within the governing structures of the United States. Aspiring to a critical reflection about disciplinary discourses of punishment and power affecting Puerto Ricans, this year’s conference aims also to engage those narratives and practices of empowerment which facilitate and enable progressive civic action.


PRSA Conference Themes
This year’s conference thus features two mutually constitutive themes, one with a focus on technologies of the self, one on practical approaches to social, political and economic empowerment. Efforts to study the intersections of power and the body have opened up new spaces for critical thinking and collective action. To critically explore their diverse forms and dimensions, we invite presenters to propose papers, panels, poster sessions, and by other creative means and fora, engaging with any of the following, merely suggestive rather than exhaustive, list of possible areas and topics:

1) Papers, panels, or presentations that focus on the roles of state technologies of power used to discipline the Puerto Rican subject, as well as on modalities of resistance to them. Proposals should include themes in the areas of law, justice, state repression and violence, and other institutional mechanisms of discipline and punishment, as well as proposals that explore critical modes of resistance. 2) Papers, panels, or presentations that are especially apt and relevant to this (New England) region, as one of the objectives of this conference is to create a critical space for the exchange of ideas, experiences and reflections on how to empower Puerto Ricans in local, state, national and international forums. 3) Papers, panels, or presentations that elucidate the ways in which Puerto Rican studies can inform broader debates across disciplines, thereby encouraging that interdisciplinarity which has traditionally been one of the hallmarks of the PRSA and its conferences.

We encourage submissions from the array of communities that together shape the Puerto Rican experience: university and college professors, independent scholars, community and labor organizers/activists, teachers and intellectual workers, artists, and graduate and undergraduate students.

Send two copies of your proposal form, abstract and membership fee by
February 10, 2010 to:
Secretariat, Puerto Rican Studies Association: 2009 Conference
c/o Latino Studies Program
Cornell University
434 Rockefeller Hall
Ithaca NY 14853

Please remember that only proposals from paid-up PRSA members will be accepted for inclusion in the 9th Conference. Membership dues must be received by the PRSA Secretariat by February 1, 2010. Membership dues information and a downloadable membership form are available at
http://www.puertorican-studies.org.

PRSA Pre-Conference Workshops
The PRSA Pre-Conference Workshops are designed to provide junior faculty and advance graduate students with a series of professional workshops which seek to assist in faculty development and career planning for scholars whose research and work projects focus on Puerto Rico, Puerto Ricans and their communities, and Puerto Rican Studies. These will include a workshop on tenure and promotion as well as a discussion of the history of PRSA and its contributions to intellectual life and collaborative community work. Pre-Conference Workshops will take place on Thursday, October 21, 2010. More details forthcoming.

The Sponsoring Institutions
The Puerto Rican Studies Association was founded to help promote scholarship in the field and offer a place for its scholars to come together. The Association meets every other year (in even-numbered years) in a different location. We maintain a list-serve for the dissemination of news of interest to the membership. For more information on the PRSA please visit our website at: http://www.puertorican-studies.org/. We encourage students, scholars, activists, and others with interests in the island and its people to join and actively participate in the PRSA.

The City of Hartford, a vibrant city with one of the largest proportional populations of Puerto Ricans in the United States, will assist in the hosting of the 2010 conference. Our 9th biennial conference represents the collaborative effort of members of the city’s local Puerto Rican and Latino communities as well as various academic programs and institutions affiliated with the University of Connecticut, Eastern Connecticut State University and Trinity College.

The Conference Sites
The PRSA Conference will take place in the Hartford Marriott Downtown in Hartford, Connecticut, which will also serve as the primary lodging site for conference attendees. The Hartford Marriott is located in downtown Hartford, within walking distance of many of the city’s amenities. The city of Hartford is itself conveniently located at the crossroads of New England. Only 30 minutes from Bradley International Airport, it is also within reasonable driving distance from New York City, NY, Boston, MA, and Providence, RI.

The Hartford Marriott was selected because it provided a consolidated space with access to meeting rooms as well as a central location within walking distance of restaurants and other downtown establishments. Conference rates will be available. Most of the conference events will take place in the available conference rooms in the hotel. For more information on the hotel, please visit their website at:
http://www.marriott.com/hotels/travel/bdldt-hartford-marriott-downtown/.
Additional information on hotel rates will be forthcoming and available at the PRSA
webpage.

For local information please contact, Charles R. Venator-Santiago, IPRLS & Department of Political Science, University of Connecticut, charles.venator@uconn.edu

For information on PRSA please contact:
• PRSA Secretariat, Marti Dense, Latinos Studies Program,
Cornell University, prsa@cornell.edu
• PRSA President, Gladys M. Jiménez-Muñoz, Department of Sociology,
Binghamton University-SUNY, gjimenez@binghamton.edu
• PRSA Program Committee Chair, Vilma Santiago- Irizarry,
Department of Anthropology, Cornell University, vs23@cornell.edu .