T. Atluri - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by T. Atluri
International Journal of Žižek Studies, 2016
The politics and poetics of this writing cut across borders and time, meeting at a place in which... more The politics and poetics of this writing cut across borders and time, meeting at a place in which disparate theory, politics, and bodies touch. As activists tirelessly battled to repeal section 377 of the Indian penal code, the act which officially criminalises sodomy, fighting against rantings of “religious leaders” and the hypocrisy of the Indian state (See Bhan 2005, Menon, 2007, Joshi, 2009), Slavoj Žižek rang in the new year in New Delhi. Žižek’s visit to India happened in 2010 with a series of public lectures that marked the launch of his recent text, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. Žižek spoke as part of a lecture series produced by Navayana, India’s first and only publishing house which focuses on caste from an anti-caste perspective (www.navayana.org). Žižek arrived at a moment when radical thought is necessary. India stands at a particular political juncture in which it is currying favour with the United States to become the world’s preferred “Asian tiger” on the backs of...
Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2010
What does it mean to have empathy within a late capitalist world? What does it mean to practise s... more What does it mean to have empathy within a late capitalist world? What does it mean to practise solidarity in a time of common sense individualism? In this piece, I reflect upon the deeply tragic case of Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian immigrant who was brutally murdered by the British police in the wake of the London bombing. Drawing upon concepts from psychoanalysis and critical psychology, I discuss the affective and emotive nature of the case. I argue that the case offers insight into the irrational nature of 'terror' used to explain state-led violence in a time of mass Islamophobic paranoia. I further argue that the emotive nature of the political is consistently disavowed in order to consolidate the face of the nation state as a white, western, masculinist, rational one. Finally, I offer thoughts on what this case might tell us about the interrelationship between discourses of 'race,' racism, and citizenship within our contemporary political moment. Rather than being used to support succinct political and theoretical categories of identity politics, the death of Jean Charles de Menezes is an example of the urgent necessity for solidarity to be formed between marginalized bodies. The persistence of state-led murders, justified and legislated by the newest 'N word' of the decade-'terrorist'-requires theoretical endeavours that transcend disciplinary boundaries and political action that transcends bodies. In December 2008, a formal enquiry was made into the death of Jean Charles de Menezes, shot seven times in the head and once in the shoulder at close range by British police in the wake of post-London bombing paranoia. The case is a sobering reminder of the fragility of migrant life within a global 'war against terror.' Using this case, I discuss how 'race' and citizenship are affective constructions that justify nonsensical violence while allowing modern liberal state's to claim rationality. The Murder of Jean Charles de Menezes: A Brief Synopsis On July 22, 2005, Jean Charles de Menezes stepped out of his Brixton home on his way to work. Little did he know that British police were waiting outside his building in hopes of finding a suspected suicide bomber. de Menezes made his way to Stockwell tube station. He broke no laws. He entered the tube station a law-abiding person and died shortly after, a terrorist (See Pugliese, 2006, p.1). It later became clear through a leak from the IPCC investigation that because of a chain of errors from the operations of the police that day to larger failings in state-led 'antiterrorist' operations, the officers wrongly followed and subsequently shot Jean Charles de Menezes, an electrician from Brazil who became a martyr for a time of mass paranoia (Bell, 2007, online reference). The case offers insight into the affective operations of racism and 'terrorism' within an Orwellian regime in which murder is glorified to maintain an imagined national order.
framejournal.org
... Wearing a sari and feigning a universal “Indian accent,” I sat outside the bathroom with a sm... more ... Wearing a sari and feigning a universal “Indian accent,” I sat outside the bathroom with a small table of amenties that carried wares which attendants often carry: chewing gum, mints, condoms, toilet paper, and of course the looming tip jar, encouraging pa-trons to tip the often ...
continent., 2011
We live in a state of economic emergency, bearing witness to an ever emerging war. Yet, politics ... more We live in a state of economic emergency, bearing witness to an ever emerging war. Yet, politics does not simply react to emergencies, it produces them. In a time of grotesque violence and abhorrent apathy we must resist the urge only to react and fight for some ...
Sikh Formations, 2013
Following the Delhi gang rape and murder of Jyoti Singh Pandhey in New Delhi and the unprecedente... more Following the Delhi gang rape and murder of Jyoti Singh Pandhey in New Delhi and the unprecedented levels of protest that followed, high numbers of young people in the subcontinent and specifically urban India were blamed for sexual violence, while also heralded as a progressive vanguard.1 In this piece, I discuss the paradoxical discourses that surround the Delhi gang rape and the unprecedented levels of protest that followed in relation to global austerity and anxieties concerning youth. While ‘idle young men’ are blamed for sexual violence and ‘young’ women are subject to paternalistic protectionism, I suggest that gendered violence in urban India must be thought of in relation to a wider moment of global recession and austerity. I use the Delhi gang rape case and discursive constructions of ‘youth’ as both deviant and politically progressive to discuss the gendered effects that increased forms of global precarity supports.
Media, Culture & Society, 2009
In her work Bodies that Matter, Judith Butler argues that sex is materialized through an existing... more In her work Bodies that Matter, Judith Butler argues that sex is materialized through an existing discourse of gender that slots 'acceptable'bodies into two categories, male or female (1993: 125). If we accepted that Butler's arguments concerning performativity could be ...
While there is often a common sense understanding of sexual ‘progress’ as being tied to legal ri... more While there is often a common sense understanding of sexual ‘progress’ as being tied to legal rights and secularism, this chapter questions the relation- ship between narratives of Western secular feminism and queer theory by examining the embodied politics of feminist and queer movements in India and the articulations of sexual politics outside of Orientalist and colonial categories of citizenship. Understandings of political subjectivity rooted in Orientalist thought fail to apprehend the divergent ways in which sexual politics are articulated outside the grammars of the Western polis. One should perhaps consider a larger political context that produces what Puar terms homonationalism, a discourse within which sexual politics coincide with the aims of postcolonial Western powers (Puar 2007).
I discuss three interrelated moments within contemporary sexual politi- cal struggles: the 2013 decision to uphold Section 377, India’s colonial sodomy law, by the Supreme Court of India; the street protests following with a poor record on LGBT rights. These three examples are connected through genealogies of colonial history and Orientalist discourse. All of these moments highlight the ways in which contemporary sexual politics in the Global South continue to be informed by the history of imperial domination and challenged by the ongoing resilience of postcolonial publics through localised protest.
In Welcome to the Desert of the Real, i ek writes, One of the heroes of the Shoah for me is a fa... more In Welcome to the Desert of the Real, i ek writes,
One of the heroes of the Shoah for me is a famous Jewish ballerina who, as a gesture of special humiliation, was asked by the camp officers to dance for them. Instead of refusing, she did it, and while she held their attention, she quickly grabbed the machine-gun from one of the distracted guards and, before being shot down herself, succeeded in killing more than a dozen officers...( Žižek,143)
i ek’s writing resonates with the figurative sculpture of black British artist Yinka Shonibare. Globe Head Ballerina (2012) and Revolution Ballerina (2013) offer figurative representations of a ballet dancer that resist glorifications of white feminine beauty, often found in “high cultures” of dance. I discuss these sculptures in regards to Shonibare’s embodied politic as a black British
artist with a physical disability. Shonibare uses African Dutch fabric and African Dutch wax to construct a ballerina whose head is made out of a Victorian style globe, and a headless ballerina armed with guns. I consider Shonibare’s use of remnants of Dutch colonial history, to construct sculptures that challenge narcissistic representations of whiteness as “culture.”
What does it mean to have empathy within a late capitalist world? What does it mean to practise s... more What does it mean to have empathy within a late capitalist world? What does it mean to practise solidarity in a time of common sense individualism? In this piece, I reflect upon the deeply tragic case of Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian immigrant who was brutally murdered by the British police in the wake of the London bombing. Drawing upon concepts from psychoanalysis and critical psychology, I discuss the affective and emotive nature of the case. I argue that the case offers insight into the irrational nature of 'terror' used to explain state-led violence in a time of mass Islamophobic paranoia. I further argue that the emotive nature of the political is consistently disavowed in order to consolidate the face of the nation state as a white, western, masculinist, rational one. Finally, I offer thoughts on what this case might tell us about the interrelationship between discourses of 'race,' racism, and citizenship within our contemporary political moment. Rather than being used to support succinct political and theoretical categories of identity politics, the death of Jean Charles de Menezes is an example of the urgent necessity for solidarity to be formed between marginalized bodies. The persistence of state-led murders, justified and legislated by the newest 'N word' of the decade – 'terrorist' – requires theoretical endeavours that transcend disciplinary boundaries and political action that transcends bodies. In December 2008, a formal enquiry was made into the death of Jean Charles de Mene-zes, shot seven times in the head and once in the shoulder at close range by British police in the wake of post-London bombing paranoia. The case is a sobering reminder of the fragility of migrant life within a global 'war against terror.' Using this case, I discuss how 'race' and citizenship are affective constructions that justify nonsensical violence while allowing modern liberal state's to claim rationality.
" It's referencing back all of those Indian women that have come worked on the plantations and in... more " It's referencing back all of those Indian women that have come worked on the plantations and in the cane fields. It's empowering them to a degree and yet the dance is South Asian…it evokes Bengali folk dance. It has an Indianness coded in it….And on the side of that shot is the Guyana flag which I've inverted as well which is a big thing because in not showing the flag as is, I'm gesturing to the question of sexuality. So there are many layers there… " (Mohabeer 2008) Toronto-based filmmaker Michelle Mohabeer's films offer a rare glimpse into the multiple layers of irony and resistance that define dissident Caribbean sexualities. Mohabeer offers what she terms an " oppositional aesthetics " (Ibid) to capture the disparate layers of politics, memory, and desire which shape dissident sexualities in postcolonial Guyana and the Caribbean diaspora. In this paper, I am interested in how the complex entanglements through which Caribbean sexualities are processed are expressed through avant garde art forms. ________________________________________________________________________
In Welcome to the Desert of the Real, Slavoj Žižek draws on concepts from Lacanian psychoanalysis... more In Welcome to the Desert of the Real, Slavoj Žižek draws on concepts from Lacanian psychoanalysis to discuss the bombing of the World Trade Center. He writes,
It was when we watched the two WTC towers collapsing on the TV screen, that it became possible to experience the falsity of “reality TV shows”: even if these shows are “for real,” people still act in them—they are simply playing themselves.1
I use Žižek’s writing to discuss the Guantanamo Files, an interactive website launched by e Guardian in 2010. e Guantanamo Files functions like a social media site like Facebook, where one can click on photos and snippets of information about prisoners being held in Guantanamo Bay. e Guantanamo Files o ers an entry point into thinking through the relationship between desire, drive, and anxiety in regard to Internet-based technology and spectacles of terror. When people visit the site, they are struck by the resemblance it bears to social media sites and the disturbingly commercial layout in which pris- oners’ photos and numbers ash on the screen. Termed an “interactive data- base,” viewers are told they can nd out who’s who speaking to the con ation between media celebrity and “terror.”2
The politics and poetics of this writing cut across borders and time, meeting at a place in which... more The politics and poetics of this writing cut across borders and time, meeting at a place in which disparate theory, politics, and bodies touch. As activists tirelessly battled to repeal section 377 of the Indian penal code, the act which officially criminalises sodomy, fighting against rantings of " religious leaders " and the hypocrisy of the Indian state (See Bhan 2005, Menon, 2007, Joshi, 2009), Slavoj Žižek rang in the new year in New Delhi. Žižek's visit to India happened in 2010 with a series of public lectures that marked the launch of his recent text, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. Žižek spoke as part of a lecture series produced by Navayana, India's first and only publishing house which focuses on caste from an anti-caste perspective (www.navayana.org). i Žižek arrived at a moment when radical thought is necessary. India stands at a particular political juncture in which it is currying favour with the United States to become the world's preferred " Asian tiger " on the backs of the landless, the rural, the poor. ii At the same time, the nation defines itself against " terrorist " elements by demonizing Pakistan and pathologising Muslims within and outside the nation. iii Finally, as we waited for Žižek to obtain necessary documents to cross the border, the ironies of our moment became clear as the Indian
FRAME: a journal of visual and material culture 69 It is easy for an academic of a round table to... more FRAME: a journal of visual and material culture 69 It is easy for an academic of a round table to claim that we live in a post-ideological universe but the moment he visits the lavatory after the heated discussion, he is again knee deep in ideology. — Žižek The toilets of major nation states can be used to reflect upon the ideological and political leanings of Western powers. A b s t r a c t Slavoj Žižek writes that " It is easy for an academic of a round table to claim that we live in a post-ideological universe but the moment he visits the lavatory after the heated discussion, he is again knee deep in ideology " (Žižek, 2004). Žižek cites Hegel who was " …the first to see in the geographical triad of Germany, France, and England an expression of three different existential attitudes: reflective thoroughness (German), revolutionary hastiness (French), utilitarian pragmatism (English) " (Žižek, 2004). The Žižekian toilet is never just a toilet. Rather it reflects upon how our lives are governed by the ideologies of places in which we live, work, and well, shit. I am interested in other fixtures of the contemporary bathroom. Namely, I am troubled by the restroom attendant, a strange figure in urban Western public spaces. In an article titled " Who Would Be a Bathroom Attendant? " the BBC reveals that the job is often carried out by non status migrant workers (Cook, 2010). I am interested in the relationship between slavery which allotted black bodies 'care' roles and the current racialisation of undocumented workers. To paraphrase Sivanandan, the rest room attendant might speak to a time in which citizenship is the new black (Sivanandan, 2001). I further reflect upon what attendants can tell us about racism and academic labour. Drawing upon a case at Duke University where a student referred to a Black professor as " … a cross between a welfare queen and a restroom attendant " (Lawrence, 1990) and a performance art piece in which I played a restroom attendant, I return to Žižek's assertion that once the debates are done, one can learn a lot in the lavatory.
In this article I discuss the complex figure of the 'Hijra', a sexually dissident actor in Indian... more In this article I discuss the complex figure of the 'Hijra', a sexually dissident actor in Indian politics that might offer inroads into thinking through sexual citizenship after orientalism. This article aims to trouble spectacles of vulnerability that often apprehend sexed/gendered bodies in the global south as consummate victims, seen to be perpetually grieving on world stages. I suggest that the embodied and confrontational performances of Hijras in public space might offer an affront to such narratives. I point to examples of sexual politics articulated by Hijras that gesture to a sexual citizenship after, beyond, and outside orientalism. This article questions occidentalist frameworks that undercut contemporary sexual/gendered politics and suggests that there should perhaps be a scholarly prerogative to reframe the concepts of desire.
International Journal of Žižek Studies, 2016
The politics and poetics of this writing cut across borders and time, meeting at a place in which... more The politics and poetics of this writing cut across borders and time, meeting at a place in which disparate theory, politics, and bodies touch. As activists tirelessly battled to repeal section 377 of the Indian penal code, the act which officially criminalises sodomy, fighting against rantings of “religious leaders” and the hypocrisy of the Indian state (See Bhan 2005, Menon, 2007, Joshi, 2009), Slavoj Žižek rang in the new year in New Delhi. Žižek’s visit to India happened in 2010 with a series of public lectures that marked the launch of his recent text, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. Žižek spoke as part of a lecture series produced by Navayana, India’s first and only publishing house which focuses on caste from an anti-caste perspective (www.navayana.org). Žižek arrived at a moment when radical thought is necessary. India stands at a particular political juncture in which it is currying favour with the United States to become the world’s preferred “Asian tiger” on the backs of...
Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2010
What does it mean to have empathy within a late capitalist world? What does it mean to practise s... more What does it mean to have empathy within a late capitalist world? What does it mean to practise solidarity in a time of common sense individualism? In this piece, I reflect upon the deeply tragic case of Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian immigrant who was brutally murdered by the British police in the wake of the London bombing. Drawing upon concepts from psychoanalysis and critical psychology, I discuss the affective and emotive nature of the case. I argue that the case offers insight into the irrational nature of 'terror' used to explain state-led violence in a time of mass Islamophobic paranoia. I further argue that the emotive nature of the political is consistently disavowed in order to consolidate the face of the nation state as a white, western, masculinist, rational one. Finally, I offer thoughts on what this case might tell us about the interrelationship between discourses of 'race,' racism, and citizenship within our contemporary political moment. Rather than being used to support succinct political and theoretical categories of identity politics, the death of Jean Charles de Menezes is an example of the urgent necessity for solidarity to be formed between marginalized bodies. The persistence of state-led murders, justified and legislated by the newest 'N word' of the decade-'terrorist'-requires theoretical endeavours that transcend disciplinary boundaries and political action that transcends bodies. In December 2008, a formal enquiry was made into the death of Jean Charles de Menezes, shot seven times in the head and once in the shoulder at close range by British police in the wake of post-London bombing paranoia. The case is a sobering reminder of the fragility of migrant life within a global 'war against terror.' Using this case, I discuss how 'race' and citizenship are affective constructions that justify nonsensical violence while allowing modern liberal state's to claim rationality. The Murder of Jean Charles de Menezes: A Brief Synopsis On July 22, 2005, Jean Charles de Menezes stepped out of his Brixton home on his way to work. Little did he know that British police were waiting outside his building in hopes of finding a suspected suicide bomber. de Menezes made his way to Stockwell tube station. He broke no laws. He entered the tube station a law-abiding person and died shortly after, a terrorist (See Pugliese, 2006, p.1). It later became clear through a leak from the IPCC investigation that because of a chain of errors from the operations of the police that day to larger failings in state-led 'antiterrorist' operations, the officers wrongly followed and subsequently shot Jean Charles de Menezes, an electrician from Brazil who became a martyr for a time of mass paranoia (Bell, 2007, online reference). The case offers insight into the affective operations of racism and 'terrorism' within an Orwellian regime in which murder is glorified to maintain an imagined national order.
framejournal.org
... Wearing a sari and feigning a universal “Indian accent,” I sat outside the bathroom with a sm... more ... Wearing a sari and feigning a universal “Indian accent,” I sat outside the bathroom with a small table of amenties that carried wares which attendants often carry: chewing gum, mints, condoms, toilet paper, and of course the looming tip jar, encouraging pa-trons to tip the often ...
continent., 2011
We live in a state of economic emergency, bearing witness to an ever emerging war. Yet, politics ... more We live in a state of economic emergency, bearing witness to an ever emerging war. Yet, politics does not simply react to emergencies, it produces them. In a time of grotesque violence and abhorrent apathy we must resist the urge only to react and fight for some ...
Sikh Formations, 2013
Following the Delhi gang rape and murder of Jyoti Singh Pandhey in New Delhi and the unprecedente... more Following the Delhi gang rape and murder of Jyoti Singh Pandhey in New Delhi and the unprecedented levels of protest that followed, high numbers of young people in the subcontinent and specifically urban India were blamed for sexual violence, while also heralded as a progressive vanguard.1 In this piece, I discuss the paradoxical discourses that surround the Delhi gang rape and the unprecedented levels of protest that followed in relation to global austerity and anxieties concerning youth. While ‘idle young men’ are blamed for sexual violence and ‘young’ women are subject to paternalistic protectionism, I suggest that gendered violence in urban India must be thought of in relation to a wider moment of global recession and austerity. I use the Delhi gang rape case and discursive constructions of ‘youth’ as both deviant and politically progressive to discuss the gendered effects that increased forms of global precarity supports.
Media, Culture & Society, 2009
In her work Bodies that Matter, Judith Butler argues that sex is materialized through an existing... more In her work Bodies that Matter, Judith Butler argues that sex is materialized through an existing discourse of gender that slots 'acceptable'bodies into two categories, male or female (1993: 125). If we accepted that Butler's arguments concerning performativity could be ...
While there is often a common sense understanding of sexual ‘progress’ as being tied to legal ri... more While there is often a common sense understanding of sexual ‘progress’ as being tied to legal rights and secularism, this chapter questions the relation- ship between narratives of Western secular feminism and queer theory by examining the embodied politics of feminist and queer movements in India and the articulations of sexual politics outside of Orientalist and colonial categories of citizenship. Understandings of political subjectivity rooted in Orientalist thought fail to apprehend the divergent ways in which sexual politics are articulated outside the grammars of the Western polis. One should perhaps consider a larger political context that produces what Puar terms homonationalism, a discourse within which sexual politics coincide with the aims of postcolonial Western powers (Puar 2007).
I discuss three interrelated moments within contemporary sexual politi- cal struggles: the 2013 decision to uphold Section 377, India’s colonial sodomy law, by the Supreme Court of India; the street protests following with a poor record on LGBT rights. These three examples are connected through genealogies of colonial history and Orientalist discourse. All of these moments highlight the ways in which contemporary sexual politics in the Global South continue to be informed by the history of imperial domination and challenged by the ongoing resilience of postcolonial publics through localised protest.
In Welcome to the Desert of the Real, i ek writes, One of the heroes of the Shoah for me is a fa... more In Welcome to the Desert of the Real, i ek writes,
One of the heroes of the Shoah for me is a famous Jewish ballerina who, as a gesture of special humiliation, was asked by the camp officers to dance for them. Instead of refusing, she did it, and while she held their attention, she quickly grabbed the machine-gun from one of the distracted guards and, before being shot down herself, succeeded in killing more than a dozen officers...( Žižek,143)
i ek’s writing resonates with the figurative sculpture of black British artist Yinka Shonibare. Globe Head Ballerina (2012) and Revolution Ballerina (2013) offer figurative representations of a ballet dancer that resist glorifications of white feminine beauty, often found in “high cultures” of dance. I discuss these sculptures in regards to Shonibare’s embodied politic as a black British
artist with a physical disability. Shonibare uses African Dutch fabric and African Dutch wax to construct a ballerina whose head is made out of a Victorian style globe, and a headless ballerina armed with guns. I consider Shonibare’s use of remnants of Dutch colonial history, to construct sculptures that challenge narcissistic representations of whiteness as “culture.”
What does it mean to have empathy within a late capitalist world? What does it mean to practise s... more What does it mean to have empathy within a late capitalist world? What does it mean to practise solidarity in a time of common sense individualism? In this piece, I reflect upon the deeply tragic case of Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian immigrant who was brutally murdered by the British police in the wake of the London bombing. Drawing upon concepts from psychoanalysis and critical psychology, I discuss the affective and emotive nature of the case. I argue that the case offers insight into the irrational nature of 'terror' used to explain state-led violence in a time of mass Islamophobic paranoia. I further argue that the emotive nature of the political is consistently disavowed in order to consolidate the face of the nation state as a white, western, masculinist, rational one. Finally, I offer thoughts on what this case might tell us about the interrelationship between discourses of 'race,' racism, and citizenship within our contemporary political moment. Rather than being used to support succinct political and theoretical categories of identity politics, the death of Jean Charles de Menezes is an example of the urgent necessity for solidarity to be formed between marginalized bodies. The persistence of state-led murders, justified and legislated by the newest 'N word' of the decade – 'terrorist' – requires theoretical endeavours that transcend disciplinary boundaries and political action that transcends bodies. In December 2008, a formal enquiry was made into the death of Jean Charles de Mene-zes, shot seven times in the head and once in the shoulder at close range by British police in the wake of post-London bombing paranoia. The case is a sobering reminder of the fragility of migrant life within a global 'war against terror.' Using this case, I discuss how 'race' and citizenship are affective constructions that justify nonsensical violence while allowing modern liberal state's to claim rationality.
" It's referencing back all of those Indian women that have come worked on the plantations and in... more " It's referencing back all of those Indian women that have come worked on the plantations and in the cane fields. It's empowering them to a degree and yet the dance is South Asian…it evokes Bengali folk dance. It has an Indianness coded in it….And on the side of that shot is the Guyana flag which I've inverted as well which is a big thing because in not showing the flag as is, I'm gesturing to the question of sexuality. So there are many layers there… " (Mohabeer 2008) Toronto-based filmmaker Michelle Mohabeer's films offer a rare glimpse into the multiple layers of irony and resistance that define dissident Caribbean sexualities. Mohabeer offers what she terms an " oppositional aesthetics " (Ibid) to capture the disparate layers of politics, memory, and desire which shape dissident sexualities in postcolonial Guyana and the Caribbean diaspora. In this paper, I am interested in how the complex entanglements through which Caribbean sexualities are processed are expressed through avant garde art forms. ________________________________________________________________________
In Welcome to the Desert of the Real, Slavoj Žižek draws on concepts from Lacanian psychoanalysis... more In Welcome to the Desert of the Real, Slavoj Žižek draws on concepts from Lacanian psychoanalysis to discuss the bombing of the World Trade Center. He writes,
It was when we watched the two WTC towers collapsing on the TV screen, that it became possible to experience the falsity of “reality TV shows”: even if these shows are “for real,” people still act in them—they are simply playing themselves.1
I use Žižek’s writing to discuss the Guantanamo Files, an interactive website launched by e Guardian in 2010. e Guantanamo Files functions like a social media site like Facebook, where one can click on photos and snippets of information about prisoners being held in Guantanamo Bay. e Guantanamo Files o ers an entry point into thinking through the relationship between desire, drive, and anxiety in regard to Internet-based technology and spectacles of terror. When people visit the site, they are struck by the resemblance it bears to social media sites and the disturbingly commercial layout in which pris- oners’ photos and numbers ash on the screen. Termed an “interactive data- base,” viewers are told they can nd out who’s who speaking to the con ation between media celebrity and “terror.”2
The politics and poetics of this writing cut across borders and time, meeting at a place in which... more The politics and poetics of this writing cut across borders and time, meeting at a place in which disparate theory, politics, and bodies touch. As activists tirelessly battled to repeal section 377 of the Indian penal code, the act which officially criminalises sodomy, fighting against rantings of " religious leaders " and the hypocrisy of the Indian state (See Bhan 2005, Menon, 2007, Joshi, 2009), Slavoj Žižek rang in the new year in New Delhi. Žižek's visit to India happened in 2010 with a series of public lectures that marked the launch of his recent text, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. Žižek spoke as part of a lecture series produced by Navayana, India's first and only publishing house which focuses on caste from an anti-caste perspective (www.navayana.org). i Žižek arrived at a moment when radical thought is necessary. India stands at a particular political juncture in which it is currying favour with the United States to become the world's preferred " Asian tiger " on the backs of the landless, the rural, the poor. ii At the same time, the nation defines itself against " terrorist " elements by demonizing Pakistan and pathologising Muslims within and outside the nation. iii Finally, as we waited for Žižek to obtain necessary documents to cross the border, the ironies of our moment became clear as the Indian
FRAME: a journal of visual and material culture 69 It is easy for an academic of a round table to... more FRAME: a journal of visual and material culture 69 It is easy for an academic of a round table to claim that we live in a post-ideological universe but the moment he visits the lavatory after the heated discussion, he is again knee deep in ideology. — Žižek The toilets of major nation states can be used to reflect upon the ideological and political leanings of Western powers. A b s t r a c t Slavoj Žižek writes that " It is easy for an academic of a round table to claim that we live in a post-ideological universe but the moment he visits the lavatory after the heated discussion, he is again knee deep in ideology " (Žižek, 2004). Žižek cites Hegel who was " …the first to see in the geographical triad of Germany, France, and England an expression of three different existential attitudes: reflective thoroughness (German), revolutionary hastiness (French), utilitarian pragmatism (English) " (Žižek, 2004). The Žižekian toilet is never just a toilet. Rather it reflects upon how our lives are governed by the ideologies of places in which we live, work, and well, shit. I am interested in other fixtures of the contemporary bathroom. Namely, I am troubled by the restroom attendant, a strange figure in urban Western public spaces. In an article titled " Who Would Be a Bathroom Attendant? " the BBC reveals that the job is often carried out by non status migrant workers (Cook, 2010). I am interested in the relationship between slavery which allotted black bodies 'care' roles and the current racialisation of undocumented workers. To paraphrase Sivanandan, the rest room attendant might speak to a time in which citizenship is the new black (Sivanandan, 2001). I further reflect upon what attendants can tell us about racism and academic labour. Drawing upon a case at Duke University where a student referred to a Black professor as " … a cross between a welfare queen and a restroom attendant " (Lawrence, 1990) and a performance art piece in which I played a restroom attendant, I return to Žižek's assertion that once the debates are done, one can learn a lot in the lavatory.
In this article I discuss the complex figure of the 'Hijra', a sexually dissident actor in Indian... more In this article I discuss the complex figure of the 'Hijra', a sexually dissident actor in Indian politics that might offer inroads into thinking through sexual citizenship after orientalism. This article aims to trouble spectacles of vulnerability that often apprehend sexed/gendered bodies in the global south as consummate victims, seen to be perpetually grieving on world stages. I suggest that the embodied and confrontational performances of Hijras in public space might offer an affront to such narratives. I point to examples of sexual politics articulated by Hijras that gesture to a sexual citizenship after, beyond, and outside orientalism. This article questions occidentalist frameworks that undercut contemporary sexual/gendered politics and suggests that there should perhaps be a scholarly prerogative to reframe the concepts of desire.