moon charania | Spelman College (original) (raw)
Books by moon charania
Duke University Press, 2023
In Archive of Tongues, Moon Charania explores feminine dispossession and the brown diaspora throu... more In Archive of Tongues, Moon Charania explores feminine dispossession and the brown diaspora through a reflection on the life of her mother. Drawing on her mother’s memories and stories of migration, violence, sexuality, queerness, domesticity, and the intimate economies of everyday life, Charania conceptualizes her mother’s tongue as an object of theory and an archive of brown intimate life. By presenting a mode of storytelling that is sensual and melancholic, piercing and sharp, Charania recovers otherwise silenced modes of brown mothers’ survival, disobedience, and meaning making that are often only lived out in invisible, intimate spaces, and too often disappear into them. In narrating her mother’s tongue as both metaphor for and material reservoir of other ways of knowing, Charania gestures to the afflictions, limits, and failures of feminist, queer, and postcolonial scholarly interrogations and the consequences of closing the archive of the brown mother.
McFarland Press, 2015
Pakistan leaves its psychic print on me, intense, unforgiving, tender. A deep nostalgia runs thr... more Pakistan leaves its psychic print on me, intense, unforgiving, tender. A deep nostalgia runs through me daily, but its distance stretches out in front of me. Water, land, war, death and politics announce the disappearance of the Pakistan I knew. Its veracity lingers only in the memories of those who lived it and in the complex truths of those who continue to occupy it. If nations are constituted by relations of desire and familiarity, community and connectivity, imagined solidarities and real practices of eating and speaking, sights and smells, clothes and music and poetry, then perhaps I never left Pakistan. But indeed I did. When I left Pakistan, I was too young to understand why my mother cogently gathered all these things close, how my father's refusal to allow us to speak English in the house erected a wall that kept us from ever assimilating into (the whiteness of) America, and the dreams that connected them to the route back banished with time and space. Instead, I left with the arrogance of young girl who thought returning to the past was as simple as returning to a country. I didn't know, then, that time would and could dilute the "Pakistani" in me.
Articles by moon charania
International Feminist Journal of Politics, 2019
This special Conversations section, “Student Meets Author,” is a twist on the “Author Meets Criti... more This special Conversations section, “Student Meets Author,” is a twist on the “Author Meets Critic” concept. This conversation is between undergraduate student Sydney Tisch and feminist academic Dr Moon Charania, Assistant Professor of International Studies at Spelman College, Atlanta, Georgia, and author of Will the Real Pakistani Woman Please Stand Up? (2015). Charania's book uses transnational studies, cultural politics, and queer studies to examine how Western visual representations of Pakistani women signify the US neocolonial power relationship with Pakistan. Sydney is a Women’s and Gender Studies and Peace and Justice Studies double major (class of 2019). She grew up in Wisconsin and is primarily interested in US queer histories and transnational queer organizing. The conversation conversation covers issues of accessibility, activism, the struggle with writing and meanings of justice.
Meridians: Feminisms, Race, Transnationalisms, 2019
This essay takes on ghosts as an explicit analytic lever to examine the storied archive of one ra... more This essay takes on ghosts as an explicit analytic lever to examine the storied archive of one racial and racialized mother. It defines ghosts as conglomerating and attached energies whose nodes of human connection rely on the lived experience of violence, violation, and volatility. Through three narrated encounters, the essay uses social and affective memory and autoethnographic matter as food for critical thought, building on philosophy, postcolonial, feminist, and queer criticism, in order to address the hauntology of the necropartriarchal and necropolitical against the backdrop of late liberal globalization and its enduring injustices. In writing at the limit of the unspeakable and the unknown, this essay mimes the violence of the archive. However, this essay does more than recount the violence deposited in the fragment of this archive. It tells the story of ghosts to retrieve what remains dormant in critical feminist theorizations of violence against women. Using a cross-genre form, a secret collection of memories that includes elements of hauntology, this essay exposes some of the cracks and fissures in feminist theorizing on sexual violence, migration, and the figure of the other mother.
Camera Obscura, 2020
This paper sits at the intersection of what George Lipsitz has aptly called “the impossibility of... more This paper sits at the intersection of what George Lipsitz has aptly called “the impossibility of the [white] anti-racist subject” and Deleuze’s notion that cinema is a massive conceptual and sensual apparatus that prepares us to see in a certain way. I look specifically at two controversial war films - Eye in the Sky (Hood, 2015) and Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (Ficarra and Racua, 2016) - both of which feature white female protagonists as conflicted but central participants in the racialized domains of war and political machinations. While one film takes on a serious ethical polemic (the innocent lives of civilians caught in the visual crosshairs of drone cameras) and the latter is a filmic rom-com following the adventures of a journalist in Afghanistan, they both visually capture important ethical questions around white imperial violence, the disposability of brown lives, and the current political shift/ing of/towards white women in positions of intense power. Mobilizing a “vast social geometry of white particularities,” even as they deny them, both films appear to be both profoundly anti-muscular and inaugurate an antiracist white subject. I argue that these two technologies of domination – visual culture that entertains its citizens and political practice that secures its citizenry – are profoundly interlinked public archives to read, what I am calling, “ethical whiteness,” its relationship to the death drive and the gendered currency of both. Using the figure of the little brown girl that sits at the center of Eye in the Sky - the fetish object central to the story – alongside the comedic characterology in Whiskey Tango FoxTrot, my paper underscores how ethical whiteness is tightly bound up with the death drive, but in a way that destroys through the dimension of the empathetic. I argue that these widely circulated visual moments of “ethical whiteness” expose a pernicious social text that priorities the necropolitical through the necropedophiliac.
Feminist Studies, 2019
The idea that divorce is a negative and traumatic event is part of U.S. cultural consciousness an... more The idea that divorce is a negative and traumatic event is part of U.S. cultural consciousness and in the Reagan-Bush era (1981-1992), heightened anxiety about both the demise of marriage and the rise of divorce created state policy mandating court-approved parenting classes for divorcing couples – a requirement for the final dissolution of marriage. The ubiquity and legitimacy of these parenting courses demonstrates that the unruliness of divorce is met with new technologies of governing. We position these state-mandated parenting courses as a form of “governmentality” – a mode of governance encompassing but not limited to the state – designed to produce apologetic citizens whose social, sexual, emotional, and intimate behavior becomes regulated (Foucault 1977). These parenting seminars deploy specific forms of knowledge in order to legitimate the normativity of hetero-marriage; perpetuate the notion that children of divorcing parents are at risk; and promote liberal concepts of self-improvement and empowerment. We analyze the discursive conditions through which parenting courses for divorcing couples came to be legally required, and socially desirable. We show how the policy and the courses advance idealizations of individualism, equality, and child welfare, while also expressing anxiety about the fate of the heterosexual nuclear family. We argue that these policies and courses attempt to regulate parental conduct, thought, and emotion, prescribing and proscribing attitudes and behaviors in order to shape divorcing couples into redeemable, responsible parents.
Journal of Progressive Human Services, 2017
Islamophobia describes the racism, exploitation, and violence experienced by Arabs, individuals o... more Islamophobia describes the racism, exploitation, and violence experienced by Arabs, individuals of Arab descent, and Muslims. Although social workers are meant to challenge social injustice, social work codes of ethics and the literature are without guidance for unlearning Islamophobia. Arguing that one's ability to interrupt Islamophobia is strengthened by an understanding of the historical record and theoretical tenets of Orientalism, we offer social workers explicit linkages between Orientalism and Islamophobia, and engage with the idea of Islamo-racism. In this article, we attend to the ways in which Orientalism is used to 'other' individuals while strengthening white hegemony, and link those processes with Islamophobia and Islamo-racism. We conclude with some strategies derived from postcolonial theory to disrupt Islamophobia.
Intensities: A Journal Of Cult Culture, 2016
In this paper, I look closely at how whiteness, as a key demonstrative site of power in Sam Taylo... more In this paper, I look closely at how whiteness, as a key demonstrative site of power in Sam Taylor-Johnson’s Fifty Shades of Grey (2015), scripts a repertoire of behaviors on sexual, gender, racial, and class lines. Positioning Fifty Shades of Grey in the post 9/11 globalized media machine, I argue that this internationally bestselling erotic phenomenon is haunted by the master narrative of white racism and heterosexual compulsion, where both are reconstituted as desirable in growing social climate of gay cosmopolitanism and anti-racist awareness. Wrought through a lexicon white superiority, Fifty Shades offers us a way of thinking about how dominant fe/male subject(s) employ whiteness as a crucial practice of producing social subordination, and how a close reading of this film underscore the private and public pleasures of white subjectivity, and the inherent stability of white affluent subjectivity, despite of and even in spite of its excesses – a position disallowed to queer and colored subjects. Analyzing various narrative moments in the film, I show how Christian Grey, despite his eroticization of violence, is nonetheless secured by distinctive individuality most closely associated with white bodies and the privileges of the white body politic. Grey’s irreducible and extradiagetic white presence demand further thinking about how Fifty Shades is fundamentally about the pleasures (and promises) of whiteness. I argue that the ultimate duplicity of Fifty Shades of Grey is that it seduces viewers through a promise of explicit sex and wealth, even though the films’ true offering is much more simple: the promise of whiteness.
Sexualities, 2016
This paper draws on the June 26, 2011 US embassy-sponsored gay pride parade in Islamabad, Pakista... more This paper draws on the June 26, 2011 US embassy-sponsored gay pride parade in Islamabad, Pakistan alongside popular US visual cultural moments (2008-2012). I use visual culture to reread US intrigue in Pakistani queer subjects through specific images of terrorist/feminized masculinities - images that elucidate the conspicuous shifts in the technologies of power and sexuality in the context of contemporary Pakistani LGBT visibility. I move through popular US representations of Pakistan, Muslim masculinity and US LGBT visibility – all of which attempt to capture homoerotic desire (and dread) in the transnational landscape of sexuality-racial-gender politics and all of which, I argue, are embroiled in US national identity (and “security”). My analysis is two-pronged. First, I look closely and critically at the narrative and visual character of the knowledge the US has created around defining Pakistan and Pakistani (sexual) subjects. Second, I demonstrate that in Pakistan queer resistance is often produced and animated from below the state and articulated against US hegemonic practices of visibility and representation.
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 2010
book chapters by moon charania
In a series of absorbing case studies, Will the Real Pakistani Woman Please Stand Up? Empire, Vis... more In a series of absorbing case studies, Will the Real Pakistani Woman Please Stand Up? Empire, Visual Culture and the Brown Female Body, focuses on the portrayal of Pakistani women in the global media. Analyzing Hollywood films, British documentaries, U.S. newspapers and magazines, this book traces sensational female figures of Pakistan—all of whom have been subject to patriarchal violence— to explore the current crisis of desire and detestation of the feminine, racialized other. This book fundamentally takes on an old problem – the racial and imperial politics of liberal feminism - but in theoretically and conceptually new ways. I locate my readings of these visual texts in the broader scholarly and political questions around spectatorship and fetishisms in our current age of empire and globalization. Drawing from a variety of disciplines - feminist studies, postcolonial studies, and visual cultural studies – I illuminate the “strange” “queer” and “disturbed” relationships and questions that popular visual images of Pakistani, and more broadly Muslim, women foster and provoke. I blend visual research, discourse analysis, and my own entanglements in these women’s life, death and feminist politics, to take on the dilemma of representation and democracy.
Feminist and Queer Theory: An Intersectional and Transnational Reader, Eds, Saraswati, L.A., Barbara Shaw, and Heather Rellihan, Oxford University Press. , 2020
Our primary aim is to look at what we are terming, “The New Disney” – a series of new Disney film... more Our primary aim is to look at what we are terming, “The New Disney” – a series of new Disney films (2010 - 2015) that re-tell classic patriarchal Anglo-American stories through contemporary tropes of girl power, female friendships and sexual agency. Faithfully following the public mood, these “New Disney” films flirt with feminism, codify a unique form of social rebellion, and sign into legitimacy youth-oriented sexual and gender alterity. We situate the new Disney in the “sensual” turn of the public towards both gay cosmopolitism and girls’ (liberal) empowerment. We use the term sensual to point to the libidinal economy that centralizes national “feel-goodness” around progress and equality (read: Nike’s “Girl Effect” campaign or Adverts such as, “Throw like a Girl”). From Frozen’s celebrated queer anthem “Let It Go” to the erotic undertone’s of Maleficent’s love for young Aurora, it appears that Disney is dismantling the gendered, metaphoric hierarchy implicit in its historical films. Truly, it seems that Disney’s new heroines are “leaning in.” Conversely, Disney’s latest penchant for feminist empowerment is visually narrativized through a youthful white feminism that, we argue, surfaces through gendered and sexual grief. In the New Disney, gender and sexual melancholia is both a technology and a nightmare of young feminist/queer subjectivity. The fact that Disney narrates the story of an empowered alternative youth through melancholy and trauma speaks volumes to Disney’s simultaneous repulsion and investment in the young feminist and queer subject.
Border Politics: Social Movements, Collective Identities and Globalization, Oct 2014
Book Reviews by moon charania
Talks by moon charania
Conversation at Charis Books with Wendy Simonds and Opal Moore
Duke University Press, 2023
In Archive of Tongues, Moon Charania explores feminine dispossession and the brown diaspora throu... more In Archive of Tongues, Moon Charania explores feminine dispossession and the brown diaspora through a reflection on the life of her mother. Drawing on her mother’s memories and stories of migration, violence, sexuality, queerness, domesticity, and the intimate economies of everyday life, Charania conceptualizes her mother’s tongue as an object of theory and an archive of brown intimate life. By presenting a mode of storytelling that is sensual and melancholic, piercing and sharp, Charania recovers otherwise silenced modes of brown mothers’ survival, disobedience, and meaning making that are often only lived out in invisible, intimate spaces, and too often disappear into them. In narrating her mother’s tongue as both metaphor for and material reservoir of other ways of knowing, Charania gestures to the afflictions, limits, and failures of feminist, queer, and postcolonial scholarly interrogations and the consequences of closing the archive of the brown mother.
McFarland Press, 2015
Pakistan leaves its psychic print on me, intense, unforgiving, tender. A deep nostalgia runs thr... more Pakistan leaves its psychic print on me, intense, unforgiving, tender. A deep nostalgia runs through me daily, but its distance stretches out in front of me. Water, land, war, death and politics announce the disappearance of the Pakistan I knew. Its veracity lingers only in the memories of those who lived it and in the complex truths of those who continue to occupy it. If nations are constituted by relations of desire and familiarity, community and connectivity, imagined solidarities and real practices of eating and speaking, sights and smells, clothes and music and poetry, then perhaps I never left Pakistan. But indeed I did. When I left Pakistan, I was too young to understand why my mother cogently gathered all these things close, how my father's refusal to allow us to speak English in the house erected a wall that kept us from ever assimilating into (the whiteness of) America, and the dreams that connected them to the route back banished with time and space. Instead, I left with the arrogance of young girl who thought returning to the past was as simple as returning to a country. I didn't know, then, that time would and could dilute the "Pakistani" in me.
International Feminist Journal of Politics, 2019
This special Conversations section, “Student Meets Author,” is a twist on the “Author Meets Criti... more This special Conversations section, “Student Meets Author,” is a twist on the “Author Meets Critic” concept. This conversation is between undergraduate student Sydney Tisch and feminist academic Dr Moon Charania, Assistant Professor of International Studies at Spelman College, Atlanta, Georgia, and author of Will the Real Pakistani Woman Please Stand Up? (2015). Charania's book uses transnational studies, cultural politics, and queer studies to examine how Western visual representations of Pakistani women signify the US neocolonial power relationship with Pakistan. Sydney is a Women’s and Gender Studies and Peace and Justice Studies double major (class of 2019). She grew up in Wisconsin and is primarily interested in US queer histories and transnational queer organizing. The conversation conversation covers issues of accessibility, activism, the struggle with writing and meanings of justice.
Meridians: Feminisms, Race, Transnationalisms, 2019
This essay takes on ghosts as an explicit analytic lever to examine the storied archive of one ra... more This essay takes on ghosts as an explicit analytic lever to examine the storied archive of one racial and racialized mother. It defines ghosts as conglomerating and attached energies whose nodes of human connection rely on the lived experience of violence, violation, and volatility. Through three narrated encounters, the essay uses social and affective memory and autoethnographic matter as food for critical thought, building on philosophy, postcolonial, feminist, and queer criticism, in order to address the hauntology of the necropartriarchal and necropolitical against the backdrop of late liberal globalization and its enduring injustices. In writing at the limit of the unspeakable and the unknown, this essay mimes the violence of the archive. However, this essay does more than recount the violence deposited in the fragment of this archive. It tells the story of ghosts to retrieve what remains dormant in critical feminist theorizations of violence against women. Using a cross-genre form, a secret collection of memories that includes elements of hauntology, this essay exposes some of the cracks and fissures in feminist theorizing on sexual violence, migration, and the figure of the other mother.
Camera Obscura, 2020
This paper sits at the intersection of what George Lipsitz has aptly called “the impossibility of... more This paper sits at the intersection of what George Lipsitz has aptly called “the impossibility of the [white] anti-racist subject” and Deleuze’s notion that cinema is a massive conceptual and sensual apparatus that prepares us to see in a certain way. I look specifically at two controversial war films - Eye in the Sky (Hood, 2015) and Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (Ficarra and Racua, 2016) - both of which feature white female protagonists as conflicted but central participants in the racialized domains of war and political machinations. While one film takes on a serious ethical polemic (the innocent lives of civilians caught in the visual crosshairs of drone cameras) and the latter is a filmic rom-com following the adventures of a journalist in Afghanistan, they both visually capture important ethical questions around white imperial violence, the disposability of brown lives, and the current political shift/ing of/towards white women in positions of intense power. Mobilizing a “vast social geometry of white particularities,” even as they deny them, both films appear to be both profoundly anti-muscular and inaugurate an antiracist white subject. I argue that these two technologies of domination – visual culture that entertains its citizens and political practice that secures its citizenry – are profoundly interlinked public archives to read, what I am calling, “ethical whiteness,” its relationship to the death drive and the gendered currency of both. Using the figure of the little brown girl that sits at the center of Eye in the Sky - the fetish object central to the story – alongside the comedic characterology in Whiskey Tango FoxTrot, my paper underscores how ethical whiteness is tightly bound up with the death drive, but in a way that destroys through the dimension of the empathetic. I argue that these widely circulated visual moments of “ethical whiteness” expose a pernicious social text that priorities the necropolitical through the necropedophiliac.
Feminist Studies, 2019
The idea that divorce is a negative and traumatic event is part of U.S. cultural consciousness an... more The idea that divorce is a negative and traumatic event is part of U.S. cultural consciousness and in the Reagan-Bush era (1981-1992), heightened anxiety about both the demise of marriage and the rise of divorce created state policy mandating court-approved parenting classes for divorcing couples – a requirement for the final dissolution of marriage. The ubiquity and legitimacy of these parenting courses demonstrates that the unruliness of divorce is met with new technologies of governing. We position these state-mandated parenting courses as a form of “governmentality” – a mode of governance encompassing but not limited to the state – designed to produce apologetic citizens whose social, sexual, emotional, and intimate behavior becomes regulated (Foucault 1977). These parenting seminars deploy specific forms of knowledge in order to legitimate the normativity of hetero-marriage; perpetuate the notion that children of divorcing parents are at risk; and promote liberal concepts of self-improvement and empowerment. We analyze the discursive conditions through which parenting courses for divorcing couples came to be legally required, and socially desirable. We show how the policy and the courses advance idealizations of individualism, equality, and child welfare, while also expressing anxiety about the fate of the heterosexual nuclear family. We argue that these policies and courses attempt to regulate parental conduct, thought, and emotion, prescribing and proscribing attitudes and behaviors in order to shape divorcing couples into redeemable, responsible parents.
Journal of Progressive Human Services, 2017
Islamophobia describes the racism, exploitation, and violence experienced by Arabs, individuals o... more Islamophobia describes the racism, exploitation, and violence experienced by Arabs, individuals of Arab descent, and Muslims. Although social workers are meant to challenge social injustice, social work codes of ethics and the literature are without guidance for unlearning Islamophobia. Arguing that one's ability to interrupt Islamophobia is strengthened by an understanding of the historical record and theoretical tenets of Orientalism, we offer social workers explicit linkages between Orientalism and Islamophobia, and engage with the idea of Islamo-racism. In this article, we attend to the ways in which Orientalism is used to 'other' individuals while strengthening white hegemony, and link those processes with Islamophobia and Islamo-racism. We conclude with some strategies derived from postcolonial theory to disrupt Islamophobia.
Intensities: A Journal Of Cult Culture, 2016
In this paper, I look closely at how whiteness, as a key demonstrative site of power in Sam Taylo... more In this paper, I look closely at how whiteness, as a key demonstrative site of power in Sam Taylor-Johnson’s Fifty Shades of Grey (2015), scripts a repertoire of behaviors on sexual, gender, racial, and class lines. Positioning Fifty Shades of Grey in the post 9/11 globalized media machine, I argue that this internationally bestselling erotic phenomenon is haunted by the master narrative of white racism and heterosexual compulsion, where both are reconstituted as desirable in growing social climate of gay cosmopolitanism and anti-racist awareness. Wrought through a lexicon white superiority, Fifty Shades offers us a way of thinking about how dominant fe/male subject(s) employ whiteness as a crucial practice of producing social subordination, and how a close reading of this film underscore the private and public pleasures of white subjectivity, and the inherent stability of white affluent subjectivity, despite of and even in spite of its excesses – a position disallowed to queer and colored subjects. Analyzing various narrative moments in the film, I show how Christian Grey, despite his eroticization of violence, is nonetheless secured by distinctive individuality most closely associated with white bodies and the privileges of the white body politic. Grey’s irreducible and extradiagetic white presence demand further thinking about how Fifty Shades is fundamentally about the pleasures (and promises) of whiteness. I argue that the ultimate duplicity of Fifty Shades of Grey is that it seduces viewers through a promise of explicit sex and wealth, even though the films’ true offering is much more simple: the promise of whiteness.
Sexualities, 2016
This paper draws on the June 26, 2011 US embassy-sponsored gay pride parade in Islamabad, Pakista... more This paper draws on the June 26, 2011 US embassy-sponsored gay pride parade in Islamabad, Pakistan alongside popular US visual cultural moments (2008-2012). I use visual culture to reread US intrigue in Pakistani queer subjects through specific images of terrorist/feminized masculinities - images that elucidate the conspicuous shifts in the technologies of power and sexuality in the context of contemporary Pakistani LGBT visibility. I move through popular US representations of Pakistan, Muslim masculinity and US LGBT visibility – all of which attempt to capture homoerotic desire (and dread) in the transnational landscape of sexuality-racial-gender politics and all of which, I argue, are embroiled in US national identity (and “security”). My analysis is two-pronged. First, I look closely and critically at the narrative and visual character of the knowledge the US has created around defining Pakistan and Pakistani (sexual) subjects. Second, I demonstrate that in Pakistan queer resistance is often produced and animated from below the state and articulated against US hegemonic practices of visibility and representation.
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 2010
In a series of absorbing case studies, Will the Real Pakistani Woman Please Stand Up? Empire, Vis... more In a series of absorbing case studies, Will the Real Pakistani Woman Please Stand Up? Empire, Visual Culture and the Brown Female Body, focuses on the portrayal of Pakistani women in the global media. Analyzing Hollywood films, British documentaries, U.S. newspapers and magazines, this book traces sensational female figures of Pakistan—all of whom have been subject to patriarchal violence— to explore the current crisis of desire and detestation of the feminine, racialized other. This book fundamentally takes on an old problem – the racial and imperial politics of liberal feminism - but in theoretically and conceptually new ways. I locate my readings of these visual texts in the broader scholarly and political questions around spectatorship and fetishisms in our current age of empire and globalization. Drawing from a variety of disciplines - feminist studies, postcolonial studies, and visual cultural studies – I illuminate the “strange” “queer” and “disturbed” relationships and questions that popular visual images of Pakistani, and more broadly Muslim, women foster and provoke. I blend visual research, discourse analysis, and my own entanglements in these women’s life, death and feminist politics, to take on the dilemma of representation and democracy.
Feminist and Queer Theory: An Intersectional and Transnational Reader, Eds, Saraswati, L.A., Barbara Shaw, and Heather Rellihan, Oxford University Press. , 2020
Our primary aim is to look at what we are terming, “The New Disney” – a series of new Disney film... more Our primary aim is to look at what we are terming, “The New Disney” – a series of new Disney films (2010 - 2015) that re-tell classic patriarchal Anglo-American stories through contemporary tropes of girl power, female friendships and sexual agency. Faithfully following the public mood, these “New Disney” films flirt with feminism, codify a unique form of social rebellion, and sign into legitimacy youth-oriented sexual and gender alterity. We situate the new Disney in the “sensual” turn of the public towards both gay cosmopolitism and girls’ (liberal) empowerment. We use the term sensual to point to the libidinal economy that centralizes national “feel-goodness” around progress and equality (read: Nike’s “Girl Effect” campaign or Adverts such as, “Throw like a Girl”). From Frozen’s celebrated queer anthem “Let It Go” to the erotic undertone’s of Maleficent’s love for young Aurora, it appears that Disney is dismantling the gendered, metaphoric hierarchy implicit in its historical films. Truly, it seems that Disney’s new heroines are “leaning in.” Conversely, Disney’s latest penchant for feminist empowerment is visually narrativized through a youthful white feminism that, we argue, surfaces through gendered and sexual grief. In the New Disney, gender and sexual melancholia is both a technology and a nightmare of young feminist/queer subjectivity. The fact that Disney narrates the story of an empowered alternative youth through melancholy and trauma speaks volumes to Disney’s simultaneous repulsion and investment in the young feminist and queer subject.
Border Politics: Social Movements, Collective Identities and Globalization, Oct 2014
Conversation at Charis Books with Wendy Simonds and Opal Moore
Global Media Cultures Podcast., 2021
In this week’s episode, guest Moon Charania discusses her article “Ethical Whiteness and the Deat... more In this week’s episode, guest Moon Charania discusses her article “Ethical Whiteness and the Death Drive: White Women as the New War Hero,” which examines how contemporary films use white women protagonists to justify drone warfare and military intervention in the Middle East. Charania argues that media mobilize the figure of the suffering brown girl to elicit empathy and to assuage Western audiences’ guilt about collateral damage in neo-colonial wars. Through what Charania calls “ethical whiteness”, Global North citizens can promote humanitarian causes to rescue Global South brown girls from numerous atrocities without interrogating how their own governments are responsible for creating the conditions for such atrocities.