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My Inscription of the Girly Man piece was published in the online journal Vaugue Terrain this month (January 2009). The journal included my essay "The Language of Machines."

Date
January, 2009
Images

The site of production for Inscription, has a significance beyond some breezy fascination with the "making of" things. The machine shop instantiates a particular machinic aesthetic.

Date
June, 2005

How is it that image and the epithet have replaced rhetoric as the stuff of American politics? This is the question proper to Schwarzenegger’s exploitation of the insult “girly-man” in order to attempt to force the recalcitrant state legislature to assent to his budget proposal.

Images

Inscription is an exploration of the aesthetics of power in relation to the task of writing. Here, in a time when the neo-fascist spirit is casting a shadow across the political culture, and when the possibility of meaningful political discourse seems more and more remote because of it, there is a relationship between the wealth of violence–war, images of brutality–and the poverty of our communications. There is a relationship between the denigration of thoughtfulness as weakness, femininity, and gayness, and the impossibility of halting the campaign of aggression that the U.S. has embarked on, or of furthering stalled progress in the domain of civil rights or economic justice.

Date
May, 2005

The reception of Bridget Riley's paintings in the 60s serve as an example for thinking about how a notion like kinesthetic empathy might be used to explain a viewers relationship to painting. It suggests a path away from an insistently integrative ego that is incapable of an empathetic attitude towards the other constructed within an unbridgeable difference. Heteropathic identifications with unidealized images of the other interrupts the stubborn refusal of difference. Our experience of a variety of art forms demonstrates this possibility.

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A particular figure of absence seems to possess a suspicious connotative efficacy in its deployment within language and as a visual figure. What is at stake in the use of the empty square? A clue to answering lies in the relation of two series which can be used to describe the mechanisms of computation. These are: the series of creation, including invention, birth, production, etc.; and the series of rule, including conditionality, boundary, possibility, etc. The two series are clearly gendered opposites that correlate with Oedipal principles.

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In reading Barney’s work, what is at stake is the question of the possible transformations of masculinities in a milieu which must account for the critiques not just of feminism but of queerness. It is equally probable that Barney stands as evidence of a regressive retrenchment of the masculine in these circumstances as it is that he stands for just the opposite, a masculinity that can renounce a determined mastery of a dominant role in relation to nature, women, creation, self, etc.

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Between 1920 and 1945, Iwata Jun’ichi carried out an unprecedented, extensive research project on the history and literature of homoeroticism in Japan. Iwata used the Tokugawa period word nanshoku (a compound of the character for “male” and the character for “sexual love”) almost exclusively in reference to his topic; however, the more recent coinage doseiai (literally “same-sex-love”), a translation of “homosexuality,” was also current.

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