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Monthly Archives: April 2012

A Perfectly Queer Tactic

April 27th, 2012|

There was a strange interchange reported by the American Civil Liberties Union a couple months ago. This past December, the Boston Police Department filed an administrative subpoena for identifying information connected with the Twitter account @p0isAn0N. What catalyzed police attention of @p0isAn0N’s account was simply and only “the compiling of publicly available information from the internet, something anyone could have done, which is not illegal and does not constitute a threat.” Twitter, following its stated policies, informed the user, who sought to challenge the constitutionality of the subpoena in court. The following interchange occurred during the second hearing while the court was considering whether or not it would allow the challenge. The topic at hand was anonymity, the importance of first amendment protected anonymous speech for democracy, and the practicalities of performing anonymous speech in the 21st century.

Review of Dina Iordanova, David Martin-Jones, and Belén Vidal, eds. Cinema at the Periphery. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010), 280 pp.

April 27th, 2012|

Is a quiet revolution taking place at the intersection of film studies and postcolonial theory? Are we seeing a renewal of diasporic cinema and the production of innovative films in transnational contexts? Is the Hollywood hegemony slipping and the Eurocentric model redundant? After thirty years of ‘liberated’ international markets and unfettered ‘progress’ of globalization it is timely to take stock of the dialogues and debates being advanced in film studies and in the cinematic forum. A new collection of essays entitled Cinema at the Periphery seeks to explore some of these questions.

Pluralizing Identity and Identifying zir Plurality

April 11th, 2012|

The notion of a plural identity is in contrast to the subtle (or perhaps not so subtle!) ways in which hetero-patriarchal colonial history sublimated indigenous ways of knowing and identity production. I wish to move into not only advocating but privileging the plurality of identities as a way to queer the post/colonial space and place that today’s earth’s bodies inhabit.