Week 4 Day 2 Response

 

The standardization of intangible concepts is a problem that has presented itself to many over the years. Hume, in his “Of the Standard of Taste,” argues that standardization is necessary for the most accurate and useful interpretations of art. The concept of taste is one that, especially in Hume’s discussion, is heavily informed by race, class, and gender. These concepts – race, class, and gender – have faced their own standardizations, and criticisms of those standardizations, recently. In “Types, Acts, or What? Regulation of Sexuality in Nineteenth Century Iran,” Afsaneh Najmabadi explores how the modern standardization of sex and gender does not hold up when compared against conceptions of sex and gender in 1800’s Iran. Najmabadi expands on her research into sexuality and relationships in “Beyond the Americas: Are Gender and Sexuality Useful Categories of Historical Analysis,” going into the divisions made between male sexuality and gender and the comparative homogenizing of female sexuality and gender. Finally, Dennis Altman examines the standardization of a global gay identity in “Rupture or Continuity? The Internationalization of Gay Identities,” bringing in elements of class and national identity into how homosexuality specifically exists around the world.

“Types, Acts, or What” begins with Najmabadi’s interpretation of a short narrative, launching her exploration of the “refusal of the hailing categories useful for studying genders and sexualities in Qajar Iran, where genders do not respond to ‘Are you a man, or are you a woman?’ and sexual subjectivities cannot be named homosexual or heterosexual” (Najmabadi 275).

During this period in Iran, despite gender and sexuality not conforming to the binaries commonly understood in modern analysis, standardization and inherent categorization of sexual relationships between individuals remained. As Najmabadi explains, there is a “hierarchy of sacredness of bodily orifices” where male anuses are the most pleasurable and female’s the least (Najmabadi 279). The existence of a hierarchy, combined with the fact that notions of gender, albeit not the same notions generally held today, are present suggests a sort of standardization of gender and sexuality. While the searching for a singular, underpinning logic to the hierarchization that took place would be misguided, in Najmabadi’s opinion, the hierarchization itself, the assessing, ordering, naming, and regulating, of sexual relationships, does point to the categories of gender and sexuality becoming in some way standardized.

Unpacking the term “same-sex”, Najmabadi acknowledges the standardization that exists within the term itself, here in “Beyond the Americas,” and how that standardization can be detrimental to a true understanding of relationships in a given time or place. She argues that, with the term “same-sex”, “not only have we made “sex” the truth of these relationships, by attaching “same” onto that truth, we may have become participants in regenerating the binary of male and female bio-genital difference as the defining mark of that truth,” and goes on to write “moreover, the notion of same-sex implies an opposite-sex, indeed a very modernist concept in many societies, including the Islamicate world” (Najmabadi 17). Attempts to use the term same-sex, in both the context of Qajar Iran and other contexts, apply certain notions to the histories of interest that do not reflect the complexities or entire differences of modern conceptions of gender and sexuality. Here, standardization can be not only harmful but actually obscure a real understanding of an object of study.

Dennis Altman also comes to the issue of standardization in “Rupture or Continuity”, and looks at how the standardization of a gay identity is impacted by Westernism and capitalism. The importation of the First-World Gay is examined by Altman when he writes, “the ever-expanding impact of (post)modern capitalism is clearly redrawing traditional sex/gender orders to match the ideology and consciousness imposed by huge changes in the economy. The impact of economic growth, consumerism, urbanization, social mobility, and improving telecommunications places great strains on existing familial and personal relations, and on the very conceptions of self with which people make sense of these arrangements” (Altman 86). The standardization of the global gay is not one that arises naturally, independent from the economic forces that necessitate a standard to which economic benefit can be siphoned. The struggle against the specific capitalist form of standardization is “a choice between political economy, which argues for universalizing trends, and anthropology, which argues for cultural specificities,” though cultural specificities do not necessarily do away with standardization as a tool (Altman 87). It is not standardization itself that is inherently problematic, but the absence of an acknowledgement in the historical diversity of standardizations that causes misinterpretation of the supposed global gay identity.

While all three pieces critique in some way the modern conceptions and existing categories for gender and sexuality, all also deal with the concept of standardization, and its seeming inescapability. Just as taste was questioned in Hume’s day, leading him to argue for a standardization that would clear up confusion and dissatisfaction with subjective readings of art, the categories of gender and sexuality are similarly questioned today, leading scholars to assess how standardization has impacted the topics both historically and in the modern period. In looking to escape the boundaries of existing or previously existing standardizations, though, these three pieces recognize that this often leads to more uncertainty. Najmabadi ends “Types,Acts, or What?” with an acknowledgement that this discussion has just gotten started, and begins and ends “Beyond the Americas” with questions. All three pieces include questions in their titles. The topic of the usefulness, or even honesty, of the categorization of gender and sexuality is one that, when viewed through the lens of standardization, leaves much unanswered. 

Week 4 Day 1 Response

 

Modern Technology: Good Omens

Abu Lughod and associates talk about the effect of Egyptian melodramas on the people who watch it. It was interesting at first to talk about the differences between Egyptian melodramas, that work towards the hegemony of the group, and that are within the bounds of political and social contexts of the world, and comparing that to what would be found in the United States when oftentimes, there will be some hidden context and meaning before. It was briefly mentioned that the melodramas in the United States, like The Bold and the Beautiful and The Young and the Restless avoid mentionings of political and social commentary. Yet, there are many things that have been within the context of politics and society that are found within modern television and melodramas. Most of the political handoffs that end up on television are found in comedies but still live TV shows that do not fit the standard melodrama. Even this, according to the “Out of Shadows” documentary, has been used by the government to control the people through the usage of propaganda within the media. Out of the shadows was a video that discussed the involvement of the US government in popular cinema and how many of the systematic ways that the government has been able to control the country through using the media as a method of spreading propaganda. It was something that was never recommended, but could only be found through searching the exact title, but now is taken off of Youtube.It was an eye-opener to many on the idea of how the media is used to control the people in the most subtle way possible, and it seems possible that there is a similar, but not exactly the same, system that could be found in Egyptian melodramas.

Extended past the media, there has always been the expectation that the technology that we use is something that can be controlled by the government. As technology becomes smarter, there is a fear that technology will replace humans one day in many jobs, so much so that the world will become so automated that it will be robots that run everything instead of humans. The most classic example of this is a movie like The Terminator, a story about an android sent to the past to kill a woman to stop her child from saving the world against the robots. It is also what gave a boost to Former President Trump’s campaign in 2016 to gain a following of those who were losing their jobs in the Midwest. But, as Atanasoski and Vora went over in the introduction The Surrogate Effects of Liberalism, it is clear that the innovation of technology exposes a lot about the world. As the world went from chattel slavery to industrial technology, there are clear racial disparities exposed within this fear of technology. It continued to discuss the past changes in technoliberal ideals. For example, the invention of the cotton gin was what caused a growth in the usage of slavery within the southeastern part of the United States, as it made it much easier to use cotton as it filtered out all of the seeds that were found within the cotton that were priorly much harder to get out. Thank you Eli Whitney.

At the same time, it made a purpose for the large usage of labor that could be used to gather the labor, making the usage of slavery to do such arduous work much more relevant in the United States.Modern technology has innovated many of the ways that we communicate as well as doing domestic work around the home. It has made it much easier for travel, as well as sharing ideas. However, there are other dangers about technology that was not as thoroughly discussed within either paper. Of course, the ability to control others through the use of technology was discussed, but the continual monitoring of people was not mentioned, and that has become more of a prominent issue at the moment. Within the palm of our hands, we hold one of the most powerful items to ever exist. It holds the ability to communicate, to find entertainment, to act as a map, to learn about the current news, and many many more possibilities of usage. However, it

also acts as a constant tracker as when it is used, it gives our location away which can be used to track ourselves. There is also, of course, the dreaded internet history, as there is a footprint that is also left when people use their electronics, that is permanent and relatively easily traceable. The dangers of technology can be examined in the case of the large oil hack that occurred i n one of the largest oil rigs that affected the Southeastern part of the United States, where many places ran out of gas because of the panic that ensued. Not to mention the Sony hack, the hack of twitter, and the hack of other social media platforms, such as Facebook and the access to private information and how that is used for social and political means, especially in the case again of the 2016 elections and the leaking of Clinton’s private emails. There are so many avenues of technology that can be shared and changed over time, and many future usages. But as the world has gone even more digital in the past year, there are many things that people should be wary of, since the usage of technology has been made more mainstream, and how many people have not realized yet how dangerous technology can be, which I think is best expressed in the movie “Megan Is missing”, a movie about a girl who goes missing as a result of a social media platform similar to Omegle.

Week 4 Day 1

Week 4, Day 1 → Transnational Technologies and Media

    In season four of The Office, there is an episode where Michael Scott, the lovable yet quirky manager, moonlights as a telemarketer in a call center in order to afford his new girlfriend’s luxurious lifestyle. While working for the call center, which sells diet pills, Michael befriends top salesman Vikram. Vikram immigrated to the United States from India and worked as a surgeon before coming to the US. He is lauded for his sales abilities and offers Michael advice about how to improve his sales. While the focus of the episode is on the comedy of Michael’s financial situation, as he declares bankruptcy by literally declaring it to his colleagues, the depictions of the call center and Michael’s interactions with Vikram demonstrate the alienation that call center employees must undergo, the assumptions about cheap labor, and notions about surrogate humanity.

    After his boss at the call center chastises Michael for not making any sales, Vikram offers to share his dinner with Michael. It is during this interaction that Vikram reveals he used to be a surgeon when living in India. While he does not disclose why he moved to the United States, his demotion from physician to telemarketer illuminates the struggles immigrants face when trying to attain “skilled labor” jobs in the United States (as we read about during Week One of class). On top of this, Michael’s surprise at the fact that Vikram held a medical degree shows that the employees at the call center had little time for camaraderie. Due to the pressures to sell products, the employees spend their shifts chasing statistics instead of functioning how a “normal” office would. In fact, Michael soon gets in trouble for fraternizing with other call center employees instead of making more phone calls. As Kalindi Vora pointed out in chapter two of Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor, the call center employee becomes alienated due to the demands of the job and the persona they must put on to interact with customers. As exemplified by A Terrible Beauty Is Born, call center worker John/Ashok learns of a coworker’s suicide moments before taking a call with an American customer, who is in the process of reacting to 9/11. As he takes this call, he becomes John, an African American man capable of helping this American through their struggles through unpaid affective labor. However, Ashok receives no return on the affective labor he produces as he is left to mourn his dead coworker on his own, and he is rendered nonexistent by his adoption of John. This alienation, Vora argues, along with John/Ashok’s reaction to his coworker’s suicide, “indicates something about how value produced by affect is carried or embodied in affective commodities and how it can be accumulated by some and lost by others,” (57). As John/Ashok represses any feelings about his coworker’s death, his affect given to his customer over the phone transforms care into company interest and profit. While we see little of Vikram, the stereotyped portrayal of an Indian call center employee allows us to assume that his work also does not allow for his calls to surpass the one-sided interaction Vora describes.

    In addition to describing the alienation call center employees experience at the hands of capitalism’s interests, Vora also outlines the assumptions about the low cost of living in India and how that enables an “international division of labor to extract and invest the value produced by Indian service workers into the lives of people living in the United States,” (44). While Vikram and Michael are both in the United States, The Office reproduces the notion that the cost of living is low in India by having Michael ask Vikram how much medical school costs, saying, “What’s the dollar worth in your land? Medical school must’ve cost, like, forty bucks or a donkey or something,” (The Office, “Money”). Vikram responds “No.” While this exchange was short, it perpetuates ideas about the cost of living in other countries and does so without questioning the correlation between cost of living, quality of life, or the use of laborers in other countries for work in the United States for the benefit of transnational corporations. In fact, Vora claims that due to this, “Indian lives are cheapened’ and the surplus value they produce is outsourced and removed from India via labor extraction (44).

    Due to Michael’s failure as a telemarketer, as well as the negative impacts moonlighting was having on his “real” job, he is forced to quit his job at the call center. As he walks out, he remarks, “But the good thing about the American Dream is that you can just go to sleep and try it all again the next night,” (The Office, “Money”). Michael fails to realize that the American Dream is not something that provides second chances for many people. Michael, a middle-class, white, male, American citizen with a good job, took on a second job to afford his girlfriend’s spending habits. Thus, he has, as he said, many more opportunities to live out the American Dream. However, there is a lack of a security net for Vikram, and others, if the American Dream does not work out the first time. As discussed in “The Surrogate Human Effects of Technoliberalism,” surrogate humans are those who exist in relation to the liberal subject, “whose freedom is possible only through the racial unfreedom of the surrogate,” (5). As provided in the reading, an example of this surrogate humanity is "invisibilized labor including indenture, immigration, and outsourcing," (6). The alienation of the call center employees allows them to fall into this category of surrogate humanity as it invisibilizes their labor; in addition, this labor is often outsourced, once again affirming the surrogate humanity of call center employees. Michael, although briefly a telemarketer, holds status as a white American man, which separates him from this class of surrogate humans, and reifies the notion that there is a distinction in the labor market, and in neoliberal capitalism more generally, between Michael and “the others” whose affective labor is undervalued, and who his freedoms are measured against. In this case, Michael is free to move from American Dream to American Dream, while there is a clear lack of this ability for others, such as Vikram. 

Week 3 Day 2 Response: Destigmatizing the Female Body

 

Women’s health as a collective fight

There is so much that is not taught about when it comes to sexual health. In the United States especially, it is almost unorthodox, and especially unheard of, of teaching sex ed in schools. I know that when I got taught about sex ed in high school, the main point about sex was that the best preventative measure against pregnancy was abstention. I was told about other measures to protect against pregnancy, such as condoms as well as the pill, but there was not as much as an emphasis on this as there was abstention. In those sex ed classes, it was almost taboo to talk about the sexes, particular about the sexual organs. Even now as I write this, I am getting apprehensive that this might not be an appropriate topic for the reading response even though this is not the main topic of the response.

The main thing that I wanted to discuss within this response is the need to destigmatize talking about the female body, however, of course, I understand that this is not something that is easily done nor that is possible at this time. There is almost a fear in many countries around the world for women to discover their own selves, and to discuss it outside of matrimony. This is evident in the article, “Feminist Body/Politics as a World Traveller”, where Kathy Davis discusses a book dubbed the ‘Women’s Bible’ written by a group of feminist activists and translated and spread throughout the entire world, known as Our Bodies, Ourselves. This book covered many controversial topics centered around the female body, and it gained a lot of praise and criticism, as well as a lot of censorship around the world. It is reflective of American ideas, and there were many books based on it and that also took ideas from it. The goal of OBOS is to give women around the world information about their bodies, and the fact that it was able to spread this far says a lot about the knowledge about these crucial things to understand the human body before it was written.

Care is a word that pertains to the human condition, and has many meanings associated with it. There is one that sticks out among the rest, and that is described as “being worried or troubled” by Michelle Murphy in her journal article “Unsettling Care”. This focuses on the quality of health that is afforded to women’s bodies in health as well as the difference of care between women in so-called “First-World Countries” to those in “Third-World Countries”, particularly related to cervical cancer, the most common cancer that was found in women, especially women in Third World Countries. In response, there were several books that were written as self help books for women to help themselves and to see the signs of cervical cancers and how to fight them.

The point of this response to talk about the health issues about not sharing this information. As mentioned earlier, it is vital that women know about their own bodies, so that they understand and know what is going on with their bodies. This is not enough however. Because the womanly sex is so stigmatized, something so often occurring as periods are also stigmatized, to the point where it is expected to not be talked about, and it is expected for women to figure out how best to deal with them, as there is a general stigmatization of men against the notion of periods which is usually a monthly occurrence for women. It is important to discuss the women sex not

as a figure to fight for just rights and respect, but really for the benefit of their health. I myself do not know much about cervical cancer, however, I will probably research it after I type this up. It is necessary that diseases that can harm women are also discussed, especially if they deal with the womanly sex, because if it is not discussed, then there is the danger for the woman herself to die because of ignorance in this case. There is also obviously the case of STDs and STIs, and what could happen if a women is ignorant of ways to prevent them, ways to protect against them, as well as to protect against unwanted pregnancies. Last week we talked about how women erotic freedom is a threat to the heteropatriarchy. Ignorance of their own bodies is a threat to women’s health, and as David describes how sex is both something not talked about but also blatantly in your faith, knowing about female bodies is also essential for women to truly feel safe and know themselves, instead of the heteropatriarchal narrative of their necessitated ignorance. We as a collective as OBOS tries to accomplish, need to fight so that there is less of a stigmatization against women’s sexual health.

Week 3 Day 2

 Post 3

While reading this week’s texts, I couldn’t help but think about my own experiences with learning about my own body and puberty as I grew older. Growing up in a very Catholic, Mexican household, the discussions surrounding the female body and menstruation were hardly ever brought up and only spoken of when absolutely necessary. I remember that the only time this quiet presence around our bodies was broken was when my sisters and I got our periods or when my tia had just given my older sister a book called, “The Care and Keeping of You: The Body Book for Younger Girls” by Valorie Schaefer that regarded itself as a guide for young girls spanning topics from bras to pimples. I recall opening the book out of curiosity and being (a) terrified at the thought of puberty and later on (b) confused at the way these topics were being presented, especially since I wasn’t used to such blatant honesty and blunt conversations about the female body. This similar reflection reminded me of the conversations being had by both Kathy Davis’s  “Feminist Body/politics as World Traveler: Translating Our Bodies, Ourselves” and Michelle Murphy’s “Unsettling care: Troubling transnational itineraries of care in feminist health practices.” 

In Kathy Davis’s piece, the introduction and replication of Our Bodies, Ourselves reminded me very much of the similar thoughts going through my head while reading “The Care and Keeping of You: The Body Book for Younger Girls.” Davis grapples with the way global feminism can be a form of cultural imperialism, especially if knowledge is being shared in a way that presents the experiences and issues women face as equal or similar throughout the world. When I was reading the guide for girls, I recalled learning about tampons and how to use them and was left extremely confused because in my household, the use of tampons is very taboo and its use is heavily discouraged in comparison to other products, like pads. This confusion of mine presents a very simplistic representation of what would have happened if Our Bodies, Ourselves were not allowed to be adapted and translated to other women around the world. They would have presented, and some were due to a lack of funding or resources, a piece of text whose cultural and societal presentation and conversations of topics would not have been similar to the way that certain cultures or societies discuss certain topics where women live. Like in my case, the guidebook for young girls was meant to be presented to girls who were white or strictly American in background. It didn’t take into consideration the varying upbringings of immigrant children or non-American families who had access to the book, explaining why the way that my body and products were not talked about in a similar fashion. The text argues that because original writers encouraged the ability to have Our Bodies, Ourselves translated and adapted by the local feminist groups of their region, the text was able to be widely appreciated and adopted by so many people across the globe. The everchanging and malleable book was a foundation for the conversations and knowledge that were being distributed due to that text, “The original OBOS was reworked and contextualized in accordance with the translators’ notions of what was appropriate, useful, or necessary in their particular situation,” (Davis 235). This piece of information that was originally meant for the white, middle-class, college-educated women, turned into a global hit that has been translated and sold across the world due to its ability to form and adaptability.

Michelle Murphy’s “Unsettling care: Troubling transnational itineraries of care in feminist health practices” was an incredibly interesting read that alerted my attention to different central points that American feminist movements focus on compared to other feminists around the world. An important distinction is that of the focus on the “self” and the ability to care for and look after one’s own self and body. “As one ancestor of feminist science studies, feminist self-help was a subversive way of hitching together care and science that both deserves attention and need troubling. It was protocol feminism inventive of practices, manuals, and guidelines that could move translocally and that explicitly sought to take note of how power, emotion, and bonding circulated within clinical settings so as to create less oppressive medical experiences and less pathologizing research,” (Murphy 719). Murphy emphasized throughout the text how oftentimes “self-help” was a heavily preached topic for Americans (although bonding between people was noted) and I found that Davis points out this emphasis when discussing how Latina women were changing their translation of Our Bodies, Ourselves from a focus on the self to community. “The focus of the new NCNV shifted from the individual woman and her ability to take care of herself to the importance of family and community for women’s health and well-being. The term ‘self-help’, so prevalent in the original OBOS, was banished in favour of a  more community-oriented term, ‘mutual help’,” (Davis 236). Murphy and Davis's examples and discussions of feminist thought and practices both bring to light the varying ways in which feminist thought is practiced from region to region, culture to culture, and community to community.

"Modern Medicine" and its Borders

As the phrase “the wonders of modern medicine” has been tossed around frequently over the past few decades, what actually constitutes “modern medicine” has scarcely been interrogated. The acceptance in the United States and other “developed” countries of Western Biomedicine as the only acceptable form of health care has implications for gender, racial, and sexuality minorities, as well as those in the working class. In “Unsettling Care”, Michelle Murphy explores how the concept of care has impacted health from a feminist perspective, digging deeper into how medicine and care are treated in a society and how those treatments can be used to harm or advantage individuals based on gender, race, and class. In “Feminist Body/Politics as World Traveler,” Kathy Davis looks at, through the story of the global proliferation of Our Bodies, Our Selves, how North American health literature and perspectives can be successfully translated and transitioned transnationally. 

Murphy begins her discussion of care by explaining how feminist self-help movements in the United States, Canada, and Europe, “tended to confine its critical interventions to the choreography of clinical techniques and research within women’s health centers or small collectives, believing that their emphasis on flexible, individualized control over clinical encounters could circumvent, by virtue of implicitly accommodating, explicit questions of race, colonialism, and class” (Murphy 720). The medical feminism that shaped so much discussion in the late twentieth century did not question medicine, or care, itself, but rather worked within the existing, predetermined Western Biomedical canon. In doing this, problems associated with this specific rendition of care could be left behind, as when all emphasis is placed on the individual, the systems that individual operates within can be left unchallenged. Murphy’s tentative solution to this, then, is “unsettling” the systems, histories, and institutions that have caused care to become a concept abused by those who uphold racist, sexist, classist, and colonizer medical frameworks. Later, the example of the pap-smear becoming a central issue for some feminists demonstrates the transnational complications that come with this one-sided conceptualization of care; “the analysis of a racialized political economy ‘out there’ did not disrupt the unraced sense that it was better if all women should make themselves available to a technically equitable world of feminist health care ‘in here’” (Murphy 725). The inability to view health care through a lense other than the Western Biomedical one prevents the whole picture from being seen by feminists that are part of the “in here”. This problem of a small health care Overton window extends to women’s healthcare organizations being run by those in positions of power that directly harm “third world” women and running like exploitative multinational corporations. While women in South Africa suffer physical harm due to dangerous conditions in diamond mining, “at the 2007 IWHC [International Women’s Health Coalition] two female members of The De Beers Group, the South African diamond trade titans, were invited to give prominent speeches as supporters and donors” (Murphy 728). The parameters set around healthcare discourse that disregard entirely transnational perspectives severely limits both tangible and intangible health factors of women around the world. 

Davis uses “Feminist Body/Politics as World Traveller” to highlight the ways in which a transnational approach to medicine can be successful, as opposed to the failures of the less transnational approaches described in Murphy’s “Unsettling Care.” As the famous book Our Bodies, Our Selves gained traction across borders, the demand for translations arose. First in Europe, countries like the Netherlands “rejected the division between lesbian and heterosexual relationships as too ‘strict’. It did not fit the Dutch context, nor did it correspond with their own feeling that homosexuality and heterosexuality are a ‘continuum with lots of feelings in between’,” taking a distinctly American book and adapting it to fit their country’s own needs and understandings (Davis 235). In places like Egypt, the version of Our Bodies, Our Selves that suited Egyptian women best was much clearer about its anti-Western medicine stance, as “while the authors support women’s right to have access to all medical knowledge about their bodies and health (the cover of the book shows a young woman with bare arms, western attire and flowing hair peering intently through a microscope), they are also critical of western medicine, which is often authoritarian and disrespectful of women’s needs” (Davis 238). The different approaches taken by each individual locality allowed the book to suit women’s needs globally without building up the fictional character of the “global woman”. 

Although Western Biomedicine is critiqued by even the original American authors, the larger idea of the ability to see possibilities outside of a system that alone makes up all taught and discussed perspectives allowing a far more successful dissemination of feminist praxis, is at the heart of the Davis piece. Western Biomedicine and its shortcomings have failures that go beyond its lack of effectiveness in stopping chronic disease, for example. The acceptance by many, particularly those in the United States, Canada, and Europe, of Western Biomedicine as all that medicine is and can be has stifled not only medical progress but discussion about the role of class, race, and gender in health. This has had consequences globally, for all who fall outside the belief system of Western Biomedicine, typically meaning those most negatively impacted by their class, race, and/or gender, are left out entirely from medicine both in practice and in theory

Week 3, Day 2 → Sexuality, Global Health, Biopolitics

“I am not doing any more homework tonight. Self-care.” 

    This sentence and many others like it were commonly uttered by my roommates and me last semester. For us, self-care was defined as a late afternoon chai, the forgoing of extra reading, and the 20 minutes of Netflix we would indulge in between p-sets. But why does the burden of self-care fall upon us at all? Why is the “grind culture” so much that we need to designate time to take care of ourselves so we don’t lose our minds. How does the relationship between “the grind,” self-care, neoliberal individualism, and capitalism work to create a commodification of health that results in a raceless, classless standard for how to take care of yourself? How is this harmful? 

    As Michelle Murphy discusses in the context of cervical cancer and pap smears, US feminist ideals of self-determination in medicine promoted vaginal self-exams as “a route toward depathologizing and destigmatizing sexuality and reproduction,” (“Unsettling Care” 718). However, this practice aspired toward an “unraced” woman, which ignored the “coercive, racist sterilization of Latina women” that was occurring during the same time and in the same place where self-exams originated (720). Thus, self-exams placed the burden on women (and, more inclusively, people with vaginas) to individually account for their health while refusing to confront the legacies of colonialism and racism rampant in reproductive medicine. What’s more, self-exams and care labor women perform more generally contribute to global capitalism. 

    Murphy writes, “Capitalism… was dependent on patriarchy for keeping the care work of social reproduction as unwaged labor so that capital could freely accrue the benefits of the labor power (as well as consumption) created by the caring practices that nurtured new workers and new consumers (723). I would advance the argument that self-care, in the form of face masks (not the COVID-19 kind), a video game, or a glass of wine, would also fall under the scope of unpaid care labor. The self-care performed at the home allows rejuvenation of the worker so that they can return to work refreshed and ready. As quoted by Murphy, “Capital is based on extracting surplus value from women’s unwaged and low-waged labor. They want us in ‘economic development’ so we do two jobs instead of one…” (730). Just as it relies on unpaid care labor in the form of childrearing and self-exams, capitalism enjoys the free benefits of self-care in the form of more efficient workers and the creation of a market of self-care products. 

    While this labor is not as gendered as care work within the home, there still exists a tendency for self-care products to be marketed towards women. These products, which are centered mainly around health and cleanliness, have created a consumer culture based on the commodification of self-care, which translates to the commodification of health. Purchasing things under the guise of self-care promotes the mindset that care is the responsibility of the individual. What this fails to do is recognize that the privilege of self-care is neither classless nor raceless. Many people cannot afford to splurge on non-essential products, and racial barriers to employment in this country mean that BIPOC disproportionately have lower socioeconomic statuses. 

    Self-care is not the only, or even the primary, way in which health is commodified and tied to global capitalism. As demonstrated in Fassin’s piece on AIDS in South Africa, “even the horror of AIDS does not stop the thirst for profit,” (68). Even in the lack of proper drugs to treat AIDS, AIDS dissidents explained the benefits of not having access to anti-HIV drugs as a “blessing of poverty,” (59). Health has never been without differences across classes, but the rhetoric of feminist self-help movements works to remove class differences in favor of a universal empowered woman. However, this ignores the fact that even if women take care of themselves, even if they perform vaginal self-exams, and adverse findings will result in a need for conventional medicine, to which they may not have access. Then what? What does self-help say about that? And what if your self-care isn’t enough, but you cannot afford a therapist, regular visits to the doctors, or to take time off of work? According to the neoliberal feminist self-help model, any failings of your health are your responsibility, just as it is your responsibility to care for yourself. 

    This is not to say that all (or any) self-care is bad. Take time for yourself and nurture your mind and body in ways you see fit. Davis’s piece on Our Body, Our Selves demonstrates that feminist projects can transcend borders while adapting to accommodate differences across groups of women. All hope is not lost. However, I urge you to be critical of the ways your health and wellbeing have been commodified and designated solely as your responsibility. But as I said before, I am not doing any more homework tonight. Self-care.

-- Lilley

Davis and Murphy in Discussion with Hondagneu-Sotelo: Feminized Labour Exists Outside the Home

 The “Day 2” readings this week focus on the themes of sexuality, health, and global politics, but what specifically interested me was the discussion of feminized labour through care work. Michelle Murphy’s “Unsettling care: Troubling transnational itineraries of care in feminist health practices” discusses of the need for confronting the non-innocent histories in which care politics currently circulate, notably in international couplings of feminism and health, focusing on a specific set of feminist engagements (with the pap smear and cervical cancer). Her work was powerful for a number of reasons, attempting to disrupt hegemonic narratives and arrangements of racism, colonialism, and political economy while recognizing different multi-local itineraries as pertinent to technoscientific concerns of care. It especially struck me due to a discussion that I’ve had on numerous occasions with friends in the medical field: why is being a nurse so gendered? A male friend of mine expressed to me recently that he would get ridiculed by people close to him for being a nurse, both in his personal life and even in the workplace. In taking this class the answer to this question became quite clear, such a norm is the result of the feminization of care work, which in turn results in nursing becoming a cause for social justice. 

Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo with “Maid in L.A.” illustrated that housework and childcare are devalued because they are feminized; care work is something that comes naturally to the women, so thus they shouldn’t be paid as much. Specifically, her work of charting the particular history of domestic labour done by women of color and immigrant women highlighted issues of labor conditions, class divides, racialization, and citizenship status exclusion in domestic work, and offered a historical backdrop to Murphy's piece. Domestic and care labor has historically been classified as a woman's job, which explains its devalued status in a patriarchal culture. Its connection with domesticity places it solidly within the scope of the sanctified private home, a remnant of 19th-century gendered labor divides; even paid domestic and care work “is not recognized or treated as a ‘real job'” (Hondagneu-Sotelo 114). While Sotelo focused on domestic care work, feminization of labour extends into all care work, including medical, as we can see in the Murphy piece.

“Care” is central to nursing practice. Ozdemir, Akanselm and Tunk of the Uludag University School of Health conducted a study that aimed to determine what female and male undergraduate nursing students think of males in nursing (https://www.hsj.gr/medicine/gender-and-career-female-and-male-nursing-students-perceptions-of-male-nursing-role-in-turkey.php?aid=3661). Senior nursing students (n=90) at an undergraduate program in the School of Health located in Bursa, Turkey were questioned. The questionnaire used for data collection received a response rate of 97 %, where close to half of the female nursing students (45.3 %) wanted to see males as staff nurses while most of the male nursing students wanted to occupy administrative or administrative/instructor positions after graduation. The study states that the “nursing community aims to increase the number of male nursing students and practicing male nurses lately.” and while “there is a growing body of literature on men in nursing, research has failed to question gender differences between opinions of female and male nursing students on where men should be in nursing careers and what they will add to the nursing profession.” The fact is that many female-dominated professions, like nursing, have struggled to attract male candidates. This can be ascribed in part to factors such as status and salary, but it is also a product of the profession's gender role stereotyping. As a result, it has been characterized as a profession strongly rooted in society's gender-based power relations (Murphy and class). Men's roles in patient care and the healthcare field are not new; they date back to medieval times. The emphasis placed on women and their role in society is naturally mirrored in the nursing profession due to patriarchies. For instance, the Turkish word for nurse is “hemşire”, which has two meanings-- “sister” and “woman who gives care to sick people,” clearly quite gendered (TDK Turkish Dictionary 2001). In addition, The Turkish Nursing Law, issued in 1954’s, describes nursing as a profession which only can be performed by Turkish women (http://ojin.nursingworld.org/MainMenuCategories/ANAMarketplace/ANAPeriodicals/OJIN/TableofContents/vol132008/No2May08/ArticlePreviousTopic/NursinginTurkey.html).  

We must oppose the dichotomization of care and politics and instead place care within the framework of power and politics. Postcolonial feminism has the potential to impact nursing research and practice in the twenty-first century, while health is still a goal to strive for and a commitment to humanity. This is especially important for nurses, who thus serve as global citizens and as advocates for the voiceless. In class we learned that it is dangerous to project the rules of your own culture upon others, but in this response I use Turkish culture for an example of feminized labor when my knowledge of Turkish culture is confined to my three month visit last year. However, we also learned that it is dangerous to only navigate within your own cultural bubble, or within the borders of your nation-state, so how can we toe that line? What I took away from Kathy Davis’ “Feminist Body/politics as World Traveler: Translating Our Bodies, Ourselves,” is that during migration, feminism allows for the articulation of a broader range of its  interpretations, which may encompass many diverse viewpoints. As Davis argues in her account of global feminism, what effectively contributed to the specific goal of gender equality was the approach of allowing women to talk about and share their own experience and knowledge about body politics. Gender equality as part of feminism puts in motion diverse arguments that may have unforeseen implications for the political gender struggle, especially when traveling across different contextual and conceptual borders. Although these differences of thinking might seem inefficient, and while they might not be necessary for local change, it is only by the true examination and discussion of feminism in different nation-states that we can fully understand the topic. and help one another achieve change (and by “true examination and discussion,” I mean not ascribing your own ideals and experiences unto others, but listening to the ideals and experiences of others with an open mind). 

Week 3, Day 1: Global Capitalism

            This week I will examine “From Gender as Object to Gender as Verb: Rethinking how Global Restructuring Happens*” by Leslie Salzinger and “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy” by Arjun Appadurai. Admittedly, “Disjuncture and Difference” was a bit difficult to understand at some points. However, I found that after having read “From Gender as Object to Gender as Verb,” I understood it a bit better and was able to make connections between the texts. The two reminded me of a text I read for ER&M 439: Fruits of Empire which is Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical Studies of Chile and Brazil by Andre Gunder Frank. 

In Salzinger’s text, I found it particularly salient when they wrote, “However it is time to flip the question: to ask not how global processes affect ‘women,’ or even ‘men,’ but how gendered understandings, assumptions, and subjectivities structure global production itself. Thus, in the following pages, I will explore the consequences for global restructuring of its gendered form.” Salzinger posits that “global restructuring is a gendered process.” I have previously heard things such as, “labor is gendered,” and I generally understood what it meant, but this text helped clarify it for me by explaining that gendered understandings went into the “creation” (if there was ever really an emergence, as “Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue” by Frederic Jameson tells us, globalization has been around since the neolithic era trade routes) of globalization and global production. 

In Capitalism and Underdevelopment, Andre Gunder Frank’s thesis is underdevelopment cannot and will not be solved or resolved by still capitalist development, and the peoples who inhabit these underdeveloped nations need to liberate themselves from capitalism completely in order to for the masses to have their needs met because capitalism only reproduces itself regionally and locally. That is the insidious part about the global capitalist system: You cannot develop an underdeveloped nation, region, locality, enterprise, etc. If you attempt to, the underdevelopment just expands and deepens. As the peripheries (or satellites), nations in Central and South America, Africa, and Asia get their resources expropriated from them and they get appropriated by the “developed” capitalist nations and within those nations, the elites. This is why, in my opinion, Gunder Frank’s most salient point has to be, “For the generation of structural underdevelopment, more important still than the drain of economic surplus from the satellite after its incorporation as such into the world capitalist system, is the impregnation of the satellite’s domestic economy with the same capitalist structure and its fundamental contradictions” (10). This leads me to consider the ways perpetual underdevelopment that only deepens with attempts to develop is gendered. I wonder how “gendered understandings, assumptions and subjectivities” structured development and underdevelopment and incorporated what Gunder Frank argues in the world order, allowing this world to function as/within a global capitalist system. I know that in Salzinger’s piece, they argue that “within transnational production, the creation and allocation of labor power is organized around and in terms of tropes of gendered personhood, and this has consequences for the way production works in general, above and beyond its impact on gendered selves per se” (44). I reckon, then, gender and race, or perhaps the marginalization and subordination of the Third World identity, worked to structure the aspect of global production that renders the Global South “underdeveloped.”

Furthermore, I was really compelled by Arjun Appadurai’s argument that “the new global economy has to be understood as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order, which cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing center-periphery models (even those that might account for multiple centers and peripheries)” (296). This point is especially striking to me because most of what I learned in Fruits of Empire revolves around the center-periphery model and does draw from neo-Marxist theories of development, which Appadurai says can no longer explain our new global cultural economy. Honestly, I have so many questions about this I don’t know where to begin. However, I am really interested in the notion that “at least as rapidly as forces from various metropolises are brought into new societies they tend to become indigenized in one or other way” (295). This notion adds to, and disrupts, what I know and have learned about development, global capitalism, and metropole-periphery relationships, all of which are explained in Capitalism and Underdevelopment. 

Overall, I am interested in how gendered notions, subjectivities, and perspectives went into the structuring of disorganized capitalism, which brings all three of these texts together. I want to further explore how the gendering of “the relationship between the five dimensions of global cultural flow which can be termed: (a) ethnoscapes; (b) mediascapes; (c) technoscapes; (d) finanscapes; and (e) ideoscapes” and its implications for empire and the study of empire (296). I believe these readings are useful and can lend themselves to the study of Fruits of Empire.

Week 3, Day 1

             Concerning the concept of globalization, this week’s readings especially appealed to me. More specifically, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy” by Arjun Appadurai especially piqued my interest. Within their article, they focus on an “…elementary framework for exploring such disjunctures” with the economy, culture, and politics (296). This framework viewed five concepts—ethnoscape, mediascape, technoscape, finanscape, ideascape—which all connected ideas of globalization. Interestingly enough, Appadurai’s conversation mirrored many of our earlier lectures. In this response, I will mainly refer to our second week, first class and first week, second class lectures.

         In his section about the ‘ethnoscape,’ he mentioned how people in certain areas move to entirely different areas without their “relatively stable communities and networks” (Appadurai 297). This example brought me back to our second week and our talks about how people would move to entirely new areas and not be able to stay in their career field. Yet in Appadurai (unless I am understanding it incorrectly) almost argues that as these nation-states need change, global people can move to their desired positions and jobs. In retrospect, that idea can also parallel how when nation-states desire certain labor, they call for it. For instance, when the United States sought more labor for its fields, they allowed an influx of Central and Latin American immigrants in on work visas. On a more microscale, individuals and families called upon certain races for their needs. Relying on established stereotypes, they desired, let us say, Hispanic women for domestic work. While there are many more examples of labor needs, the main idea is that sometimes people move and cannot get a job in their past field. However, it seems that when the nation-state calls for a certain type of person or expertise, then people can move to enter that field if they so desired. With that conclusion, Appadurai’s argument is not all too different from our previous lectures.

         Although, the final words for the framework base intrigued me the most. Here, he mentions that the “global relationships between ethnoscape, technoscape, and finanscape” … “is subject to its own constraints and incentives” … “[while] act[ing] as a constraint and a parameter for movements in the other” (Appadurai 298). Although my next point does not necessarily concern our lectures, I still find it important to mention. See, this line reminded me of a sort of spiritual/psychological (or whatever your preferred term might be) existence. In other words, where people and their subsequent actions and ideas not only restrict themselves at times but might also be used to restrict others. Onto our own lectures, recall the term “sanitize sanctorum.” In its essence, based on appearance and smell, one might be “sanitized” to fit what the norm perceives as “clean” or “appropriate.” And so, applying that term here, sanitizing acts to hinder the perceived minority. And in this way, the person or society sanitizing acts as a “constraint” and a parameter in that it puts people into a box. And if you do not fit into this box, then good luck getting a job or entering a society that follows such a standard. However, I want to talk more about the first clause of that mentioned sentence. In restricting others, sanitize sanctorum restricts the society upholding the standards. Following the examples we used in class, the heteronormative patriarchy restricts itself. At this point, we all know well enough how they restrict others and put them into these parameters. However, this conversation should also shift to why this standard is also bad to those enacting it. When this misogynistic, white, cis, usually upper-class man attempts to instill the heteropatriarchy, they are also missing out. But this is not just about that man, it is about all those who try to instill this misogynistic framing. For instance, when this restrictive idea is put out, the people upholding and living in it are missing out on the valuable lessons that could be learned from others. From people who are not under this constant pressure of fitting the norm. Now, I am not saying that “Oh, there should be a society without any norm, etc.” But, when we do have this one supermajority and peer pressure, there are ideas being restricted and lessons being lost.

And these relations circle back into Appadurai’s arguments in a few key takeaways. Firstly, while looking at this connection between ethnoscape, technoscape, and finanscape, we see that all these dimensions play a role in sanitize sanctorum and creating these similar people. When people move like in the ethnoscape example, they have to adapt to these new majorities like with the Pakistani women and the hiring force jobs. And with the technoscape, the distribution of technology and its increasing power help set these trends and standards that are quickly shared and create a more global identity. And in the first part of his articles, he mentions how the global society and foreign areas might be more Americanized and follow this Western example. Moving on though, the finanscape is important because it can give us a look into the economics of following the standard and sanitizing’s fiscal consequences. In other words, it provides numbers into more intangible concepts. All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed Appadurai’s article, and our past lessons provided a great base for understanding it. 

Week 2: Day 2

TW: Migrant Violence at the Border

Through reading both Eithne Luibhéid’s “Entry Denied: A History of U.S. Immigration Control” and the piece written by both Jasbir K. Puar and Amit S. Rai, I was able to learn more about the history regarding immigration and women’s autonomy in the United States and heteronormative patriotism in the war on/of terrorism. Through these readings, I was able to expand my personal knowledge on the ways that heteropatriarchal systems impact migrants of color through race, class, gender, and ethnic backgrounds. Puar and Rai’s work introduced me to the concept of heterosexual patriotism and the “terrorist monster”, both concepts that I would appreciate expanding more on in class as I have never been exposed to them before this reading. Luibhéid helped establish a timeline of the treatment of women, and their sexual and reproductive autonomy, through the immigration laws, practices, and official departments in the United States. 

In Luibhéid’s first chapter, we’re introduced to the way that women’s reproduction and sexuality have been and continue to be controlled when immigrating to and being excluded from the United States. The author provides us with multiple examples, beginning with the pregnant Irish woman, Catherine Dolan, who was denied entry due to a familial/reproductive situation and pregnancy with a married man. As time goes on, the intersections of race, class, and gender begin to deepen as “poor, immigrant, and minority people'' become more and more affected and targeted by the policies and acts being passed in the US. In the text, Luibhéid elaborates that, “Discourses including scientific racism, gender, economics, public health and criminology provided tools to describe the threat represented by these “undesirable” women and to craft techniques for identifying and expelling them,” (Luibhéid 29). As I was reading this, I couldn’t help but think of the recent news that some women in ICE detention centers were forced/manipulated into undergoing hysterectomies while in detainment (NPR). ICE and detention centers utilize these tools to expel the volition and sexual power that women have in these centers through extremely dehumanizing practices and treatment. “According to the complaint, a detained immigrant told Project South that she talked to five women at the facility who received hysterectomies between October and December 2019 and said they ‘reacted confused when explaining why they had one done.’” These women were placed/coerced into situations where their reproductive autonomy and bodies were controlled by immigration forces, continuing the long history of the ways in which the federal government establishes its power over the women who migrate across the borders. While the text focused on policies that regulated the women who were allowed to enter, the text also sheds light on the regulatory practices that were conducted to the women who entered the US as well. These hysterectomies are an extension of the power and authority that the federal government forces over the bodies of these migrants and show the continued removal and regulation of women’s sexuality and reproductive freedom, and in this extremely horrific case, through a physical manner. 

An aspect of Amit S. Rai and Jasbir K. Puar’s academic text that caught my attention was the discussion of symbolism, the racist manipulation of certain articles or aspects of people of color’s culture or religion, and homophobic imagery through the American lens. Specifically, for Sikh men, the treatment of the turban in America became a form of “otherness”. The authors elaborate that, “To the average uninterested American eye, however, a turban is just a turban. And it symbolizes the revived, erect, and violent patriarchy of the East, of Islam, and of the Taliban; the oppression of Afghan women; the castration and the penetration of white Western phallic power by bad brown dick and its turban. (Lest one think that the backlash is “over'' and that Americans are now educated about Sikhs, a gurudwara (temple) in upstate New York that was burned to the ground a few days before Thanksgiving was declared to be arson.)” (Puar & Rai 137). This violent transformation of what a turban represented in the United States by the American perspective led to multiple Sikh men and the Sikh community facing racist and discriminatory treatment, forcing a few to abandon their use of the religious garment for survival. This adaptation through means of survival due to the “American eye” reminded me of how queer people, especially those who are of color, were exposed to violent and homophobic treatment due to the imagery and symbolism used in the United States through depictions of Osama Bin Laden. “And indeed, there have been reports from community-based organizations throughout  New York City that violent incidents against queers of color have increased,” (Puar & Rai 126). This use of heteronormative patriotism helped establish the creation of the “other”, singling out and demonizing minority groups in the US. 

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/16/913398383/whistleblower-alleges-medical-neglect-questionable-hysterectomies-of-ice-detaine 

Week 2, Class 2: Mobility and Security

    This week I will attend to Eithne Luibhéid’s, Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border and Jasbir K. Puar and Amit S. Rai’s “Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism and the Production of Docile Patriots.” In engaging both of these works, I found myself considering Adrienne Rich’s (whose work we read prior to our first class) essay titled, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Lesbian Existence.” These two readings, in particular, truly helped me further consider how compulsory heterosexuality and performance of gender (whether cis or trans) is a means of subordinating the woman and using her to serve the nation-state and its ideologies. In particular, these two texts have helped me more deeply understand this through a transnational lens which is so helpful to me as a queer, Third World woman and as someone who is interested in this scholarship. In Entry Denied, I find it particularly salient that, “Family reunification provisions constructed women’s sexuality not just as heterosexual but also as procreative within a patriarchal framework. Consequently, they reified women’s sexuality as a form of property that men owned, controlled, and competed over, and that was most appropriately channeled into marriage and reproduction” (3). This piece of gender and/or queer theory (I presume?) prompted me to consider Adrienne Rich’s theory on compulsory heterosexuality as it explains how women’s sexuality is something that was constructed and is produced by the nation-state, especially starting in 1981 when “federal immigration control was fully institutionalized” (1). Luibhéid writes that these family reunification provisions also went on to generate “a class of women who were excluded because they were deemed to directly threaten heteropatriarchy’s dominance… [thus,] the Page Law [of 1875] was primarily motivated not by concern for the Asian women involved but by fears that they threatened white heteropatriarchy” (5). I consider how lesbian women and non-binary and genderqueer lesbians directly threaten heteropatriarchy and the nation-state as well, simply because their existence and sexuality are not “procreative within a patriarchal framework,” as in they will not marry men nor reproduce with men. In fact, the basis of their sexual and romantic (and platonic) relationships is not (necessarily) the creation of a nuclear family. Queer and genderqueer relationships do not exist to serve the family unit that serves cisgender-heteropatriarchy which ultimately serves the nation-state and capitalism, as we have discussed a bit in class.

Furthermore, in her essay, Adrienne Rich writes that the authors of the four books she references fail to consider the “institution of heterosexuality itself as a beachhead of male dominance. In none of them is the question ever raised, whether in a different context, or other things being equal, women would choose heterosexual coupling and marriage… In none of these books, which concern themselves with mothering, sex roles, relationships, and societal prescriptions for women, is compulsory heterosexuality ever examined as an institution powerfully affecting all these; or the idea of “preference” or “innate orientation” even indirectly questioned.” When we consider the idea of compulsory heterosexuality through a transnational lens, as Entry Denied has enabled me to do, I believe the notion that women’s sexuality is male-dominated and tied to what the woman can do for the man, family, and nation can resonate more and reach more people. Women’s sexuality is constructed by the state and serves to reproduce the state and patriotic sentiments, and disseminating this information can create possibilities for rupturing this subordination and returning agency back to the woman and her sexuality.

Moreover, in reading “Monster, Terrorist” I was deeply compelled by the crucial idea that “the absolute power that produces and quarantines the monster finds its dispersal in techniques of normalization and discipline… [which enables] an analysis of monstrosity within a broader history of sexuality” (119). Puar and Rai go on to write that, “monsters and abnormals have always also been sexual deviants. Foucault tied monstrosity to sexuality through specific analyses of the deployment of gendered bodies, the regulation of proper desires, the manipulation of domestic spaces, and the taxonomy of sexual acts such as sodomy” (119). The question, “How are gender and sexuality central to the current ‘war on terrorism’?” is so striking to me because it, again, forces me to consider how this transnational approach to gender and sexuality discourse can serve to further illuminate some of Rich’s arguments so that they are able to resonate more (117). In “Compulsory Heterosexuality,” Rich writes that through “The bias of compulsory heterosexuality… lesbian experience is perceived on a scale ranging from deviant to abhorrent, or simply rendered invisible.” I am interested in the implications the war on terrorism, stemming from 9/11, has on lesbians, especially those who are genderqueer and/or nonbinary. There was a point in my annotations where I wrote, “queerness as deviance?” in response to the notion that “The human monster combines the impossible and the forbidden” (119). I consider how queerness is impossible in the nation-state we live in today, and yet, it exists. So what does this mean for us? Again, I believe this means that there are so many possibilities for rupture. 

In Entry Denied, we encounter how immigration policy was constructed overtime to control who comes in, which implicates and entangles race, gender, sexuality, and class. And in “Monster, Terrorist,” we encounter the production of docile patriots to control who lives here and who will serve the nation-state. These transnational encounters and theories surrounding gender and sexuality have urged me to consider how transnational approaches are necessary to understanding compulsory heterosexuality and how it is not something that exists in a vacuum. Similar to how race, class, gender, and culture are entangled with sexuality, nation is as well. Adrienne Rich helps us understand that a woman’s (hetero)sexuality is tied to and informed by their subordination by men, and larger society; Luibhéid and Puar and Rai help us understand that in addition to this, a woman’s (hetero)sexuality and gender performance is constructed and produced and reproduced to reify the nation-state and serve it.