monstersorphansrobots-blog

[monstersorphansrobots-blog]

Glossary of Haunting

Dirty Computers.

“You were dirty if you looked different. You were dirty if you refused to live the way they dictated. You were dirty if you showed any form of opposition at all. And if you were dirty, it was only a matter of time.”

Jane is sent to be cleaned, but she does not accept it. She looks “different,” she lives how she wants, and she opposes the system. They clean her memories, but she makes Zen “dirty.” They escape together, as dirty computers. Two queer black women and a black man fight against the system and win.

[monstersorphansrobots-blog]

Janelle Monáe’s Dirty Computer creates a dystopian world of surveillance, mind control, and enslavement. Her portrayal of androids in this “emotion picture” appears to be tied to race. By nature, androids are meant to resemble humans, so the remaining characters may also be androids; however, those in power appear to be white, while all characters confirmed to be androids are black. Through this clear coding of power dynamics, the androids have an orphaned beginning in which they do not appear to have full personhood.

The music videos presented as memories explore a liberatory state, though it is the past rather than the present. We are not shown much about the world outside The House of New Dawn, but it holds a freedom that is stripped away inside this institution. However, this freedom is not complete because Jane and Zen still appear to be policed and are required to have some form of identification.

Two men sit inside a booth to sort through Jane’s memories as part of the NEVERMIND program. Despite every memory eventually getting deleted, every one of them must be watched. One of these men questions the other about what the contents of her memories are because of the abstract nature of many of the music videos, but he receives no answers and is told to just delete them. The surveillance does not appear to result in any learned information for those in power, yet it acts as another form of control.

In the outside world, Jane is shown participating in queer relationships, which matches many themes in Monáe’s music. This, in part, earns her the label of “dirty computer.” The participation in difference must be corrected by the system of power. To me, this aspect of the House of New Dawn appeared to be a metaphor for conversion therapy.

After the first credits appear, Jane is shown as a Torch for Ché. However, a liberatory future is finally realized when Zen uses her reclaimed memories of her love for Jane to help free both aforementioned androids. They use the tool of violence used again them--the NEVERMIND gas--to facilitate their escape. Rather than destroy the system, they simply put the facility to sleep in order to preserve their own lives. In this way, we are not shown to what extent a future has been liberated for androids at large, but the three protagonists of the “emotion picture” successfully find an opportunity for their own future.

[monstersorphansrobots-blog]

Mama was a G, she was cleanin' hotels / Papa was a driver, I was workin' retail / Kept us in the back of the store / We ain't hidden no more

Janelle Monáe, “Django Jane”

[monstersorphansrobots-blog]

[monstersorphansrobots-blog]

Glossary of Haunting

Imposter Syndrome by Mari Kurisato

Aanji almost passed for a human. But she’s not passable yet. She changes herself. Noncitizen machine to human. Female to male. She gets onto the ship. As someone else. Not human but passing.

Not entirely like the others, he reminded himself. He, no, she, was different.

[monstersorphansrobots-blog]

Mia Mignus’s “Disability Justice’ is Simply Another Term for Love” clearly presents a vision of a liberatory future and some steps necessary to achieve this goal. Her introduction thanking those who have contributed to creating the space in which she is speaking appeared to embody the types of changes she is looking for. By thanking the people she was in contact with that asked her to speak, the indigenous folks whose land she speaks on, and the individuals responsible for the maintenance of the building who often go unseen, she presents particular situations that she goes on to discuss.

The personal nature of this talk provided a different kind of media for us to engage with than our usual readings. Reading a transcript of a talk, rather than a scholarly article, felt more persuasive and compelling. Mia incorporates her own intersectional identity as a way to talk about structural problems at large, “My story is just as much a story about korean adoptees and korea, as it is a story about disability, as it is a story about feminism and queerness and growing up on a rural island outside of the U.S. mainland.”

She emphasizes the need for discussion in all spaces, for “liberatory access and access intimacy.” Alongside this need, she critiques the way people at marginalized intersections act in complicity with the dominant structures of oppression. Thus, she advocates for a two-fold liberation: the structure and the self.

Nirmala Erevelles brings a personal narrative into her piece, though it is not her struggle with disability and it follows the aforementioned style of an academic piece more typical of this class. Though less emotionally persuasive, the context given for disability studies holds its own importance, “I was introduced to the intriguing notion of reading disability outside of the narrow category of medicine, and recognizing it more usefully as a social and political category of difference” (2).

In a similar manner as Mignus, Erevelles discusses the intersectionality of disabilities through her husband’s experience. “The black male body, already a source of terror in the white patriarchy, when transformed during a grand mal seizure...could become an even more terrifying spectacle as a result of the now-lethal triple combination of race, gender, and disability, the very embodiment of abjection” (4). This visual image of perceived difference provides an example of how disability studies can and should be integrated into the broader context of social and political categories. Erevelles and Mignus both present liberatory futures through the incorporation of disability studies. 

[monstersorphansrobots-blog]

Advice for writers: you can give disabled characters happy endings without ‘curing’ them.

[monstersorphansrobots-blog]

Most of us are in an abusive relationship with ourselves and that helps to lay the groundwork for abuse in the world.

“Disability Justice” is Simply Another Term for Love by Mia Mignus

[monstersorphansrobots-blog]

“Infiltrated Infancies: The Case of Palestinian Returnees” by Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian documents the personal accounts of women who were forcibly removed from their home in Palestine and later returned. She highlights the stories of mothers who gave birth during the Nakba--a clear example of orphaned beginnings. The sense of statelessness for these women and children represents what she describes as “Israeli power infiltrating the intimate interiors of Palestinian life” (167).

The structures of power at work during the Nakba relied on the transformation of Palestinians into infiltrators, “Israeli biopolitics manages who can and cannot enter Israel, and who can and cannot stay with their family and on their land, energized by the eliminatory logic of the settler-colonial regime” (169). Violent land acquisition and political enforcement of discriminatory citizenship practices have stripped Palestinians of national identity, land, domesticity, ways of life, and personhood. Shalhoub-Kevorkian examines the ways women in particular experienced the Nakba, but this process occurred to an entire nation--though not one recognized by the United States.

Without the international support given to Israel, this settler colonial takeover would not have been possible. The context given for Nakba on the website “Palestine Remix” (https://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/PalestineRemix/al-nakba.html#/17) explains the history of French interest in establishing a Jewish state, which was then taken up by the British. Land divisions made by the UN and the backing of Israel by many major countries--including the United States--despite the violence required to maintain their settler colonial practices reveal the international acceptance of ideologically dehumanizing Palestinians in order to facilitate their deaths.

Towards the end of the article, Shalhoub-Kavorkian transitions from describing the struggles of these women to an appreciation of their resistance, “In the context of this daily terror, the mere act of surviving and living on, the insistence on remaining in Israel and asserting a Palestinian presence, serves as a form of resistance.” (184). Thus, this article in its entirety becomes a documentation on the ways in which the interviewed women have resisted the imposition of settler colonialism.

These acts of resistance become a window to potential liberatory futures. Though she acknowledges that silence has potential to heal the victims of this violence, she points out, “silence on the part of survivors can also reinscribe a sundering with the past that Israel enforces through its settler-colonial regime” (190). The exposure of these stories and the reinforcement of Palestinian lives as valuable rather than infiltrators could be an avenue towards a liberatory future.

[monstersorphansrobots-blog]

Her account attests to the inability to live in the present when one's connections with the past have been sundered.

Nadera Shalhoun-Kevorkian’s “Infiltrated Infancies” (pg 176)

[monstersorphansrobots-blog]

The Glossary of Haunting

My mother encourages me and my sister to go on our birthright trip to Israel. To visit land that is not ours. I was not born there, my family was not born there. I do not belong there.

But I have the privilege to go. It is a Jewish right. The occupation of Palestine has embedded itself into my culture. Even though I refuse it is still thrusted upon me as a right.

Land acquisition is not a right. Settler colonialism is not a right. Birthright is not my right.

[monstersorphansrobots-blog]

• “La liberté guidant le peuple” by Eugène Delacroix

and

• “13th attempt to break the Gaza blockade by sea”. Photo by Mustafa Hassouna (Andalou Agency for Getty)

[monstersorphansrobots-blog]

Glossary of Haunting

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid.

Changez sits in a Lahore cafe and tells an American stranger about his time in America and his return to Pakistan.

He loved a girl named Erica, a white all-American girl.

After 9/11 he is treated differently. He returns to Pakistan and becomes active in political protest.

The conversation with the American stranger ends with a gun.

[monstersorphansrobots-blog]

“Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism and the Production of Docile Patriots” by Jasbir K. Puar and Amit Rai exposes the ways in which terrorist studies focuses on an abnormality of specific individuals engaging in practices labelled as terrorism. They argue that this move decontextualizes the “complex social, historical, and political dynamics to various psychic causes rooted in childhood family dynamics” (124). The enforcement of this as the dominant motivation for terrorism prevents an interrogation of the power structures producing the violence of terrorist, and therefore cannot combat terrorism in any way.

The conceptualization of the terrorist as a deviant monster works in tandem with the image of the heteronormative patriot. As a rejection of the perceived difference of the “othered” category, American nationalism works to prove itself as both distinct and correct. The reinforcement of these ideologies of patriotism occurs in particular ways, for example, “American retaliation promises to emasculate bin Laden and turn him into a fag” (126). This process of emasculation is not meant to turn the image of a terrorist—in this particular quote bin Laden—into a gay person, but rather into a deviant to be ostracized and violently corrected. Thus, the representation of terrorism ultimately acts as a reinforcement of nationalistic, hetero-patriarchal norms.

The introduction to Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism details the ways in which environmental and political disasters become the pretense for sweeping economic reform. Her first example of this is Hurricane Katrina, though she later goes on to give a more comprehensive, global history of these practices. The choice to start with Katrina, rather than at the beginning of a chronological timeline, centers these practices in the United States. Furthermore, the centering on Milton Friedman as the “grand guru of the movement for unfettered capitalism and the man credited with writing the rulebook for the contemporary, hyper mobile economy”  emphasizes the way in which white, American men stand at the forefront of these changes (4).

Klein defines the shock doctrine as “a rapid-fire transformation of the economy—tax cuts, free trade, privatized services, cuts to social spending and deregulation…Friedman predicted that the speed, suddenness and scope of the economic shifts would provoke psychological reactions that ‘facilitate the adjustment’” (7). In this introduction to her novel, she argues that the reliance on disaster to bring about these changes occurs because “the three trademark demands—privatization, government spending and deep cuts to social spending—tended to be extremely unpopular with citizens” (9). Thus, a correlation builds between the literal shock doctrine imposed upon citizens who fight back against these policies and the use of disaster capitalism.

The populations affected by Friedman’s shock doctrine often represent communities of color. In returning to the first example of Hurricane Katrina, the education system was easily converted into a privatized system because the displaced residents did not have the ability to combat the joint efforts of the U.S. government and the private entities establishing charter schools. The implementation of capitalism in the United States occurred through slavery, and has created generational wealth disparities based upon implemented categories of race. Therefore, these disaster capitalism practices disproportionately affect communities of color domestically, while affecting countries affected by imperialism or the influence of Western political influence abroad.

[monstersorphansrobots-blog]

Most people who survive a devastating disaster want the opposite of a clean slate: they want to salvage whatever they can and begin repairing what has not been destroyed; they want to affirm their relatedness to the places that formed them.

Naomi Klen, Introduction to Shock Doctrine (pg 8)

[monstersorphansrobots-blog]

Glossary of Haunting

Transition by Gwen Benaway.

“Being a woman isn’t about your body. It’s about your spirit. You need ceremony to help with that, not pills.”

Anishinaabe understanding of gender does not rely on bio-logic. Gender tied to the body is a colonial practice.