Things that get me thinking
I turned this in as a short response paper and it kinda ended up with me rambling. But that rambling helped me articulate some of my issues, so here it is:
Jane Juffer explains the increasingly visible hostility that Latin@s experience in the United States by exploring the dimensions of the human face and, by extension, our conceptions of the human(e). She looks at the paradox of the proximity of the face: at once it is associated with contact, with the bare faces we see in our daily lives, and their very ordinariness compels a sense of familiarity. At the same time this familiarity and its irremediable proximity can be deeply unsettling to ideas of national belonging and ethnic superiority and, she suggests, can even cause people to act out with the cruelest of rage. Juffer states that the face-to-face encounter brings with itself such a level of intimacy that “[t]he tendency is to resort to categories that reduce the vulnerability of the face-to-face, that make the encounter recognizable and therefore safe...The reliance on categories transforms the face into a representative and leads to racism, xenophobia, sexism, homophobia, or perhaps tolerance, charity, salvation.” (222-223). It is to avoid the sense overpowering sense of the intimate that the face-to-face encounter brings that we reduce the individual human being to a series of categories that we can analyze and infer from-based either on prior knowledge or the pretense of such under the name of stereotypes.
I think Juffer hits the nail in the head and gives me another lexicon to explain my resistances to certain facets of academic life. As a queer theorist (which is what I consider myself primarily), I have a heavy investment in the production of pleasure alongside the production of knowledge: our knowledges should not only speak to the necessities of fighting against normalizing discourses, but they should also empower us, make us happier and more wholesome subjects in whatever way we decide to apply those concepts to our lives (if we do). I search for and am deeply invested in all facets of intimacy: sensual, sexual, familial, erotic, friendly, intellectual, emotional, spiritual and so on. Affect theory is at this point the entryway into this intimacy that I crave to foment. Feel free to disagree with me, but my understanding of gender studies as a current field is that it is too materialistic-but it is a materialism of categories, a distance from the primal intimacy of the individual, of the face-to-face contact points that spark affective ties. The intimate face-to-face encounter as metonym for intimate corporeality is often effaced from the registers of our interactions with our scholarship, our books, our students and with each other. I am not the highest proponent of liberation theology, but one thing I do appreciate from it is that the social change is a framework toward spiritual realization that doesn’t forget that-underlying all of the categories of identity, of privilege and oppression-there are human beings who deserve a level of dignity and respect for the mere fact of being human. I am not religious, but I am deeply moved-a(e)ffected-by the compassion demonstrated and required to do politics such as these. To bring pleasure into my research, I am compelled to craft spaces where the intimate encounter brings the possibility of looking beyond categories into actual lives. I have no clue if I’m being coherent (it makes sense in my head!); nevertheless, this is my project of Queer world building, a world of possibilities and open doors, that I strive to create when I see (an)Other’s face.
Jane Juffer explains the increasingly visible hostility that Latin@s experience in the United States by exploring the dimensions of the human face and, by extension, our conceptions of the human(e). She looks at the paradox of the proximity of the face: at once it is associated with contact, with the bare faces we see in our daily lives, and their very ordinariness compels a sense of familiarity. At the same time this familiarity and its irremediable proximity can be deeply unsettling to ideas of national belonging and ethnic superiority and, she suggests, can even cause people to act out with the cruelest of rage. Juffer states that the face-to-face encounter brings with itself such a level of intimacy that “[t]he tendency is to resort to categories that reduce the vulnerability of the face-to-face, that make the encounter recognizable and therefore safe...The reliance on categories transforms the face into a representative and leads to racism, xenophobia, sexism, homophobia, or perhaps tolerance, charity, salvation.” (222-223). It is to avoid the sense overpowering sense of the intimate that the face-to-face encounter brings that we reduce the individual human being to a series of categories that we can analyze and infer from-based either on prior knowledge or the pretense of such under the name of stereotypes.
I think Juffer hits the nail in the head and gives me another lexicon to explain my resistances to certain facets of academic life. As a queer theorist (which is what I consider myself primarily), I have a heavy investment in the production of pleasure alongside the production of knowledge: our knowledges should not only speak to the necessities of fighting against normalizing discourses, but they should also empower us, make us happier and more wholesome subjects in whatever way we decide to apply those concepts to our lives (if we do). I search for and am deeply invested in all facets of intimacy: sensual, sexual, familial, erotic, friendly, intellectual, emotional, spiritual and so on. Affect theory is at this point the entryway into this intimacy that I crave to foment. Feel free to disagree with me, but my understanding of gender studies as a current field is that it is too materialistic-but it is a materialism of categories, a distance from the primal intimacy of the individual, of the face-to-face contact points that spark affective ties. The intimate face-to-face encounter as metonym for intimate corporeality is often effaced from the registers of our interactions with our scholarship, our books, our students and with each other. I am not the highest proponent of liberation theology, but one thing I do appreciate from it is that the social change is a framework toward spiritual realization that doesn’t forget that-underlying all of the categories of identity, of privilege and oppression-there are human beings who deserve a level of dignity and respect for the mere fact of being human. I am not religious, but I am deeply moved-a(e)ffected-by the compassion demonstrated and required to do politics such as these. To bring pleasure into my research, I am compelled to craft spaces where the intimate encounter brings the possibility of looking beyond categories into actual lives. I have no clue if I’m being coherent (it makes sense in my head!); nevertheless, this is my project of Queer world building, a world of possibilities and open doors, that I strive to create when I see (an)Other’s face.