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In his blog here, "Generations,”
for SCMS, Chuck Kleinhans said that at his first SCS meeting in the mid-70s
"the meeting had two concurrent sessions: the Film Historians on
one floor and everything else below.” History still has a big place at SCMS,
albeit more dispersed, but I, too, heard and thought about it a great deal
since my arrival on Wednesday. At the panel "Queer Asian Affairs," Bliss Cua Lim used
images of Filipino ghostly Aswangs to focus our attention on the cohabiting
queer modernities of the past and present, while Fiona Lee attended to spectral communists made
visible in the present nation/time of Malaysia: "The nation is a mistranslation
of time as space.” In the panel "The Remediation of Race,” Patty Ahn, too, felt the
tug of ghosts, albeit it in the more ephemeral way that YouTube must repurpose the Kim Sisters, and
everything else, without any context other than the "community” that posts and
watches.
Meanwhile, Alexander Cho tried to catch a
glimmer of the past in Tumblr’s waterfall of gifs of mixed-raced individuals by
thinking through loops and refrains.: "the currency is image and time and
repetition.” During the Q and A, I asked us to think about loops and shifts as
well: a repeat and a slight change or maybe a Glitch (and here a shout out to
the great Glitch panel and Laura Mark’s illuminating use of the rug to help us
see, in the "Arab Glitch,” the mess and beauty of slight variation and change).
The"community” that can be found, or made (but
not usually mobilized), by attending to images of and from our past was a
concern at the thoughtful and loving panel, "Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied at 25.” Racquel Gates and
Rhea Combs helped us see some possible hauntings of Riggs’ influence in
the contemporary media forms of artists as diverse as Byron Hurt, Rodney Evans, or
Frank Ocean. E. Patrick Johnson spoke about making past films present to our
students; and Cornelius Moore andVivian
Kleiman reminded us of the contexts in which Riggs’ powerful films were made.
Kleiman explained that Riggs had made Tongues
Untied to show "in three bars”: places where black gay men met at the time, one in San
Francisco, one in Oakland, and one in DC. Meanwhile, Moore, who is Riggs’
distributor at Third World Newsreel, told us that a complete edition of Riggs’
works was newly available online.
During, and after the panel, he a I considered what gets done when people watch
activist films alone on their computers, and not in the bars and rooms and
other co-inhabited places where they were intended to be seen and used (as Combs informed us was Riggs’
primary motivation for his videomaking: to
be used by organizations, businessmen, students, teachers).
The gif(t) of past images on the
internet is a loop and a shift that may lead to a flicker of remembrance, or a
charge or recognition, but as I’ve oftenworried, it’s hard to make a hard
stop: to listen, to talk, to love, and act if things are lost in Tumblrs’
endless present.
In
the torrent, we look to the past because it feels like it might better stick.
This certainly seems to be the thrust of the "New Video Studies” that was the
subject of the panel, "Video Studies.” Most of the young scholars on the panel,
and in the room, are studying the material and other traces of a tawdry object
lost to their childhood—the tacky VHS tape, and its many cultural manifestations—that
Charles Acland so generously shook and rattled for us.
And
yet it was just this
nostalgic, affective, and inspiring freeing of the past that was what
David
Oscar Harvey so boldly tried to unmake in our Unauthorized Conversation
about
HIV/AIDS held yesterday on a platform near the Registration area.
Attending to the
past of AIDS leaves us with hard-won words and images that are not quite
descriptive
of our experience today. This is never to say that we can’t and don’t
learn
from the past—this is our job as scholars and teachers (please see all
the work
I’ve cited above)—but Harvey insists (at least for us activist
academics) that there
is another, harder job still: to also keep us attentive to the present,
ever
more lost as it seems to be in a wash of glitchy gifs of the
just-not-now and
just-not-exactly-again-or-then. Marty Fink reminded us that academic
conferences are one of the
few places where the then and now (the older and younger; past and
present
ideas and images) can cohabit lived space, explaining her particular
sadness at
an opportunity lost (and then more powerful regained, in part) when our
inter-generational workshop on the Silence of AIDS was not selected by
the programming committee
and therefore she (and we) were not gifted the opportunity, this time,
to have
dialogue with Tom Waugh, Gregg Bordowitz and Bishnu Gosh.
But please, do follow the
gift of the lost present of the wash of our just-past conversation on our Tumblr, or read more about the need
for an AIDS NOW on Theodore Kerr’s Tumblr, U Ought to Know.
The memorial event last night for Alex Doty
was unlike anything I've ever attended at SCMS (or any other conference for
that matter). Lovingly arranged and choreographed by this year's Queer Caucus
officers (Jen Malkowski,
Patty Ahn and Julia Himberg) and
as equally lovingly attended by a great many friends, colleagues, and fans of
Doty, the affair was at once a vibrant, communal celebration of a particular man
and scholar as well as serving as a reminder of the role of intellectual
community, in this case the SCMS Queer Caucus (of which Doty was a founding
member). Let me start with the man, and end with the caucus, a provocation (or
two), and an invitation.
There were six beautiful, careful
presentations from the stage and a cocktail party after. In the first version
of this post that just got eaten by my computer, I carefully detailed each
one’s loving remarks and how they built the presence of a respected, treasured,
seminal member of the SCMS community. From SCMS President, Chris Holmlund’s detailed tracing of
the history of the Queer Caucus itself, exactingly drawn through a treasure
trove of documents from the Society’s past (located by Michael Metzger), to
Corey Creekmur’s evocation of Doty as "not a person but an event,” to Kara
Keeling’s anecdote about reading Making
Things Perfectly Queer as a grad student and learning there the "things I already knew
but did not know why I knew these things,” or Taylor Cole Miller explaining how
his teaching always accounts for a queering of popular culture, for all
students and across creative exercises because of an approach he learned from
Doty’s writing, or Sarah Sinwell’s reminder that so many in the room had used
Doty’s quote about a "queer reading” not being "alternative, or wishful
thinking, or reading into things too much.” The take away was both a brave,
fun, dedicated intellectual, teacher and friend who had the courage to work
with others to found a sub-field based upon how he lived in the world, and in
the world of media, and also a tender community of people who know each other
in a variety of ways: from conferences, caucuses, and lectures, to the many words
we write and share over a career.
And
listening to the care by which these colleagues drew this man and his work, and
seeing the care by which the organizers had produced the event, I saw that part
of what the Queer Caucus (and Alex Doty, and so many more of us) have produced
is the place for love, or respect, and the personal, within professional
contexts: and this has always been at the heart of our theoretical and
political project as feminists (and I’d warrant many of the other Caucuses
share this project). The Alexander Doty Queer Mentoring Program of the Caucus
is one example of this practice, as is Doty’s writing and teaching. And yet, as
scholars, we so rarely publicly express the fondness, and other feelings, we
have for our colleagues: how their work moves us. I thought to myself, I bet
Alex didn’t know this—that we all
knew him in one way or another, and respected him, and understood (or wanted to
understand) his part in our own history as intellectuals and activists—because
we so rarely tell each other: I used
you in a paper, or I taught you in a class, or your words saved me.
And then,
I wondered, too, about those who didn’t
know Alex, who weren’t at the memorial, and weren’t members of our Caucus, and
didn’t read his books or attend his lectures … even once. Man did you miss
something and someone! Sean Griffin said of Alex how he always managed to fashion both
camaraderie and a diva moment, producing an "I’m fabulous and you are all going
to come with me” sort of presence wherever he was at work. But if you didn’t
track through SCMS seeing the faces I have come to know, again and again, given,
as you might not be—queer—maybe you didn’t know this ... So, I thought of the others
Caucuses, and wondered if love and anger and pride was in their hearts and
history, and if they might have an event like this someday, as sad as that may
be.
And that
leads me to my provocation, and my title, which points to the centers of
centers and the margins of margins in the making of fields and communities, and
sub-fields and their communities. Are we queers central to this field? Do you
know us and our work? Do I know your work and caucus? Let’s try to go to another
sub-field’s meeting or panel at this conference, and meet the Alex Doty we
wouldn’t necessarily circulate around by way of affinity. And what's more, let’s tell a
colleague or friend that their ideas move us, so that we can mark our love for what Griffin
called "the concept” (our work) as well as the person, and so that the person
can know we cherish their concepts while we are together still.
And finally,
an invitation in kind: tomorrow, Friday, March 8, I will be participating in an "Unauthorized
Conversation” about HIV/AIDS and Media Studies, in the Book Exhibit from 11-1. With
my friends, colleagues, and AIDS comrades in arms, Marty Fink and David Oscar Harvey, we will engage in a
conversation about many queer things, including some of the questions I asked
above: about the history and politics of sub-field production and maintenance
given the growth of the larger field. You don’t have to be queer to know about
AIDS, or to care about its place in Media Studies. We’d love to have you as part of the conversation.
Hello SCMS. I'll be heading to Chicago tomorrow, Wednesday, in time to pay my respects, and collectively celebrate our colleague, Alex Doty.
"Remembering the Life and Legacy of Alexander Doty" will be held from 6-8 in the Grand Ballroom.
I'm in NY today, Tuesday, and if any of you are here, I recommend the event I will be hosting: a conversation with the amazing new media artist, Natalie Bookchin, who will be showing a work in progress from her documentary and story archive, Long Story Short, about Californians living below the poverty line. We will "discuss the changing nature of DIY journalism, the social responsibility of the artist, and the project’s role as public archive." 6:30, The James Center, CUNY Grad Center.
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