Desi Divas: Activism in South Asian American Cultural Performancesis the product of five years of field research with progressive activists associated with the School for Indian Languages and ...Cultures (SILC), South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT), the feminist dance collective Post Natyam, and the grassroots feminist political organization South Asian Sisters. Christine L. Garlough explores how traditional cultural forms may be critically appropriated by marginalized groups and used as rhetorical tools to promote deliberation and debate, spur understanding and connection, broaden political engagement, and advance particular social identities. Within this framework she examines how these performance activists advocate a political commitment to both justice and care, to both deliberative discussion and deeper understanding. To consider how this might happen in diasporic performance contexts, Garlough weaves together two lines of thinking. One grows from feminist theory and draws upon a core literature concerning the ethics of care. The other comes from rhetoric, philosophy, and political science literature on recognition and acknowledgment. This dual approach is used to reflect upon South Asian American women's performances that address pressing social problems related to gender inequality, immigration rights, ethnic stereotyping, hate crimes, and religious violence.
Case study chapters address the relatively unknown history of South Asian American rhetorical performances from the early 1800s to the present. Avant-garde feminist performances by the Post Natyam dance collective appropriate women's folk practices and Hindu goddess figures make rhetorical claims about hate crimes against South Asian Americans after 9/11. InYoni ki Bat(a South Asian American version ofThe Vagina Monologues) a progressive performer transforms aspects of the Mahabharata narrative to address issues of sexual violence, such as incest and rape. Throughout the volume, Garlough argues that these performers rely on calls for acknowledgment that intertwine calls for justice and care. That is, they embed their testimony in traditional cultural forms to invite interest, reflection, and connection.
This article examines the ways in which Indian folk narratives are reinterpreted and appropriated within an Indian American school context to serve as inventional resources in rhetorical texts that ...support the reflection upon the potential for social change. More specifically, the appropriations of the Hindu folk heroine Savitri are traced as she is transfigured within (1) a liberal feminist retelling of the tale by Madhur Jaffrey and (2) a diasporic reframing of this story as exhibiting a sort of "Girl Power" by a student at the School for Indian Languages and Cultures (SILC) through a pictorial representation that functions as a piece of visual rhetoric. It is argued that these representations are characterized by a "critical play" that treats Savitri as a hermeneutic resource for rhetorical invention in order to advance multifaceted arguments about gender roles for women in India and South Asian American contexts. This work was inspired by my observations that SILC teachers and students sometimes used storytelling practices and performances for rhetorical purposes-to address exigencies in their communities, build constituencies, to assert diasporic identities, or to articulate social concerns. This rhetorical work was evident in stories that were intended to appear "traditional," as well as those in which traditional elements were critically and eclectically transformed.
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Care remains an essential feature of transformative feminist and gender politics-including performance (Hamington & Rosenow, 2019). This article takes as its starting point feminist "ethics of care" ...scholarship that is grounded in the Cavelian theme of the "vulnerability of ordinary life" (Ferrarese, 2016; Garlough, 2013) and builds on performance studies work engaged by issues of oppression, human rights, and vulnerability (Becker et al., 2021; Bertrand, 2020; Dolan, 2010). Exploring care and performance from both scholarly and applied perspectives, it complicates the conceptual relationship between "vulnerability" and "crisis" to better understand the limits and potential of care in performance activism. Two research examples illustrate how caring practices, during interrelated global crises, have been addressed in local performances in the midwestern United States. The first explores elders' experiences of vulnerability, isolation, and loneliness during the COVID-19 pandemic. It focuses on local Wisconsin Raging Grannies performers, as they reimagine vulnerability as "call for caring response-ability" through community performance activism that critiques "privileged irresponsibility" (Tronto, 1998, 2013). The second considers experiences of vulnerability and isolation through the documentary-style theatre project GenderTalks (2020) by Orion Risk. This ongoing work united transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming people from Wisconsin and Iowa in candid virtual dialogues about gender during COVID-19 social distancing. A virtual play from the transcripts was performed in US fringe festivals. The GenderTalks project provides important insights about care's potential in performances to create opportunities for interconnection and social critique (D'Urso, Rosenberg, and Winget, 2021).
Both performance contexts illustrate the impossibility of detangling care "from its messy worldliness" (de la Bellacasa, 2017) and how care becomes increasingly complicated and valuable in interrelated moments of crisis. This work centers ways that vulnerability can be reimagined through performance as a powerful political resource, as well as means of rejuvenation and social connection.
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Care remains an essential feature of transformative feminist and gender politics—including performance (Hamington & Rosenow, 2019). This article takes as its starting point feminist “ethics of care” ...scholarship that is grounded in the Cavelian theme of the “vulnerability of ordinary life” (Ferrarese, 2016; Garlough, 2013) and builds on performance studies work engaged by issues of oppression, human rights, and vulnerability (Becker et al., 2021; Bertrand, 2020; Dolan, 2010). Exploring care and performance from both scholarly and applied perspectives, it complicates the conceptual relationship between “vulnerability” and “crisis” to better understand the limits and potential of care in performance activism. Two research examples illustrate how caring practices, during interrelated global crises, have been addressed in local performances in the midwestern United States. The first explores elders’ experiences of vulnerability, isolation, and loneliness during the COVID-19 pandemic. It focuses on local Wisconsin Raging Grannies performers, as they reimagine vulnerability as “call for caring response-ability” through community performance activism that critiques “privileged irresponsibility” (Tronto, 1998, 2013). The second considers experiences of vulnerability and isolation through the documentary-style theatre project GenderTalks (2020) by Orion Risk. This ongoing work united transgender, nonbinary, and gender nonconforming people from Wisconsin and Iowa in candid virtual dialogues about gender during COVID-19 social distancing. A virtual play from the transcripts was performed in US fringe festivals. The GenderTalks project provides important insights about care’s potential in performances to create opportunities for interconnection and social critique (D’Urso, Rosenberg, and Winget, 2021).Both performance contexts illustrate the impossibility of detangling care “from its messy worldliness” (de la Bellacasa, 2017) and how care becomes increasingly complicated and valuable in interrelated moments of crisis. This work centers ways that vulnerability can be reimagined through performance as a powerful political resource, as well as means of rejuvenation and social connection.
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6.
Gender and Generation in the Social Positioning of Taste LEE, NAM-JIN; GARLOUGH, CHRISTINE L.; FRIEDLAND, LEWIS A. ...
The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science,
11/2012, Volume:
644, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The authors examine the intersection of gender and generation for the field of cultural consumption in the United States, considering their interplay in the social positioning of taste. The authors' ...prior work found that while cultural capital in the United States largely parallels the field structure observed in 1960s France, the form of cultural capital in the United States discriminates between nurturance and community, on one side, and aggressiveness and individualism, on the other. To investigate this seemingly gendered and ideological positioning of taste, the authors locate individuals as "occupants" of this social field, distinguishing them by gender and age, and find that gender no longer structures a preference for a particular form of cultural capital among younger citizens. This blending of gendered identities in younger Americans suggests a realignment of the notions of gentility and community as defining femininity and coarseness and individualism as defining masculinity. The gendered patterns of cultural consumption that defined older generations do not define younger ones.
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Abstract
This study focuses on the outpouring of sympathy in response to mass shootings and the contestation over gun policy on Twitter from 2012 to 2014 and relates these discourses to features of ...mass shooting events. We use two approaches to Twitter text analysis—hashtag grouping and supervised machine learning (ML)—to triangulate an understanding of intensity and duration of “thoughts and prayers,” gun control, and gun rights discourses. We conduct parallel time series analyses to predict their temporal patterns in response to features of mass shootings. Our analyses reveal that while the total number of victims and child deaths consistently predicted public grieving and calls for gun control, public shootings consistently predicted the defense of gun rights. Further, the race of victims and perpetrators affected the levels of public mourning and policy debates, with the loss of black lives and the violence inflicted by white shooters generating less sympathy and policy discourses.
How did efforts that prompted the sharing of personal experiences of sexual violence and harassment around #MeToo coalesce into calls for action across a range of institutions and communities? We ...argue that sharing experiences of trauma in digital spaces created a network of acknowledgment, which supported and sustained nascent #MeToo activism based on the logic of connective action. This article attempts to (a) understand the temporal dynamics of these different discourses within the #MeToo movement on Twitter, (b) reveal the accounts animating these discourses and the most prominent themes within them, and (c) model the overtime relationship between these discourses and their relationship to major news event and #MeToo revelations. To do so, we analyze a 1% sample of tweets from the 5-month period following the revelations about Harvey Weinstein in early October 2017, employing a range of computational approaches, including part-of-speech tagging, dependency analysis, hashtags extraction, and retweet network analysis—to identify key discourses, actors, and themes. We then conduct time series analysis to identify the relationship between the two discourses and predict how the ebbs and flows of each discourse are shaped by news events.
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This study explores the framing strategies and language features of U.S. news coverage surrounding sexual violence and gender issues across the ideological media spectrum at two pivotal phases of the ...#MeToo movement: (1) during its initial rise as a hashtag-driven social movement in 2017 and (2) during the Kavanaugh nomination and confirmation in 2018. Using structural topic modeling, community detection, and feature extraction, we reveal a heightened employment of political framing during the Kavanaugh accusations. Topical prevalence and language use in news treatment also showed clear partisan differences, consistent with theories of moral foundation and issue ownership. Implications for research on news coverage of gender rights and framing of social movements are discussed.
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In recent years, a growing group of scholars has begun to draw upon queer theory as they research aspects of LGBTQ folk performances and texts from around the globe. In the process, folklore scholars ...have become increasingly intrigued by bodies that appear to transgress dimorphism, and complicate binary oppositions like male/female. Performances of gender identity and sexuality by hijras in South Asia have awakened audiences' imaginings since the Kama Sutra period (Gupta 2005:180). In folktale, dance, song, religious epic, and popular culture, the figure of the hijra often evokes a liminal play of "otherness." Commonly known as the "third gender"--a conceptual space outside of typical Western constructs--hijra individuals engage with varied notions of transsexual, transgender, intersex, cross-dresser, eunuch, or sexual fluidity. This article focuses on a feminist appropriation of the hijra withinYoni Ki Baat, a South Asian American version ofThe Vagina Monologues. The authors explore how the figure of the hijra--drawn from South Asian folk narratives, religious discourse, and popular culture--might be used strategically by social activists in political performance narratives to (1) encourage a complicated sense of sexually ambiguous or queer practices and identities, and (2) acknowledge individuals facing social oppression due to their marginalized identities. As such, their approach conceptualizes performance as both a relational space and as a space in which to wonder about questions of relationality (Madison and Hamera 2006; Schechner 1990).
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