“There's Nothing More Debilitating than Travel”: Locating US Empire in Todd Haynes' Safe

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

¹By “empire” we refer both to more recent imperial endeavors on the part of the US (characterized by the complicity of corporations and the state within globalized capital, support for other states' neocolonialism, and “development” of the economic South) and to older legacies of US imperial endeavors (genocide, slavery, the doctrine of manifest destiny, and territorial expansion).

²Authors Muñoz, Davis, and Burdette for example refer to the new Queer cinema in discussing Haynes. The first use of the phrase is generally credited to B. Ruby Rich in her article of the same name (1992).

³See Laura Donaldson for further discussion of feminism and New Age Shame-ans.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Danielle Bouchard

Danielle Bouchard is a Ph.D candidate in the Department of Women's Studies at the University of Minnesota. She co-authored the article “Film and Video Studies” in the Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered History in America (2004) with Jigna Desai. Her research interests include postcolonial studies, studies in disciplinarity, feminist cultural studies, and theories of text. Her dissertation, The Feminist Order of Things: Interdisciplinarity and Globalism in Contemporary Feminist Theory, analyzes how the call for interdisciplinarity that characterizes recent theorizing on the university is in fact indebted to modes of knowledge production complicit with colonialism and globalization.

Jigna Desai

Jigna Desai is an assistant professor in the Department of Women's Studies at the University of Minnesota. Her research interests include Asian American, postcolonial, Queer, and diasporic cultural studies. Her book Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film was published in 2004 by Routledge Press. Beyond Bollywood analyzes the complex relationships between diaspora and nation in the current moment of globalization through contestations over gender and sexuality. She has also published essays in journals such as Social Text and South Asian Popular Culture.