The feminist futures of cultural studies

ABSTRACT

The future of Critical Cultural Studies depends on the questions we have asked, are asking, and will ask. I hope that central to the present and future of critical cultural studies is the question: What is the “critical” project in Cultural Studies, today? The critical must evolve to consider how power adapts to critique, and to progress. Cultural Studies, Black, Post/ DeColonial, and Queer Feminist Studies, is a source of robust life for thinking about resistive politics in the wake of critique. Here, I use the concept of feminist militarism to gesture to the feminist futures of Critical Cultural Studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Feminism
• Militarism
• Cultural Studies
• Power

Notes

1 Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007); Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation (London: Routledge Press, 1996); Lila Abu Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); Deepa Kumar, Islamaphobia and the Politics of Empire (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012).

2 Hua Hsu, “Stuart Hall and the Rise of Cultural Studies,” The New Yorker, July 17, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/stuart-hall-and-the-rise-of-cultural-studies (accessed January 30, 2020); Jessica Loudis, “Why We Need Stuart Hall’s Imaginative Left,” The New Republic, September 27, 2017, https://newrepublic.com/article/145042/need-stuart-halls-imaginative-left (accessed January 30, 2020); Bruce Robbins, “A Starting Point for Politics: The Radical Life and Times of Stuart Hall,” The Nation, October 27, 2016, https://www.thenation.com/article/the-radical-life-of-stuart-hall (accessed January 30, 2020).

3 Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Andalzúa, eds., This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color (London: Persephone Press, 1981); Gloria Andulzúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Franciso: Aunt Lute Books, 1987); Trin T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989); bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992), Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge Press, 1990); Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241.

4 Trinh T. Minh-ha, “Difference: ‘A Special Third World Woman Issue’” Feminist Review 25, no. 1 (1987): 10.

5 Theodor Adorno, “Recommendation Letter for Angela Davis,” December 20, 1966, http://www.literaturarchiv1968.de/content/theodor-w-adornos-gutachten-fuer-angela-davis/ (accessed January 30, 2020).

6 Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster Press, 1996).

7 There are many ways in which racist and Orientalist tropes are evident in the stories of the “third sex,” particularly through the project of adaptation. An Afghan official who Kim Barker depicts as flirtatious in her memoir, The Taliban Shuffle, is dramatized in the feature comedy film adaptation until the character, played by British actor Alfred Molina, becomes buffoonish, while retaining an air of sexual menace, echoing the Orientalist tropes identified by Edward Said as a by-product of the colonial frameworks that permeate European and North American knowledge production about “the Muslim world.”

8 Aryn Baker “Afghan Women and the Return of the Taliban,” Time Magazine, August 9, 2010, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2007407,00.htm (accessed January 30, 2020).