Wednesday, December 1, 2010

A Post of Links

So many links, so little time.

Tim Morton is live-streaming the UCLA OOO conference. It is already in full swing, but maybe you can see some of it before it ends.

I missed a lot of Thanksgiving links, but let me cover an important one. Magnus Fiskesjö's pamphlet, The Thanksgiving Turkey Pardon, the Death of Teddy's Bear, and the Sovereign Exception of Guantánamo (.pdf. Also, the longest title for the shortest book) is one of my favorite little tracts. Jason Read integrates this book with a critique of Thanksgiving and our current political situation. Magnus Fiskesjö recently commented on this blog to share that he has a new article out updating much of his analysis in his pamphlet. Fiskesjö, Magnus "The reluctant sovereign: New adventures of the US presidential Thanksgiving turkey." Anthropology Today (October 2010), Volume 26, Issue 5, pages 13–17. Sorry, no link. But if you have some problem accessing this article, let me know and I will help you out. He also points out, "Note, though, that a major aspect I tried to debate there has been obliterated: the Disneyland tour of the post-pardoning turkey. It will now go to the old home of George Washington(back yard?)! See: "George's house, not Mickey's, for pardoned turkey"".

Dr. J has a some useful notes up on the other side of the job market. Definitely worth a read if you are planning on going on the job market, and are curious how the people interviewing you look at the process.

HJM of the always awesome Prodigies + Monsters has an essay out that you can all read. It is entitled, “Medical Histories, Queer Futures: Imaging and Imagining ‘Abnormal’ Corporealities” (.pdf), and I swear to you all it is awesome. Here is the abstract:
This paper explores the political and epistemic work done by ostensibly denotative and reproducible imaging technologies in the process of establishing a scientific concept of sexual dimorphism. Beginning with an account of the prehistory of medical gender assignation in cases of intersexuality, it examines medical photographs of queer corporealities in order to ask after the political and epistemological work done by these images as well as the politics of biomedicine traceable in the orchestration of these images. Building upon Foucault's writing on hermaphroditism and Thomas Laqueur's work on the decline of a 'one-sex' (1990) system of sex intelligibility, it pairs these insights with Deleuze and Guattari's theorization of the function of faciality in the service of subjective biunivocalization (1987) in order to examine the function of the black bar or blurred face in medical photography. I argue that this trope of medical photodocumentation works to both secure the authority of the medical practitioner as modest witness (Haraway 1997) as well as place the queer body imaged in an ontological caesura while proper – that is, male or female – subjecthood is adjudicated upon. This tropology of desubjectivation is often coupled, in the medical photography of queer corporealities, with what Linda Williams has called the 'principle of maximum visibility,' visually indexed by perspectival multplication. While Williams theorizes this principle in the context of an analysis of pornography, this paper maps a certain consanguinity between medical photography and pornography insofar as both seek to image certain heretofore ineluctable 'truths' of sex.


The Sex, Gender, Species conference I will be at now has information on all of the speakers and the schedule for the conference. Check it out.

Over at Anarchists Without Content, we have a recording of Michael Hardt giving a talk entitled "Empire: A Retrospective". He also has a summary of Christian Marazzi's talk, "Financial Entropy: Struggle Within and Against Empire".

I have not been posting about the struggles in the UK like I should be. Not because they aren't important, or even important to me. I just don't have much to add. However, Nina Power has a great post up entitled Against Generations which examines the current struggle and the desire to compare and contrast it with previous struggles. Peter has some interesting follow-ups on this post over at his place.

David Cassuto has a map up that shows where the factory farms are located in the US, with a link to where it comes from with even more maps. This actually reminds me of Noelie Vialles important and under-read book, Animal to Edible. There is a lot of thought and work that goes into where to put factory farms and abattoirs so that slaughtering of other animals remains largely unregulated and, more important, forgettable.

Following up on that note, the Food Empowerment Project has a short essay on the expansion and exportation of the factory farm to the rest of the world. Not a surprise, but important to read.

I have two pieces of music to share today. The first comes from the 21st Century Monads about the lack of women in philosophy. You can read an interview about the song and find the link to listen to it here. But to my knowledge, there isn't a youtube video of this song (yet?). So, in that spirit I want to give the bizarre pairing with Dire Straits' "Les Boys".