Fashioning Futures
This panel starts with the premise that experiences of subjugated peoples have been rooted in a representational apparatus of vicious modernity. Subaltern histories and lives within this apparatus are narrated through the lenses of dispossession, disenfranchisement, and social disposability. Feminist and queer cultural production nevertheless while conjuring such normative representational aesthetics simultaneously reimagine suffering, futurity, and human aspirations. Beyond representational revision, correction or uplift, expressive cultures have the capacity to call into question the very grounds of knowledge that make them possible and at the same time hint at new horizons of surviving and thriving.
We invite panelists to think through
• What are the substantive, symbolic and structural preoccupations of representational practices across genres that simultaneously trouble our modes of knowledge yet fashion a more joyful future?
• In what ways can we conceptualize desires of subjugated peoples to devise and complicate a future beyond a singular traumatic narration?
• How can art, photography, fashion, and other expressive cultural genres gesture towards an alternate apparatus that is embodied, relational, and forward-thinking but captures aesthetically and ethically the ruinous present?
Captioning will be provided.
Roundtable Participants:
Genevieve Clutario, Wellesley College
Genevieve Clutario is the Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of American Studies at Wellesley College. She specializes in interdisciplinary and transnational feminist approaches to Filipinx and Asian American histories. Her work is especially interested racial and gendered formations and U.S. empire building in the global south. She is currently completing her first book, Beauty Regimes (Duke University Press, forthcoming), a book that examines the cultural, political, and economic dimensions of fashion and beauty systems that lay at the heart of modern empire and Philippine nation-building projects. She published, “Pageant Politics: Tensions of Power, Empire, and Nationalism in Manila Carnival Queen Contests,” in the anthology, Gendering the Trans-Pacific World (Brill Press, 2017) and “World War II and the Promise of Normalcy: Filipina Lives Under Two Empires” in Beyond the Edge of the Nation: Transimperial Histories with a U.S. Angle (Duke University Press 2020). Before arriving at Wellesley, Clutario was an assistant professor in History and History and Literature at Harvard University. She continues to pursue research and teaching interests focused on Asian American narratives in global perspectives; Filipinx studies; comparative histories of culture and modern empire; transnational feminisms; and gender, race, and the politics of fashion and beauty.
Meera Sethi
Meera Sethi is an interdisciplinary visual artist whose affective, research-based practice explores fashion, dress, garments, and materiality from critical, feminist, and anti-colonial perspectives. She engages drawing, painting, fibre, social practice, and performance to think through migration and its relationship to memory, cloth, and care with a special interest in the histories of South Asia. Meera's work is in the permanent collection of the Royal Ontario Museum and the Wedge Collection and has been exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Art Gallery of Mississuaga, and the L'Oréal Melbourne Fashion Festival among other venues. She is the recipient of multiple awards from the Toronto, Ontario and Canada Arts Councils, the Textile Museum of Canada, University of Toronto, Inter Access, and the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Her work has been featured in NBC, NPR, The Toronto Star, The Globe&Mail, The Fader, VICE, VOGUE India, CNN, MTV and numerous other print and online publications.
IG & Twitter: @meerasethi
Rachel Afi Quinn, University of Houston
Rachel Afi Quinn is an associate professor in the Program in Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies and the Department of Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Houston. She received her doctorate from the Program in American Culture from the University of Michigan. Her transnational feminist cultural studies scholarship focuses on mixed race, gender and sexuality, social media and visual culture in the African Diaspora. Her first book, Being La Dominicana: Race and Identity in the Visual Culture of Santo Domingo (2021) was published by University of Illinois Press. Quinn was part of a filmmaking team that produced the documentary "Cimarrón Spirit" (2015) about contemporary Afro-Dominican identities, and her related essay “‘No tienes que entenderlo, solo respetalo’: Xiomara Fortuna, Racism, Feminism and Other Forces in the Dominican Republic” was published in The Black Scholar. Her essay, “Spinning the Zoetrope: Visualizing the Mixed-Race Body of Dominican Actress Zoe Saldaña” was published in Latin American & Latinx Visual Culture. She has also written about queerness and the Dominican Republic for Small Axe and on Africanness and photography for Burlington Contemporary. She is a recipient of the Ross M. Lence Award for Teaching Excellence in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, a co-creator of the UH Critical Disability Studies Initiative and co-founder of the social justice feminist collective South Asian Youth in Houston Unite (SAYHU). She received a 2018-19 Career Enhancement Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation.
Siobhan Carter-David, Southern Connecticut State University
Siobhan Carter-David is Associate Professor in the Department of History and affiliate faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies at Southern Connecticut State University. She teaches in the areas of cultural studies, women’s studies, and African American/Diaspora and contemporary United States histories. As a public historian, she has worked with museum and special collection curators on projects involving various facets of African American and broad-based United States cultural history. She is author of several chapters and articles in edited volumes, exhibition catalogues, and academic journals, and is completing her book manuscript, Issuing the Black Wardrobe: Magazines and Fashion Post-Soul.
Thea Quiray Tagle, UMass Boston
Thea Quiray Tagle, PhD is a Filipinx femme writer, scholar, teacher and curator whose research broadly investigates socially engaged art and site-specific performance; visual cultures of violence and waste; urban planning and the environment; and grassroots responses to political crises and ecological collapse in the expanded Pacific Rim. Across her various research and creative projects, a question that drives Thea’s work is: how can socially engaged art and performance move us, collectively and individually, to work towards more just and livable futures that are anti-capitalist, feminist, and queer? How can art and performance model practices of right relation with other humans and non-human life, that might impact how we choose to live in the day-to-day?
Thea is a transdisciplinary feminist scholar and is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Program in Critical Ethnic & Community Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She received her PhD in Ethnic Studies from the University of California, San Diego, and holds a BA in Political Science and Human Rights Studies from Barnard College, Columbia University. She was the Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Associate in Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 2015-2016. Her research has been published in academic journals including American Quarterly, Critical Ethnic Studies, ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, and Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas. Thea currently sits on the editorial board of Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society, and is on the board of the Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women & Society (GCWS).
IG: @ teeqeetee | Twiter: @Thea_QT
Moderator: Elora Chowdhury is a Professor in the Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Director of the Human Rights Minor at UMass Boston. Her teaching and research interests include transnational feminisms, gender violence and human rights advocacy, narrative and film with an emphasis on South Asia. She is the author of Transnationalism Reversed: Women Organizing Against Gendered Violence in Bangladesh (2011), which was awarded the National Women’s Studies Association Gloria Anzaldua book prize in 2012; and the co-edited volumes (with Liz Philipose) Dissident Friendships: Feminism, Imperialism and Transnational Solidarity (2016), Interdisciplinary Approaches to Human Rights: History, Politics, Practice (with Rajini Srikanth, 2018), and the recently published anthology, South Asian Filmscapes: Transregional Encounters (with Esha Niyogi De, 2020).
ABOUT FEMINISMS UNBOUND
This Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality (GCWS) initiative, Feminisms Unbound, is an annual event series featuring debates that focus on feminist concerns, theories, and practices in this contemporary moment. This series is intended to foster conversations and community among Boston-area feminist intellectuals and activists. The series, in its open configuration, endeavors to allow the greatest measure of engagement across multiple disciplinary trajectories, and a full array of feminist investments.
The event organizers, who are also visiting scholars with the GCWS this year, are Elora Chowdhury (Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Chair of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at University of Massachusetts Boston), Faith Smith (Associate Professor of African and Afro-American Studies and English at Brandeis University), and Kareem Khubchandani (Mellon Bridge Assistant Professor in theDepartment of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies and the Program in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Tufts University). have programmed the events in this series.