Pictured above are Raven VonScruptious (right) an Sepia Jewel (left), two burlesque dancers from San Diego, California. Raven and Sepia started “eye fucking” in burlesque classes with Coco L’Amour and later they transferred these gestures to the photo studio and the stage, gestures that as Juana Maria Rodriguez notes, “dance, flirt and fuck” (2014). “Eye fucking” is transmitting tease, a play with your audience that is coquettish. Eye fucking entails going beyond the gaze of the audience into a realm where you meet your inner erotic, your inner gaze. Eye fucking creates arousal, homosociality, agency, femme desire, confidence, and a queer space with a lot of glitter. As Smiley LaRose—the name I chose to take on as my student burlesque name—I have learned to “fuck the camera lens” from these two women and the burlesque community in San Diego, who encourage me to embrace what Celine Parreñas Shimizu calls “productive perversity.”
In this post, I reflect on the sonic intimacies between burlesque and boudoir photography. I am sharing part of a larger film project titled #GlitterBabes, where I tell a story of how burlesque as a recreational practice empowers women to engage their sensual selves. The film came about when I signed up for a Soloist Workshop and my burlesque stage persona Smiley LaRose was born. I tell this story through Glitter Tribe Studio, the first studio dedicated to the art of burlesque in San Diego.
In fact, both the dance and photography studios I write about here have an intimate relationship. The film starts with Smiley’s curiosity about how her classmates and teachers engaged the art of tease and navigated all the different aspects of it. As a fat performer, I was particularly interested in the way that my burlesque sisters and myself would navigate topics of body confidence, sensuality and stripping. As it turned out, these practices require a practice of listening to the details of our bodies and its engagement with musicality, the rhythm of our tease(s), and our awareness for how the camera can capture our corporeal erotic wavelengths both on and off stage.
In other words, I engage in ‘dirty listening’ to describe the sonics of boudoir photography and the erotic sounds that go into capturing sensuality in its most intimate ways. In their qualitative study of erotic photographers, Wentland and Muise found that in order to have a successful shoot it was crucial to create “relaxing and comfortable” spaces for femmes. A common practice among the photographers was to have “constant dialogue with their clients, both at the beginning and during the photo shoot, in order to help their clients relax.” They allowed femmes to have control over the shoot and explained every step along the way. In fact, as photo shoots progressed, several clients “requested shots that were more revealing than what they had initially discussed” (106). The findings by Wentland and Muise share many commonalities with the way photographers in San Diego also engage the practice of Boudoir, particularly the understanding that agency is experienced along a continuum and photographers support their clients by accommodating different techniques that can silence their negative self-talk.
At Bad Kitty Photography, where both Raven and Sepia had their shoots, a layer enabling femmes to get into an affective state of sensual comfort is music. To prepare for shoots, Bad Kitty asks their clients to think about their favorite music to set the mood. On their website, they list creating a music playlist as a recommendation to prepare for the shoot. This recommendation intrigued me and aroused an intellectual sonic orgasm. As a scholar of music, sound, and sexuality, their suggestion reminded me of a post by Robin James, where she argues that “we can understand the physical pleasures of listening to music, music making, and music performance as kinds of sexual pleasure.” In Modernity’s Ear: Listening to Race and Gender in World Music, Roshanak Khesti has described the erotic aspects of aurality, and has described the ear, as an ‘invaginated organ’ that penetrates the body with pleasure-in-listening. Here, music is consumed in a femme-centered space to get the model and its photographer to a state of intoxicating perversity.
Beyond the music recommendation, the photographer who worked with me also used sonic techniques to help me get relaxed and comfortable. Ashley Rae, aka “My Bomb Ass photographer,” no longer works at Bad Kitty, but her impact there particularly with other women of color clients is remembered. While we were choosing my outfits, I shared with Ashley, how nervous I was about not being able to make sexy faces. She looked at me and said, “It’s easy! All you have to do is pronounce ‘juice.’” She later asked me to look at the mirror while I practiced. The trick in the exercise was how slow I said “juice” the slowness and softness or my pronunciation created a shape in my lips that unconsciously also influenced the way my eyes moved. After juice she told me to pronounce “prune.” Ppppp-rrrr-uuuuuuu-nnnnnn—ee.
I look at my photos and I see the effect it created. “vocal utterances function as another kind of embodied gesture – opening the mouth and projecting sounds, words, and breath imprinted by the unique physical qualities of our inhabited bodily instruments,” as she points out in Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and other Latina Longings (124).
She spoke dirty to me and I liked it.
“Give me more bootyhole,” Ashley said.
Rodriguez asks, “what happens when I talk dirty to you? How does the address of speech transform the performative gesture of its utterance?” (125). Dirty talk– how my photographer engaged me in dialogue – contributed to my afloje (looseness) as the shoot progressed. The address of her speech, along with her gestures, made me get lost in her camera. Witnessing the way she touched herself–and the way she wanted me to touch my body–formed a collective vision of sensuality, one where all femmes of color could feel like goddesses. It was her dirty talk, the tone of her voice, and the power of her Black Femme gaze that helped me get there. Following Audre Lorde’s vision for the power of the erotics, we imaged a different world with her camera, a world where femmes eye fuck each other, and for each other, constantly displacing the male gaze. Her foreplay allowed me to listen to how my Eyes Talked, My Eyes Teased, My Eyes Fucked.
Beyond the shoot, the boudoir photos that she took of me would capture forever the fat perversity that she inspired in me. The energy we created inside that studio lingers in my skin. I remember her dirty talk and when we pose, my friends who have also gone through her spell also say, “give me more bootyhole” Like that, my remix yells “si, metete con mi Cucu!”
As a fat student of burlesque, my dirty talk, my dirty listening, is inspired by other women of color, fat performers, and porn stars. I gaze upon them for inspiration, guidance on eye fucking, and poses. On March 9, 2018, I participated in the second annual Plus Size Art Show at Meseeka Art studio in San Diego, California. I submitted 20 pieces of boudoir photography to the show that celebrated the bodies of five women of color plus-size burlesque performers from San Diego. They included Buttah Love, Raven VonScrumptious, Lucy May, Sepia Jewel and Smiley LaRose. The other art pieces in the show also centered fat perversity by presenting women in shibari, bikinis, nude, and boudoir.
Photographed by Ahnyung Nadine
The all-women DJ collective Chulita Vinyl Club de San Diego played at the show while people danced, drank, and viewed the live fat artwork in formation. Listening to the charlas in the room, you could hear fat women share the power they felt from seeing other fat women feeling sexy. One of the participants approached Sepia and Smiley to ask us if we were also exhibited in the artwork. We both pointed at our images, celebrating each other by complementing our sexy poses. She told us that it was her first time ever taking photos in lingerie, and that playing with the shoot was empowering. We both agreed, because as burlesque dancers and students, stripping to nakedness has had multiple effects on the way we viewed our bodies, and their sensuality. Can you listen to how we use boudoir, erotic art and burlesque to create a visual archive of fat-sex-positivity?
Although Raven was not able to attend the opening of the show, she saw it through Buttah’s Instagram story. When I texted Raven, she told me she almost cried from seeing her photos framed on the wall. Raven was art, a fat femme was art. But even though she was not there, her photos transmitted energy and a fat perversity: her fat eyes talked, her fat eyes teased, her fat eyes fucked us.
Prrruuuuuu-nnnnnnneeeeee
We moan.
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All images courtesy of the author.
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Yessica Garcia Hernandez is a doctoral candidate and filmmaker in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of California San Diego. Her scholarship bridges fan studies, sound studies, women of color feminisms, fat studies, girl studies, and sexuality/porn studies to think about intergenerational fans of Mexican regional music. Yessica earned her B.A. in Chicanx Studies from University of California, Riverside and an M.A. in Chicanx and Latinx Studies at California State University Los Angeles. She has published in the Journal of Popular Music, New American Notes Online, Imagining America, Journal of Ethnomusicology, and the Chicana/Latina Studies Journal. Her dissertation entitled, “Boobs and Booze: Jenni Rivera, the Erotics of Transnational Fandom, and Sonic Pedagogies” examines the ways in which Jenni Rivera fans reimagine age, gender, sexuality, motherhood, and class by listening to her music, engaging in fandom, and participating in web communities. She explores the social element of their gatherings, both inside and outside the concert space, and probe how these moments foreground transmissions of Latina power. Yessica’s broader research interests includes paisa party crews, Banda Sinaloense, Contestaciones, and Gordibuena/BBW erotics. She is a co-founder and member of the Rebel Quinceañera Collective, a project that utilizes art, music, photography, creative writing, filmmaking, and charlas to activate spaces for self-expression and radical education by and for youth of color in San Diego.
Graag nodigen wij je uit voor het evenement: ‘Het internet genezen’!
Filosoof en internetpionier Marleen Stikker is te gast bij HvA Debatcentrum FLOOR. Zij richtte de Waag Society op, een instituut voor technologie en samenleving dat pioniert op het gebied van opkomende technologieën. Marleen kijkt kritisch naar technologieën en tools die internetgiganten ons aanbieden. Zij zal ons meenemen in de online wereld en wellicht het internet genezen!
Datum en tijd Donderdag 6 december 2018
17:00 – 17:45 uur – Marleen Stikker
On November 23rd 2018, Pim van den Berg published Execute Order 66: How Star Wars Memes Became Indebted to Fascist Dictatorshipon the INC website. In line with The Case Against the Jedi Order, Pim’s text is critical of the politics of Star Wars meme culture. It was read about 3700 times and caused controversy on r/KotakuInAction – an old-school meeting place for gamergaters (the men that started a campaign against the corrupting influence of women and people of color in gaming under the flag of ‘ethical game journalism’). An aggressive string of comments exhibiting a stunning variety of fallacies denounce Execute Order 66 and its author. Let’s buckle up and dive into the rhetoric Pim’s article provoked.
The I’m-not-even-going-argue-with-you-cuck
Some people like to keep it simple. In this case, the simplest blow is below the belt: disregarding any content matter and instead directly targeting the author as a person. This fallacy, also referred to as ad hominem,might funnily invoke radioactive Vice authors or question the financial situation/education of the writer. It can also be a ‘roundabout’ advise to the author to commit suicide.
You need to get bitten by a radioactive Vice writer.
How the fuck does someone make a living writing shit like that?
I just kind of skimmed to chuckle at the shitty, fake “education” the author underwent. That’s always fun to do with these long-winded diatribes.
Now I’m not saying the writer should hang themselves,but I’m not saying they shouldn’t either.
The latter comment was deleted by the moderator of r/KiA but remains readable as a quote. Neither one of these comments are actual arguments, but they do indicate the rhetoric of Star Wars geek meme culture.
The this-article-is-a-crime
Other commenters take to a more noble and sophisticated type of ranting, not targeting the author directly, but suggesting that this article is a criminal entity (salt fest/breed of stupidity) which brings direct harm to the reader (cancer) and should therefore be punished accordingly (smeared with shit).
That article gave me cancer.
This is all a salt fest over TLJ [the Last Jedi].
Theres more stretches in this article than a yoga manual.
I’ve seen garbage tier Star Wars articles but this is a new breed of stupidity. I hope Uncle Ethan tears into it.
Why can’t that author live a normal life instead of crying about people having fun using fictional villains in fictional universes?
I think I’m gonna print this article out. So I can actually shit on it.
This is so tiresome. Can we start to discuss actual arguments instead of slander?
The stop-attacking-said-geeks-already-you-cultural-imperialist
The most upvoted argument against Pim’s article is an attack-as-defense:
Maybe they should stop attacking said geeks for a moment? A radical notion, I know.
This often-seen type of argument takes any critique of geek culture as an attack on an innocent marginalized and adorkable subculture. Such an attack might be characterized by geeks asa random act of aggression, a deliberate post-modern identity-political reverse sexist witch-hunt, or an instance of cultural gentrification.
It’s just shit slinging with a veneer of pomo jargon. Might as well be yelling garbled insults at passerbyes in parks.
This is Maslow’s hammer … “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”, You’ll find zealots of the new Progressive Cathedral wield it to pound round pegs into square holes. They are indoctrinated into one form of criticism, one frame of reference; They will preceive everything through that lens/frame no matter how the original subject matter is warped by that distortion.
There’s a concept that if you don’t try as hard as possible to attack and demean a person or group, they won’t do it back. Someone teach this to leftists and sjws.
It’s made up, sexist bullshit. Yes, we don’t like certain types of people bargaining in and making demands/throwing shade, but that has nothing to do with race, gender, sexual orientation and so on, on both sides. tl;dr: Normies get out reeeeeee.
They didn’t hate [geeks] back [in the 70’s and 80’s]. You were just weirdos that they had vague distaste for and never interacted with or acknowledged if they could help it. Now they hate you because you’re sitting on a cultural niche that is suddenly valuable and valued, and resisting their efforts to colonise it. They didn’t give a shit about your country, but then one of your natural resources suddenly became valuable.
What, you don’t love cultural gentrification?
Literally cultural imperialism. Social Justice Leopolds!
It’s great having a voice of our own, which the fascists want to take away, while calling us fascists lol.
Well, they’re the ones who called us nazis.
Cynically, with the rise of geek culture’s popularity, the marginal position claimed by geeks as the basis of entitlement to send death wishes to their enemies has clearly ceased to exist (if it ever really existed). In Toxic Geek Masculinity in Media, A. Salter & B. Blodgett argue:“Geekdom is at a crossroads. Once defined by their outside status and victimization, geeks are now powerful enough as a subculture to make victims out of others, particularly those perceived as lacking the credential earned through suffering that makes one a “true” outsider geek.” (p.12)
According to the ‘’true’’ geeks, then, calling out their racism, sexism and fascism for what it is, is blaming the victim. We, normies, should leave the innocent geeks alone, or meet their wrath. LOL, not gonna happen. As The Pop Culture Detective pointed out using the case of The Big Bang Theory,adorkable misogyny is still misogyny. The same goes here: clumsy light saber fascism is still fascism.
The you-don’t-know-us-you-can’t-judge-us
Are we right in critiquing the crowd of anonymous Redditors as a unified political or identitarian homogeneity? Some Redditors point at the impossibility of empirically confirming the homogeneity of the gender, sex, and class of the commenters. Others admit that toxic masculinity in geek culture is a thing but argue that it is only present in a small (and therefore harmless?) part of the community.
How the hell can anyone in there tell if someone is a white man when they’re all a bunch anons saying “hello there” and “General Kenobi,” and if someone does bring up real-world politics all you get is “oh, I’m not brave enough for politics,” or “so this is how democracy dies.”
Literally ‘the people we don’t like are white, male, basement-dwelling losers’. Yaknow why people hate these people? Because of armchair psychology like this.
Those [geek masculine] types exist, of course, but it doesn’t really make sense why their behavior, which may or may not be some sort of ersatz masculinity, would be the declared the standard for all male geeks. There is a difference between probing if someone is actually into a hobby, and being that prick, who, in my opinion, really is just clinging hard to the one thing he knows, because he thinks being an expert on it is all he has going for him in life.
It seems like these defenders of the geek cause did not make the effort to read all other comments, or they would have noticed that most other comments ferociously and violently defend exactly the homogeneity they deny exists (see the WE-ARE-NOT-PATHETIC! below). Also, can you seriously deny that geek culture is white and male-dominated? Can you really call it nitpicking to critique the violent nature of a community’s culture, when members of that community respond with roundabout suicide advice?
The our-innocent-culture-is-not-political-even-though-it-is
Despite the existence of subreddits like r/empiredidnothingwrong, some argue that Star Wars memes are an apolitical cultural phenomenon. In a reaction to the controversy around his article, Pim van den Berg states: ‘I first wanted to share this article on r/starwars, but they have a strong ‘no real-world politics’-policy. Complete bullshit, of course.’ True. It is bullshit. But it’s also bullshit with a function.
I also noticed that the author gave numerous example of harmless memes and could only sometime cited memes that were “problematic” only if you intentionally and obtusely misconstrued them’’
The Left can’t meme because tyrants have no sense of humor. That’s the easiest way to spot a tyrant – they’re the ones that try to shoot the court jester. The Right used to be the tyrants, but now the Left are for some strange reason.
Exactly in being apolitical, in being mere humorous memes, Star Wars memes are argued to fulfil the political role of the court jester – the powerless using humor to speak truth in the face of power. And, of course, it is the moralist, post-modern, identity-political, purist Left that does not allow for such parrhesiastic practice. Start Wars memes are only (Right-wing) political in being humorously apolitical and are therefore harmed in their political role when addressed (by the Left) as directly political.
The leave-my-hero-George-Lucas-alone
Surprisingly often, the slander of the article and its author recedes back into technical geeky elaborations of the Star Wars universe within a few comments – Is Jar Jar a convincing character? Are the ten-minute light-saber fights sped up or not? ARE THE PREQUELS BETTER MOVIES THAN THE SEQUELS? This results in a specific type of the our-innocent-culture-is-not-political-even-though-it-is, which emphasizes the genius authority of Georg Lucas.
You have to like the sequels or you’re a bad person who hates women and minorities. Like the sequels or you’re a fascist. The prequels are flawed movies that embrace one man’s vision, right or wrong, and you’re free to agree or disagree, the sequels are a studio produced work of a giant company and you either like it….or else. I’ll take the prequels any day of the week. We all thought the prequels were as bad as it could ever get, but today is really the dark times of the empire.
Everything about the prequels is Pure George Lucas, for all the good and the bad that implies.
This argument (a Rich White Man’s Vision is a Rich White Man’s Vision) neutralizes any critique of the Star Wars Prequels commenters’ communities’ sexism, racism, and fascism by calling upon the individual Vision of their genius creator George Lucas. You can’t expect a genius to be politically correct, right?
The WE-ARE-NOT-PATHETIC!
The ultimate fallacy is a falsely debunked fallacy. In this case, a combination of a wrongly diagnosed non-sequitur(a cause-effect argument which does not concern the necessity it presents to concern)combined with a wrongly diagnosed lawyer’s question (a false dilemma of two options) tops the iceberg of toxic geek masculinity.
I love my life, beautiful wife, good job, a couple of properties under my belt everything I could realistically want. AND I am a massive geek and hate social justice warriors.
Did the article ever state that you don’t love your life filled with toxic geek masculinity? Does having a wife and a ‘couple of properties under your belt’ exclude the possibility of you being pathetically racist, sexist, and/or fascist? Do you realise that, by saying this, not only are you pleading guilty as charged, but you also show that you simply lack the moral compass to see why you are wrong?
We are left to draw a sad conclusion. In reaction to Pim’s critique, no effort was spared to write death threats, ad hominems, non-sequiturs, lawyer’s questions, shit-slinging, community-defending, anti-social justice warrior rants, claims of innocence, and geekily repetitive Star Wars nitpicking. Yet, no single Redditor r/KiA ever engaged with the actual observations and arguments in Execute Order 66. Under the pretense of ethical game journalism, r/KiA upholds an echo chamber of affirmative tautologies and a culture in which rage-filled fallacies are accepted and normalized. https://www.reddit.com/r/KotakuInAction/comments/9zs1x2/star_wars_memes_became_indebted_to_fascist/ shows what every white male gamer, including myself, knows deep down: geek culture is driven by sadness, frustration and insecurity.
Not Your Muse is a podcast series that dissects the unique experience of being a woman in the music industry. Each episode features an interview with a different artist; we talk about their entry into music, and the struggles and triumphs that followed. The goal of this series is to bring attention to the sexism, both blatant and subtle, that women have to process as professionals.
Our debut episode features Hailey Niswanger, a 28-year-old experimental jazz artist based in Brooklyn, NY. From playing Saturday Night Live to touring with Esperanza Spalding, Hailey’s career has been nothing short of extraordinary. So what did she do when her former mentor, who helped shape her relationship with music, crossed a line? Listen in to learn more about her story.
Featured image used with permission by the author.
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Allison Young is a Binghamton University graduate with a passion for media and its place in social activism and culture. Her positions as publisher of Free Press, Binghamton University’s only free-format arts and culture magazine, and music director of the Binghamtontincs, the campus’ oldest co-ed a cappella group, have fueled her support of the arts and its symbiotic relationship to success. She believes storytelling has the unique ability to connect and shape our society for the better–sometimes the best thing we can do is just listen.
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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
“ The long-held idea of images as proof of reality vanished. Washed away by manipulative practices of image production our hyper-visual media streams have become highly subjective and emotional. Authenticity claims to be the new challenge while power structures shift and users become creators.”
On Friday 23 November, Hackers & Designers, together with Froh! organized a lecture evening to kick off the two 48-hour workshops ‘The Universe of [ ] Images’. The evening and first workshop were hosted by Fanfare. The second workshop will be held in December in Cologne.
In these workshops journalists, designers, artists, filmmakers, hackers are invited to explore and experiment with the role of technical applications within the de-/construction and perception of (visual) truth, now that images no longer serve as pieces of evidence. How can the tools that are built and used shape how media is published and consumed?
The evening set the context for the workshops and was kicked off by Fanfare with a presentation about physical publishing and their history as a nomadic studio and non-profit platform for graphic design and visual arts. Their nomadic existence forced them to design a traveling display for exhibitions that was flexible but also enabled them to retain their identity.
Next was an interactive presentation about Aesthetic Warfare by Arthur Steiner and Leonardo Dellanoce. They initiated the Digital Earth Fellowship program, and are co-curating Vertical Atlas, a research project investigating the use of the Stack methodology as a way construct new maps to navigate the layered, interconnected and disconnected technological realities, as current maps fail to capture these complexities. The presentation illustrated some localities of the universe of [ ] images with three stories from different geozones.
The next Vertical Atlas focusses on the Russian digital cosmos, with two public events: 29 November at the Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam and 2 December at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.
Closing the evening, Colm O’Neill, a designer and researcher concerned with mediations of digital literacy, talked about adversarial interfaces as a way of critically looking at interface design. Colm’s presentation can be found here: http://adversarial.interfaces.site/pages/introduction.html
With the presentations the participants of the workshops were given interesting questions and cases to start exploring, navigating and perhaps designing a new universe of [ ] images.
The title of the symposium and workshops is based on the book ‘Into the Universe of Technical Images’ by Vilém Flusser.
OBP has participated in the data-gathering exercise that is currently being carried out by Fullstopp Gmbh on behalf of the Universities UK Open Access Monographs working group. The questionnaire, which is available online, has been designed to collect information that will inform future OA policy decisions, and in the spirit of openness we share our responses in full below. We also share the data we provided to Fullstopp, which comprises sales data for all the print editions of our books published before the end of 2017. We also have sales information for our digital editions and readership statistics for all our titles that we are happy to make available if requested.
OBP has participated in the data-gathering exercise that is currently being carried out by Fullstopp Gmbh on behalf of the Universities UK Open Access Monographs working group. The questionnaire, which is available online, has been designed to collect information that will … Continue reading →
How Many Latinos are in this Motherfucking House? –DJ Irene
At the Arena Nightclub in Hollywood, California, the sounds of DJ Irene could be heard on any given Friday in the 1990s. Arena, a 4000-foot former ice factory, was a haven for club kids, ravers, rebels, kids from LA exurbs, youth of color, and drag queens throughout the 1990s and 2000s. The now-defunct nightclub was one of my hang outs when I was coming of age. Like other Latinx youth who came into their own at Arena, I remember fondly the fashion, the music, the drama, and the freedom. It was a home away from home. Many of us were underage, and this was one of the only clubs that would let us in.
Arena was a cacophony of sounds that were part of the multi-sensorial experience of going to the club. There would be deep house or hip-hop music blasting from the cars in the parking lot, and then, once inside: the stomping of feet, the sirens, the whistles, the Arena clap—when dancers would clap fast and in unison—and of course the remixes and the shout outs and laughter of DJ Irene, particularly her trademark call and response: “How Many Motherfucking Latinos are in this Motherfucking House?,” immortalized now on CDs and You-Tube videos.
DJ Irene
Irene M. Gutierrez, famously known as DJ Irene, is one of the most successful queer Latina DJs and she was a staple at Arena. Growing up in Montebello, a city in the southeast region of LA county, Irene overcame a difficult childhood, homelessness, and addiction to break through a male-dominated industry and become an award-winning, internationally-known DJ. A single mother who started her career at Circus and then Arena, Irene was named as one of the “twenty greatest gay DJs of all time” by THUMP in 2014, along with Chicago house music godfather, Frankie Knuckles. Since her Arena days, DJ Irene has performed all over the world and has returned to school and received a master’s degree. In addition to continuing to DJ festivals and clubs, she is currently a music instructor at various colleges in Los Angeles. Speaking to her relevance, Nightclub&Bar music industry website reports, “her DJ and life dramas played out publicly on the dance floor and through her performing. This only made people love her more and helped her to see how she could give back by leading a positive life through music.”
DJ Irene’s shout-out– one of the most recognizable sounds from Arena–was a familiar Friday night hailing that interpellated us, a shout out that rallied the crowd, and a rhetorical question. The club-goers were usually and regularly predominately Latin@, although other kids of color and white kids also attended. We were celebrating queer brown life, desire, love in the midst of much suffering outside the walls of the club like anti-immigrant sentiment, conservative backlash against Latinos, HIV and AIDS, intertwined with teen depression and substance abuse.
From my vantage today, I hear the traces of Arena’s sounds as embodied forms of knowledge about a queer past which has become trivialized or erased in both mainstream narratives of Los Angeles and queer histories of the city. I argue that the sonic memories of Arena–in particular Irene’s sets and shout outs–provide a rich archive of queer Latinx life. After the physical site of memories are torn down (Arena was demolished in 2016), our senses serve as a conduit for memories.
As one former patron of Arena recalls, “I remember the lights, the smell, the loud music, and the most interesting people I had ever seen.” As her comment reveals, senses are archival, and they activate memories of transitory and liminal moments in queer LA Latinx histories. DJ Irene’s recognizable shout-out at the beginning of her sets– “How Many Latinos are in this House?”–allowed queer Latinx dancers to be seen and heard in an otherwise hostile historical moment of exclusion and demonization outside the walls of the club. The songs of Arena, in particular, function as a sonic epistemology, inviting readers (and dancers) into a specific world of memories and providing entry into corporeal sites of knowledge.
Both my recollections and the memories of Arena goers whom I have interviewed allow us to register the cultural and political relevance of these sonic epistemologies. Irene’s shout-outs function as what I call “dissident sonic interpolations”: sounds enabling us to be seen, heard, and celebrated in opposition to official narratives of queerness and Latinidad in the 1990s. Following José Anguiano, Dolores Inés Casillas, Yessica García Hernandez, Marci McMahon, Jennifer L. Stoever, Karen Tongson, Deborah R. Vargas, Yvon Bonenfant, and other sound and cultural studies scholars, I argue that the sounds surrounding youth at Arena shaped them as they “listened queerly” to race, gender and sexuality. Maria Chaves-Daza reminds us that “queer listening, takes seriously the power that bodies have to make sounds that reach out of the body to touch queer people and queer people’s ability to feel them.” At Arena, DJ Irene’s vocalic sounds reached us, touching our souls as we danced the night away.
Before you could even see the parade of styles in the parking lot, you could hear Arena and/or feel its pulse. The rhythmic stomping of feet, for example, an influence from African-American stepping, was a popular club movement that brought people together in a collective choreography of Latin@ comunitas and dissent. We felt, heard, and saw these embodied sounds in unison. The sounds of profanity–“motherfucking house”–from a Latina empowered us. Irene’s reference to “the house,” of course, makes spatial and cultural reference to Black culture, house music and drag ball scenes where “houses” were sites of community formation. Some songs that called out to “the house” that DJ Irene, or other DJs might have played were Frank Ski’s “There’s Some Whores in this House,”“In My House” by the Mary Jane Girls, and “In the House” by the LA Dream Team.
Then, the bold and profane language hit our ears and we felt pride hearing a “bad woman” (Alicia Gaspar de Alba) and one of “the girls our mothers warned us about” (Carla Trujillo). By being “bad” “like bad ass bitch,” DJ Irene through her language and corporeality, was refusing to cooperate with patriarchal dictates about what constitutes a “good woman.” Through her DJing and weekly performances at Arena, Irene contested heteronormative histories and “unframed” herself from patriarchal structures. Through her shout outs we too felt “unframed” (Gaspar de Alba).
Dissident sonic interpellation summons queer brown Latinx youth–demonized and made invisible and inaudible in the spatial and cultural politics of 1990s Los Angeles—and ensures they are seen and heard. Adopting Marie “Keta” Miranda’s use of the Althusserian concept of interpellation in her analysis of Chicana youth and mod culture of the 60s, I go beyond the notion that interpellation offers only subjugation through ideological state apparatus, arguing that DJ Irene’s shout-outs politicized the Latinx dancers or “bailadorxs” (Micaela Diaz-Sanchez) at Arena and offered them a collective identity, reassuring the Latinxs she is calling on of their visibility, audibility, and their community cohesiveness.
Perhaps this was the only time these communities heard themselves be named. As Casillas reminds us “sound has power to shape the lived experiences of Latina/o communities” and that for Latinos listening to the radio in Spanish for example, and talking about their situation, was critical. While DJ Irene’s hailing did not take place on the radio but in a club, a similar process was taking place. In my reading, supported by the memories of many who attended, the hailing was a “dissident interpolation” that served as recognition of community cohesiveness and perhaps was the only time these youth heard themselves publicly affirmed, especially due to the racial and political climate of 1990s Los Angeles.
Vintage photo of Arena, 1990s, Image by Julio Z
The 1990s were racially and politically tense time in Los Angeles and in California which were under conservative Republican leadership. At the start of the nineties George Deukmejian was finishing his last term from 1990-1991; Pete Wilson’s tenure was from 1991-1999. Richard Riordan was mayor of Los Angeles for the majority of the decade, from 1993- 2001. The riots that erupted in 1992 after the not guilty verdict for the police officers indicted in the Rodney King beating case and the polarizing effect of the OJ Simpson trial in 1995 were indicative of anti-black and anti-Latinx racism and its impacts across the city. In addition to these tensions, gang warfare and the 1994 earthquake brought on its own set of economic and political circumstances. Anti-immigrant sentiment had been building since the 1980s when economic and political refugees from Mexico and Central American entered the US in large numbers and with the passing of the Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986, what is known as Reagan’s “Amnesty program.” On a national level, Bill Clinton ushered in the implementation of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy in the military, which barred openly LGB people from service. In 1991, Anita Hill testified against Clarence Thomas’s nomination to the United States Supreme Court due to his ongoing sexual harassment of her at work; the U.S. Senate ultimately browbeat Hill and ignored her testimony, confirming Thomas anyway.
In the midst of all this, queer and minoritized youth in LA tried to find a place for themselves, finding particular solace in “the motherfucking house”: musical and artistic scenes. The club served a “house” or home to many of us and the lyrical references to houses were invitations into temporary and ephemeral sonic homes. Counting mattered. Who did the counting mattered. How many of us were there mattered. An ongoing unofficial census was unfolding in the club through Irene’s question/shout-out, answered by our collective cheers, whistles, and claps in response. In this case, as Marci McMahon reminds us, “Sound demarcates whose lives matter” (2017, 211) or as the Depeche Mode song goes, “everything counts in large amounts.”
Numbers mattered at a time when anti-immigrant sentiment was rampant, spawning white conservative sponsored legislation such as Prop 187 the so-called “Save Our State” initiative (which banned “undocumented Immigrant Public Benefits”), Prop 209 (the ban on Affirmative Action), and Prop 227 “English in Public Schools” (the Bilingual Education ban). Through these propositions, legislators, business people, and politicians such as Pete Wilson and his ilk demonized our parents and our families. Many can remember Wilson’s virulently anti-immigrant 1994 re-election campaign advertisement depicting people running across the freeway as the voiceover says “They keep coming” and then Wilson saying “enough is enough.” This ad is an example of the images used to represent immigrants as animals, invaders and as dangerous (Otto Santa Ana). As Daniel Martinez HoSang reminds us, these “racial propositions” were a manifestation of race-based hierarchies and reinforced segregation and inequity (2010, 8).
While all of this was happening— attempts to make us invisible, state-sponsored refusals of the humanity of our families—the space of the club, Irene’s interpellation, and the sounds of Arena offered a way to be visible. To be seen and heard was, and remains, political. As Casillas, Stoever, and Anguiano and remind us in their work on the sounds of Spanish language radio, SB 1070 in Arizona, and janitorial laborers in Los Angeles, respectively, to be heard is a sign of being human and to listen collectively is powerful.
Listening collectively to Irene’s shout out was powerful as a proclamation of life and a celebratory interpellation into the space of community, a space where as one participant in my project remembers, “friendships were built.” For DJ Irene to ask how many Latinos were in the house mattered also because the AIDS prevalence among Latinos increased by 130% from 1993 to 2001. This meant our community was experiencing social and physical death. Who stood up, who showed up, and who danced at the club mattered; even though we were very young, some of us and some of the older folks around us were dying. Like the ball culture scene discussed in Marlon M. Bailey’s scholarship or represented in the new FX hit show Pose, the corporeal attendance at these sites was testament to survival but also to the possibility for fabulosity. While invisibility, stigma and death loomed outside of the club, Arena became a space where we mattered.
For Black, brown and other minoritized groups, the space of the queer nightclub provided solace and was an experiment in self-making and self-discovery despite the odds. Madison Moore reminds us that “Fabulousness is an embrace of yourself through style when the world around you is saying you don’t deserve to be here” (New York Times). As Louis Campos–club kid extraordinaire and one half of Arena’s fixtures the Fabulous Wonder Twins–remembers,
besides from the great exposure to dance music, it [Arena] allowed the real-life exposure to several others whom, sadly, became casualties of the AIDS epidemic. The very first people we knew who died of AIDS happened to be some of the people we socialized with at Arena. Those who made it a goal to survive the incurable epidemic continued dancing.
The Fabulous Wonder Twins
Collectively, scholarship by queer of color scholars on queer nightlife allows us entryway into gaps in these queer histories that have been erased or whitewashed by mainstream gay and lesbian historiography. Whether queering reggaetón (Ramón Rivera-Servera), the multi-Latin@ genders and dance moves at San Francisco’s Pan Dulce (Horacio Roque-Ramirez), Kemi Adeyemi’s research on Chicago nightlife and the “mobilization of black sound as a theory and method” in gentrifying neighborhoods, or Luis-Manuel García’s work on the tactility and embodied intimacy of electronic dance music events, these works provide context for Louis’ remark above about the knowledges and affective ties and kinships produced in these spaces, and the importance of nightlife for queer communities of color.
When I interview people about their memories, other Arena clubgoers from this time period recall a certain type of collective listening and response—as in “that’s us! Irene is talking about us! We are being seen and heard!” At Arena, we heard DJ Irene as making subversive aesthetic moves through fashion, sound and gestures; Irene was “misbehaving” unlike the respectable woman she was supposed to be. Another queer Latinx dancer asserts: “I could fuck with gender, wear whatever I wanted, be a puta and I didn’t feel judged.”
DJ Irene’s “How many motherfucking Latinos in the motherfucking house,” or other versions of it, is a sonic accompaniment to and a sign of, queer brown youth misbehaving, and the response of the crowd was an affirmation that we were being recognized as queer and Latin@ youth. For example, J, one queer Chicano whom I interviewed says:
We would be so excited when she would say “How Many Latinos in the Motherfucking House?” Latinidad wasn’t what it is now, you know? There was still shame around our identities. I came from a family and a generation that was shamed for speaking Spanish. We weren’t yet having the conversation about being the majority. Arena spoke to our identities.
For J, Arena was a place that spoke to first generation youth coming of age in LA, whose experiences were different than our parents and to the experiences of queer Latinxs before us. In her shout-outs, DJ Irene was calling into the house those like J and myself, people who felt deviant outside of Arena and/or were then able to more freely perform deviance or defiance within the walls of the club.
Our responses are dissident sonic interpellations in that they refuse the mainstream narrative. If to be a dissident is to be against official policy, then to be sonically dissident is to protest or refuse through the sounds we make or via our response to sounds. In my reading, dissident sonic interpellation is both about Irene’s shout out and about how it moved us towards and through visibility and resistance and about how we, the interpellated, responded kinetically through our dance moves and our own shout outs: screaming, enthusiastic “yeahhhhs,” clapping, and stomping. We were celebrating queer brown life, desire, love in the midst of much suffering outside the walls of the club. Arena enabled us to make sounds of resistance against these violences, sounds that not everyone hears, but as Stoever reminds us, even sounds we cannot all hear are essential, and how we hear them, even more so.
Even though many of us didn’t know Irene personally (although many of the club kids did!) we knew and felt her music and her laughter and the way she interpellated us sonically in all our complexity every Friday. Irene’s laughter and her interpellation of dissent were sounds of celebration and recognition, particularly in a city bent on our erasure, in a state trying to legislate us out of existence, on indigenous land that was first our ancestors.
In the present, listening to these sounds and remembering the way they interpellated us is urgent at a time when gentrification is eliminating physical traces of this queer history, when face-to face personal encounters and community building are being replaced by social media “likes,” and when we are engaging in a historical project that is “lacking in archival footage” to quote Juan Fernandez, who has also written about Arena. When lacking the evidence Fernandez writes, the sonic archive whether as audio recording or as a memory, importantly, becomes a form of footage. When queer life is dependent on what David Eng calls “queer liberalism” or “the empowerment of certain gay and lesbian U.S. citizens economically through an increasingly visible and mass-mediated consumer lifestyle, and politically through the legal protection of rights to privacy and intimacy,” spaces like Arena–accessed via the memories and the sonic archive that remains– becomes ever so critical.
Voice recordings can be echoes of a past that announce and heralds a future of possibility. In their Sounding Out! essay Chaves-Daza writes about her experience listening to a 1991 recording of Gloria Anzaldúa speaking at the University of Arizona, which they encountered in the archives at UT Austin. Reflecting on the impact of Anzaldúa’s recorded voice and laughter as she spoke to a room full of queer folks, Chaves-Daza notes the timbre and tone, the ways Anzaldúa’s voice makes space for queer brown possibility. “Listening to Anzaldúa at home, regenerates my belief in the impossible, in our ability to be in intimate spaces without homophobia,” they write.
Queer Latinxs coming across or queerly listening to Irene’s shout out is similar to Chaves-Daza’s affective connection to Anzaldúa’s recording. Such listening similarly invites us into the memory of the possibility, comfort, complexity we felt at Arena in the nineties, but also a collective futurity gestured in Chaves-Daza’s words:. “Her nervous, silly laugh–echoed in the laughs of her audience–reaches out to bring me into that space, that time. Her smooth, slow and raspy voice–her vocalic body–touches me as I listen.” She writes, “Her voice in the recording and in her writing sparks a recognition and validation of my being.” Here, Anzaldúa’s laughter, like Irene’s shout-out, is a vocal choreography and creates a “somatic bond,” one I also see in other aspects of dancers, bailadorxs, remembering about and through sound and listening to each other’s memories of Arena. Chaves-Daza writes, “sound builds affective connections between myself and other queers of color- strikes a chord in me that resonates without the need for language, across space and time.”
In unearthing these queer Latin@ sonic histories of the city, my hopes are that others listen intently before these spaces disappear but also that we collectively unearth others. At Arena we weren’t just dancing and stomping through history, but we were making history, our bodies sweaty and styled up and our feet in unison with the beats and the music of DJ Irene.“ How Many Latinos in the Mutherfucking House?”, then, as a practice of cultural citizenship, is about affective connections (and what Karen Tongson calls “remote intimacies”), “across, space and time.” The musics and sounds in the archive of Arena activates the refusals, connections, world-making, and embodied knowledge in our somatic archives, powerful fugitive affects that continue to call Latinx divas to the dancefloor, to cheer, stomp and be counted in the motherfucking house: right here, right now.
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Featured Image: DJ Irene, Image by Flickr User Eric Hamilton (CC BY-NC 2.0)
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Eddy Francisco Alvarez Jr. came of age in the 1990s, raised in North Hollywood, California by his Mexican mother and Cuban father. A a first generation college student, he received his a BA and MA in Spanish from California State University, Northridge and his PhD in Chicana and Chicano Studies from University of California, Santa Barbara. A former grade school teacher, after graduate school, he spent three years teaching Latinx Studies in upstate New York before moving to Oregon where he is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and University Studies at Portland State University. His scholarly and creative works have been published in TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, Revista Bilingue/Bilingual Review, and Pedagogy Notebook among other journals, edited books, and blogs. Currently, he is working on a book manuscript titled Finding Sequins in the Rubble: Mapping Queer Latinx Los Angeles. He is on the board of the Association for Jotería Arts, Activism, and Scholarship (AJAAS) and Friends of AfroChicano Press.
The October 2018 presidential elections in Brazil saw the rise of an extreme-right candidate due to several strategies, but there are equally many counter-movements that took place in the electoral period.
One of these counter-movements is the action #MarielleMultiplica which went viral after a series of street protests for human rights, democracy and social justice, in response to the openly mysogynistic, racist, and authoritarian rhetorics of the what was to be the winning party, Jair’s Bolsonaro’s PSL.
The #MarielleMultiplica action started in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in October 2018 in preparation for a manifestation in honor of Marielle Franco, a black lesbian sociologist and elected local politician, executed earlier this year in an ambush for her work in the city’s human rights commission. Her task was to report on potential abuses of a military intervention in Rio’s favelas. Marielle Franco became an international symbol for social justice, and we are still wondering #QuemMatouMarielle? – who killed Marielle?
At the time of her death, a symbolic street sign with her name was created as a symbol and homage on the street where she was killed in central Rio.
In commemoration of the 6-month anniversary of her death in mid-October, a manifestation would be held in honor to claim for resolution of the crime and also strengthen the campaign for democracy during the elections. When white male candidates of the extreme-right party PSL learned about this, they took the symbolic street sign in Marielle Franco’s honor, broke it in half in a political rally and held it up like a war trophy as a crowd of thousands of people cheered on. All the candidates who broke Marielle’s street sign on this rally were elected in state elections for high posts in the senate, chamber of deputies and as the governor of the state, with a very high number of votes.
The response by an online satirical newspaper Sensacionalista with a crowdfunding initiative to print 1,000 signs and give the proceeds for a human rights organization. These signs were distributed on site in Cinelândia, where the manifestation took place. An online arts platform (Caju.com.br) run by curator Daniela Name and artist Sidnei Balbino printed out 2,000 more signs for the occasion, which was already scheduled when the original street sign was torn apart.
The manifestation was held with over 30,000 people on the streets of Rio. The 3,000 street signs were then placed everywhere in the city, hashtagged #MarielleMultiplica online. Celebrities joined in and helped the cause onsite and online. The artist received orders for more prints as the action went viral. Other cities in Brazil printed signs and did similar manifestations. The street sign now has been printed 13,000 times, and spread all over Brazil and in the world.
As the manifestation hit social media (mass media reported very little on this), the street sign went viral with the hashtag #MarielleMultiplica – “Marielle Multiplied”.
I took part of this action remotely by requesting the design to be printed in Stockholm. 20 such signs were printed and spread in the city. It was also sent to other Brazilians abroad to do the same. On election day, October 28th, a group of Brazilian women and I placed the street sign on the Brazilian Embassy wall. This was further photographed and viralized in social media.
Marielle Franco’s memory cannot be torn apart by fascist politicians. Her memory will multiply until justice will be done.
Below some images of the political rally where the sign was broken, and the response/action/manifestation in Brazil, Stockholm and other places in the world.
On November 10 the Institute of Human Obsolescence (IoHO) founded by artist and activist Manuel Beltrán, organized a discussion in the context of the Data Production Labor series to investigate the hidden dynamics behind our data work. There were three installations on show that visualized data labor in different ways.
IoHO is an artistic research project investigating the repositioning of human labor in a time where manual and intellectual labor are increasingly being performed by machines and new forms of inequality and exploitation arise. With a series of public events the IoHO aims to create an understanding of the production of data as a form of labor. With a new understanding of our relation to work, it might become possible to negotiate the terms of data labor and claim a better position for human workers.
Yes. You and me are data workers. The second we enter the web, go online, we produce data with every little move we make or don’t make. And this data is turned into Big Capital by Big Tech. And, of course you know this already or have at least a vague notion that this is how the internet works, while going about your daily business.
The panel with Manuel Beltrán, Katrin Fritsch, Luis Rodil-Fernández and Ksenia Ermoshina.
The investigation kicked off with a discussion about the narrative of the user. In this narrative, users of free services do not question the technology that they use. They don’t question it because, well, it’s a free service, right? Not having any expectations, users are passive and don’t feel accountable for their (micro) actions. Besides, the services are very convenient. So, from a user’s perspective, why ask questions?
From this starting point the hidden infrastructures behind the seemingly innocent or simple tasks that we perform online were discussed. During this session many topics were brought up that provoked plenty of questions about the human in the loop. In an A.I. based economy digital labor is the currency and this labor is used, among other things, to train algorithms. While a lot of this labor is indeed framed as a form of labor (or Human Intelligence (micro) tasks), much of our digital work is done unknowingly. For instance, when you have to prove that you are not a robot to sign up for a newsletter, and you have to solve one of reCAPTCHA’s traffic light puzzles, you might also be training algorithms for military drones. This seemingly innocent task produced data (value) for Google and was done without consent or the possibility to negotiate what this data is used for.
During the discussion the possibility of a Data Workers Union, that was founded by the IoHO in 2017, was discussed in the context of cultural differences, tradeoffs between privacy and security, political organization of citizens as users of platform governments, and more. What is to be done remains an open question that needs continuous investigation and updating.
Update:
These days you can just check the ‘I’m not a robot’ box and you may proceed without making some puzzle. Or the checkbox does not even show up. By tracking your online behavior and clicking patterns Google already knows that you are not a robot. Besides, users found the security check to be very annoying. With another layer of technology moving into the background, signing up for a newsletter just became a bit more convenient and asking questions a bit harder.
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