Anti-colonial Feminist Ramblings About Everything and Anything

To discuss desire as the driving force of the social, as well as to identify certain forms of desire present in cultural expressions, it will be useful to bring up Jacques Lacan’s formulation of the realms of the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real. Using this framework, desire can be understood as a transindividual field that pertains to the realm of the Symbolic, with both conscious and unconscious dimensions. Desire can only be identified by its effects on discourse and culture, and neither discourse nor culture are the possession of an individual. For Lacan, Language, that is the realm of the Symbolic, actually precedes the subject, as signifying chains from which subject effects can be derived. Desire is governed by a fundamental lack, which keeps it moving from one object to the next, and keeps the subject desiring, and talking until death, without ever being able to fulfill “it.” Desire, in this sense, does not refer to an individual longing for something, a defined concrete ob

 I picked up this VHS from the thrift store, "Frankie and Johnny." It has Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer on the cover, they look working class. I thought it was going to be a cute, heartwarming romantic comedy. Instead, it was an excruciating 2 hours of feeling uncomfortable, triggered, disgusted. What the fuck were writers in 1991 thinking?? The whole movie is a plain rape culture apology. The only interesting part of this film is the class subtext about pre-gentrification New York.  If you look it up on IMDb, the movie's plot is summarized like this: "Johnny, a former convict, gets a job as a cook in a local diner. There, he falls in love with Frankie, an emotionally wounded waitress whole love he is determined to win her love." So basically, when they say "determined to win her love", it means even without her consent . In fact, watching this film almost unbearable as Frankie spends most of the movie looking annoyed and uncomfortable and telling Jo

Warning! This post if full of spoilers of the 2001 movie AI, which, if you haven't seen yet, you really don't need to. It is looong and cheesy, and oh boy does Spielberg have mommy issues! Send him to therapy please. Anyways, here is the rambling: Reproducing without women has been a constant nightmarish fantasy of white men, and it could be read as the underlying motivation under the whole project of scientific discourse under European enlightenment, AKA the philosophical and political project of white men to demonstrate their superiority and thus the need to exclude women and men of colour and non binary folks from political power. And, as is expected, rampant sexist jokes and representations abound from the beginning of this 2001 Stephen Spielberg's movie.  A.I. Artificial Intelligence revolves around a white man's project of creating a (white) child who will be able to love. Yes, a futuristic Ghepetto. The creepiest part, he is conceived as the replacement of the sc

 I have always had a suspicion about horror and sci-fi movies. They reflect the paranoia of cis-het white men of eventually being violently retaliated. The colonizers, the oppressors, the ones that know what it was done, and how they benefit from it. They sleep at night with the nightmare of all that violence that was perpetrated against colonized, unruly female and queer bodies is coming back to haunt them.  Alien invasion movies reflect the paranoia of being violently colonized by a "more advanced" foreign civilization with which we cannot communicate or understand. Our ways of being are threatened, but in the end we always succeed thanks to the leadership of the US military. We are made to vicariously participate in the military imperial project this way. As I am watching 1953's War of the Worlds, a sort of blueprint for this genre, it just makes sense how this idea would be a perfect pitch to refer to the invasion of communism amidst the peak of the Cold War. In thi

Edited by Rachel E. Dubrofsky and Shoshana Amielle Magnet.  Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015. This book boldly declares the inauguration of the field of feminist surveillance studies.   I picked it up hoping to learn more about our interactions with systems of data production/collection (such as algorithms) and how they shape our sense of identity and subjectivity.  The authors argue for the need to think critically about the ways that the state collects and manages information. Under the guise of rationality, efficiency and neutrality, the technologies of data collection would themselves be structured under the logic of heteropatriarchy, colonialism and white supremacy. This idea has been circulating already in mainstream media: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/apr/13/ai-programs-exhibit-racist-and-sexist-biases-research-reveals?CMP=fb_gu To be sure, the authors are not just interested in examining the namely 'abuses' of data collection, but fo

My name is Manuela Valle-Castro, I was born in Chile and I am a newcomer to Treaty Six territory. I moved to Canada from Chile in 2005 looking to pursue graduate studies, and moved to Saskatchewan in 2014 with my two Canadian born daughters. As an international student and an immigrant, I have faced some social and cultural challenges and financial vulnerabilities; however, I am also aware of how my class privilege, if yet precarious, provided me with the choice to migrate here, voluntarily, and with more relative social and cultural capital than most immigrants in Canada. I was already fluent in English, had two university degrees, and had family financial resources to cover for most of the cost of the move and settling in Canada. Also, I encountered a country familiar with Chilean recent history and often sympathetic to Chileans. In Chile, I grew up under a military dictatorship until I was a teenager. The year before I was born, a military coup ended with the democratically ele