Cymene Howe

Paradoxical Infrastructures: Ruins, Retrofit, and Risk

In recent years, a dramatic increase in the study of infrastructure has occurred in the social sciences and humanities, following upon foundational work in the physical sciences, architecture, planning, information science, and engineering. This article, authored by a multidisciplinary group of scholars, probes the generative potential of infrastructure at this historical juncture. Accounting for the conceptual and material capacities of infrastructure, the article argues for the importance of paradox in understanding infrastructure. Thematically the article is organized around three key points that speak to the study of infrastructure: ruin, retrofit, and risk. The first paradox of infrastructure, ruin, suggests that even as infrastructure is generative, it degenerates. A second paradox is found in retrofit, an apparent ontological oxymoron that attempts to bridge temporality from the present to the future and yet ultimately reveals that infrastructural solidity, in material and symbolic terms, is more apparent than actual. Finally, a third paradox of infrastructure, risk, demonstrates that while a key purpose of infrastructure is to mitigate risk, it also involves new risks as it comes to fruition. The article concludes with a series of suggestions and provocations to view the study of infrastructure in more contingent and paradoxical forms.

Transnationalizing Desire: Sexualizing Culture and Commodifying Sexualities

Sexuality, as a conceptual framework, has become a site for several social, moral, and political controversies, economic strategies, existential anxieties and ontological uncertainties. The transformation of sexuality, semiotically and in practice, particularly since the 1950s, reveals itself to be part of wider social and economic processes that have been variously described under the rubrics of ‘globalization’ (Appadurai 1996; Featherstone 1990; Hannerz 1989; Sassen 1998) and ‘transnationalism’ (Blanc et al. 1994; Glick Schiller et al. 1992), or the kindred categories of ‘post-modernity’ (Jameson 1991), ‘late capitalism’ (Mandel 1975) and a ‘new imperialism’ (Harvey 2005). In this special issue, we are interested in how sexuality as commodity and practice has come to stand for vast categories of meaning and experience in a transnational context. We explore how various forms of sexuality and desire inform national identities, the sexual policies of the state, and concepts surrounding commodifi cation and subjectivity. We understand ‘transnationalizing desire’ to be the locus of several overlapping political and cultural processes regarding the intimacies of sexuality: how desire and subjectivity are understood on ‘local’ levels, and in turn, how these categories of meaning and experience become appropriated and re-articulated in transnational exchanges. Central to the analytical frame works included here is how individuals and collectivities imagine the horizons of sexuality and desire, whether through legal interventions of sexual rights and responsibilities, interactions in the international marriage ‘market,’ or in modifying local hierarchies of sexual identity. Resonating in each of these discussions is a tension between ‘local’ practices, identities and values and those that are seen to be transnationally ‘imported’ varieties. Intersecting systems of economic and cultural priorities have induced moments of global ‘friction’ (Tsing 2005). So too can sexuality be said to

Aeolian Extractivism and Community Wind in Southern Mexico

The conditions of the Anthropocene, and the relative novelty of renewable energy forms, demonstrate the experimental plasticity of our era. Existing infrastructures of energy, political power, and capital can resist the more revolutionary ambitions of renewable energy to mitigate climate change and promote collaborative energy production, such as community-owned wind parks. Even when states adopt bold energy transition targets, as Mexico has done, the methods of transition can be deeply problematic.

The Legible Lesbian: Crimes of Passion in Nicaragua

This article considers a precedent-setting murder case in Nicaragua that rendered a conviction based upon the victims ‘sexual option’ and status as a ‘lesbian.’ A significant achievement for advocates in Nicaragua, the case was also a victory for sexual and human rights proponents globally. This article queries how the sexualization of culture can be viewed through the spectacle of Aura Rosas life, death and symbolic resurrection. Analyzing the discourses and practices of Nicaraguan activists, international rights campaigns, the state, and local media, I argue that the post-mortem process of re-figuring the victim as a ‘lesbian’ is imaginable only within a discursive field saturated with human rights paradigms including those of sexual rights. Central to these practices are notions of vulnerable bodies, ascriptions to particular models of modernity and an emerging ‘epistemology of the hate crime.’