Heidi J. Nast

Queer Patriarchies, Queer Racisms, International

This paper explores the potential for certain gay white men to benefit from postindustrial sectors that depend structurally and implicitly upon white supremacy and heteropatriarchy. The paper maps out how gay white patriarchies coexist with, and in some cases displace, heteronormative patriarchies, shoring up pre–existing racialized and politically and economically conservative processes of profit–accumulation. Former cultural investments in a fatherhood defined by biological procreation are accordingly dislodged by investments in fatherhoods abstracted from procreation, which circulate in a variety of commodity forms. Motherhood is geographically and socially sidelined, procreation becoming a service and commodity form purchasable from impoverished places within or outside nations. The white oedipal Family romance is geopolitically reconstituted, with the proprietary reach of patriarchy irrupting out of the confines of the biologically homebound and racist triad of mother–father–son and into extrafamilial, and often transnationalized, domains of racialized and class–transected procreational purchase.

Mapping the “Unconscious”: Racism and the Oedipal Family

This paper argues that modern constructions of “race” are inherent in specifically modern constructions of heterosexuality and that both of them inform the normative familial quadrad: Mother, Father, Son, and the Repressed (Bestial). These mythic familial categories constitute the basis of the “oedipal” family and are instrumentally interconnected. Here the oedipal triad of Mother-Son-Father is ideationally encoded as white, the repressed bestial being “colored”– typically “black.” I argue racism’s immanence to oedipal familial constructions by spatially reworking Fredric Jameson’s notion of the political unconscious. In so doing, I develop ways for thinking through how the psyche can be understood as a structured and libidinized spatial effect, a repository of colonial violences of body and place, unspoken and hence repressed (“unconscious”). I propose the term racist-oedipalization (after Deleuze and Guattaris oedipalization) to connote the processual ways in which racist thinking and practices are integral to white oedipal family structures and norms. In so doing, I explore how racist-oedipal configurations have worked variably, in the interests of contemporary and past colonialisms, to great embodied geographical effect. The paper begins by theoretically linking blackness to incestuousness and colonization to productions of the psychical “unconscious.” The core of the paper threads the theory through particular racialized geographies in the U.S. These include, on the one hand, southern plantation slave and post-Reconstruction settings, and, on the other hand, urban segregationary practices impelled by the University of Chicago, culminating in their racialized plans for urban renewal in the 1950s.

Where's the Difference? The Heterosexualization of Alterity in Henri Lefebvre and Jacques Lacan

It has been largely overlooked that Henri Lefebvre in his book The Production of Space draws heavily upon Lacanian psychoanalytic accounts of the emergence of subjectivity in theorizing political relations, Lefebvre implicitly repudiates at the same time that he builds upon Lacans distinctions between real, imaginary, and symbolic registers of subjectivity. For Lefebvre, Lacans registers give primacy to visuality and heterosexualized familial dynamics while lived material, spatial, and political experience arc incidental to subject formation and systems of meaning Lefebvre transforms Lacans registers by historicizing them in spatially dialectical terms, loosely replacing them with distinct forms of evolutionary spatialities which he calls natural, absolute, and abstract, In the process, he both subverts and reproduces Lacans paternal–maternal (heterosexual) order. We hold that Lefebvrcs critique provides powerful theoretical tools for understanding how alterity and signification are always and inevitably politically and materially mediated through corporealities and ‘space’. Nonetheless, Lefebvre can only work out his spatial dialectic of history in heterosexist terms: although he usefully identifies maternal–paternal metaphors in different Western social formations over time, he fails to interrogate directly the very hetero-sexuality that gives these metaphors their relational significance and force. In short, he brings us to the brink of a nonheterosexist domain, but never enters it. In this paper then, we outline the striking parallels in the theoretical frameworks of Lefebvre and Lacan in order to illustrate how both theorists focus on gender construction as the fundamental social process through which alterity is achieved. At the same time, we unpack the underlying phallocentrism and heterosexism that sustain their versions of alterity, subjectivity, and agency, in the process showing how Lefebvre deftly undermines the apolitical stance of Lacan. In conclusion, we strive to recuperate the crucial liberatory aspects of Lefebvres project through considering how we might go on to dislocate received versions of capitalism and sexual difference.

Resisting Corporate Multiculturalism: Mapping Faculty Initiatives and Institutional-Student Harassment in the Classroom

This paper argues that calls for multicultural curricula in universities across the US can be met with strategic curricular interventions that radically confront gendered racisms across regional, national, and international racial formations. Faculty who risk making such interventions should plan for student and institutional resistances. Intersecting consumer and corporate interests desire universities to be socially nonconflictual and economical places of leisure and entertainment, not sites of critical intervention. Accordingly, we theorize how and why faculty committed to oppositional multiculturalism might be cast as transgressive. In so doing, we pay particular attention to how identity politics are quadrangulated through embodiment, performance, time, and place. We additionally discuss ways for systematically working against the grain of gendered racisms and for supporting those who are teaching multiculturalism (critically) or seen to embody it. Working against the grain is particularly important as we enter the 21st century, given the increasing diversification of faculty and student bodies in universities across the US and the attendant risks “diverse” persons take, risks generally not experienced or acknowledged by White Americans.

The Impact of British Imperialism on the Landscape of Female Slavery in the Kano Palace, Northern Nigeria

This article addresses these biases through a spatial analysis of palace slave womens changing positions and powers in the gendered spatial division of slave labour following the British conquest. The first part of the article contextualises these changes through exploring the patriarchal character of pre-colonial spatial divisions in the palace and especially how these divisions shaped and reflected traditional social divisions in the secluded female domain. There follows a discussion of the impact of colonial directives on this traditional order and particularly of how the directives worked through and restructured the gendered spatial divisions in ways that furthered patriarchal gender relations. The status of female slavery in post-colonial Kano especially concubinage is also explored. (excerpt)

Into the arms of dolls: Japan’s declining fertility rates, the 1990s financial crisis and the (maternal) comforts of the posthuman

Abstract Japan’s 1990s financial crisis proved psychically traumatic for many men, their trauma exacerbated by decades of falling fertility rates and related sociospatial attenuation. The crisis disrupted a range of heteronormative practices that had stabilized post-war gendered identities, especially marriage and stay-at-home motherhood. Some men consequently began seeking comfort in the company of youthful-looking, large-format, hyper-feminized commodity-dolls of which there are two psychical kinds: ‘infantile’ dolls used largely by precariously positioned young men for comfort and play; and expensive ‘Oedipal’ silicone sex dolls associated with Japanese salarymen whose jobs had become less secure. Both have worked emotionally for two reasons: dolls are evocative of the maternal – the basis of intersubjective (be) longing/Eros; and the dolls are owned, ownership allowing pleasure and control more securely to intertwine. Following the oil crisis and the de-industrialization that followed, men in racially and economically privileged terrain across the US and Europe turned to similar kinds of commodity dolls for comfort, if for differently sexed and racialized reasons. Japanese men’s doll markets therefore speak to certain particular and general conditions of masculinity and geopolitical economic trauma.

Sexuality and Geography

This article poses a series of questions that ask the reader to think through how sexuality and geography are analytically interconnected, particularly in social and spatial contexts of heterosexuality. The newness of sexuality questions in geographic enquiry is also addressed. The kinds of sexuality and geography questions that have been broached in the discipline are then discussed, followed by an outline of what kinds of research might be engaged in the future.

III. Secrets, Reflexivity, and Geographies of Refusal

Secrets and silences operate, and are made, through all relational contexts and interactions. How is one to write about them, then, if they are so ubiquitous and of the ordinary? And, in the context of my work, would writing directly to the politics involved make me central to secret-making processes to which I am/was otherwise incidental? This three-part article argues that the cultural and political context of my research on royal concubinage in the massive and still inhabited 500-year-old palace in northern Nigeria, in tandem with my own philosophical and theoretical predilections, make it difficult for me to write about the politics of field encounters or the difficulties of writing about them. In so doing, I draw on the Nigeria research as well as my earlier writing on racism in the USA to question what is meant by the ‘field’ (as in fieldwork), what makes us reflexive, and why we invest in some secrets but not others.

Book Review: The companion species manifesto: dogs, people, and significant otherness:

It is an essential read, and offers a challenge for all geographers engaged with these literatures. The text is a stark reminder of the continuing acceptability of an Orientalist lens through which ethnographies and academic literatures are received, produced and reproduced. South Asian women in the diaspora is a collection written by South Asian women within the academy who theorize from a position of being producers and subjects of research within the institutions of knowledge production. This collection offers a critical review of the nature of the racial politics within the academy, and an insight into the sociology of knowledge production from the perspective of the South Asian academic. Here, the heterogeneity of South Asian women’s academic interventions are explored, and thus challenge the usually reductive frame of subjective knowledges. The first key theme within the text is the objectification, essentialism and limitation of intellectual agency afforded to South Asian women, reflecting the dynamics of race and the reductive dynamism within academic process. The second theme is the means through which stereotypes of South Asian women’s embodied identities are purveyed in familiar iconographic forms. Nayanika Mookerjee examines the aestheticization of the raped woman as being incorporated within masculinist constructions of Bangladeshi nationalism, communicated through icons of nature and landscape. Bakirathi Mani also reviews the form of the South Asian body, within work on South Asian fashions in the West, as being one located in a cultural and homogenizing intellectual cul-de-sac. The third theme of the book is concerned with grounded approaches to South Asian spatial, identity, and participatory politics. In this section Rani Kwale records South Asian lesbian activism, which challenges the heterosexual matrix which structures spatial politics within society. Samina Zahir extends this concern with participatory practices in the context of community arts; here she examines the continued burden of representation played out within the political landscapes of community arts projects This burden is expressed effectively by the editors in their development and promotion of a productive dialogue with social theory and practice within and outside the academy. Here, the gaze of those Othered is returned, and a variety of new lenses of academic enquiry are borne through new research trajectories and epistemological challenges.

cultural geographies in practice

Department of International Studies, Depaul University - Chicago--> - (Nast, Heidi J.)