Karma R. Chávez

Counter-Public Enclaves and Understanding the Function of Rhetoric in Social Movement Coalition-Building

Social movement scholarship has focused primarily on public rhetoric and single-issue movements. This focus has led to limited understanding of the function of “protected enclaves” within movement-building, at the same time that we know little about coalition-building. This article fills this gap in the literature by examining how activists in coalition interpret external rhetoric within protected enclaves. Using data collected during a field research project, this essay shows how rhetoric functions to facilitate coalition-building between a queer rights and a migrant rights organization by demonstrating how activists interpret rhetoric from 3 primary sources: media, legislation and policy, and law enforcement.

Identifying the Needs of LGBTQ Immigrants and Refugees in Southern Arizona

This article reports on the results of a needs assessment conducted for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) immigrants, asylees, refugees, and their allies in Southern Arizona, and it is the first study of its kind in the United States. Utilizing interview data collected with migrants, allies, and service providers in Tucson, Arizona, this article presents findings on the quality of service provision provided to this very underserved community pertaining to health care, housing, and legal services. The assessment shows that no services are provided specifically for LGBTQ migrants, and most LGBTQ migrants turn to family and friends when they have needs. The most significant result of this study pertains to the lack of cultural competence and an overall deficiency in terms of cultural awareness when it comes to the specific needs of LGBTQ migrants.

Kiva.org, Person-to-Person Lending, and the Conditions of Intercultural Contact

Emerging groups such as Kiva International are using the Internet to make person-to-person microlending available by matching mostly First World lenders with Third World borrowers. This study analyzes 635 lender profile Web pages on Kiva.org to identify how Kiva International and its lenders imagine this intercultural, financial exchange through an analysis of discourses that lenders use in their lender profiles to describe their motivations for lending. This article first provides background on Kiva International and the role of the Internet in addressing power inequalities, and then explains the methodological approach. Next, we reveal the themes that emerged in our analysis of lender profiles, addressing the ways that neoliberal discourses of individualism and personal responsibility guide lenders’ motivations for participating in Kiva.orgs microlending process. Finally, we offer discussion and implications of this deployment of neoliberal discourse for intercultural communication, new media, and global financial exchanges, arguing that seemingly liberal and progressive Internet-discourses can perpetuate problematic neoliberal notions.

Beyond Inclusion: Rethinking Rhetoric's Historical Narrative

In this paper, the author reconsiders the historical narrative of Rhetorical Studies as a citizenship narrative and thus argues that much rhetorical theory works to uphold the value and ideal of citizenship, while often ignoring or reframing appeals that challenge the very bases of citizenship and the nation-state. This account of Rhetorics intellectual history reveals the very parameters for what deserves attention in disciplinary history. The author suggests that this account also reveals the necessity to break from that history, not in order that Rhetoric become more inclusive but so that Rhetoric may be something entirely different, something constituted through non-normative, non-citizen, non-Western perspectives and ways of knowing and being.

Kiva's Flat, Flat World: Ten Years of Microcredit in Cyberspace

Abstract While microcredit has been widely praised as a new, powerful tool for enabling development and empowering the poor, this form of ‘development from below’ does not exist in a vacuum. Rather, microcredit programs are inseperable from a host of neoliberal political, cultural, and economic practices and projects. These contexts are, however, systematically missing from Kiva.org, the largest and most popular peer-to-peer microlending portal. Instead, Kiva.org presents a placeless perspective on development and poverty, where borrowers’ skin color, native dress, and picturesque backgrounds seem to vary, but the ‘fix’ of microcredit remains universal. This ‘flat’ approach is problematic for two reasons. First, Kiva.org naturalizes the financialization of poor peoples disadvantage in the coercive form of debt. Second, lenders are encouraged to channel their desire to help alleviate poverty through Kiva.orgs lending portal based on an illusory sense of connection, transparency and beneficence in lending, thus potentially displacing other forms of less problematic development aid and intervention.

Valerie Solanas and the Queer Performativity of Madness

Accusations of madness have long been hurled at queer and feminist bodies, and typically when people are deemed mad, they are granted little agency. This article attempts to read madness as potentially agentic when it manifests as what we call a “queer performativity of madness.” Using the writing of and rhetoric surrounding Valerie Solanas, the infamous radical feminist known for shooting Andy Warhol, we develop the notion of a queer performativity of madness and show how historical figures like Solanas read against the binary oppositions that often create our understanding of sexuality, reason, and politics. Though madness does not always supply agency, we suggest that rethinking madness offers fruitful resources for feminist and queer theory.

Women\'s Studies in Communication Still Matters

When we coedited our special issue of Women’s Studies in Communication (2009, volume 32, issue 1), ‘‘Power Feminism: Exploring Agency, Oppression, and Victimage,’’ Karma was a graduate student concerned about directions in which she saw some feminist scholarship heading. Some of those directions seemed like perfect embodiments of broader cultural turns toward the neoliberal privatization of the social and the attendant cult of personal responsibility. Cindy was equally as concerned, and out of our increasingly shared perspective, we laid the groundwork for the special issue. Despite our clear political point of view on power feminism, in our introduction to that issue, we wrote, ‘‘[C]onversations about what our feminisms are, how we define them, and how they move us forward in the world are among the most important feminist conversations that we could have’’ (Chávez & Griffin, 2009, p. 2). In that spirit, our interest was not in foreclosing conversations or silencing perspectives; in fact, we were committed to featuring an array of voices. WSIC is the only journal in the field of communication where we could imagine having hosted that special issue. This journal continues to serve vital functions in the field, and it will do so no matter what we call it. Those functions include featuring the best in feminist communication scholarship and serving an important pedagogical purpose for newer scholars by helping them through the publication process. Undoubtedly, this mission and the journal’s name reflect its second-wave feminist beginnings, even as the mission and function has morphed over the years. We are not opposed to changing the name if, by some consensus, feminists in the field of communication determine that this is best. We will insist that some form of ‘‘women’s studies’’ remains and, in the remainder of this article, we will explain why. To begin, women’s studies (broadly conceptualized) has a history as a field of study that emerges from activist efforts and grassroots social movements; this is also true of women’s studies in communication. The preservation and promotion of such impetuses seems to us vital even if such pursuits remain fraught. Certainly, the histories of women’s studies are contested, diverging over questions regarding identity categories such as race, class, and sexuality and the systems of oppression

EUROPEAN OTHERS: QUEERING ETHNICITY IN POST-NATIONAL EUROPE

focus is upon religious authority, knowledge and the claims to ‘true Islam’ in the light of the priorities communities have. Religious authority influences the interpretation of religion: the author points out how multiple authorities speak in the name of Islam and competing among themselves both for resources and followers. The most communities get involved in socio-religious activism for their followers, the more adapted to Europe they are, the author finds. However, the nature of activism differs from community to community: from public sphere activities to education and to Quranic recitation and mysticism. The choice of emphasis determines the way resources are spent and the nature of the claims of superiority among Muslim communities. Turkish Muslim communities respond differently to opportunity spaces created by laws and policies. State policies targeting migrants and religions affect Islamic organization and the interpretation of Islam. These opportunities are considered in this book in the light of the perception and meaning of the concept of integration in the Netherlands and Germany with the example of the Milli Görüs communities. The difference between a pro-integration approach in the Netherlands and a lack of cooperation with the state in Germany is explained by the differences in the integration policies of the two countries. Revolutionary Islam is discussed in chapter six which engages with the claim that religious communities provide possibilities for their believers to socially and culturally isolate themselves in the receiving countries. This chapter looks closely at the Kaplan community suggesting that is has failed due to the isolation, claims to monopoly, resistance to change and refusal of competition. Negotiation is the key word of this book. Religious communities persist because they respond to the needs of the believers and the conditions they find themselves in. As Muslims settle in Europe they require organizations that meet their needs. In this process both the practice and interpretation of religious doctrine changes. As Muslims are by now at home in Europe, the author argues that an Islam of Europe rather than Islam in Europe is constructed and reconstructed through Muslims and their organizations. The book is a well-documented study of Turkish Muslim communities in a muchwelcomed comparative perspective. Its foremost contribution is the amazing amount of detail in which the author describes the similarities and differences between different Muslim communities and their concerns, especially in relation to Islam. This makes it not only a compelling read for all interested in Turkish Muslims living in diaspora, but also a good example of throughout ethnography on a politicized and amply studied subject.

ACT UP, Haitian Migrants, and Alternative Memories of HIV/AIDS.

Just outside the front doors of the Immigration and Naturalization Service Varick Street Detention Center in Manhattan, a diverse group of 25–30 activists marches in a circle. Their homemade signs ...

Acts of Activism: Human Rights as Radical Performance

presented with empirical evidence of how ordinary visitors remember or forget particular events. For example, Bowman supplements his own insights with survey research from tourists and Bodnar uses material from local newspaper materials on Bataan. Yet several of these studies simply assume that they do not need to prove the existence of any public memory, or they focus primary attention on their own impressions of the rhetorics of these museums, with little evidence of any actual public debate or contestation. Implicit linkages are made between the ways that an academic critic might evaluate a memorial and museum, and how members of the public actually argued about museums, planning, displays, interpretations of museum artifacts, or societal controversies. Moreover, in some of these essays sweeping claims are made about what are supposedly dominant ideologies, preferred readings, traditional or counter narratives, tactics, and strategic practices. In other words, the praxis may be missing from some of these investigations. How, for example, can we study the ‘‘liberatory’’ potential of ‘‘the Occupation’’ of Alcatraz Island without understanding how Native Americans actually argued in public spheres about these tourist visits to the island or their memories of those struggles? How can we claim to be extending de Certeau’s work on the study of the everyday world when there is little concrete evidence that any publics in Memphis or elsewhere remembered or forgot about Jacqueline Smith, or publicly debated museums about issues related to the homeless? If we go back to the introduction and remember the editors’ admonition that we think of public memory studies as rhetorics that involve the ‘‘meaningful, legible, partisan, and consequential’’ characters (2) of our lives, then we need to quit prioritizing the words and deeds of individual critics or theorists and their subjective impressions of places and memories. Yes, those have a place, but if we are going to make a commitment to the study of ‘‘public memory,’’ doesn’t it seem reasonable that actual publics do more than make cameo appearances in our books, journal articles, or book chapters?