Objectsexuality and Gestures

After watching (A)sexual and Married to the Eiffel Tower, I found myself questioning what it meant to be a member of the queer community. Because I was already aware of the struggles and erasure the asexual community experiences within the queer community, the ideas in (A)sexuality seemed to be easier for me to grasp compared […]

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a/object-sexual

Both of the films (A)Sexual and Married to the Eiffel tower aim to bring to light two non-traditional (those people are less likely to have heard of) queer identities. Asexuality has become more accepted over time but the documentary itself seemed to focus on the roots of the community forming. Seeing how essentially one man […]

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Rodriguez and Objectsexuality

Married to the Eiffel Tower, and objectsexuality, is certainly something that has forced me to think about how I perceive the limits of sexuality. Before I saw the movie I assumed there was no way this form of sexual expression could be real. However, after seeing the way the characters of the film respond to […]

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Married to the Eiffel Tower and Nakamura

Married to the Eiffel Tower shed light on a sexuality I had rarely heard of- objectum sexuality. The women portrayed in the documentary felt a sexual and intimate connection to physical structures such as the Golden Gate Bridge, the Eiffel Tower, and more. The only time I had previously seen someone with objectum sexuality was on […]

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(A)Sexuality and Queerness

The documentaries we viewed this week were about sexualities, and how people identify based on their sexual orientation, whether it be lack of a sexual expression or activity, as in (A)Sexual, or the object of their sexual drive and attraction, as with Married to the Eiffel Tower. Both of these concepts, asexuality and objectumsexuality, are […]

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Spivak and the Semiotics of Islam

To my understanding of Spivak’s piece, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, she discusses the way in which Western academics investigate other cultures, but particularly, in the studies of the most disenfranchised or powerless group of the social hierarchy. Spivak works with postcolonial thought, where she criticizes the work of predominantly white male academic’s depiction of the […]

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Spivak and Persepolis

I recently watched Persepolis, a French-Iranian film based on the graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi with the same name. The film was is an autobiographical cartoon about Satrapi’s life living in Iran through a revolution and a war, living in Germany as an Iranian teen, moving back to Iran after the war ended, and eventually […]

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Authenticity, The Subaltern, and Unveiled

In “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak makes the claim that the Subaltern, a term that is hard to define but in some sense can be thought of the as “the least powerful group of the most colonized people”, (shout out to Sarah for that summary video that helped a lot) have no “voice” or way […]

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Unveiled and Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?”

In Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s article, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, the questioned is raised of whether or not the subaltern can speak and be able to have their own voice that has not been distorted through the lens of primarily white academics, or through the lens of someone who has not experienced what they are going […]

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Unveiled and The Subaltern

Can The Subaltern Speak? is a significant piece of work authored by Gayatri Spivak, and became an extremely important essay within postcolonial theory. The piece is quite dense– the beginning sections seem to be conversations with philosophers like Deleuze and Foucault. In the concluding section, however, Spivak truly digs into the meat of her argument. From […]

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