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 Jenn Ackerman’s “Trapped”

In 2008, Jen Ackerman spent a month at Kentucky State Reformatory to document images of mentally ill people being taken care of by guards and administrators inside. The images are extremely brutal, showing people be denied basic human contact in their most vulnerable moments, showing mutilated, destroyed bodies in inhumane conditions. And yet, the images […]

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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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Spivak in Conversation with McMillian

The piece we read by Spivak was difficult to read both logistically and emotionally. I am not incredibly sure that I understood the complexity of the issue at hand, but from what I did grasp, I saw a large parallel to McMillian’s “Performing Objects.” For example, let us look at the following quote by Spivak: “This […]

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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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Single Stories and the Subaltern’s Voice

Can the Subaltern Speak? by Gayatri Spivak is a piece that focuses on how the experiences and the feelings produced from these lived experiences of marginalized groups are skewed by second hand reports from white academics and media. Spivak’s piece immediately made me think of a Ted Talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie called “The Danger […]

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The “Subaltern” in South Carolina

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s piece, “Can the Subaltern Speak”, can easily be applied to news coverage of modern tragedies. For example, these ideas are relevant to the reporting of the massacre at Mother Emanuel church in Charleston on June 17, 2015. As Spivak says, the colonizer creates a narrative with knowledge collected from words rather than experiences. […]

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