Taylor Marie Doherty, "Grounded Ephemerality: The Liberatory Potential of the Queer Feminist Archive/s"
This paper employs transdisciplinary queer, feminist, and trans, Black feminist, decolonial, critical, and assemblage theories to rework methodological assumptions that pose social movements as empirically discrete objects anchored in space and time. develop “grounded ephemerality” as an archival reading praxis that reads and reassembles materials from the archive, alongside the liveness of protest and what is left behind in its wake in the present. This paper draws on my ethnographic research at the New York City Women’s Strike and is grounded in my participation in a performance of “Un violador en tu camino” alongside queer feminist Latin American artist colectivas. I examine how fleeting traces of protest, like street art, posters, glitter, and pañuelos verdes stick to our bodies and spaces inviting ephemera as an embrace of disorderly space and a refusal of the normativity of permanence (Muñoz 1996; Bey 2022). This protest ephemera as it travels can transform into an invitation that prefigures feminist futures.
This project examines the relationship between archive/s and protest. I develop the term the archive/s to refer to the archive—as deployed in critical theory—and actual archives—as understood in archival science—as always becoming and co-constitutive. I attend to space, practice, and theory to make ephemera and fleeting, fugitive timescapes valuable to archive/s and protest. This reshapes how political science understands protest and how archival science understands records with the explicit aim of moving towards liberatory futures. I develop grounded ephemerality as an (auto)ethnographic method that reads archival materials alongside embodied experiences and tethers ephemera to community. This method offers ways of reading, feeling, sensing, and listening to the archive that foster more livable futures.
Liyang Dong, "Against the Narrative Crisis of Censorship: From Closed Hearings to Congressional Testimonies"
The grounding of the ship Golden Venture carrying 286 Chinese refugees in New York on June 6, 1993 brought undocumented immigration from China to national attention. Driven by national fear of the “Asian horde,” the ancient Orientalist rhetoric of the “yellow peril,” the Clinton Administration orchestrated dispersed mass detention and a sweeping denial of asylum of the Golden Venture asylees through inappropriate political interference and ex parte communication with the judicial agencies. Such abrupt administrative changes in asylum statute catalyzed by the Golden Venture asylees eventually prompted the enactment of the 1996 IIRIRA which normatized mass detention and expedited deportation of undocumented immigrants we are witnessing today.
This paper is a chapter of my digital dissertation using ArcGIS StoryMaps as a digital arm to present different forms of the detainees’ narratives in multimodal media genres. Drawing on legal case archives preserved by pro bono lawyers representing the Golden Venture detainees and neglected for three decades, this paper will illuminate how the U.S. government orchestrated a narrative crisis of censoring the testimonies of the detained Chinese asylum seekers, will foreground the collective fight of the female and male detainees alongside their attorneys and advocates against government agencies and engagement with the media, and center the “subaltern” Chinese detainees’ testimonies. The liberatory practices of their solidarity across national, racial, class, and religious overturned sweeping denial of asylum in closed hearings to publicly testifying in Congress, and offers us an alternative way to resist symbolic annihilation and racialization, against official Orientalist narrative, and a marvelous miracle of community building.
Daria "Dasha" Anikina Ogle, "Identifying Gendered Racial Spectacle in Scientific Research"
Racial spectacles are tools used to control the portrayal of race while deviating attention away from the systems of oppression. Scientific research can operate as a racial spectacle when we pathologize race, gender, and other intersecting identities that deviate from the norms put in place according to the white supremacy model. Often, comparative research reinforces presumptions about superior race (white), gender (male), and heteronormative sexual behavior, strategically placing those that do not subscribe to stated social constructs in the periphery. To assume that the notion of racial spectacle operates within and through racially charged research is to hypothesize that the intersectionality of race and gender in research will potentially operate in concurrence with gendered racial spectacle. To explore further, I look at two articles that conduct research by utilizing constructs of race, gender, and sexual behavior. I then identify the narrative created around women of color regarding drug use, promiscuity, and the risk of STIs. I point out statistical inconsistencies and research biases in these articles and reflect on the authors' failures to question the root cause of social disparities or address the structural obstacles inherent in systems of oppression. I situate gendered racial spectacles by evaluating the background assumptions of the noted articles. I explore the connections between the methods and frameworks used to interpret the findings. I present the ideologies and structures of power that help reinforce specific forms of knowledge. I expose the damaging nature of inserting data into gendered and racial formations. Finally, I propose a direction for future scientific inquiry to amend these problems.
Speakers LD
PhD, Binghamton University
PhD Student, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
PhD Candidate, University of Arizona
Sunday March 23, 2025 9:00am - 10:15am EDT
Room 124
Stata Center, 32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA 02167
