queer

Interview: Mutual Aid and Black Queer Futurities, with Empty Your Venmo Fund — Epistemic Unruliness 33

In this Epistemic Unruliness interview, James features Savanna Touré, Lincoln Mondy, and Amirio Freeman — the activists-creatives at the Empty Your Venmo Mutual Aid Fund for Black LGBTQ+ youth. The collective details their coming together within Washington, D.C. activist networks and highlights the distinction of their mutual aid/collective care mobilizations and their historic models from prevailing charity modes and non-profit/NGO strategies of social action. Far from merely offering material support, Empty Your Venmo “conjures audacity” by inspiring Black LGBTQ+ youth to dream lavishly of futurity, this institutional love praxis mirroring the intimacy that animates Lincoln and Amirio’s personal relationship. Not only will listeners of this episode learn more about the important work of Empty Your Venmo, but, with no shortage of kikis and giggity-goos, they’ll get the tea about Amirio’s experience as a student in the first class James ever taught, including the ways Amirio’s research on the house-ballroom community have informed Empty Your Venmo’s critical horizon of Black LGBTQ+ mutual aid.
Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Patreon here. Thanks to Bad Infinity for the intro music from their album FutureCommons; always already thanks to B for the outro music. For the mp3 of the episode click here.
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Ep. 42 – Queer Inhumanisms

In this week’s episode, Emily, B and Rachel dig into GLQ‘s special issue, “Queer Inhumanisms,” edited by Mel Y. Chen and Dana Luciano. We begin by discussing the editors’ introduction to the issue, entitled “Has the Queer Ever Been Human?” followed by Jeanne Vaccaro‘s piece, “Feelings and Fractals: Woolly Ecologies of Transgender Matter,” and conclude with Karen Barad‘s “TransMaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings.” Our myriad topics of discussion include parsing the contributions to queer theory of scholarship on animacies, post-humanism, and animal studies, what we can learn from quantum physics about the way we conceptualize (or fail to conceptualize) the human and the subject, and the sticky role of language in creating and hindering new ways of thinking queerness. Listen in as we delve through this rich set of texts!

Remember to support us on Patreon to help offset/reimburse the cost of our fancy new microphone, which we have named Lacan. Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. RSS feed here. Thanks to Leah Dion and to B for the music. Get the mp3 here.

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Ep. 34 – Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

Join Rachel, Emily, and B as they delve into Maggie Nelson‘s memoir The Argonauts. As they discuss the power of the memoir genre as a tool for thinking critically about social life, they explore its political potential. How can the memoir, like poetry and other ‘forms’ of writing, allow for the kinds of destabilizing ‘epistemic unruliness’ that familiar forms of academic discourses disallow? If the memoir is thinking, and thinking-politically, what kinds of everyday experiences can be politicized and theorized? Listen as they consider Nelson’s contemplations of the queerness of pregnancy; the function and status of canonical philosophers in the memoir; and the general problem/inadequacy of words.

Thanks to listener @angellemke for suggesting The Argonauts.  Requests for texts for us to discuss? Dreams for us to interpret? Advice questions for us to answer? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes. Follow us on Twitter. Like our Facebook page. Get the mp3 of the episode here. RSS feed here. Thanks to Leah Dion and to B for the music.

 

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Ep. 20 – Mel Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect

On this week’s episode, we discuss two chapters from Mel Chen’s Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. We ask what Chen’s main project is throughout the segments we read, pondering the meaning of sociality, toxicity and animacy, and the critical ambivalence generated by the work. We also talk briefly about the use of affect theory in the book, as it combines with broader themes related to environmentalism, queer theory (its institutionalization, re-animation, de-animation and various lexical uses), and cognitive linguistics. We conclude, as always, by giving advice to our dear listeners, in this case advice on writing an abstract to submit to a conference.

Thank you to wallsaremean for suggesting we read this text! Requests for texts for us to discuss? Advice questions for us to answer on the show? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes. Like our Facebook page. Get the mp3 of the episode here. RSS feed here. This episode’s music by B and by Rocco & Lizzie.

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Ep. 18 – C. Riley Snorton and Jin Haritaworn on Trans Necropolitics

In this episode of Always Already, John and B explore the meaning (and afterlife) of the deaths of trans women of color at home and abroad through through “Trans Necropolitics: A Transnational Reflection on Violence, Death, and the Trans of Color Afterlife” by C. Riley Snorton and Jim Haritaworn. In tackling the larger conceptual framework of necropolitics and biopower, the duo unpack what an ‘afterlife’ does in its circulation amongst competing homonormative and transnormative discourses. How do trans of color lives and deaths come to stand in not for their particular moments, but a more generalized notion of social violence? In that way, do their narratives service larger, homogenizing and thus obviating forces in neoliberalism, gentrification, and LGBTQI community activism? How can the concept of the archive (as both inclusive and exclusive) come to represent our cultural memory, the fund of our social knowledge?

Of course, My Tumblr Friend from Canada invites us to think about a utopian future where power is distributed, affect theory and mental health, and, critically, what breed of dog we perceive ourselves and each other to be.

Requests for texts for us to discuss? Advice questions for the show? Email us at alwaysalreadypodcast AT gmail DOT com. Subscribe on iTunes. Like our Facebook page. Get the mp3 of the episode here. RSS feed here. This episode’s music by B and by Jordan Cass.

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