Year: 2014
Type: article
Abstract: This dissertation offers a critique of liberatory practices and projects that locate "voice" as the means to and sign of liberation. This work contributes to queer and trans* scholarship on emancipatory practices and offers insights for critical pedagogy. My project situates "voice," and the liberatory projects dependent on it, within a political "economy of vulnerability" that circulates and produces vulnerable bodies. I foreground the transgender student and the quiet student as two types of queer bodies and subjects that are mutually constituted within this economy. Though the pairing of quiet and trans* may seem irregular, considering them together serves as a wedge to get at the larger regime within which the privileging of voice, specific understandings of the body, and contemporary politics of liberation and empowerment operate. I focus in particular on visual and other cultural texts to examine the complex workings of the "economy of vulnerability." This analysis reveals the abstract surveillance machine that produces, for example, both conflicts about trans* access to bathrooms and the politics of school shootings.
Author: Michelle Powell
Language: English
Subfield: Gender Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2537909521