Touqan begins “From Behind the Bars” with “A salute to our sons and daughters, the fighters that have been swallowed up by Israeli prisons,” immediately emphasizing the depths of Israel’s detainment of political prisoners and its predication on phantomizing them to the broader world.^[2] Under an administrative detention, the Israeli military can hold a detainee for up to six months without a charge, and, as a result, Israel has detained over 800,000 Palestinians since the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967.^[3] In Israel’s perspective, these are peoples that must disappear for the sake of their settler colonial project and, as such, an essential part of Palestinian resistance literature is refusing this act of disappearance and re-narrating the phantoms left in the shadows of these detention centers, regardless of whether their physical bodies are still there or not.

In “3. From the Diary of “_,”” Touqan begins with a note in parentheses, stating, “(There in Israel, our prisoners whom we know nothing about).”^[4] In this moment, I understand Touqan enacting what Saidiya Hartman coined “critical fabulation”: the creation of a counter narrative that is not technically factual but is informed by the author’s interpretation of historical records and archival materials.^[5] What is absent in those records? What has been discarded or not entered? How has a colonial and racialized archive impacted the material available, and the histories told within those documents? In the poem, Touqan embodies an unknown and unnamed phantomized political prisoner and critically fabulates an affective image of what their detention does to their mental and physical state. Touqan writes:

From the ravine pours silent angry darkness
and night spreads its large sails here
the light of the stars and the dawn
cannot sneak in
A night without light
where our voices are lost
and the echo dies
and time cannot move (lines 1-8)^[6]

Touqan’s imagery in this stanza places the audience into a negative affective space through her embodiment of the phantomized political prisoner in solitary confinement. A common torture tactic by the Israeli military, political prisoners are detained in a cell as narrow and dark and silent as a ravine, where any access to the light of the day and the night are denied, which in turn denies temporal regularity to them. As Touqan emphasizes at the end of this stanza, the detainee is completely isolated. There is no one to talk to or listen to, and so the physical loss of the detainee’s voice can be the literal loss of their voice gone hoarse attempting to fill the void through their speech which echoes back at them, mimicking a conversation that mitigates their feelings of isolation and reaffirms their sense of identity and time in space until their voice was lost. The lost voices of the detainees can also represent the metaphorical loss of their voices, in that, though they do not lose the physical ability to speak, the emotional toil of being detained and isolated leads them to losing their sense of purpose. They do not have the mental voice nor emotional strength to voice themselves in ways that affirm their existence in a space that wants them to become a permanent phantom and disappear. Touqan’s embodiment of this voice, be it a layered amalgamation of multiple phantomized political prisoners in different spaces or one meant to symbolize the many, offers a mode of re-narrating and revitalizing the detainee’s personal and political identity in the face of the temporal constraints of the detention center.

Touqan continues to illustrate this theme of temporality in the second stanza, writing:

Time has lost its shoes here
Its stood still
turning around the axis of the stillness and boredom
Confusing days and seasons
Is it the season for planting?
Is it the season for harvest?
Is it — who can say? No news
and the jailor stands, his face a stone
his eyes a stone
Robbing from us the sun, robbing the moon (lines 9-18)^[7]

Time is frozen in this cell, just as the detainees are; there is nowhere to go and nowhere to hide from the mental and physical violence that defines their detention. There is no way to know or keep track of the seasons, which also means there is no way to keep track of the outside world, and what stage the families, friends, partners, etc. of the detainee are at in their life. Are they getting ready to plant or to harvest? These questions, just like all questions would be, are left unanswered. No news is ever received, furthering their isolation from the real world and what life outside of the cell can look like; pushing them further into the darkness and further into becoming a disappeared phantomized political prisoner as the physical space and temporal limbo of the cell consumes them. This consumption is completed by the Israeli jailor who only extracts from the detainee and is responsible for his entrapment in the cell, and subsequently, his loss of the light of the sun and the moon.

While the poem does not include a miraculous escape or direct affirmations of the detainee’s strength, Touqan’s critical fabulation and embodiment of this narrative begins to re-narrate and revitalize the image and tangible actor of the phantomized political prisoner in Palestine whose life is similarly constricted by space, temporality, light, touch, smell, etc. in reality. The re-narration and revitalization embodied in Touqan’s revolutionary poetics hails us to bear witness to these colonial violences and search for the absences of these disappeared and obscured lives in the archive and the current moment, both for the sake of the originary life itself and also what can be learned when community sources of knowledge, strength, and steadfastness are recovered alongside the phantomized political prisoner.

^[1]Basil Farraj. “Palestinian Prisoners: Smuggling Freedom, Writing from Captivity.” CLCWeb, vol. 25, no. 1, 2025, pp. 14. ProQuest, https://libezproxy.syr.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/palestinian-prisoners-smuggling-freedom-writing/docview/3270298356/se-2, doi:https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.4877.

^[2] Fadwa Touqan. “From Behind the Bars” in Enemy of the Sun: Poetry of Palestinian Resistance, ed. Naseer Aruri and Edmund Ghareeh (Drum and Spear Press, 1970), pp. 40.

^[3] Yara Hawari, “The Systematic Torture of Palestinians in Israeli Detention,” Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network, 2019. https://al-shabaka.org/briefs/the-systematic-torture-of-palestinians-in-israeli-detention/

^[4] Fadwa Touqan. “From Behind the Bars” in Enemy of the Sun: Poetry of Palestinian Resistance, ed. Naseer Aruri and Edmund Ghareeh (Drum and Spear Press, 1970), pp. 40.

^[5] ​​Saidiya V. Hartman. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments : Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. First edition., W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2019.

^[6] Fadwa Touqan, “From Behind the Bars,” in Enemy of the Sun: Poetry of Palestinian Resistance, ed. Naseer Aruri and Edmund Ghareeh (Drum and Spear Press, 1970), pp. 40.

^[7] Touqan, “From Behind the Bars,” in Enemy of the Sun, pp. 40.

The post Palestinian Feminist Poetics of Resistance: Reviving Phantomized Political Prisoners appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

As a burgeoning field of audiovisual analysis, videographic criticism allows film and screen studies scholars to analyze, dissect, and reimagine screen media in ways that promote insights previously limited by traditional modes of scholarship. Just as literary scholars produce written scholarship, film and screen studies scholars have begun producing scholarship in the same medium as their primary sources, through the use of editing software. As English PhD candidates with research interests in film and game studies, we (Samuel Santiago, Jacob Reese, and Meg Healy), formed a videographic working group to familiarize ourselves with the tools and techniques of video editing with the goal of uncovering the potential of this quickly growing mode of scholarly inquiry.

An obvious starting point was the Scholarship in Sound & Image workshop. Held annually at Middlebury College in Vermont, this renowned workshop promises to introduce scholars to the tools necessary to produce videographic work. Our working group sought to emulate the exercises and collaborative process of the Middlebury workshop, albeit closer to home. Using essays and examples available through the online text The Videographic Essay: Practice and Pedagogy by Christian Keathley, Jason Mittell, and Catherine Grant, we worked through various constraint-based exercises that honed our editing skills, deepened our understanding of videographic techniques, and provided new insights into films we felt that we already knew well. 

Below, we include the results of our “multiscreen composition” exercises. This exercise tasks participants with pairing their own text with that of another group member, prompting the films to “speak” to one another by placing their imagery side by side within one frame. In effect, this exercise asked us to look “for ways in which the movies might show their potential for positive valence, echoing one another through visuals, sound, or dramatic intensity” (Keathley, et. al.). Incidentally, we all chose sci-fi films: Santiago working with Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve, 2017), Reese working with Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1982), and Healy working with 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968). As a result, there were a myriad of opportunities for potential overlap and valence, and, as we would find upon viewing each other’s works, plenty of opportunity for originality despite the use of the same texts.

Sam Santiago – Blade Runner 2049 and 2001: A Space Odyssey

I’ve been obsessed with the “baseline test” sequences of Blade Runner 2049 since I first saw the movie. They’re a fascinating escalation in tone from the first (1982) film’s more subdued Voight-Kampff tests. Where the first film’s Voigt-Kampff tests framed interrogation as an interview, 2049’s baseline test is loud and demanding. With this multiscreen composition, I wanted to compare the baseline test device and HAL 9000, from Healy’s text, 2001. The juxtaposition of the scenes’ light and dark colors was a serendipitous bonus, providing stark visual contrast between the films while I otherwise explored their similarities—namely their depictions of callous and intense machinelike voices projecting from wall-mounted devices with watchful lenses. Both films use slow moving and static cameras to keep the devices centered while they uncannily project human speech. What I found most interesting was both films’ tendency to present these devices in extremely flat, head-on shots that kind of phase them into the walls; the lack of depth in the shots compliments the machines’ shallow views of their human counterparts—HAL conceives of Dave as an obstacle to be rid of, and the baseline test aims to maintain the suppression of Agent K’s emotions.

These observations arose from chopping up and reorganizing bits of the films, finding visuals that paired interestingly and fiddling with timing to synchronize or juxtapose them in ways that felt interesting and meaningful. Although Meg, Jacob, and I all worked with 2049, our three multiscreen compositions elicit divergent tones and focus on different details despite our overlapping subject matter. I found it interesting that all three of our videos, despite the differences of scene selection and accompanying background music, are paced with a kind of lurching motion. The burst of violence at the midpoint of Healy’s video gets bookended by slower shots that more slowly emphasize the direction actors’ gazes. Meanwhile, Reese’s video focuses on the combined cinematic motion of human bodies and of water. These videos are more exercise than essay, allowing us to experiment with editing tools more so than to offer specific filmic critique. Nevertheless, it’s clear that thinking through film(s) with editing tools unlocks a great deal of perspective on how we can engage with them not only by discussing their contents, but by interacting with the way that film captures time, space, and sound.

Jacob Reese – Stalker and Blade Runner 2049

I often approach scholarship by working with texts individually, so putting two films in direct conversation with one another was a novel challenge—particularly with the constraint of using only their audiovisual components. Comparative viewings of Stalker and Blade Runner 2049, however, led me to discover unexpected resonances between not only the films’ visual qualities and kinetic movements, but also their thematic harmonies. Water, light, and movement became the framing elements that led me to think about life, death, and the inter-personal moments between. As I began assembling my project, the editing timeline enabled me to construct a dialogue between concurrent clips in ways that made visible these thematic harmonies and helped me think about comparative critical analysis in a new way. Using only the films’ audiovisual language required that I let go of my reliance on words to provide a clear argument about the project—and that I learn to trust the films to speak for themselves. 

This new understanding was reaffirmed as I watched the others’ projects. Healy’s composition highlighted, for me, the intersection between the technological and the biological in both films, and the resulting tensions between knowledge and violence. In dealing with the same films, Santiago calls similar clips into question, but with an entirely different effect, aligning moments of interrogation and fear between the autonomous and the rational, blurring the lines between the two. In both creating and viewing works of videographic criticism, I’ve come to appreciate how this novel approach to screen and media scholarship can be used not only to communicate one’s ideas through the language of the films themselves, but also to facilitate modes of viewing and thinking that are generative and potent for new observations.

Meg Healy – 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner 2049

When first approaching this exercise, my initial idea was to focus on shots and sequences that stood out as visually similar between 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner 2049. Upon reviewing scenes from the latter, however, I was struck by both the visual and thematic symmetry of the monolith from 2001 and the tree from Blade Runner 2049. Both the monolith and the tree act not only as points of revelation for key characters, but also as precursors to violence. As a result, my multiscreen composition explores these themes of revelation and violence as they appear across both films by pairing similar shots, sequences, and dialogue. 

In viewing Santiago’s and Reese’s multiscreen compositions, I was pleased to find that despite using the same films, we each produced quite different work. Reese’s video, with its emphasis on overlapping moments of community, care, and weather, paired with melancholic music, highlighted the somber and atmospheric elements that pervade both Tarkovsky’s Stalker and Villeneuve’s Blade Runner. Although we used the same two films, Santiago’s use of dialogue to cue shifts to new sequences in both fullscreen and multiscreen moments evoked a sense of anxiety present in both 2001 and Blade Runner 2049, especially anxieties around the boundaries being crossed between humans and technology. Together, all three videos highlight the potential of videographic work to convey complex and original ideas about audiovisual texts without sacrificing the medium itself. Through a literal reframing of media objects, videographic criticism opens up space for reconsidering how screen studies scholars watch, read, interact, and think through our work.

Author Bios:

Samuel Santiago currently studies visual rhetoric and performance in video games, with a particular focus upon how interactive experiences of cyberpunk science fiction provide avenues to reevaluate and reimagine conceptions of consciousness and personhood. He often studies texts prominent within gaming popular culture, and aims to form a critical understanding of digital play as a transformative experience wherein diegetic and nondiegetic identities converge. Other interests include Early Modern literature and theater, adaptation studies, media studies, and film studies.

Jacob Reese is a PhD candidate in English at Syracuse University whose research focuses on the intersections between slow media and the environmental humanities, with a particular emphasis on how “slow” video games function in conversation with broader cultural sustainability movements. He has taught courses on American literature, popular culture, and environmental rhetoric, and has served as a teaching assistant for courses on the Western humanities, video games, and film.

Meg Healy is an English PhD candidate whose work explores the relationship between cinematic and literary science fiction. She seeks to understand how science fiction became a cultural dominant by focusing on how the genre is discussed, defined, and redefined among contingents from varied sectors of the social world that produce, distribute, and consume science fiction.

References:

Keathley, Christian, Jason Mittell, and Catherine Grant. The Videographic Essay: Practice and Pedagogy. 2019, videographicessay.org. Accessed on 16 September 2025.

Kubrick, Stanley, director. 2001: A Space Odyssey. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1968.

Scholarship in Sound & Image. Middlebury U, sites.middlebury.edu/videoworkshop/. Accessed on 16 September 2025.

Tarkovsky, Andrei, director. Stalker, Goskino, 1979.

Villeneuve, Denis, director. Blade Runner 2049. Warner Brothers Pictures, 2017.

The post Reframing Screen Studies: Videographic Criticism and Collaborative Scholarship appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

How Immigrant Farmers Build Resilience

Immigrant farmers build resilience by drawing on deep traditional knowledge and by practicing diversified farming that helps buffer climate shocks. Some programs are helping farmers balance competition and collaboration, turning individual efforts into benefits for the whole community (Meenar and Hoover, 2012; Reynolds, 2015). Immigrant farmers are essential to building climate havens because they bring diverse, innovative agricultural practices from their home countries, many of which have already faced severe climate impacts, including extreme weather. Their expertise is key to building resilient and sustainable local food systems. These immigrant farms illustrate how alternative food systems foster “innovation” in food production methods that prioritize community needs through “community-based cross-cultural connections” (Klocker et al., 2018; Wekerle and Classens, 2015), “social inclusion” (Meenar and Hoover, 2012), and participation in the “alternative food movement” (Minkoff-Zern and Sloat, 2017).

Research on immigrant community gardens has grown (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2017). Farmers’ markets have emerged as trust-based, transparent platforms that enable immigrant farmers to trade with diverse communities. While these markets offer valuable opportunities for immigrant farmers to sell their produce, they also present significant challenges, especially for smallholders. These challenges include navigating bureaucratic systems (Minkoff-Zern and Sloat, 2017; Minkoff-Zern and Sloat, 2020), managing complex race relations (Jentsch et al., 2007), securing access to land (Calo and De Master, 2016), and overcoming structural and institutional barriers, particularly for those new to farming (Calo, 2018; Sowerwine et al., 2015). Urban residents can support immigrant farms by buying local, culturally diverse produce or volunteering at community gardens. Beyond their social and economic contributions, immigrant farmers’ ecological practices further highlight their central role in shaping resilient climate havens.

Sustainable Practices in Action

Immigrant farms strive to provide culturally preferred foods and establish trade networks. They also create self-sustaining enclaves that emphasize both resilience and self-reliance. Immigrant farmers bring valuable agroecological knowledge through practices such as crop rotation and mixed farming. These biodiversity-focused approaches promote social well-being, conserve water, and help communities adapt to climate change, strengthening local food systems and the resilience of climate havens. Immigrant and refugee gardeners draw on traditional knowledge to maintain diverse crops, minimize synthetic inputs, and farm on a small scale, supporting food sovereignty and ecosystem resilience in new environments (Montenegro de Wit, 2016; Minkoff-Zern et al., 2020). Immigrant farmers also use conservation tillage, which leaves at least 30% of the previous crop’s residue on the surface to reduce erosion. They additionally practice cover cropping and return of organic matter to the soil, practices that enhance carbon sequestration and improve soil health. These practices demonstrate that ecological innovation is not confined to laboratories or universities but is already embedded in the everyday work of immigrant communities.

Overcoming Barriers

However, immigrant farmers still face systemic barriers to policy support, local knowledge, and the upfront costs of adopting new techniques, highlighting the need for justice-focused initiatives. Critics of the conventional food system contend that capitalist logic disproportionately harms immigrants and labor migrants, thereby undermining their contributions to community livelihoods (De Haan, 1999; Alkon and Mares, 2012). In the United States, immigrant farmers face not only institutional racism but also limited access to agricultural opportunities (Minkoff-Zern and Sloat, 2017). Many immigrant farmers persist in creating alternative agricultural spaces despite these barriers. These alternatives often take the form of small-scale, diversified, family-run farms that struggle to secure federal aid. Some critics question whether urban agriculture can effectively integrate immigrant farmers into business alliances, arguing that intense market competition leaves little room for immigrant farms to thrive (McClintock, 2014).

Despite a growing body of literature on the inclusive role of immigrant farms and the importance of justice in food security, there has been limited research on fostering cooperation between immigrant farms, alternative food networks, and other producers. The creation of climate havens necessitates collaboration between immigrant and other ethnic groups. However, many studies on alternative food systems fail to account for the distinct experiences of immigrant farmers, often grouping them with other minority populations (Flora et al., 2012; MacGregor et al., 2019). This lack of attention to immigrant-specific characteristics undermines their ability to address climate justice, which in turn hampers agricultural adaptation at both the grassroots and governance levels. Furthermore, it threatens livelihoods by disrupting food markets, water management systems, and climate-smart farming infrastructure (Yazar et al., 2024; Morton, 2007; Howden et al., 2007).

Further Direction

Climate havens enable immigrant farmers to develop resilient farming systems that optimize resource use and strengthen immigrants’ long-term survival. These observations raise broader questions: To what extent do immigrant farmers, as an alternative mode of food provisioning, influence a city’s ability to function and adapt to climate change? How can immigrant farms and their agroecological knowledge be integrated into urban food production while scaling up urban agriculture? What strategies can incentivize a more resilient, inclusive, and sustainable food system? And how can food security be enhanced through collaboration? Understanding how these farms serve surrounding communities is key to envisioning more just, inclusive, and sustainable urban futures. As cities position themselves as climate havens, the knowledge and labor of immigrant farmers remind us that true resilience extends beyond technology to encompass culture, politics, and community.

Author Bio

Ning Zou is a PhD candidate in the Division of Environmental Science at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. Her research focuses on urban resilience, social networks, and food justice. She is a publicly engaged researcher who has built deeper connections with stakeholders actively involved in the local food supply chain in Syracuse. Ning aims to co-produce knowledge with local residents and ensure that the benefits are returned to the community.

References

Alkon, A. H., & Mares, T. M. (2012). Food sovereignty in US food movements: radical visions and neoliberal constraints. Agriculture and Human Values, 29(3), 347–359. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-012-9356-z

Calo, A. (2018). How knowledge deficit interventions fail to resolve beginning farmer challenges. Agriculture and Human Values, 35(2), 367–381. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-017-9832-6

Calo, A., & De Master, K. T. (2016). After the incubator: Factors impeding land access along the path from farmworker to proprietor. Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development, 6(2), 111-127.

De Haan, A. (1999). Livelihoods and poverty: The role of migration – a critical review of the migration literature. The Journal of Development Studies, 36(2), 1–47. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220389908422619

Flora, J. L., Emery, M., Thompson, D., Prado-Meza, C. M., & Flora, C. B. (2012). New immigrants in local food systems: Two Iowa cases. The International Journal of Sociology of Agriculture and Food, 19(1), 119-134.

Jentsch, B., De Lima, P., & MacDonald, B. R. I. A. N. (2007). Migrant workers in rural Scotland: ‘going to the middle of nowhere’. International Journal on Multicultural Societies, 9(1), 35-53.

Judelsohn, A., Orom, H., Kim, I., Na Sa, A. B., Khan, H., Devito, R., Diaz Del Carpio, R. O., & Raja, S. (2017). Planning the City of Good (and New) Neighbours: Refugees’ Experiences of the Food Environment in Buffalo, New York. Built Environment (London. 1978), 43(3), 402–416. https://doi.org/10.2148/benv.43.3.402

Hirschman, E. C., Bourgin, W., Castilla, A., Glover, C., Justice, C., Munoz, M., … & Toomer, O. (2024). Social and Economic Considerations for Creating Sustainable Climate Change Haven Communities. Journal of Environmental Protection, 15(1), 76-93.

Hondagneu-Sotelo, P. (2017). At home in inner-city immigrant community gardens. Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, 32(1), 13–28. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10901-015-9491-0

Howden, S. M., Soussana, J. F., Tubiello, F. N., Chhetri, N., Dunlop, M., & Meinke, H. (2007). Adapting agriculture to climate change. Proceedings of the national academy of sciences, 104(50), 19691-19696.

Klocker, N., Head, L., Dun, O., & Spaven, T. (2018). Experimenting with agricultural diversity: Migrant knowledge as a resource for climate change adaptation. Journal of Rural Studies, 57, 13-24.

MacGregor, S., Walker, C., & Katz-Gerro, T. (2019). ‘It’s what I’ve always done’: Continuity and change in the household sustainability practices of Somali immigrants in the UK. Geoforum, 107, 143–153. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2019.09.013

McClintock, N. (2014). Radical, reformist, and garden-variety neoliberal: coming to terms with urban agriculture’s contradictions. Local Environment, 19(2), 147–171. https://doi.org/10.1080/13549839.2012.752797

Meenar, M., & Hoover, B. (2012). Community Food Security via Urban Agriculture: Understanding People, Place, Economy, and Accessibility from a Food Justice Perspective. Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems, and Community Development, 3(1), 143–160. https://doi.org/10.5304/jafscd.2012.031.013

Minkoff-Zern, L.-A., Welsh, R., & Ludden, M. T. (2020). Immigrant farmers, sustainable practices: growing ecological and racial diversity in alternative agrifood spaces. Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, 44(7), 947–972. https://doi.org/10.1080/21683565.2019.1666076

Minkoff-Zern, L.-A., & Sloat, S. (2017). A new era of civil rights? Latino immigrant farmers and exclusion at the United States Department of Agriculture. Agriculture and Human Values, 34(3), 631–643. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-016-9756-6

Minkoff-Zern, L. A., & Sloat, S. (2020). The Immigrant-Food Nexus: Borders, Labor, and Identity in North America.

Montenegro de Wit, M. (2016). Are we losing diversity? Navigating ecological, political, and epistemic dimensions of agrobiodiversity conservation. Agriculture and Human Values, 33(3), 625–640. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-015-9642-7

Morton, J. F. (2007). impact of climate change on smallholder and subsistence agriculture. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences – PNAS, 104(50), 19680–19685. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0701855104

Reynolds, K. (2015). Disparity Despite Diversity: Social Injustice in New York City’s Urban Agriculture System. Antipode, 47(1), 240–259. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12098

Sowerwine, J., Getz, C., & Peluso, N. (2015). The myth of the protected worker: Southeast Asian micro-farmers in California agriculture. Agriculture and Human Values, 32(4), 579–595. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-014-9578-3

Wekerle, G. R., & Classens, M. (2015). Food production in the city: (re)negotiating land, food and property. Local Environment, 20(10), 1175–1193. https://doi.org/10.1080/13549839.2015.1007121

Yazar, M., Baykal Fide, E., & Daloglu Cetinkaya, I. (2024). The nested hierarchy of urban vulnerability within land use policies fails to address climate injustices in Turkey. Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning, 26(1), 30-46.

The post Immigrant Farmers and Alternative Practices of Sustainability in Creating Climate Havens appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

Cyberpunk’s penchant for representing wealth and poverty as a matter of “up versus down” generally results in the depiction of lofty spaces such as high-rises as bastions of security, while lower spaces like city streets carry countless dangers. However, while cyberpunk media almost always foregrounds the societal violences of extreme inequality, those violences are not always neatly contained to the streets. An early scene in RoboCop (1987) presents a example wherein cyberpunk’s thematic concerns of corporate greed and government privatization give rise to violence within a supposedly secure space of an upper-class corporate high-rise. As I’ll unpack below, RoboCop’s depiction of the violent killing of a wealthy bureaucrat during a boardroom meeting can add nuance to our understanding of the spatial arguments in cyberpunk’s representations of urban design: namely that cyberpunk does not relegate the violence of its necroscapes to the lowly realm of the streets—in fact, this scene from RoboCop insists that necroscapes envelop society as a whole, including the socioeconomic elite.

In the RoboCop scene, a scaled down model of the utopian urban revitalization project known as Delta City occupies the foreground of the frame (fig. 1) before the scene shifts toward what would now be referred to as a “big tech takeover” of Detroit’s local police force. Executives and business partners of Omni Consumer Products (OCP) listen while the company’s unnamed CEO remarks that “Although shifts in tax structure have created an economy ideal for corporate growth, community services, in this case law enforcement, have suffered.” Infused with irony and foreshadowing the upcoming moment of gory satire, the CEO states “I think it’s time we gave something back” before another businessman, Dick Jones, introduces a bipedal tank-like robot called ED-209, a “24-hour-a-day police officer” that needs neither sleep nor meals. A handgun disarming demonstration with the robot goes awry and the hesitant volunteer who held the gun to ED-209, Mr. Kinney, gets shot repeatedly as the boardroom watches in horror and technicians fail to disable the robot (fig. 2). Excessive spurts of blood and chunks of flesh fly about the room in the film’s unrated director’s cut, but even in the toned-down theatrical release, the thoroughly bloodied Mr. Kinney gets thrown back by the gunfire, landing upon the table displaying the model of Delta City, literally shattering OCP’s corporate-utopian visions of future Detroit, staining its white plastics with his viscera. During his presentation before this incident, Dick Jones had noted that while policing generally functions as a public service, OCP often successfully “gambled in markets traditionally regarded as nonprofit. Hospitals, prisons, space exploration.” He continues, “I say good business is where you find it.”

Within cyberpunk’s necroscapes, everyone and everything is good business, or at least a resource for good business. After some initial gasps, several businessmen present in the boardroom resume discussions as usual, one making a successful pitch to the CEO to forego the now-embarrassed ED-209 project to instead fund the film’s eponymous RoboCop program. The ED-209 crisis makes RoboCop appear ever more the opportunity. The fatal malfunctions just witnessed signify to OCP executives only that they need to innovate policing with a new product, rather than prompting consideration of their involvement in and militarization of policing to begin with. The terrible irony that permeates this scene stems from its satirical reinforcement of corporate hubris in the face of a shocking event that should cause dispute; the CEO’s remarks about “an economy ideal for corporate growth” echo the deregulatory policies of the Reagan administration contemporary to the film. With public services in disrepair both in RoboCop’s fiction and the realities it reflects, corporations posture as saviors to communities facing crises of crime and poverty, but pose solutions through profit-driven systems, as opposed to the nonprofit systems of social benefit that OCP declares it has successfully dominated.

While Mr. Kinney’s bloody crash upon the Delta City model shatters the allure of technologized business solutions for socioeconomic problems only momentarily for the characters in the scene, this incident confronts audiences with a striking representation of the “infrastructural brutalism” that Truscello discusses in his book of the same name. He says the term describes “the historical context in which industrial capitalism has met the limits of its expansion and domination, and yet continues to press for unprecedented commitments to build more” (Truscello 4). The bloodied, shattered Delta City model illustrates that even when such violent tragedies transpire on the human level, the broader systems undergirding corporatism keep ticking along, keep pressing for those “unprecedented commitments” by constructing naïve aspirations such as utopian future cities rather than attempts to resolve the issues already at hand. Infrastructural brutalism—in other words, capitalism’s overextensions—actualizes frequently in the form of “exciting” new products (such as Delta City, ED-209, or RoboCop himself) that corporations successfully market as solutions regardless of their actual viability when deployed within the communities that they will affect.

Just before the shooting, in an over-the-shoulder shot that aligns the robot’s gun barrels, Mr. Kinney, Delta City, and Detroit itself through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the high-rise boardroom, the many businesspeople scatter about in fear and surprise (fig. 3). However, opposite to Mr. Kinney’s rightward presence on the screen, the OCP CEO appears calm in the background of the upper left, sitting at the head of the conference table whereas the others have all sprung up in fear, resting his chin upon his hands with haunting indifference. Unnamed, referred to by others simply as “the Old Man,” the CEO functions less as a character and more as a figurative representation of the institutional drive and will of OCP as a corporation. Though an employee of OCP, Mr. Kinney remained expendable. As Carlen Lavigne explains, cyberpunk is “closely associated with North American economic and labor concerns of the 1980s; its citizens, devalued as interchangeable and easily replaceable assets within corporate society” (12). Illustrated by the abundance of his suited coworkers in the scene, within a necroscape even those who have climbed the corporate ladder often function as surplus populations, described by Marx as “a relatively redundant working population . . . superfluous to capital’s average requirements for its own valorization” (782). Alphin attests that present day neoliberal capitalist governments “eliminate surplus bodies that fail to function in the production of value” (1). With Mr. Kinney, it becomes apparent that even those ostensibly contributing to the production of value remain expendable within the full systemic scope of a corporation like OCP.

Alongside this scene’s visual foregrounding of the Delta City model, the prominently featured floor-to-ceiling windows maintain the presence of actual Detroit[1] in the background as members of the boardroom rather nonchalantly make investment and technological development decisions in a corporate space vertically removed from the populace of the city itself. Furthermore, the exaggerated verticality pictured by the central towers of Delta City declare an intent for an even further distancing between this controlling class of corporate executives and the Detroit citizenry. ED-209 targeting Mr. Kinney depicts not only malfunction, but disregard for collateral damage—satirical in the self-destructive crushing of Delta City, and symbolic in its taking aim upon Detroit in the distance.

In addressing cyberpunk’s imaginary worlds, I suggest that the capitalist overextensions that Truscello terms as “infrastructural brutalism” drive the elimination of the surplus bodies that this kind of societal organization kills “in subtle and overt ways” (Alphin 93). Tendencies toward deregulatory policy, alongside incentives for continuous corporate growth that disincentivize sustainable planning, establish conditions that devalue lives—not only the lives of the lower classes who in the RoboCop example would be policed by the violent machines onscreen, but even the lives of those integrated into corporate hegemony, like Mr. Kinney. Thus, infrastructural brutalism permits indiscriminate brutality.

Notes

[1] The “actual Detroit” of the fiction, at least. In reality, the window featured in figs. 8 and 9 overlooks Dallas, Texas, the film’s boardroom set located on the 54th floor of the city’s Rennaisance Tower (Maschino and Gallagher).

Works Cited

AKIRA. Directed by Katsuhiro Otomo, Toho, 1988.

Alphin, Caroline. Neoliberalism and Cyberpunk Science Fiction: Living on the Edge of Burnout. Routledge, 2021.

Blade Runner. Directed by Ridley Scott. Warner Brothers, 1982. The Final Cut, 2007.

Maschino, Brian, and Danny Gallagher. “RoboCop Versus Reality: Looking at Dallas Locations of the Film’s Scenes.” Dallas Observer, 11 July 2017, https://www.dallasobserver.com/slideshow/robocop-versus-reality-looking-at-dallas-locations-of-the-films-scenes-9647490/9647497. Accessed 8 Apr. 2025.

RoboCop. Directed by Peter Weller, Orion Pictures, 1987. Director’s Cut, 1995.

Truscello, Michael. Infrastructural Brutalism: Art and the Necropolitics of Infrastructure. MIT P, 2020.

The post Buildings and Brutality in RoboCop appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

Among the many issues within academia, one that is particularly frustrating for us in the humanities is the ways various institutional forces demand that our work fit into narrower and narrower categories. Within our disciplines we shrink into our fields, eras, methodologies, texts, claims, and politics, staking out smaller and smaller territories so that we may assert our individual value to our departments and institutions. Yet, such a tendency runs contrary to the goals of humanities research and education, which emphasize the constant reevaluation and critical exploration of our world through a plurality of texts, art or media forms, experiences, and more. At a time when the federal government has put such work so directly in its crosshairs (along with its flagrant disregard for both the realities and actual lives of so many millions), we should be not just wary of but actively resistant to the ways our institutions and the academy at large separate us and demand we produce knowledge within our individual and narrow expertise. Now is the time to reimagine our work as a collective endeavor that sees us co-producing knowledge across our disciplines as well as with our students and communities.

Although my doctorate is nominally in “English,” my dissertation, Subcultural Textuality: Skateboarding and the Politics of Subcultural Media, is a diachronic look at the skateboarding subculture and its engagement with media forms beginning in the mid-1970s and going through today. In various lecture halls, conference rooms, libraries, breweries, and wherever else academics gather to discuss our niche scholarly interests, I am often referred to as the “skateboarding guy” (although I should clarify that I do not actually know how to skateboard). Despite my reservations about the way the academy forces us to categorize our work, I wear the “skateboarding guy” title pretty proudly. My dissertation is not narrow, but rather interdisciplinary. By looking at the skateboarding subculture and its mediations in various historical moments, I combine textual analysis, media history, cultural studies, and other critical approaches in order to interrogate not only skateboarding and its politics, but also the politics of different media platforms and their supposedly subcultural potentials. I am extremely thankful that my graduate education empowered me to combine these different methodologies in order to explore what has long been a personal interest. However, in that sense, my project is no anomaly (“skateboarding guy from an English department” jokes notwithstanding). As humanities scholars, what we explore is always deeply personal. We can only combine texts, historical periods, and methodologies in ways that make sense to us and us alone. This is what pushes the humanities forward and why interdisciplinary work is so essential to our continued critical interrogation of the world around us.

And yet, as much as we value the unique aspects of our frequently solitary research, this work requires going beyond traditional scholarship and reimagining how our interests intersect with our identities as both educators and community members. For example, as a Visiting Professor at SUNY Morrisville, my various courses, whether introductory composition, literature, film studies, or otherwise, seek to have students not merely “learn” material, but also seriously reflect on their own interests. Since my field is film studies and media history, I frequently ask students to consider the texts and media forms they regularly engage with in order to interrogate those experiences and complicate our notions of what is worthy of rigorous academic analysis. My desire for students to think, discuss, and write about their interests and media habits stems in part from my own love of skateboarding media, from its magazines and videos to the Jackass franchiseand Tony Hawk video game series, none of which are traditionally “academic” fare. In making this a regular approach for every humanities course I teach, my goal is to encourage students to see not just their own interests, but also–through various in-class exercises and discussions–those of everyone in the classroom as worthy of the same intellectual rigor. This plays an important role in setting the expectation that one of the most valuable aspects of a humanities education is that it empowers students to recognize the agency of themselves and others, becoming part of a community where learning happens while we are together. As with my research motivations, I am hardly unique in this. Still, it is a shift in perspective for how those of us in the humanities can envision our research and teaching as interconnected.

However, I also believe that truly practicing this means going beyond the classroom and engaging with the communities we live and work in. One of the best choices I made in my graduate education was getting involved in a publicly engaged humanities project. Write Out is a community writing collective that runs weekly creative writing workshops at Syracuse-area afterschool programs that serve students traditionally underrepresented in higher education, including immigrants, New Americans, and young girls of color. Along with Lauren Cooper, one of the current Engaged Humanities Postdoctoral Fellows, I serve as one of Write Out’s Community Program Directors for our team that works with the 9-12 year-olds at Girl’s Inc, an organization whose mission is to inspire all girls to be strong, smart, and bold, and runs their programming at the Syracuse YWCA. Since Write Out began in an MFA class in Syracuse University’s English department, our mentors often have some connection to the school, frequently graduate and undergraduate students as well as faculty and staff. But one of the most fundamental aspects of Write Out’s mission is that it is not school. We do not seek to go into community spaces and “teach” young students to be in some way more like us. Instead, it is about recognizing these students and their already profound cultural agency. Our weekly activities emphasize that students can express themselves however they desire. Such creative expressions can be any form of writing in whatever mode or language a student wishes, as well as drawings, skits, songs, dances, or anything else. Write Out mentors help students however they may need it. This could very well be help with spelling and grammar or to write while a student dictates, but it could also be to help a student generate ideas, simply talk with them about their day, or even be a prop or character in the work a student wants to share. Having students share their work loudly and proudly is foundational for Write Out. Not only do we do so during every week of programming, but we also publish annual chapbooks of student work and celebrate them with end-of-year readings open to the public. Thus, we seek to empower students who are traditionally underserved by existing models of education while making reading and writing far more joyful experiences.

It can certainly be tempting, given the differences between academic research, teaching at institutions of higher education, and doing engaged work in community spaces, to view these things as separate. However, it is more fruitful to recognize that these three modes, while distinct, are very much intertwined. My academic interests directly influence my pedagogy in the college classroom as well as my motivations and practices for co-producing new forms of knowledge and creative works with my students and fellow community members. In doing so, I seek to reimagine the humanities as a collective undertaking that can potentially wield far more power at a time when so much great work that celebrates diversity and interrogates various societal injustices and inequities is being threatened. This is harder than it sounds. It requires us to think responsibly about our communities and approach our work in a new way that does not prioritize our individual goals (which we have for so long and in so many ways been told are more important than anything). Regardless, if you truly believe in the work and what it can accomplish, it is always worth it.

The post Reimagining Knowledge: Research, Teaching, and Publicly Engaged Humanities Projects appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

You should not be in this sacred place of rest, reserved for honorable Nordic peoples, but you are. You should not loot the burial urns littering its halls, filled with gold, gems, and armor meant to ease the Nords’ journeys to the afterlife, but you likely will. By this same logic, you should not pick the barrow’s locks or traverse its traps—the express intent of which is to keep outsiders out—but you most certainly will. Thus, “no” in the burial tombs of Skyrim does not mean “no.” Rather, I argue that the “no” imparted by the game’s resistant landscapes fuels the fire of the player’s rapacious “yes.”

Critical gender analyses are never freed from the risk of inadvertently naturalizing the very systems they intend to critique. To focus on binary gender in Skyrim, for instance, comes at the expense of sufficient attention to its representation of nonbinary and other identity formations, including the all-important intersections of gender with race, class, and ability. However, I insist that value abounds in a critical analysis of Skyrim’s dominant gender representations, particularly its portrayal of femininity as a concept that exceeds the category of the human and guarantees bodily violation. 

As Alexander Galloway insists in Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (2006), those who play such video games as Sid Meier’s Civilization franchise are not merely passive consumers of media. Rather, they become “actors” who,

learn[], internaliz[e], and becom[e] intimate with a massive, multipart global algorithm. To play the game means to play the code of the game. To win means to know the system. And thus, to interpret a game means to interpret its algorithm (to discover its parallel ‘allegorithm’). […] In fact, in their very core, video games do nothing but present contemporary political realities in relatively unmediated form. They solve the problem of political control, not by sublimating it as does the cinema, but by making it coterminous with the entire game, and in this way video games achieve a unique type of political transparency.¹

By considering Skyrim as allegorithmic, or a political rather than neutral media object, I suggest that its players “learn, internalize, and become intimate with” the binary gender system while navigating its tombs and pursuing its quest objectives. Galloway’s method trains my gaze at the game’s subdermal gender structures, or the way(s) that binary gender undergirds not only its NPCs but its level design. Whereas Galloway tags global resource management games like Meier’s Civilization as media which “fetishize control,” I insist that Skyrim’s allegorithm similarly fetishizes, and implicitly genders, the act of discovery itself.²

In their relation of early modern European travel narratives to Nintendo games, Mary Fuller and Henry Jenkins define the former by their “time-honored representation of [early modern] English voyages [as] a confident, masculine ‘thrust outwards’ and expansion of, among other things, an enlightened English rule.”³ This same ethic, they suggest, drives players of games like Super Mario ever onward into “the frontier” of successive game environs:

“[W]hat never loses its interest [in these games] is the promise of moving into the next space, of mastering these worlds and making them your own playground. […] [An] increased understanding of the geography, biology, and physics of the different [game] worlds makes it easy to return quickly to the same spot and move further into the frontier.”⁴

At the heart of the “promise” that players will gain mastery over game environs, I argue that desire rhythmically pulses. In Skyrim, players’ increased ease of entry into hostile game environments, filled as they are with rewards (e.g. gold, armor, books, etc.), builds the anticipation of future such ease. Cyclically, ease begets action. To plunder a barrow or traverse an earthen cave, to extract their resources and quell the uprising of their opposing inhabitants, is to “play” at self-perpetuating colonialism. 

After fighting their way through the bowels of a tomb, players earn a reward that may initially appear a mundanity: the word “Cleared” permanently appends the location of the “dungeon” (i.e. the barrow, cave, ruin, etc.) on their map. However, this word signifies players’ domination over the environ, marking its transformation from an unknown space into one which has been seen, touched, “mapped,” and thus irrevocably “known.” To refer back to Ulfric’s gendered metaphor, “Cleared” signifies that the player has traversed once-virgin soil and made it theirs.

Returning to Ulfric Stormcloak’s relation of ore extraction to “the raping of Skyrim’s silver mines” (mentioned in part one of this two-part series), the age-old relation of nature and femininity underlies both his metaphor and, by extension, players’ journeys into subterranean space. In her expansive survey of feminine representations of the natural world, Carolyn Merchant explains that, as the West shifted into the Enlightenment era, dominant images of Earth concomitantly shifted from a “nurturing mother and womb of life into a source of secrets to be extracted for economic advance.”⁵ Even centuries prior to the Enlightenment (which spanned the late 17th through 18th centuries in Europe), the Roman poet Ovid charts a similar shift relative to man’s degradation from the Golden Age to the Iron Age. If Earth flourished with freely given abundance during the Golden Age, the Metamorphoses poet suggests, then the Iron Age conditions Earth as a victim of humanity’s rape:

men began to bound

With dowles and diches drawen in length the free and fertile ground,

Which was as common as the Ayre and light of Sunne before.

Not onely corne and other fruites, for sustnance and for store,

Were now exacted of the Earth: but eft they gan to digge,

And in the bowels of the ground unsaciably to rigge,

For Riches coucht and hidden deepe, in places nere to Hell,

The spurres and stirrers unto vice, and foes to doing well.

Then hurtfull yron came abrode, then came forth yellow golde,

More hurtfull than the yron farre, then came forth battle bolde,

That feightes with bothe, and shakes his sword in cruell bloudy hand.⁶

With “cruell,” “bloudy” hands, the poet explains that Iron-Age peoples exhibited an insatiability (“unsaciably”) while tearing into the “bowels” of “[t]he Earth their mother.”⁷ To return to the beginning of this essay, Onmund, it seems, would accord with the poet’s tangible disgust at Iron-Age peoples’ violent, forced entry into Earth’s bowels to extract her veiled “Riches.” Regardless of in-game counterpoints, Skyrim’s dominant script nevertheless trains players in the same sort of rapine practice decried in this centuries-old poem.

1. Alexander Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 90-2. ︎
2. Ibid, 93. ︎
3. Mary Fuller and Henry Jenkins, “Nintendo® and New World Travel Writing: A Dialogue,” in CyberSociety: Computer-Mediated Communication and Community, ed. Stephen Jones, (Sage Publications, 1995), 70. ︎
4. Ibid, 62-67 ︎
5. Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (HarperOne 1990), 165. ︎
6.  Ovid, 43 B.C.–18 A.D. Ovid’s Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation of 1567, ed. John Frederick Nims (Dry Books, 2000), 1.151-61. ︎
7. Ibid, 1.180 ︎

The post Representing Women in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: Gendering Discovery (Part 2) appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

When you compound Skyrim’s legacy with its massive playerbase, expansive mod capabilities, and capacious open-world format, you get an endlessly mediated game that defies oversimplification. However, this has not prevented analysis of the game’s gender politics, with online threads dating back to its release puzzling over Skyrim’s depiction of women. “Are women in [Skyrim] portrayed in a good light?” asks a GameFAQs user in 2012, to which another user answers, “Women in this game are just as dirty, violent, and nasty as the men.” Another user offers a similar, though relatively tempered response: 

“[I]t’s hard to say. I’m a guy[…] I find that most of the people in the game fall somewhere between ‘mediocre’ to ‘tool’, but there are about as many memorable women as men in my opinion. There are female jarls (rather like Skyrim’s dukes/duchesses), female housecarls, female mercenaries and high-ranking military women. There aren’t any instances in my own time with the game that struck me as sexist, just characters I liked and some I disliked.”¹

Though each user takes a different tack, their replies ultimately harmonize: in Skyrim, men and women are equal because they are equally represented.

This perspective, though not the only one, has been abundantly endorsed online. As in 2012, so in 2020: Aaron Hall’s blog post “Skyrim: The Feminist Friendly RPG” proclaims the game to be the “most feminist-friendly RPG [he’s] played”: “men and women in Skyrim have nearly no differing social expectations. They serve the same functions in society all up and down the hierarchical totem pole. For this reason, I think Skyrim might be the most feminist-friendly RPG I’ve played.” To back his claim, he lists the following observations about the game:

“1. Women often serve in prominent social positions

[…]

2. No sexualization

[…]

3. The main character can be a woman

[…]

4. No helpless damsels

[…]

5. There’s a goddess dedicated to women [“Granted,” Hall qualifies, “there are Nine Divines in the world of Skyrim and only three of them are goddesses”]”²

Hall may be right in asserting that Skyrim is the most “feminist-friendly RPG” that he has played. However, as with the GameFAQs users, Hall interprets Skyrim’s progressivism only in its representation of women. By “representation,” I think it fair to say that he and other forum posters mean “presence.” As one would be hard pressed to equate a literary character such as Aaron the Moor from Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus with a breathing, enfleshed Black subject, one cannot collapse the presence of women on-screen into gender activism.

In her book Shakespeare Without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage (2000), Dympna Callaghan considers the (im)possibility of representing marginalized peoples on the English stage in the 1500s and 1600s. “[C]hange in representation alone,” she insists, “does not bring about political change.” Nor, she asserts elsewhere, is “representation” the same thing as “inclusion”: “presence alone cannot be equated with representation any more than representation can be equated with inclusion.”³ This assertion about early modern stagecraft resonates with the present discussion of Skyrim and its walking, talking NPCs who perform, among other identity categories, gender. 

To equate representation with something like activism is to have what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls “faith in exposure,” or the belief that “mak[ing] something visible as a problem were, if not a mere hop, skip, and jump away from getting it solved, at least self-evidently a step in that direction.” But what, she prods, “does a hermeneutics of […] exposure have to say to social formations in which visibility itself constitutes much of the violence?”⁴ Pointing to such examples as US Southern chain gangs, whose labor matters less than their scrutiny under the public gaze, Sedgwick easily problematizes the oversimple equation of representation, or visibility, with ethical inclusion. 

“What won’t feminists bitch about?” one Reddit user asks beneath a 2011 thread titled, “Women in Skyrim – A Feminist Perspective.” “Women aren’t equal! Wahhhh!,’ they mime, “Women are too equal! Wahhh!”⁵ Skyrim may feature a comparable number of women and men. However, to claim in-game equality is to elide key features of its world, including the presence of sexual assault against women. I am always struck, for instance, by the flippant tone with which Sapphire, a female NPC, recounts her backstory of sexual violation:

“Oh, wait…it gets much better. How about the fact that our farm was attacked by bandits, and that they killed my entire family who didn’t even brandish a weapon against them. Here’s the best part. They took me as a prize, and violated me for a fortnight. Tossed me from bandit to bandit like…like…”⁶

Sapphire’s assault may be unspeakable, but it nevertheless shapes her as a character by facilitating her entry into the Thieves Guild, an in-game criminal faction. In other words, violence against women may not occur on screen, but it still permeates Skyrim. To sidestep this incident in favor of a “gender blind” reading of the game would be disingenuous. However, to overdetermine this narrative instance and decry utter gender inequity may be to go too far. What role does sexual assault play in determining Skyrim’s gender politics?

Although we never witness it first-hand, Skyrim’s men are not unschooled in the domination and violation of women. In a settlement called Whiterun, the first major city featured in the game’s main questline, a female NPC named Carlotta can be overheard despairing that “[l]ife’s hard enough with all these men propositioning me. But that bard is the worst.” After speaking with her, players can accept a quest to convince the bard, Mikael, to leave Carlotta alone. After urging Mikael in this regard, he stubbornly responds, “That fiery widow is mine. She just doesn’t know it yet.” While one can read Mikael’s lines as boyish and earnest, they take on a more sinister valence when considered alongside Sapphire’s account of gang rape. 

While celebrating a victory over his enemy, the Empire, the leader of the insurgent Stormcloaks, Ulfric, likewise demonstrates his familiarity with the logic of rape: “Now that the Empire has been driven from the Reach we can put a stop to the raping of her silver mines. That silver belongs in Skyrim.” “Rape,” in this instance, metaphorizes the extraction of natural resources as sexual assault, casting the Earth (i.e. “silver mines”) as a feminine victim of the Reach’s forced entry. Ulfric’s use of the word “rape” also signifies the theft of property, implying the existence of a gendered hierarchy where Hall (quoted above) otherwise sees none. “Rape” belies Ulfric’s belief that he is the capable patriarch charged with protecting the chastity of Skyrim’s vulnerable, feminine body. Skyrim’s silver belongs to him, so his extraction does not bear a rapine quality. The Reach, he reasons, does not own Skyrim, and their extraction is therefore a veritable act of assault. His metaphor thus bespeaks the unspoken: men and women are not equal in Skyrim.

“One thing I never understood,” begins the title of a Reddit thread, “‘It’s not easy being a woman in Skyrim.’” In their post, the author explains their confusion:

Olfina Gray-Mane, who lives in Whiterun, always says this to me every time I pass her. If you’re a male, she’ll say “What’s the matter? Can’t stand the sight of a strong Nord woman?” But why? Women have the same opportunities as men: there are several business owners right there in Whiterun alone, there are women in the prestigious Companions faction including the highly respected Aela the Huntress, and there are even female Jarls. Ahlam, Nazeem’s wife, says something similar: “Men are all alike, from Skyrim to Hammerfell. They care only for war and politics, and treat their women like cattle.” Again, that doesn’t make any sense seeing as how there are many women throughout Tamriel that are very much respected and even several examples of a man and a woman working together (Jarl Idrod Ravencrone and her husband and Steward Aslfur come to mind). These are the only two women that seem to complain about something that doesn’t appear to exist. Anyone else find this strange?⁷

Beneath the veneer of Skyrim’s equal representation of men and women lie the gender inequalities of a patriarchal (i.e. male-dominated) system. Stephanie Weaver catalogues such inequalities in a 2017 blog post called “Skyrim & the Unequal Application of Bigotry Pt. 1”: bandits, when snuck upon, can be overheard bemoaning the suspected infidelity of women and illegitimacy of children, a serial killer in Windhelm exclusively targets women, and a necromancer named Arondil kidnaps and sexually enslaves local women who once rejected him, to list a few examples.⁸ Perhaps, as the cultural consensus about Game of Thrones goes, Skyrim’s developers sought to generate a brutal and, thus, realistic world by referring back to strains of gender inequity that players would find familiar. Regardless, it is not only inadequate to source political progressivism in mere representation, but Skyrimdoes show why Olfina Gray-Mane insists that being a woman in Skyrim is not easy.

1.  u/Charybdis, “Are women in this game portrayed in a good light?,” “The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim,” GameFAQs, March 8, 2012. https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/615804-the-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim/62183595. ︎
2. Aaron N. Hall, “Skyrim: The Feminist Friendly RPG,” The Aaron N. Hall Blog (blog), May 11, 2020, https://www.aaronnhall.com/2020/05/11/skyrim-the-feminist-friendly-rpg/. ︎
3. Dympna Callaghan, Shakespeare Without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage (Routledge, 2000), 18, 9. ︎
4. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Introduction Is About You,” in Novel Gazing: Queer Reading in Fiction (Duke University Press, 1997), 139-40. ︎
5. u/Rachel_gmrgrl, “Women in Skyrim – A Feminist Perspective.” r/gaming, Reddit, November 12, 2011, https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/mag6e/women_in_skyrim_a_feminist_perspective/. Emphasis added. ︎
6. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Bethesda Softworks, 2013. ︎
7. u/LaPhantomess, “One thing I never understood: ‘It’s not easy being a woman in Skyrim.’” r/skyrim, Reddit, October 1, 2015, https://www.reddit.com/r/skyrim/comments/3n6skq/one_thing_i_never_understood_its_not_easy_being_a/ ︎
8.  Stephanie Weaver, “Skyrim & the Unequal Application of Bigotry Pt. 1,” Speculative Rhetoric (blog), July 29, 2017, https://speculativerhetoric.wordpress.com/2017/07/29/skyrim-the-unequal-application-of-bigotry-pt-1/. ︎

The post Representing Women in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: The Politics of Presence (Part 1) appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

Eduardo Kac, Adsum, 2019

Adsum is a 1x1x1cm glass cube with a series of symbols laser-engraved inside. The symbols, described as a “spatial poem,” are designed to be interpreted in multiple directions, a response to the multiple gravitational paradigms the cube will experience (“Adsum” 20). The hourglass and infinity symbols can be read as representing human and cosmic time scales, respectively, indicating the role Adsum plays in bringing the two together as it occupies the lunar surface ad infinitum. On his website, Kac details the five phases of the project, from early proof-of-concept to final sculpture. Over the course of these five phases, various preliminary versions of Adsum traveled to the International Space Station, the lunar-orbiting Orion spacecraft, and the lunar surface itself. Through his detailed description of the years-long process, Kac demonstrates his deep knowledge and enthusiasm for his craft. 

While the project of creating artwork for the moon is undoubtedly fascinating, Kac seems far less interested in examining the ideologies which underpin his work or the systems making it possible. No phase of the project would have been possible without the vast amount of resources expended by both governmental and private space programs in the name of capital or national supremacy. However, rather than critiquing these systems, Adsum reinforces a kind of human exceptionalism under which expansion into outer space is imperative. The title of the work, Adsum, means “Here I am” in Latin, equivalent to the “Here!” of a roll call. Kac states that he considers the title a response to the phrase “ad astra” (“to the stars”) commonly used in reference to space travel (“Art on the Moon” 20). It remains unclear whether the responding “I” refers to a homogenized collective humanity or the artist himself. 

By anticipating a call to humanity from the stars, Adsum makes the need to respond by expanding beyond the planet Earth appear self-evident. Kac certainly believes in this inevitability, anticipating somewhat conceitedly that far-future “space archaeologists and astro-art historians” will be able to find and appreciate his work (“Art on the Moon” 23). Indeed, Kac’s space artwork contributes to the ideological projects of the Deleuzian “royal science,” defined by Braidotti as “institutionally implemented and well-funded” science which is “compatible with the economic imperatives of advanced capitalism” (47). He receives support from this royal science in the form of the space program, while producing work reinforcing its cultural or aesthetic necessity. In the process, his own brand is elevated. While Kac’s words frame expansion into outer space as humanity’s inevitable future, an attention to his collaboration with the royal sciences reveal his active role in making that future a reality. 

In a period of ecological and social upheaval like the one we live in, progressivist narratives of space exploration appear particularly troubling. Kac’s participation in narratives of outer space as the “final frontier,” in which Adsum stands in for the artist as a kind of pioneer for a “new cultural phase in humanity’s history,” suggest an evasion of the many entangled issues that lie inside the Earth’s biosphere. (“Art on the Moon” 21). Kac frames this evasion as a heroic break from tradition, pointing out that, “The entire history of art is predicated on this planet’s gravity, on this planet’s atmosphere and temperature variations, on this planet’s ability to partially shield itself from cosmic radiation” (“Art on the Moon” 21). In creating artwork for the moon, he seeks to transcend these previously implicit limitations and expand the possibilities of what forms art can take. However, the shared material conditions of Earthbound art and Earthbound life are part of what enables such far-reaching engagement between the two. Kac’s Adsum, despite being designed to live on the moon, does not bind itself to any location; rather, it imagines itself as part of a movement, one of humanity’s first steps on a new journey of cosmic discovery. The work’s placelessness untethers it from the conditions of the present and projects a future in which the work’s significance can be maximally realized. 

In the end, my purpose is not primarily to cast aspersions on Kac’s motivations for Adsum. Rather, I want to prompt a reexamination of some of the basic questions concerning art. What can this artwork do, and who is it for? The space travel industry and the CLPS initiative exemplify an ideology in which progress for progress’s sake is always justified, but that ideology is one of many. Artworks like Adsum that reinforce popular narratives in high-profile settings have the power to naturalize these ideologies unless they are properly examined. Through such a naturalization, Adsum compels its audience to subscribe to its ideology in order to comprehend its significance. That kind of transformative power can surely be put to a better use in the service of the present people of Earth in all their variation, rather than for the benefit of an imaginary, homogenized, spacefaring humanity inhabiting one of many possible futures. 

The post Ad Astra: Eduardo Kac and Narratives of Progress appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

Huma Bhabha, My Ancestor, 2023 (photo: David Zwirner)

My Ancestor features two upright nubs of cork with white chalk lines depicting the amputated legs of a hooved animal affixed to a single wooden board, giving the impression that they presumably supported a once powerful anthropomorphized figure. In its ruinous state, however, the sculpture reads as a secular relic. Showcasing its durability, My Ancestor materially carries its history into the present, using its affective rhetoric to inspire reverence and belonging. Symbolically laden, the legs signal the destruction of the hidden yet living natural world, rendering unintelligible My Ancestor’s material composition—cork, chalk, and wood—to highlight the power of images and language, which, at once, give meaning to and conceal the world.

Language, particularly the politics of naming, has positives and negatives. Naming is a form of recognition and sense-making. Negatively, it can constitute a violent act, distribute false identities accepted as natural and erase a subject’s complex history. 

My Ancestor’s material components, while signaling resource extraction and globalization, serve as instructional aids for a new way of knowing. Cork oak trees, or Quercus suber, are indigenous to the Mediterranean region. These trees produce cork valued for numerous industrial applications, most notably the familiar wine stopper. Devoid of its familiar uses, cork’s bare materiality discloses the work’s artistic nature and thingly character, properly casting My Ancestor as a disruptor of habits. Following Bill Brown’s definition, a thing is an “irresolvable enigma” that “hover[s] over the threshold between the nameable and unnameable;” it specifies “a particular subject-object relation” via the “work they perform” in behaving their subjects.² Cork is a dead protective layer that replaces the tree’s epidermis. With the factual evocation of cork as skin, My Ancestor, whose “sensuous presence” defies its supposed inanimate character, inspires us as humans to alter our relationship with the world, enrich our relational capacities, and encourage an intercorporeality with nature that stimulates empathy, responsibility, and generosity.³ If one considers the “body [a] thing among things,” a permeable “dividual” or “quasi-object” deeply “entangled” in a relational world who shares an embodied kinship with “all things and everything,” then My Ancestor presents a point of origin, an oracle with regenerative powers offering renewal.⁴ Quercus suber can produce cork for centuries after multiple harvests. Hence, the Ancestor who emerges from the wood below produces not only an image of human impact but a lesson in how one should approach things. Chalk only furthers this notion. As a writing and educational tool that is “powdery and brittle,” ironically much like language, it plays a supporting role to My Ancestor’s raw charismatic power. 

Along with Bhabha’s other living sculptures, My Ancestor presents nature as a haunting. According to religious scholar David Morgan, “haunting seems to happen where enchantment has been banned and suppressed.” Suppressed needs give rise to ghosts, defined as “nagging forms of memory” who “[object] to their mistreatment” and “refuse to let the past go away.”⁵ Monuments to Confederate generals and colonizers provide an all-too-relevant example. As ghosts who have been animated and granted a voice, their material traces evoke competing colonial memories. While a majority hear hate speech, others hear these inanimate statues enacting their freedom of expression, acknowledging their calls for protection from citizens who commit against them “willful injury.” Nature, too, objects to its mistreatment and demands protection. Its voice comes through in rising sea levels and ever-stronger hurricanes, which has only accelerated the “Rights of Nature” movement. 

Huma Bhabha, Untitled, 2023
(photo: David Zwirner)

Extending the “right to life” concept, in addition to complicating our way of seeing, are Bhabha’s enigmatic, Untitled visages, whose aggressive liminal qualities evoke discomfort and sympathy. One rarely sees a picture in its entirety. A beholder discerns different aspects by alternating between the image and the medium. In these works, canines, gorillas, and humpback whales, among other animals, form pupils and supernatural eye colors; silent cries howl through agape mouths fashioned by dog hair; and a photograph of a brick wall forming the creature’s nose deceptively appears as tree bark from a distance. Viewed as a defense mechanism, the latter’s employment of mimicry marks an attempt to gauge a beholder’s relationship as parasitic or mutualistic before revealing itself. In these portraits, Bhabha toys with the psychological phenomenon of pareidolia to lend nature an ambiguous face. With these creatures’ true nature obscured, they blur the distinctions between culture/nature and human/animal, stressing relatedness and a deeper engagement with the sensible world. 

Huma Bhabha, Untitled, 2022
(photo: David Zwirner)

The medium of collage, a historic form of cultural critique, presents further challenges. Subordinate to the overall composition, pasted photographs signal reality and emphasize the picture’s surface, allowing Bhabha’s subject matter—nature’s destruction—and the reality of climate change to directly confront believers and deniers alike with a sense of immediacy.

The mediums of Bhabha’s works are the message. She highlights the symbolic veil that confines nature’s “resources” to secondary agents unable to tell their (his)stories to return this human-centered privilege to the natural world. Her humanoid yet alien creatures aid her effort by placing us face to face with our culpability, calling attention to our indirect relations to and unconscious consumption of nature. As actors in the world, their agency provokes reflection. If one truly sees these creatures, their once menacing and monstrous demeanor can appear quite sweet, relatable, and innocent. Perhaps, blinded by our “knowingness,” we are the monsters, who, selfish and ignorant, possess a ghoulish greed in our Darwinian “struggle for existence,” thus, committing violence.  

The misinterpreting of an artwork can of course be read as another form of violence, a “roving arbitrariness” as Martin Heidegger names it.⁶ But in attempting to understand one’s environment and things’ mysterious nature, one does justice. If receptive, Bhabha’s convincing works can attune us to nature’s aliveness and direct us toward a “democracy of things,” as Peers and others have argued.⁷ 

Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. According to art critic Ben Davis, ecological disaster art no longer “shocks” or provokes action; it is one crisis of many that proves too overwhelming.⁸ The public, as well as governments, have grown tired, resorting to imposing penalties and labeling climate activists “eco-clowns” and “eco-terrorists” no matter how informative and clever their actions. One of Just Stop Oil’s latest at Stonehenge, whose generous dusting of orange corn flour transformed the iconic structure into a series of glowing embers, served to mimic the fire within activists and nature. Fittingly accompanying such passions is the widely accepted interpretation of the megaliths as “ancestors,” who, standing over crematory remains, produce an enduring image of a triumphant Nature.⁹  

While Bhabha’s works are often described as apocalyptic or antitheses of progress, revelatory appears better suited. Built from an assemblage of pasts, her works confront the limitations of language while making present an image that brings the unknown closer to us, gifting beholders a glimpse into a potential future. Let us hope they are not cast as Cassandras. Despite their alien appearance, her creatures are very much of this world; it is their message that appears foreign, strange because we begrudgingly acknowledge that they teeter on the edge of a new way of knowing. Just as anthropogenic evolution has altered animals’ environments, behaviors, and genetic compositions, so too will humans be forced to adjust to sub-optimal habitats. Huma Bhabha’s haunting project urges us to reassess our role within a larger ecosystem, to acknowledge nature’s mute scream, and to see ourselves as “living beings [among others] … not just in the world,” but as Hannah Arendt argued, “of the world.”¹⁰  

Notes:

1. Glenn Peers, Animism, Materiality, and Museums: How Do Byzantine Things Feel? (Leeds: Arc Humanities Press, 2021), 1. ︎
2. Bill Brown, “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 4-5, 7, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1344258. ︎
3. Brown, “Thing Theory,” 5. ︎
4. Brown, 5; Peers, Animism, Materiality, and Museums, 1, 14. ︎
5. David Morgan, “Enchantment, Disenchantment, Re-Enchantment,” in Re-Enchantment ed. James Elkins and David Morgan (Hoboken: Taylor & Francis, 2011), 5, 9. ︎
6. Erwin Panofsky, “On the Problem of Describing and Interpreting Works of the Visual Arts” trans. Jaś Elsner and Katharina Lorenz, Critical Inquiry 38, no. 3 (2012): 477, https://doi.org/10.1086/664547. ︎
7. Peers, Animism, Materiality, and Museums, 5, 26. ︎
8. Ben Davis, “The Shocks Are Not Shocking,” Spike Art Magazine 79: The Pessimist Issue (Spring 2024): 106-109. ︎
9. Oliver J. T. Harris and Rachel J. Crellin, “Assembling new ontologies from old materials,” in Rethinking Relations and Animism: Personhood and Materiality ed. Miguel Astor-Aguilera and Graham Harvey (United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis, 2018), 62-66. ︎
10. Veronica Vasterling, “Arendt’s Post-Dualist Approach to Nature: The Plurality of Animals,” HannahArendt.Net 11 no. 1 (2022): 115, https://doi.org/10.57773/hanet.v11i1.461. ︎

Further Reading:

Nancy, Jean-Luc, and Federico Ferrari. Being Nude: The Skin of Images. Translated by Anne E. O’Byrne and Carlie Anglemire. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014.

The post Natural Hauntings: A Return to the Creaturely appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.

Referencing his mother’s passing in 1992, Nathaniel Mary Quinn’s “aim as an artist [was] to make a work that [was] so palpable and so dynamic and so incredibly felt that [his] Mom could literally walk off the surface of the canvas and back to life.”[1] The result was Untitled (Portrait of the Artist’s Mother) from 2000, which was exhibited at his high school “Senior Art Exhibition.” Now housed in a private collection, the portrait offers a rare glimpse into Quinn’s early artistic process while communicating themes of loss, longing, dignity, purpose, parenthood, rebirth, and reciprocity.

Today, Quinn’s composite portraits of friends and relatives defy traditional portrait conventions. Employing a lone exquisite corpse technique, chance encounters of distorted and realistic body parts combined with incongruous brushstrokes create subjects that border on the unfamiliar, laying bare the body as an archive of undeveloped images. The embracing of chance, intuition, and the incorporation of familial memories highlight the spontaneous nature of his work. In their own state of becoming, the portraits express Quinn’s vulnerability and participatory role, and speak closer to the process of artmaking than the finished works themselves. Their dichotomous nature—being completed works that never quite seem finished—offer a surreal experience that remains firmly grounded in reality.

This reality is no less present in his mother’s portrait. In the black space of the foreground, she stands commandingly in swagger pose, reminiscent of Grand Manner portraiture. Bathed in a white light and taking up nearly the entire frame, her protruding stomach, rigid posture, and “chin-up” mentality, add to her regal and confident demeanor. The folds of her fuchsia gown add visual weight and further cast her apart from her gloomy environment, where a depressing, blue sky looms over inward-leaning grey towers to create a sense of claustrophobia. 

Born in 1977, Quinn grew up in poverty on the South Side of Chicago in the now demolished, and presumably depicted, Robert Taylor Homes. Built with good intentions in 1962 as a waystation to foster social mobility, federal and municipal policies, soon hijacked by private interests, allowed the buildings to fall into disrepair. Social disorder followed as living standards worsened throughout the 1980s and 90s; crime, gangs, and drugs became the norm. The Home’s notoriety, “considered the worst slum area in the United States” according to the Chicago Housing Authority in 1998, would unfairly extend to its inhabitants, who were nearly all Black. Exacerbating matters, the practice of segregated development created not only a “great wall of exclusion” but a “psychological barrier,” which strengthened negative stereotypes that would plague a whole community, spawning myths that remain all too prevalent today.[2]

The Artist’s Mother is at once a denouncement of such myths and an affirmation of humanity, embodying concepts of home and community, which often fail to extend to public housing.[3] Here, Quinn rightly expresses the body as “an amalgam of numerous experiences… built from a history of joy, sadness, ups, and downs.”[4] Her grey countenance, which mimics the towers in the background, surrenders to brown hues and full pink lips. While brown serves the purpose of skin tone, it also highlights certain elements within the composition: a fragmented eye, a delineated hand, and narrow legs. Eyes, one sensitive, the other ostensibly weary, can convey one’s memories and inner emotions; as windows to the soul, they maintain the capacity to tell narratives words alone cannot. Hands can connote work, responsibility, determination, caretaking, or reference a future act of creation. The hand’s prominent singularity, a possible reference to his mother’s partial disability due to multiple strokes, performs as an accessory to motherly greatness.

From the dreary, she emerges as a complex figure whose pillar-like stature confronts historic misconceptions, which the vanishing point behind her head assists in perpetuating. Through her confrontational gaze, she assertively erases and inverses this vanishing point, a visual metaphor for single-mindedness, or more aptly, tunnel vision. In doing so, she undermines once-assured gazes; she is not what she appears. Her defiant and towering presence, which renders the picture plane abstract, commands an act of submission, a beholder’s acknowledgment of their shrunken state and similitude with the receding towers in the background.  

Quinn’s baroque sensibility and compositional framing allow for such a submission to take place. While the pyramidal composition lends his mother stability, Quinn’s foreshortening of her right foot, presenting a passage between two worlds, places this stability in question only to reaffirm it. The foot’s formal insignificance, which gives the misleading impression of a safe and comfortable bird’s eye view, demonstrates its symbolic strength by withstanding a crushing environment, and possibly, the weight of a child. No matter the picture’s placement, whether hanging on a wall or sitting on the floor, one is unable to “look down” upon this woman; the foot’s deceptiveness, at once, reveals our culpable gaze and champions her irreducible presence.[5]

Bearing a symbolic weight similar to her meager right foot, the bright blue sole of her left sandal aids in our transcending of such limiting views while referencing his mother’s deceased, yet magisterial state. In formal terms, this blue provides visual relief from a black background and corresponds with the sky above, adding a lightness to her imposing stature. The connection evokes the Christian belief of death as gain and a new life in the beyond. Between feet, a delicate balance is struck, contributing to her dichotomous nature. While one appears to hover, the other is firmly grounded; their joining marks her eternal and palpable presence—two feet, two realms. In her fragmented state, she stands as a celestial being whose given corporeal presence extends from the felt absence of Quinn’s living memory. The balancing of these juxtapositions suggests not only a determined mother ceding to succumb to a “desperate” atmosphere, but a watchful, awe-inspiring maternal icon whose transcending of such settings bestows upon beholders gifts of resilience and comfort.

These gifts, conveyed through a calming smoothness that overtakes the harsh geometrics of her setting and fragmented make-up, also aid in capturing the conflicting nature of parenthood. The rigidity and stiffness of her posture, meant to convey a sense of fear, awe, and respect, are accompanied by soft outlines, bouncing strands of hair, pillowy draped folds, and a weightless flowing gown. These contrasts, which add a sense of playfulness to an otherwise unfriendly set of circumstances, are the convincing measures of a parent’s undeniable love, and a child’s acknowledgment of their parent’s role as disciplinarian, guide, and protector.

Seemingly a memorial portrait of his late mother, in superseding her referent, the painting communicates much more than an act of remembrance. The essence of the work, of his mother, hides in plain sight by way of the painted stroke. As gestures of intimacy and longing, they are the literal transformation of life into matter. Here, in this mood-inherent medium, his mother is both immanent and transcendent, and challenges further dichotomies of subject/object, active/passive, and animate/inanimate to lend her an irrefutable existence with equal participatory powers. The depicted hereafter paradoxically presents the here and now.

“At Wabash,” Quinn “learned… to be a human being… to transcend social conditioning… to be free,” an awakening he extends to his mother.[6] Expanding upon this notion, commonly said is that having children is akin to having your heart outside your body. This feeling is mutual for Quinn, hence the adoption of his mother’s name, which he signs on the back of every canvas as co-creator, accompanied by three hearts. In this sense, the picture presents a contradiction, who has given birth to whom? Regardless of her pregnant status, or if her belly perhaps houses an unborn Quinn, there is, nonetheless, an acknowledgment that he would not be where he is today if not for his mother’s sacrifices. As a bodily extension of Quinn’s memory, the portrait communicates a reciprocal act of creation in painterly form, a gracious and resurrectionary gesture of a beloved lost soul, and for Quinn, the beginning of a new life filled with passionate pursuits.

[1] Richard Paige, “When Sunday Comes,” Wabash Magazine (Winter 2017): 28.  https://issuu.com/wabash_college/docs/wm_winter_2017

[2] Nicholas Degan Bloom, Fritz Umbach, and Lawrence J. Vale. Public Housing Myths: Perception, Reality, and Social Policy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 34, 50.

[3] Quinn’s mother “was literally around the building, helping people, feeding gangbangers and the drug users when they didn’t have anything to eat, letting guys help her with the groceries and paying them to help out.” “Mary: The Making of Nathaniel Mary Quinn.” Hindman Auctions, September 28, 2022. https://hindmanauctions.com/items/10615750-untitled-portrait-of-the-artist-s-mother#_edn1.; Bloom, Umbach, and Vale. Public Housing Myths, 57-59; Audrey Petty, High Rise Stories: Voices from Chicago Public Housing (San Francisco, CA: McSweeney’s, 2013), 17-18.

[4] Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Wabash Magazine (Winter 2017): 2.

[5] This analogy extends from my own experience with his mother while working as an intern at Hindman Auctions in Chicago and witnessing both the work’s installation and de-installation. Several times a day I walked past her hanging in the gallery. Each time, her silent gestures made subtle commands upon my body, a radiating stillness that beckoned me as if wishing to disclose a secret. Not once did I refuse to acknowledge her, whether through a quick glance or, when time permitted, through a more formal conversation, where, seemingly of my own volition, I walked respectably as I would toward any elder past the other pictures in the gallery—the massive Paul Jenkins on view never stood a chance. When standing before her, I felt inferior, but never unwanted. Each encounter was a boost in self-esteem. I looked forward to our conversations and contemplated them afterward. This would all last until her departure, where I witnessed her on the floor propped against the wall surrounded by shipping supplies. When I approached her saddened to say goodbye, even though I stood above her, my smallness remained intact. Her awesome presence denied her objecthood and demanded my humility, which I felt obliged in part for what she had given me. My sadness came in knowing that she had more to say and that I would never see her again in the flesh.

[6] Paige, “When Sunday Comes,” 28.

The post Transcending Boundaries: A Mother’s Work appeared first on Broadly Textual Pub.