Impossible Subjects Research Articles

The Impossible Subject: Belonging as a Neurodivergent in Congregations

Neurodivergent people have been reported in academic literature to not always feel a sense of belonging within church congregations. Previous scholarship has highlighted that some neurodivergent people may be stigmatized and/or excluded within congregational settings. However little attention has been paid to how neurodivergent people belong within congregations, especially from a neurodivergent perspective. Using an autoethnographic methodology, I interrogate my own personal narrative of belonging within congregational spaces. I blended Goffman’s social stigma theory and Scambler’s theorization of social stigma to examine a neurodivergent experience within church congregations, and to explore the interface between being neurodivergent and feeling a sense of belonging in a church congregation. This autoethnography highlights how impression management (particularly passing and masking) are central to the feelings of belonging, and lack of belonging, I experienced. How church is “done” also appears to influence feelings of belonging, with norms in the churches mentioned in the narrative often shaped by normalcy.

Crimmigrating Narratives: Examining Third-Party Observations of US Detained Immigration Court.

Examining what we call "crimmigrating narratives," we show that US immigration court criminalizes non-citizens, cements forms of social control, and dispenses punishment in a non-punitive legal setting. Building on theories of crimmigration and a sociology of narrative, we code, categorize, and describe third-party observations of detained immigration court hearings conducted in Fort Snelling, Minnesota, from July 2018 to June 2019. We identify and investigate structural factors of three key crimmigrating narratives in the courtroom: one based on threats (stories of the non-citizen's criminal history and perceived danger to society), a second involving deservingness (stories of the non-citizen's social ties, hardship, and belonging in the United States), and a third pertaining to their status as "impossible subjects" (stories rendering non-citizens "illegal," categorically excludable, and contradictory to the law). Findings demonstrate that the courts' prioritization of these three narratives disconnects detainees from their own socially organized experience and prevents them from fully engaging in the immigration court process. In closing, we discuss the potential implications of crimmigrating narratives for the US immigration legal system and non-citizen status.

A Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered: US Society in An Age of Restriction, 1924–1965

A Nation of Immigrants Reconsidered: US Society in An Age of Restriction, 1924–1965

The Grammar of Leprosy: Temporal Politics and the Impossible Subject

This research article critically interrogates the implications and unintended consequences of the World Health Organization’s purported elimination of leprosy as a public health problem. I explore how leprosy has been portrayed (for nearly a century) as something from the past, recalcitrantly lingering on into the present, but surely about to be gone—a temporal framing I call the ‘grammar of leprosy’. I recount the experiences of Daniel, my interlocutor in Tanzania, whose existence became a problem for his doctors. This problem they ultimately resolved by fabricating negative test results in order to record what they already knew: leprosy had been eliminated. I also analyse how researchers working for Novartis (the supplier of leprosy’s cure) continue to push for an always imminent ‘elimination’, while field researchers repeatedly caution about the potential problems of this approach. Finally, I reveal how the grammar of leprosy operates through a complex set of temporal politics, pulling into its orbit and being enabled by multiple interwoven temporalities. I conclude that—due to this grammar, the impossible subjects it produces, and the temporal politics through which it operates—leprosy elimination campaigns may have dire consequences for the lives of people with leprosy today, impeding rather than enabling treatment.

Throwing the case open: The impossible subject of Luisa Passerini’s Autobiography of a Generation

For John Forrester, the ‘case’, particularly in its psychoanalytic version, makes possible a science of the particular – knowledge open to the differences of individuals and situations. This article takes up that aspect of Forrester’s account that linked the psychoanalytic case with forms of autobiography – new narrations of that particular self. After Freud, many authors – literary and psychoanalytic – have taken up the challenge of narrating subjectivity in new forms, engaging a quasi-psychoanalytic framework (H. D., Walter Benjamin, Frantz Fanon, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick are examples). Focusing on Luisa Passerini’s text Autobiography of a Generation, which deals with the Italian experience of 1968, the article examines some of the features of such hybrid texts, and argues that psychoanalysis makes a contribution not just to the forms of self-investigation they pursue, but more significantly to the search for a radically new methodology of narration. Such models end up as ‘impossible’ cases, but in so doing they explore new interdisciplinary means for understanding the historical shaping of subjectivity.

Impossible Subjects? In Search of the Maternal Subject in Stories We Tell (Polley 2012) and The Arbor (Barnard 2010)

In 1977 Adrienne Rich wrote, ‘It is hard to write about my own mother. Whatever I do write, it is my own story I am telling’. Two years later, Michelle’s Citron’s film Daughter Rite, struggled with the same problem. It was, she later wrote, a daughter’s film, ‘incapable of imagining the mother’s story’. The difficulty of imagining and conceptualizing a specifically maternal subject is an issue that has continued to preoccupy feminist scholarship, becoming in the past ten years once more an urgent political and theoretical topic. At the same time a number of female filmmakers have returned to the issues raised by Citron’s film, using techniques which, like hers, also ask us to question the relationship between narrative, memory, and the various forms through which their claims to truth are made. Here I discuss two: Stories We Tell (Polley, 2012) and The Arbor (Barnard 2010). Both concern quests to recover the mother as subject, very different from the nurturing and devouring figure of Citron’s film. Both manipulate and question footage that claims a direct, indexical relation to ‘truth’; both construct a story which employs techniques of narrative fiction, yet operate through processes which challenge the authority of such narratives. In this article I explore the two films, to ask how far they succeed in bringing the maternal subject into view, and in so doing successfully challenge conventional notions of what a subject is and can be.

Law and Globalisation - Story of an Argument

This paper tells the story behind a book titled as 'Advanced Introduction to Law and Globalisation'. Paper is based on two lectures and it explains the train of thought and central theme of the book. First, it deals with how we conceptualise law and globalisation, second, it addresses the question of how to approach seemingly an impossible subject, third, it considers the theoretical assumptions on which the approach is based on. After that, the various subthemes of the book are presented. Final part condenses the key-message into a conclusion.

Impossible Subjects: LGBTIQ Experiences in Australian Pentecostal-Charismatic Churches

This paper is the product of in-depth interviews with 20 Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex, and Queer (LGBTIQ) people who identify, or formerly identified, as members of Pentecostal-Charismatic Christian (PCC) churches. Interviewees typically found themselves confronted with a number of choices (not necessarily mutually exclusive): remain closeted, come out but commit to remaining celibate, undergo “SOCE” (Sexual Orientation Conversion Efforts) therapy, or leave. Most left their churches, often after agonising attempts to reconcile their faith and their sexuality. Several of the practices adopted by Australian PCC churches exclude LGBTIQ people from full participation in their own congregations, rendering them “impossible subjects.” Australian Pentecostalism’s surprisingly egalitarian history, wherein the spiritually authorised ministry of women was both recognised and celebrated, suggests another, more inclusive way forward in regard to this vexed issue.

Who Speaks? Thirtieth Anniversary Dossier: Interventions

Who Speaks? Thirtieth Anniversary Dossier: Interventions

Whose race problem? Tracking patterns of racial denial in US and European educational discourses on Muslim youth

ABSTRACTIn this paper, the authors focus on everyday narrations of the nation as they are taken up by educators in schools in the United States, Denmark and Spain. As the primary institutions within which children from im/migrant communities are incorporated into the nation-state, schools are the key sites within which young people learn the languages and practices of national belonging and citizenship. Comparing ethnographic case studies in the United States, Denmark and Spain, the authors trace the nationalist storylines that serve to frame Muslim youth as particular kinds of racialized and “impossible subjects”. Across national contexts, the authors document similar, often almost verbatim, stories that educators narrated about the disjuncture between liberal ideals of the nation, and what they imagined to be true of Muslim im/migrant youth. They theorize that, despite differences in US and European approaches to immigration, there are consonances in the ways that Muslims are positioned as racialized Others across liberal democracies because of the very ways that western liberalism has constructed notions of individualism and tolerance. These seemingly benign discourses of liberalism in schools provide the conditions of possibility for schools’ imposition of exclusionary nationalist values while keeping a safe distance from charges of racism. Thus, we show how liberalism's imbrication with nationalism, and its promotion of goals conceived of as inherently humanist and universal, occlude the racial logics that ultimately restrict human freedom for Muslim youth.

Toward an awareness of the “colonial present” in education: Focusing on interdependence and inequity in the context of global migration

ABSTRACTAcross the world, the number of displaced people has risen to unprecedented levels. In the United States, rightwing politicians call for closing borders to Muslims, refugees, and immigrants. These conditions lead the authors to ask how to educate with and for immigrant students who are positioned as enemy aliens – “impossible subjects” – within their new nation? We take a comparative approach, looking across our studies with Palestinian immigrant and Cambodian refugee youth in the US to think about how their experiences in US schools can inform an education for justice. In looking across two ethnographies, done more than a decade apart from each other, we illustrate the remarkable similarities between discourses about these different groups of students. In this article, we focus on three stances toward immigrant incorporation that the young people in our research studies encountered – stances through which they learn about the meanings of and expectations for citizenship and belonging. Our argument is that despite the differences between these stances, all three erase the “colonial present” that shapes the lives of immigrant youth and their families. We call for an education that decentres the nation, and focuses attention on the co-dependent inequities at the centre of our global interdependence.

Retorno: Salvadoran Repatriation and the Landscape of Memory Interview with Mark Menjivar

Retorno:Salvadoran Repatriation and the Landscape of Memory Interview with Mark Menjivar Tatiana Reinoza (bio) INTRODUCTION The Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum in San Antonio recently commissioned a multi-media installation by the Borderland Collective, a loosely-knit group of Texas-based artists and educators who produce socially engaged projects.1 Their installation, Northern Triangle (2014), takes its name from the geographic region, one of the most violent in the world, as well as the trade agreement that binds the countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.2 Led by artists Mark Menjivar (b. 1980), Jason Reed, and art historian Erina Duganne, Northern Triangle responds to the recent wave of unaccompanied Central American minors apprehended at the U.S.-Mexico border. On the occasion of the project's initial debut, I sat down with Menjivar to discuss Retorno, a series of photographs made in collaboration with a community of former refugees in El Salvador that figures prominently in the installation, and the complicated relationship that continues to shape politics between Central America and the United States. In 2014, authorities apprehended about 68,000 minors fleeing the violence of the Northern Triangle. Once in custody, immigration officers placed the children in the newly constructed private prisons that dot the South Texas landscape. The detention centers became their temporary dwelling prior to facing deportation proceedings, a remarkable shift in policy given the region's former reputation as an entry-point to the Sanctuary Movement, a religious and political movement that provided safe-haven to Central Americans fleeing war-torn countries in the 1980s. As an example of the current migrant crisis that characterizes our time, and parallels the Syrian refugee crisis in Europe, these Central American minors transformed into what legal historian Mae Ngai calls "impossible subjects." Their presence poses a problem, not only for enforcing the boundaries of the nation-state, but also for visual modes of representation. Taking the refugee crisis as a point of departure, Borderland Collective embarks on a conceptual project that problematizes the violence of the Northern Triangle as a schema long in the making. Inspired by the New York-based art collective, Group Material, and their curatorial mediations, particularly, Timeline: A Chronicle of U.S. Intervention in Central and Latin America (1984), Borderland Collective places art objects in conversation with historical documents from the Library of Congress, the National Archives, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, news footage, human rights cases, and personal documents. Reed and Menjivar contribute photographs, while Duganne establishes a research-based approach to the display and accompanying wall text. Several invited artists, including Adriana Corral, Vincent Valdez, and Ricky Yanas, extend this dialogue to create open-ended works that question the constructed nature of mainstream images of the crisis. The result is a provocative and disquieting installation that doubles as a history museum and classroom. One critic commented that the installation "functions as a kind of puzzle."3 Viewers move through the space slowly (Fig. 1), connecting images with historical narratives, approaching three-dimensional objects such as an empty blue water barrel that signals the stakes as bodies, not much different from our own, traverse geopolitical borders. The work on display Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Installation shot of Northern Triangle (2014–) at Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum, San Antonio. Courtesy of Borderland Collective. [End Page 181] Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 2. Installation shot of Northern Triangle (2014–) with Mark Menjivar's View from Santa Marta on the left. Courtesy of Borderland Collective. deconstructs "the language of colonization and power," as one Artforum critic put it, in order to unsettle our assumptions about a region whose violent history is often shaped by outside forces.4 It is within this diverse range of objects, discourses, and texts that viewers get acquainted with Menjivar's luscious photographs. (Fig. 2) Born in Richmond, Virginia, to a Puerto Rican mother and a Salvadoran-American father, Menjivar is a military brat, whose unusual upbringing took him overseas to Honduras, Panama, and El Salvador during the 1980s, an intense period of U.S. intervention in Central America. While many viewed the surge in unaccompanied Central American children at the border...

Asian American Media Activism: Fighting for Cultural Citizenship by Lori Kido Lopez

Reviewed by: Asian American Media Activism: Fighting for Cultural Citizenship by Lori Kido Lopez Anthony Yooshin Kim (bio) Asian American Media Activism: Fighting for Cultural Citizenship by Lori Kido Lopez. New York University Press. 2016. $27 paper. 272 pages. With her first book, Asian American Media Activism: Fighting for Cultural Citizenship, Lori Kido Lopez offers a fresh multidisciplinary take for understanding this recurring scenario in the US culture industry: a major network and creative team behind a problematic media production are forced to reckon with the swiftly mobilized opposition of Asian American media activists armed with smartphones and 140 characters. Lopez argues that in such cases, "while the stated goals of media activists might seem immediate—to recast a role, to demand an apology from producers, to hire an Asian American consultant or director, to produce more images of Asian Americans—what goes unstated is the connection between these achievements and the ultimate goal of cultural citizenship for Asian Americans."1 If the full enjoyment of legal citizenship is still burdened by the ongoing contradictions of race and capital, Lopez's attention to cultural politics is indebted to the innovations of earlier Asian American scholarship like Lisa Lowe's Immigrant Acts (1996) and Mae Ngai's Impossible Subjects (2004).2 Lopez's intervention, then, is to take seriously the seeming immateriality of an Internet ad, an online video, a hashtag, or a tweet, contending that they do not exist in an information vacuum but must be considered part of the wildly disparate contests and expressions for Asian American belonging in the United States. While the salvo of digitized ephemera takes up more and more space in our hard drives, our cognitive faculties, and our social environments, Lopez does not see our outright submission to neoliberal [End Page 159] technology. Positioned as a scholar and practitioner of media activism, she is able to glean the necessary potential to produce meaningful challenges against "a ubiquitous postracial media discourse that insists upon race as merely an individual quality."3 The sites Lopez brings together to compose her study are intriguing and unexpected. Diverging from the canonical scholarly genres of literature, theater, and film, she pursues different iterations of media activism as they play out in the underexplored realms of policy, advertising, and rapidly changing social media platforms like YouTube and Twitter—underexplored, she suggests, given the way such highly commercialized and visible institutions are rife with co-optation by capitalist logics and are easily "a target of criticism rather than a site for potential contributions to social justice."4 But in spite of the skepticism of viewing Asian America as a brand name, a target audience, or a consumer public, Lopez does not concede their productive tensions in the work of fashioning cultural citizenship. Transaction, translation, and, to quote one of her interviewees, "transcreation" are also important moments in which meanings of value and (non)equivalence can be ascertained. Lopez suggests that paying attention to these combined social, cultural, and economic exchanges can help us not only critique but also collectively participate in constructing political and representational strategies to transform the terms of the Asian American community from within and without.5 Beginning with the variegated responses to the flourish of recent Asian American sitcoms like The Mindy Project (Fox, 2012–2015, Hulu, 2015–present) and Fresh off the Boat (ABC, 2015–present), Lopez suggests "that even when images of minority communities succeed in gaining visibility there can be disagreement about what political gains have really been achieved."6 She contends that these "disagreements" over Asian Americans in the media "push back against assumptions that our neoliberal media landscape is inexorably moving toward the individual" and instead interrogates "specific examples of media activism [where] we can more clearly see how activists and minority communities believe that empowerment will be achieved through cultural citizenship."7 In fighting for cultural citizenship, then, Lopez teases out the distinction of "activism" versus "media activism," being careful to "counter a romanticism for a kind of 'authentic' or 'real' activism that is limited in who it can stem from or what kinds of actions and alliances it can include."8 She defines activism as "[beginning] with the identification of...

Teaching the impossible subject of Charlie Hebdo

Teaching the impossible subject of <i>Charlie Hebdo</i>

Farid’s impossible “je”

In this essay, I analyze the speech acts of Farid, a thirty-six year old self-identified same-sex desiring man from my fieldwork, who recounts his trajectory from growing up in Algiers and his eventual migration as an adult to Angers and then Paris. I illustrate how his queer Maghrebi French story in the diaspora does not resonate significantly with the “coming out” (Provencher 2007) or “arrival” narratives (Schehr 2009) of other queer French speakers in the city. Moreover, his speech acts do not heavily echo the “flexible language” (Leap 2003) or the language of queer diasporic speakers analyzed in other contexts (Decena 2011, Manalansan 2003). Furthermore, unlike other queer Maghrebi French interlocutors — who exploit their artistic crafts such as photography, filmmaking, and creative writing to pioneer new scripts or “performative encounters” (Rosello 2005) between France and the Maghreb — Farid struggles to tell a coherent story as he remains caught between the teleologies of the Maghrebi family in Algiers on the one hand and neoliberalism and its concomitant homonormativity in “gay” Paris on the other. The linguistic dimensions of Farid’s impossible “je” [I] are evident in his use of statements that highlight the collective with the subject pronouns “we” and “they” as well as topic sentences that underscore subjects like “my family,” “the country,” and “my religion.” At the same time, he draws on fragmented and unstable identities in a series of disconnected “je” statements, often with conditional clauses and modality shifts that highlight flux instead of the ego-centered, liberated, and individual subject who must learn to say “je” assuredly in the indicative tense in the late modern era. At times, he remains an “impossible subject” in an “impossible location” (Raissiguier 2010) unable to find financial and emotional stability almost three years after leaving Algiers and arriving in France where he fails to imagine a “queer future” for himself. Hence, this study illustrates how the celebration of chaos and subversion (for example, Halberstam’s (2011) “queer art of failure”) is not always readily available to subjects like Farid, who have not (yet) acquired the “flexible language” or the economic and cultural capital in an urban setting.

Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America

Impossible Subjects, Mae Ngai’s award-winning essay, explores the origins of new categories of non-citizens shaped by American law and society from 1924 to 1965. Positioned at the crossroads of immigration history, ethnic and law studies, Impossible Subjects can be understood as a test of the validity regarding the American claims, past or present, to be a nation of immigrants, a melting pot, a land of inclusion. It is not so much the history of immigration and the “poor huddled masses” passi...

Intimate Occupations: The Afterlife of the “Coolie”

AbstractThe “coolie” occupied the European colonial imaginary as a racialized, laboring Asian body ripe for economic experimentation. But what of the interior life and the afterlife of this laborer? This article considers how two contemporary novels, Patricia Powell's The Pagoda and Monique Truong's The Book of Salt, occupy and queer the colonial archive by giving voice to “impossible subjects.” The Pagoda's protagonist Mr. Lowe escaped China as a young girl and is forced to work as a shopkeeper in post‐Emancipation Jamaica. The Book of Salt's protagonist Binh is a gay Vietnamese cook in Gertrude Stein's Paris home. Binh and Lowe represent the “coolie's” legacy and are thus rendered invisible despite the blood, sweat, and tears that go into their occupations. In these narratives, the protagonists form intimate sexual relationships with black characters who share a kindred sense of alienation becoming bodies that matter.

Picturing natural girlhoods: nature, space and femininity in girls’ school promotions

This paper furthers a discussion about the ways in which idealised versions of gender permeate the aesthetic presentation and impression management strategies of elite private schools. Specifically, we consider how the written text, layout and images used in 12 Australian private girls' school prospectuses function in constructing discourses of ‘natural’ femininity. Far from being merely factual sources of information, we see school prospectuses as strategic texts that idealise and commodify gendered subjectivities that are likely to appeal to the perceived clientele of a particular school. Drawing on feminist and poststructuralist theoretical frames and utilising social semiotic techniques, we analyse how these promotional texts align the feminine subject with nature and the natural world. This alignment serves the dual function of constituting femininity as naturally beautiful, fragile, passive and vulnerably at-risk, while at the same time ameliorating such risk through more empowered (yet constrained) notions of interconnectedness. The tensions between such contradictory discourses of traditional and neoliberal femininity create impossible subject positions for girls, as in order to succeed with one version of femininity, they must simultaneously fail at another.

Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America

Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America

Marks of Possession: Methods for an Impossible Subject

In her 1892 study of children's literature, the child and his book, louise frances field complains, “the subject of this volume is one which, from its nature, presents many difficulties as regards material. It is the fate of children's books to be destroyed by children themselves” (v). Of course, the difficulties of children's literature are not only material. Jacqueline Rose's insistence on the “impossibility of children's fiction” has had the salutary effect of keeping scholars warily attuned to how adult desires—from sex to money to politics—structure the genre. Despite the claim of possession housed in that apostrophe, most scholars of children's literature acknowledge that these books don't really belong to children at all (Hunt). My intention in this essay is to use one of these impossibilities to circumvent the other. I am interested in children's own relation to their reading; I strive to understand not just the books adults produced for children—that is, what adults thought about childhood and wanted to say to children—but also what children actually did with these texts, how they took possession of them. I hope to demonstrate that the penchant for destroying books that Field deplores can provide insight into the literary history of childhood. For this brief essay, I take as my archive the book-destroying habits of the children of one affluent, highly literary family in post–Civil War New England: the niece and nephews of the poet Emily Dickinson—Edward (“Ned”), born in 1861; Martha (“Mattie”), born in 1866; and Thomas Gilbert (“Gib”), born in 1875.