Sites Of Political Resistance Research Articles

Angry women in horror: Challenging traditional notions of femininity

One of the major contributions to popular culture by feminist movements has been that of the figure of the angry woman in horror cinema. Although the expression of female rage challenges traditional notions of femininity and disassociates strength and power from masculinity, it also makes women to be portrayed as perverse and monstrous. With this videographic essay, I want, on the one hand, to show how the rage of women protagonists in horror has nevertheless recently been depicted as the complex emotion it is. On the other hand, this video essay proposes to emphasize the idea of rage as a site of political resistance that can be channelled into a productive form of social change and justice. To this end, I focus on a scene from Midsommar (Aster, 2019) in which a group of women reflect the protagonist’s emotions of rage and pain as a form of healing. Their cries connect to those of the women who in 1984 protested nuclear weapons in Greenham (England), weaponizing traditional notions of femininity to denounce an environmental injustice.

Being water: protest zines and the politics of care in Hong Kong

ABSTRACT During the 2019 Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) protest, Hong Kong protesters invented, adapted, and deployed a variety of decentralized grassroots tactics of resistance. While understudied, the proliferation of protest zines during the Anti-ELAB movement contributed to an affective community among movement supporters and protesters, allowing them to engage in self- and communal care as they resisted state violence. We argue that protest zines foregrounded a grassroots community of care that encourages political change in the following ways: expand the emotional habitus among protesters and movement supporters to accommodate debilitating bad feelings; promote self-care and embodied emotional reflection as a form of resistance against state violence; contribute to voluntary kinship among protesters beyond the state-sanctioned nuclear family model; and articulate nuclear familial relations as a site of political resistance. By examining how protest zines articulate voluntary kinship among movement supporters, we illustrate how the zines challenge dominant paternalistic institutions to reimagine a more open political future.

Political graffiti in May 2018 at Nanterre University: A linguistic ethnographic analysis

Fifty years after May 68, spring 2018 in France was marked by mass student protest against the Parcoursup/ORE reform of university entry. After a riot police intervention on campus, Nanterre University was blocked and occupied. It was profoundly affected, both as a community and as a physical site. This linguistic ethnographic study proposes a systematic analysis of more than 500 physical interventions (political graffiti, tags and posters) on the campus during that period, to identify the functions of graffiti as political discourse. The graffiti (1) expressed resistance, reclaimed the university’s identity and manifested presence on site; (2) established dialogue with local and national authorities and (3) anchored the movement in a larger web of historical references and sites of political resistance. A striking feature was the complex indexicality of the graffiti. Each item was relevant at multiple scales beyond the here and now, anchoring graffiti in larger networks of relations, which endowed them with political power.

Performing silence as political resistance: Audience interaction and spatial politics in Thomas Ostermeier’s Richard III

According to Jan Pappelbaum, what fascinated him and Thomas Ostermeier about ‘reconstructed’ Globe Theatres is that ‘[i]t becomes impossible to ignore the presence of the audience; actors are particularly exposed and entirely at the mercy of the spectators’. This article investigates the spatial politics that emerge from/within the ‘quasi-reconstructed’ Globe for Ostermeier’s production of Richard III. Examining a 2017 performance of the play at London’s Barbican Theatre, I consider how audience interaction (and the potential for theatrical failure in that interaction, specifically through performative silence) becomes the site of political resistance in the context of theatrical performance.

Maori Prophetic Movements as Sites of Political Resistance: A Critical Analysis

This article will argue that Māori prophetic movements were sites of political resistance where Māori prophets resisted colonisation and developed syncretic theologies that gave their followers a sense of hope within a tumultuous colonial environment. The movements of four Māori prophets will be discussed in chronological order: Te Atua Wera and the Nākahi movement; Te Ua Haumēne and the Pai Mārire or Hauhau movement; Te Kooti’s Ringatū movement; and Rua Kēnana and the Iharaira movement. This article will critically analyse these Māori prophetic movements as sites of religious and political resistance to show how Māori prophets challenged colonisation and land loss.

Rethinking Intersectionality: Towards an Understanding of Discursive Marginalization

In recent years, political science research on “intersectionality” has breathed new life into perennial debates about group politics, inequality, and marginalization, demonstrating that unitary identity categories are insufficient for understanding group interests. This article critiques this emergent body of literature, noting the theoretical tensions that have surfaced as the concept has taken hold within political science. It posits that the theoretical underpinnings of this growing research paradigm have to date relied upon a liberal conception of political power that advocates greater administrative attention to particularized subgroups. This pervasive liberalism glosses over the complex and dynamic power structures that both produce political marginalization and offer sites of political resistance. Using the internal tensions of LGBTQ politics as a guiding example, this article calls for a move beyond intersectionality and towards a notion of discursive marginalization to more accurately account for the processes by which citizen-subjects are produced.

Excitable Speech: Judith Butler, Mae West, and Sexual Innuendo

Working with Judith Butler's Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative, this essay pursues a series of questions on the performativity of speech acts, using sexual innuendo as an example. As performed by the provocative American playwright and classic Hollywood film star, Mae West, sexual innuendo provides an instance of “excitable speech” that allows for the exploration of speech as a site of political resistance. The questions that frame this discussion are as follows: How are vulnerability and agency produced in speech? What are the foreclosures or censors at work in producing speech and the speaking subject? What constitutes the “force” of the performative speech act? How is the speech act repeatable? And do these conditions leave room for Butler's notion of linguistic agency, where the speech act works to undermine linguistic conventions through resignification? Finally, the essay offers queer readings of Mae West in order to demonstrate the concept of “discursive performativity,” which underpins Butler's argument.

Resisting the Law: Nathaniel Mackey's Djbot Baghostus's Run

Nathaniel Mackey's novel, Djbot Baghostus's Run, advances the possibility of poetic language as a site of political resistance. As Jared Bottle (Mackey's protagonist) sits in jail, he considers a plan for escape--an escape he bases on a form of language play that enables him to "chant down the shifting terms of incarceration" (162), chant down the logic behind the discourse (criminal law) that keeps him imprisoned. Bottle mounts his resistance by inventing new words, altering syntax, by breaking prohibitions in the laws of language and grammar, and ultimately by unveiling the dialectical logic behind criminal law, forcing it to interpret acts which have not yet been codified as proper or improper. In effect, once Bottle exposes the faulty rationale behind his arrest (for standing still at a green light), he manufactures a kind of escape--not from prison, but from the logic of the law.