Subversive Spaces Research Articles

(Re)claiming subversive spaces on TikTok: the complexities of body activisms within physical activity cultures

ABSTRACT Feminist organising in digital spaces, such as social media, has the potential for activism, resistance, and visibility; yet these spaces continue to be dominated by narrow body representations and shaped by unequal power dynamics. We propose that bodies of difference may find vibrant and difference-affirming homes within their digital communities via innovative algorithm-based social media spheres, such as TikTok. Using a creative methodological mashup that we call a ‘collaborative digital autoethnography’, we explored our experiences of difference-affirming hashtags (e.g. #CurvyGym, #DisabledFitness, #QueerFitness) and creators who shared explicitly inclusive and/or subversive content (e.g. #ThickTocker). Using reflexive thematic analysis and thinking with/through Safiya Noble’s work on algorithms of oppression, we developed four themes: #TheFringe, #(Re)claimingFlesh, #CircleOfSurveillance, and #TheWrongSideOfTikTok. In #TheFringe, we found normatively embodied creators who used TikTok as a space to question normative fitness trends – content that helped build our difference-affirming algorithmic space. In #(Re)claimingFlesh, fat-positive creators used TikTok to unapologetically reveal or grab body fat/flesh, and TikTokkers re-storied their body-related journeys by flipping the script of harmful body surveillance (i.e. #CircleOfSurveillance). Lastly, some creators shared grievances about the (oppressive) algorithms of TikTok that banished them to #TheWrongSideOfTikTok. We provide reflexive accounts of our own embodied differences while exploring the TikTok platform, searching for spaces that affirm our bodies while contending with algorithmic oppression. We conclude by discussing TikTok as a platform where powerful collective activism and revolution can form, yet always in contention with trolling, hate, and harmful algorithms that constrain activist movements within sport, exercise, and health contexts.

Dramatization of Agency and Ecological Consciousness in How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue and Oil on Water by Hellon Habila

This paper interrogates how authors deploy characters to represent ecological consciousness. The paper draws illustrations from Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were and Hellon Habila’s Oil on Water to examine how agency is dramatized through characterization. The paper explores character agency within the subversive space of Bakhtin’s carnival laughter to represent their ecological consciousness. To ground the paper into an analytical perspective, the discussion identifies and discusses the distinct characterizations the two texts' authors employ to represent the characters’ ecological consciousness. The article argues that the writers of the chosen texts effectively use characterisation to create compelling ecological narratives that teach about the need to address environmental degradation. Additionally, the discussion reveals how the two writers depict ecological awareness via the characteristics of carnival shown by the characters. Furthermore, it is worth mentioning that characters have a crucial role in delivering sermons about the gruesome consequences of environmental degradation. As a result, the components of carnival, such as craziness, clowns, and heroic characterizations, are used to undermine and challenge the impact of environmental degradation

DisCrit Literacies: Early Childhood Teachers Critically Reading School as Text and Imagining an Otherwise

AbstractIn this participatory case study, we explored the critical literacy practices of early‐career early childhood teachers in a year‐long inquiry group, examining how they collectively read school as text through DisCrit literacies. Bridging literature from Disability Critical Race Theory (DisCrit) and critical literacies scholarship, DisCrit literacies involve practices of critically reading school itself as text and uncovering intersecting systems of ableism and racism. We describe teachers’ collective engagement in DisCrit literacies, in which they: (a) deconstructed literacy practices and broader schooling mechanisms through repeated shared readings; (b) implicated themselves through critical readings of literacy classroom artifacts; and (c) identified and designed spaces of subversion and refusal in their literacy classrooms. Across each of these practices, early career early childhood teachers in our study used critical reading practices rooted in interdependence and presumptions of competence to redesign literacy routines. Ultimately, DisCrit literacies supported teachers in dismantling systems of regulation and classification in their early literacy classrooms, and—in solidarity with multiply‐marginalized children— imagining otherwise possibilities. We conclude with implications for teacher education and research, exploring how we might use DisCrit literacies to move toward humanizing early literacy spaces with and for multiply‐marginalized young children.

La Vie en Rouge

La Vie en Rouge

Dystopian/Utopian Theatre in Britain after 2000 and Its Political Spaces, Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung / Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF), University of Bielefeld, March 11–13, 2021

Dystopian/Utopian Theatre in Britain after 2000 and Its Political Spaces, Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung / Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF), University of Bielefeld, March 11–13, 2021

옥타비아 버틀러의 ??야생종??에 재현된 전복적 공간의 생산과 포스트휴먼

이 연구는 옥타비아 버틀러의 『야생종』을 바탕으로 포스트휴먼 주체에 의해 생산된 사회적 공간의 양상을 살펴보고자 한다. 포스트휴먼 공간에 대한 기대와 한계를 묘사함으로써 『야생종』에 나타난 포스트휴먼 공간의 생산 과정은 주인공의 사회에 관한 인식의 전환을 가져온다. 이를 검토하는 과정에서 이 논문은 헤테로토피아의 개념을 중심으로 작품 속 공간의 전복적 성격들을 살펴볼 것이다. 식민주의, 인종주의 성차별에 기저한 유토피아적 충동을 지시함으로써 버틀러는 포스트휴먼 공간이 가진 중첩적인 의미를 제시한다. 이를 통해 이 연구는 포스트휴먼 공간이 유토피아를 탐색하는 과정에서 기회이자 도전의 장을 제공한다는 점을 조명하도록 한다.

Life’s a Peach: The Convergence of Sexuality and Class in Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name

Call Me by Your Name (2017) became famous for its “peach scene,” though the orchard around the Perlmans’ villa where this fruit thrives could not have grown on its own. Distinctions of class and a parasitism by the most affluent of their workers cultivate the paradise where director Luca Guadagnino sets the blossoming romance between Elio and Oliver. Apricots are a clear metaphor for desire here, yet their prolificacy is only possible through the invisibility and silent intervention of other food items, from peas to latkes to frozen chicken. Critics have pointed out the beauty of the Italian setting and its use as a temporary escape from heteronormative surveillance, as well as the way domestic workers flow in and out of scenes almost wordlessly. What these critics have missed is the connection these occurrences have in explaining how the working class have built (but do not benefit from) this heaven on Earth, where the young male lovers may permit their bodies to act without restraint. While queer and class theories inform this discussion, my primary vehicle for interpretation will be food, both for its prominent place in the movie and for the ways it parallels the class structure at the villa. I find the film quietly reflects on the levels of economic privilege and exploitation needed to experience the paradise it depicts, with the usurpation of food in many scenes helping to remind the audience of the stepping-stones Guadagnino asserts are required to access this more subversive space.

Table Lands: Food in Children’s Literature by Kara K. Keeling and Scott T. Pollard

Reviewed by: Table Lands: Food in Children’s Literature by Kara K. Keeling and Scott T. Pollard Sarah Minslow (bio) Table Lands: Food in Children’s Literature. By Kara K. Keeling and Scott T. Pollard. University of Mississippi Press, 2020. This is a delightful compilation that extends arguments around food in children’s literature with which Kara Keeling and Scott Pollard have become associated since their 2008 anthology Critical Approaches to Food in Children’s Literature (Routledge). This book focuses on “how food signifies in a sociohistorical context” (5) and engages in numerous interdisciplinary discourses about history, identity, and social hierarchies associated with food: its production, preparation, presentation, and consumption. The intention of the book is to show “how comprehending the sociocultural contexts of food reveals fundamental understandings of the [End Page 210] child and children’s agency,” thus the arguments presented enrich our interpretation of texts as “classic” as Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of the Pie and the Patty-Pan to more contemporary works like Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai. They focus on the classist significance of food in Potter’s works and argue that “food and the complex beliefs, behaviors, and customs that surround it remain fraught and function to illustrate the irresolvable and irreconcilable motives that Potter uses to create her characters and build her plots” (46). Throughout this book, the authors link their interpretations of the food, foodways, and meals in children’s books to arguments of scholars like Paula Connolly, who argues that Pooh is highly motivated by his search for honey. In one of the most interesting chapters, the authors highlight and extend Michelle Pagni Stewart’s analysis of how Louise Erdrich employs the concept of “counting coup” in the Birchbark series. Keeling and Pollard argue that Laura Ingalls Wilder and Erdrich use detailed descriptions of “pioneer and Ojibwe food and food-ways” to “portray these opposing journeys of settlement and displacement” (65). They also explain that Erdrich’s series highlights Native foodways and how they were adapted by pioneers in Wilder’s books even while the pioneers displaced indigenous people from the land on which they lived and depended for survival. The first chapter is dedicated to exploring the history of cookbooks written for American kids and how they reflect “a changing set of adults’ expectations of skills based on shifting ideologies of child capability” (7). They trace the Victorian stereotype of Coventry Patmore’s “the angel in the house” in 1920s cookbooks aimed at young girls’ initiation into domesticity through to later cookbooks that provided a more subversive space where “ordinary women could record their subjectivity and network it with other women” during a time when women’s writings (and voices) were marginalized (17). This chapter also shows how American culinary traditions were passed down through generations and became “repositories of generational memory and knowledge” until they changed significantly after World War II, when “the availability of industrialized foods fed a growing appetite for convenience” (19). They also showcase more contemporary cookbooks by Molly Katzen and Alice Waters that emphasize and value child agency and promote healthy, sustainable foods. The link between food and cultural identity and history is sustained throughout Table Lands. Their analysis of Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen focuses on how it “uses the city of food to portray ethnic Jewish experiences set within the mainstream American culture” and represents “the tensions between assimilation and integration, forgetting and remembering, inclusion and alienation that shaped Jewish cultural identity for generations” (92). Further in the chapter on Rita Williams-Garcia’s books, Keeling and Pollard highlight how “each place is marked by distinctive foods and foodways that reflect the particular historical moments of African American culture of that time and place: the Black Power movement [End Page 211] in Oakland in 1968, the Great Migration in Brooklyn as it adapts to post-World War II convenience culture, and the Jim Crow American South” (144). In the chapter on Pixar’s film Ratatouille, the authors argue that viewers are invited “to value the subjectivity of characters that could be defined as Other,” in this case, a rat in the kitchen (124). Digging into the sociohistorical contexts...

PERFORMATIVE SUBJECTHOODS: LESBIAN REPRESENTATIONS IN SPLIT BRITCHES’ BELLE REPRIEVE

Emerging postmodern theories of gender and sexuality frame the terms in which society has understood these concepts in an evolutionary way throughout history. The last century has witnessed the radical changes carried out mainly by feminist and LGTB movements. On the other hand, the theater, a subversive space where it is possible to experiment with different forms of subjecthood and communication, has been the laboratory in which it has been attempted to give a plastic form to these new currents of thought. In this sense, the work of Split Britches is remarkable for the innovative ways of bringing the abject to the political forefront. From the lesbian body to drag representation, Belle Reprieve (1991) is developed under the queer premise to dismantle heteropatriarchal hegemony and the binary gender system.

Understanding Deviant Space:

This paper, preoccupied with intersectionality in spatial criticism and broadly portraying the visual representation of urban space in popular culture (film), critically looks into the lived experiences around the Delhi neighborhood, Paharganj, as illustrated in Rakesh Ranjan Kumar’s 2019 film Paharganj. Theoretically grounding on Henri Lefebvre’s spatial triad and production of space, and on Michel Foucault’s “panopticon” and “heterotopia,” this paper investigates (a) ways in which Paharganj turns into a deviant and dangerous space with its countercultural brooding and camouflaged criminality and how such deviant “lived space” negates or adds dimension to the “conceived space,” and (b) how such subversive space (Paharganj) challenges territorial jurisdiction by creating an alternative and resistant power nexus which sometimes leads to its denomination as the “Republic of Paharganj,” a status as “dangerous” or desired space in the film. As a part of its spatial reading of popular cultural texts, this paper primarily takes on Paharganj. However, to substantiate Paharganj’s spatial representation in popular culture, this paper also secondarily makes reference to two other films: Holy Smoke! (1999) and Dev. D (2009).

The discursive and the material in early childhood play: co-constitution of gender in open and subversive spaces

ABSTRACT This paper describes research exploring discursive constructions of gender and discursive/material intra-actions in two PreK classrooms in the United States, specifically through documentation of children’s play. Using a feminist poststructuralist lens, the research illustrates ways in which children are subjected through performative iterations of heterosexual gender norms. Extending these insights, we consider the effect of non-human agentic matter, such as spaces and objects in intra-action with children in constituting gender and identity. The research shows how children’s performances of gender, and especially their enactments of the heterosexual matrix, were often in relation to the material play items and the adult-deemed acceptable discursive topics for four-year-olds. The heterosexual matrix was both (re)inscribed and resisted in relationality to open and subversive spaces as children brought ‘difficult knowledge’ into their play. It is proposed that gender fluidity be supported in open and subversive spaces and that gender binaries can be challenged and renarrativized to incite more gender fluid knowings and becomings in early childhood education and care.

Art school as a transformative locus for risk in an age of uncertainty

Risk is not a neutral term even in (western) contexts of art and design pedagogic practice, where risk-taking is entwined into the matrices of the academy from the macro to the micro: from institution to studio to tutor to student. Neither design education nor practice exist in a vacuum, so the conditions and contingencies of risk in contemporary design pedagogy are unpicked, in relation to place, process and people, as inter-connected (though often fragmented) components of study. Art school is examined as a transformative locus for risk: a conceptual-architectural site for knowledge but also a temporal space of subversion, within which the studio provides students with a relatively safe setting for risk in individual and collective formulations. Neo-liberal policies of standardization and competition are as embedded in educational institutions as they are across all levels of society: the resultant loss of agency is felt individually and collectively. This article reframes risk as fundamentally located and dialogic, an autonomous cooperative and collective action, underpinned by critical thinking and disobedient pedagogies. This is a transformative educational process anticipating change in an expanded mode of design in which the student members of the Alternative Art School are considered as critical agents, employing creative reflexivity as an antidote to the neo-liberal stifling of risk.

Subversive space: representations of space as articulations of sovereignty in colonial Mysore

ABSTRACTThis article is an inquiry into the relationship between representations of space and religion, power, and territory. It argues that the manner that space is represented is intimately tied to the colonial project as the tool through which European nations could represent the world they wanted, promulgating a specific religious perspective and articulating colonizers’ desired spatial, religious, and political order. This is contrasted with a set of murals that visualize an alternative perspective of space and territory found in the citramaṇṭapa of the Vēṅkaṭaramanasvāmi temple in Mysore. These murals that depict space differently contested the colonial hegemony of space by articulating an indigenous spatial order constructed upon an alternate cosmological and religious model, thereby subtly subverting colonialism by articulating India as a sacred and sovereign domain.

The Public Library as Resistive Space in the Neoliberal City

With reduced hours, decaying infrastructure, and precariously positioned staff, local public libraries provide much needed services in cities devastated by inequality and slashed safety nets. In this article, I draw on ethnographic research of a small public library in a diverse, mostly working class neighborhood in Queens, New York. I show that in addition to providing an alternative to the capitalist market by distributing resources according to people's needs, the library serves as a moral underground space, where middle–class people bend rules to help struggling city residents. Although the library occasionally replicates hegemonic ideologies about immigrant assimilation, it provides a striking example of cross–class and interclass solidarities and resistance to the neoliberal social order. I conclude by discussing the potential of public libraries as everyday spaces of subversion and emancipation, as well as research sites for urban scholars.

Subversive Spaces and Gendered Geographies in Early Childhood Classrooms in the American Southwest

Rendered from Black Delfin, K. A. 2018. “Discursive Constructions of Gender in Early Childhood Education: A Feminist Poststructural Analysis.” PhD diss., New Mexico State University.The objective o...

Navigating between Protest Theatre and Journalism in Post-2000 Zimbabwe: A Study of All Systems Out of Order

ABSTRACTThis study assesses how the existence of repressive media laws in Zimbabwe led to the rise of journalistic production of theatre performances. The censorship of media by the state resulted in the use of creative arts as subversive spaces to convey intractable messages for majority consumption—a role similar to that of citizen journalism. Similarly, responding to the suppressive hand of the state on media, online spaces have rampantly enabled the (re) distribution of information to the citizenry. We posit that the spaces created by online platforms are similar to those created by protest theatre in the extension of the role of journalism. While there are considerable difficulties in defining journalism since it has been defined from a varied perspective, ranging from the traditional through to the derivative meanings from context and method of use, this study employs the progressive definition of journalism being inclusive of art forms. To understand protest theatre as journalism in Zimbabwe, we deploy Schechner's performance theory in analysing All Systems Out of Order.

‘Some magic is normality’: Fantastical Cosmopolitanism in David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks

David Mitchell’s <i>The Bone Clocks</i> (2014) seemingly echoes the historical struggles of <i>Cloud Atlas</i> (2004) in pitting active ethical agency against cannibalistic rapaciousness. And yet, the trans-universal war between a band of peaceful ‘Horologists’ and predatory ‘soul-decanters’ demonstrates how fantasy fiction offers alternative perspectives not only for socio-cultural models of diversity and difference, but for cosmopolitical power struggles being played out at supranational levels.<i>The Bone Clocks</i> opens up subversive spaces through which to think about threats facing the twenty-first century, from migration and xenophobic nationalism to ecological degradation and planetary destruction. By imagining progressive interrelationships between human and supernatural entities, the novel gestures towards fantasy literature’s unique capacity to extend future discussions of cosmopolitanism in new and innovative directions. While the presence of cosmopolitan theory has received much critical attention in Mitchell’s earlier fiction, this article will suggest that the speculative nature of <i>The Bone Clocks</i> is important in demonstrating the concept’s continuing capacity to serve as a fantastical form of imaginative cultural protestation and social polemic.

Programmatic Dreams: Technographic Inquiry into Censorship of Chinese Chatbots

This project explores the recent censorship of two Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots on Tencent’s popular WeChat messaging platform. Specifically, I am advancing a technographic approach in ways that give agency to bots as not just computing units but as interlocutors and informants. I seek to understand these chatbots through their intended design—by chatting with them. I argue that this methodological inquiry of chatbots can potentially points to fissures and deficiencies within the Chinese censorship machine that allows for spaces of subversion. AI chatbot development China presents a rich site of study because it embodies the extremes of surveillance and censorship. This is all the more important as China have elevated disruptive technologies like AI and big data as critical part of state security and a key component to fulfilling the “Chinese Dream of National Rejuvenation.” Whether it is the implementation of a national “social credit” system or the ubiquitous use facial recognition systems, much of Western fears about data security and state control have been already realized in China. Yet, this also implies China is at the frontlines of potential points of resistance and fissures against the party–state–corporate machine. In doing so, I not only seek to raise questions dealing with the limits of our humanity in the light of our AI-driven futures but also present methodological concerns related to human–machine interfacing in conceptualizing new modes of resistance.

From the Heavens to the Streets: Pune’s Wayside Shrines

This article presents the results from brief ethnographic research conducted in 2016 in the city of Pune, Maharashtra. Through two case studies of wayside shrines in Pune—the first, a tiny pavement shrine which is steadily growing in popularity, and the second, a small shrine turned into an extravagant temple in just a few years—I consider them as more than just spontaneous expressions of devotion. Taking into consideration the roles that urban conditions and social configurations have been playing in how social actors forge connections between localities and different communities, this paper will look at how these shrines can be spaces of creative subversion of the established socio-religious order and its structures of power. In in this contribution, I argue that the wayside shrine reveals the blurred boundaries between the rural and the urban, the sacred and the mundane, the institutionalized and the popular as well as the legal and the illegal.

The racialized roles we play: Owning the self through an emergent theatre project

ABSTRACTThis article shares the author’s reflection upon how participation in an emergent theatre project allowed for examination into the construction and deconstruction of “self” in response to an onslaught of social directives on how to perform racialized selves—or how to be Black or White or Other. Conversations and interactions across the Emergent Theatre Project (ETP) and specifically with student participant Yusuf Agunbiade and Eric Love, the co-faculty director, serve as the backdrop for this critically self-reflective piece. In doing so, Applied Theatre is imagined as a radical and subversive space where socially imposed identities may be named, challenged, deconstructed, reconstructed, rearranged, owned, and acted upon.