 Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the fourth annual workshop by the Consortium Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora, and the Chair for the afternoon panel, my name is Nishant Bhatiaj. I'm from UMass that month. Welcome, if you're just joining us, welcome. Exciting day lined up, and I want to start by thanking Kareem and the Consortium for organizing this. This is really amazing space, centric, cutie and performers, and these things are still so rare in the academy, so thank you for this lovely day and this lovely space. I feel so much better here, it's really exciting. So without further ado, we'll start the panel get well soon on class and disability. I'm going to read out the bios for the presenters in the lineup they'll be presenting. Each presenter has about 15 minutes, and then we have 45 minutes for a good discussion. So our first presenter is Nick Kaye. Nick is from the Bronx, currently occupying several human spaces. There are persons who make performances and creates, organizes performative spaces. Nick's current transdisciplinary projects explore movements at the space of reclamation of the body, history, and sexuality. Nick has shown works, spoken on panels and hosted workshops at numerous venues throughout the United States and internationally. Nick Kaye is currently a 2017 movement research artist president's Van Beer fellow in New York City. Next we have Chandan Reddy. Chandan Reddy is an associate professor of gender women's sexuality studies and at the program of co-comparative study of ideas at the University of Washington. His book, Freedom with Violence, Great Sexuality in the U.S. State, from Duke University Press, won the Allen Gray Memorial Award for Queer Studies from the MLA, as well as the best book in cultural studies from the Asian American Studies Association, both in 2013. Next we have Gina Mekim. Gina Mekim is currently a consortium for minority diversity post-docs for a fellow at Mount Holyoke College in the program of critical social thought. In 2018, she joined Smith College as an assistant professor in English for the study of women and gender. Her research exam is multi-ethnic U.S. literature written in the afterlife of 1996 U.S. welfare reform and engages the inspection of critical visibility, feminism of color, and urban environment to studies. And last but not least, we have Stephen Pennington. Stephen Pennington is an associate professor of music at Delta University. His areas of research include popular music and jazz of the United States and Europe, African American music, critical musicology, queer and transgender studies, and the performance of musical identity with special attention to race, class, gender, and sexuality. He's also affiliated with the Africana Studies Program, the American Studies Program, and the Women Gender and Sexuality Studies Program. So if you can all welcome them with a big round of applause. Thank you so much for your help. Hello everybody, my name is Nick Kay and I am a performance artist. When Karim originally invited me and I saw what the theme of the panel was, I was somewhat surprised and I questioned if I had the sort of expertise to be able to present on class and disability. But it seemed he was inspired by my recent project, Get Well Soon, which is the title of today's panel. So I'm going to talk a little bit about my practice and my project, Get Well Soon. I'm going to start with this awesome quote by Audrey Lohr because for me, it really is the foundation of my performance practice. If I did not define myself or myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten a lot. I began my journey. I often think back to a moment, I don't know what came first, an understanding or my knowledge of being black and a girl in the world or a sadness. And I often think about the sadness as the sort of crunching that I felt as a small person from the people in my family and in school based on the type of character and personal. I wanted to be in how I was showing up and performance acting out before I even knew what acting was. Acting out was the way that I grappled with that crunching with that continuous phrase of to be seen and not heard, right? So here I am today standing in front of you and I'm gonna talk a little bit about how I have been chosen or how I choose to be seen. So I am obsessed with performance. This is a definition I pulled off that tonight. You can find it if you want. But I've also acted a little few words of my own. I am interested in the ways that action and body and behavior agency all go into performance. And I'm interested in the blackness that I inhabit and blackness as performative on stage and in the living and in the being. So I wanted to start with that. To return to Get Well Soon. Get Well Soon is a project and a meditation based on loose phrase indicating the hope of recovery. I'm really inspired by the activist and writer, Miriam Kava, who says hope is a discipline. And earlier in the year, I was grappling with trying to articulate what I had felt in my body whilst watching the news, but more specifically on Facebook, watching videos and conversations about black death and what that did to my body. And I'm interested in making work in a sort of trajectory and a history of black people, black LGBT queer people who make as a mode of survival, right? So at a time of insistent death and policing, I wondered how could you in a way choreograph resistance? How do we choreograph resistance and how do, can we, if hope is a discipline, what does that look like in a performance practice? And I was interested in this phrase Get Well Soon that I was told very often by administrators at arts organizations who would expect me to deliver said performances. And I wasn't able to leave the bed or I was unable to articulate some really awesome idea that I had of set dressing, lighting and bodies in space because I couldn't imagine performance as a mode of recovery or dealing and or futurity. So I thought, how could I create exercises? I'm gonna leave you with that. I'm gonna do a lot of jumping around. I think I'm gonna just do some sharing and then I'm gonna end back with that. Okay, this is an image of my first project as a performance artist. Being an actor didn't work out for me. I learned very quickly that although I studied all of the awesome playwrights that I was never going to get casted in the roles that I imagined for myself. I love Shekhov, I love the melancholy, but they didn't see it for me. I was not gonna be in Uncle Vanya. So I decided to find a path where I had a little bit more agency. And my practice started sort of serendipitously. I was on a street corner in Soho. I was working at Ralph Lauren and I was gifted a bouquet of cotton by a young white woman about the same age as I was at the time, which was 18 years old. So really it was almost as if the performance had already begun and I was somewhat unbeknownst like actor on this stage. So I received the bouquet of cotton. I took the bouquet of cotton back to my job at Ralph Lauren and then was told quickly to hide or end the dispose of the cotton by my coworkers who also actors in this play gave me a little bit more knowledge about the object. And that is where I began with my object-based performances. This sort of charged gift of American history for me in this moment allowed me to understand sort of the racialization of the object but also how I was being seen by this passerby and by my coworkers at my job. I became obsessed with going on walks with the object, to develop a language to talk about what I think many of my friends at the time were doing in school around critical race theory and performativity. I was searching for by walking around New York City and engaging in conversations with people who stopped me and or interrupted and or made fun of this weird person walking around with the bouquet of cotton. I had a friend who was at Cooper Union who would document the walks. And the thing that I'd like to emphasize is that during these walks, there was not a specific audience, right? So as someone who was trained as an actor to perform on stage, I found great joy in being able to determine when the performance began and ended but also the other players were not of my design, it was sort of improvisational. And through the repetition, I developed a language to understand a longing for self-making in particular ways and also challenging. I didn't have the language at the time to talk about gender in relationship to how I wanted to show up in the world and gender in relationship to labor, gender in relationship to black racial history in the South. But through the performance, I was able to gain the language and find the text to help me understand what I was doing. I continued the sort of object-based walks with a project called the Mannequin Walk. During the Mannequin Walk, I did a very similar thing this time, I video-documented the experience, but I was interested in taking it a step further and kind of using the Mannequin as a sort of personification of white beauty standards and having that be something that I carried around and it really like food and generational food around New York City. Once again, I didn't have a script per se, there were really no other characters, but there were many interesting things that followed. I'm going to jump a little bit. So, you know, I'm trying to give you an idea of where I'm coming from and some of the things that I've been interested in. The internet started to become important for me as I was trying to understand how to share the work, how to create an audience for the things that I was interested in. And I became more confident through sharing on the internet, talking about gestures in the black body and the history of black movement and performance. So, I would post a series of videos based on videos that I was looking at on YouTube. So, I would usually be interested in trends that were traveling, say, go figure, trends that were traveling. I always lose time. Thank you very much. I'm going to skip. This is images of a project that I was working on called Little Black. I'd like to end with this. So, with all of that said, what can I leave you with? I think where I'm at currently is in my movement exploration, how can I create moments of glitches? How can I create moments and exercises that are in some ways abstract and silly but are a way for the performer to have agency and to maybe embody a sort of futurity that, in theory, makes one excited but in practice sometimes seems impossible. And this is a video that I edited that I feel like embodies some of that impossibility and possibility. I'm going to go on the rail. I'm going to go on the rail. Just walk, not a hurry not to fall. Yeah, not a hurry not to fall. Right, not a hurry not to fall. Who the fuck do I call to? I ain't got no friends, right? All I've got is my family. If you don't really give a fuck, I don't need to give a damn to do a song with you. If you want to know what I'm thinking, then follow me on my Twitter. That's where the shit ends. You all have got to relax and stick to the fucking facts, man. That's the idea that ain't lying. Ninda really had the snacks cause I've been going through it all and ain't nobody had my back. Where the fuck was y'all at? My vibe doodling down. Soon as I'm back up, everybody want to come around. Y'all know I go hard, right? So push up the fucking fader, right? Yesterday I'm a hater, yeah. Today you cover up the fader, baby. I could be with me, right? The world would be fucked up, yeah. But my face wasn't all in, man. She goes back in your face. You see her on Instagram and book face. And I ain't done with y'all yet, man. I end up going hard, hard. You can shit to yourself, right? When the girl's not my fault, bitch. Back all against the wall, right? Try hard not to fall. All of us to the wall, yeah? I can't do it. I had today and just talked a little informally about some of the new work I'm trying to develop and it's very speculative and amazing. So I'm excited to be able to get some help and criticisms as I develop it. The new project is trying to think about third color critique in what I call the time of social movements, which is a way of thinking about how a third color critique can be useful for and be also transformed by some of the emergent and kind of dynamic social movements operative at this current moment. Particularly movements like Black Lives Matter, immigrant rights and undoubtedly queer movement, various queer indigenous movements that were part of the water protectors movement and so on and so forth. And so in order to do that, the project really thinks about the ways in which career color critique has engaged social movements in sort of two forms. One has been to think about what some of the, sorry, racial and gendered logics of some of the existing forms or previous forms of social movements have been. So career color critique has looked at things like act up, feminist anti-violence movements, in other words, domestic violence movement, marriage equality, all to think about the ways in which these movements are not only constituted within specific racializing processes, but are themselves part of the sets of processes that differentiate and racialize access to the not just rewards of the movements, but to the political subjectivity narrated by the movements. And so that's sort of the one strain. The second strain that I'm trying to work through in this new project is to try to understand how to think about and theorize what we might call the strong, clear component in existing anti-racist, indigenous, anti-prison and anti-poverty politics. And of course, I think of organizations like of course Black Lives Matter, which responded by three queer Black women as well as one of them working in the immigrant rights movement, the local organizers and folks who began the uprising in Ferguson, which I'll show you a couple of them in a second, movements like Undocque Queer, Transfibrillia that I'll talk about momentarily, and others. And one of the challenges in these movements is that they have not narrated themselves as queer movements, they've narrated themselves as immigrant rights movements, as anti-racist movements, as indigenous movements, as movements against Black disposability and the death of Black life. And so for those of us who do queer of color work, it's a question of how do we think about the fact that these are queer organizers that oftentimes came from queer racialized social worlds as their own infrastructures, more than just noting the empirical point that they are queer in some way when they were organizers and entered into the movement. And so what I try to think through is really, if we think about race in a sort of asymmetrical division of value, meaning and history, then in talking about how to theorize this latter moment in which we see sort of racialized and economic politics sort of infused with queer organizers, to try to think about what kinds of contradictions and historical conditions and sort of anti-racial ideologies and epistemic structures create the forms of social movement agency we're now trying, we're now witnessing and trying to work through. In a way, this image shares a lot about what I'll be talking about momentarily, which is a sort of new emergent order of what I call administrative state power that has sort of overtaken in many ways political power and political forms, has sort of taken political forms and transformed them into administrative forms. And I thought that this would be a good example of some of what I'm talking about so that we could use it in Q&A. To the left, of course, is pictures, the famous picture of Elizabeth Eckford going into a Alabama school after the desegregation of Brown versus Board of Education. And as you can see, Eckford is facing the camera, her view seems fixed towards a kind of future to come, a kind of what future could look like after the civil rights and black participation in civic institutions and their transformation. And she's moving towards a kind of educational apparatus that says that it's not the right, but what might be transformed by those who radically seize rights that will be the story that's told here. And to the side of that, on the other hand, is what we got when the marriage was passed on the front cover of the New York Times, which were two women in Michigan getting a marriage license in an administrative building of the state. And the pictures were so stark to me, in part because in complete contrast to the Eckford picture, what you see in gay marriage at re-narrating itself as a civil right are women, one, the pair, which is very important, we can talk about that, the ways in which this gay right for marriage or the transformation of civil rights into administrative rights requires a kind of pairing so that you can note the homosexuality, visualize the affirmation of the right. But what you also see that their backs are turned to the camera, there's a market lack of vitality in all sectors of the image. It's not just the women who seem rather bored by their own assertion of rights. But it's also, you can't tell, but it's also that in the back, the entire administrative staff of the state seems completely unmoved by this kind of enactment, supposedly of a historic expression of rights, which is contrast to the Eckford where what you see is that there is a public sphere that is rageful and motivated, interpretive against the radical black seizure of rights to produce a future that was yet to be narrated that had all kinds of radical possibilities and continues to have all kinds of radical possibilities within it that exceed the state's logic and parameters. So I've really been interested in this, in this sort of surrogation of the radical use of rights by sort of gay marriage as a kind of administrative transformation of the meaning of rights, which is also a kind of mechanism that omits history in the very expression of rights. And I'll talk about that momentarily. Let me give you an example of the ways in which contemporary and religious movements are getting up as well and you do it. Karima Winkigart, I'm so sorry. So, should I maybe just copy that and you put it in a browser with these? Rolling dyons and roadblocks. Does this feel like a different thing? So this is, yeah, I mean, it's younger, it's first year and I think that we're more connected than most people think of, this is not the civil rights movement. You can tell by how I got a hat on my T-shirt and how I rock my shoes. This is not the civil rights movement. This is the press people's movement. So when you see us, you're gonna see some gay folk, you're gonna see some queer folk, you're gonna see some poor black folk, you're gonna see some brown folk, you're gonna see some white people and we all out here for the same reasons. We wanna be free, we believe that we have the right overlaws. I think the question that we keep getting as to what's legal, we need to be talking about what's right. We're not heading that way. We could just end there. But this is Tori Russell who was one of the neighborhood organizers of the Ferguson movement who was interviewed during the protests and you can see that in the neighborhood movement itself, this was only one month after the start of the Ferguson protests. Russell was explaining that the kind of anti-racist movement that they were involved in wasn't a movement for civil rights. In fact, to go back to the Eckford image, the paradox of that image is not only that Eckford is sort of radically seizing on the possibility of rights and radicalizing rights of the image of what it might mean for black spot in the academy, but also in another way we can think about the academy has suppressed the radicalization of that moment and produced the kinds of norms of the meaning of civil rights that now somebody like Tori Russell is interrogating. And so Russell is sort of situating this poor people's movement as a kind of ensemble of actors of difference that are working together to interrupt not only the sort of segregation of rights by this administrative formation that produces sort of homosexual identity and sort of marriage as a uniformity, but also as a way to try to narrate what kind of power poor people are subjected to at this historical moment. In other words, what are the mechanisms by which the poor are regulated? You'll remember that in the case of Ferguson, the city, one of the reasons that the city was so overpoliced and could be so overpoliced in the context of appearing legal was that the city's population was not only the site of sort of extractive asset stripping of people's monies by small violations, things like nuisance laws, things like laws of leaving your car and attended to on the street or oil tripping, et cetera. And those very nuisances then became violations that you had to pay when you didn't pay those fines to start getting warrants. And in this process of administrative, in other words, there are no political acts regulating the poor. These were all administrative decisions made at the municipal level and through the municipal state in the guise of rights, under the cover of rights, such that not only was it that these were extractive activities, but they produced the warrants in which 83% of the population had a legal warrant for his or her arrest. So by the time you see the murder of the young man, what you see actually is the mechanism by which legality is producing the conditions of a kind of administrative violence in which who is murdered in the eyes of the state isn't narrated as even a subject of rights, but a criminal body that has violated, ironically, an administrative law, not a political or moral law. So there's this kind of way in which the criminal, which we usually think of as a moral figure, is now actually that which is on the other side of the administrative domination. And you see this as well, for example, in immigration politics, currently, where the idea of immigrants as law breakers because they crossed the border was a very recent construction. While there was, of course, lots of concerns with undocumented migration, the concept of the immorality of the migrant was that they were culturally immoral, that they were culturally unsanitary, and that it was those ones of immorality that should prevent them from crossing the border. Now the logic is that if you violate the administrative terms of the state, you are an immoral person, and that attribution of immorality doesn't meet the discourse of culture, it actually enacts a direct state violence through your administrative designation. So we're seeing a kind of transformation of what used to be sort of more classical forms of liberal racism into a kind of post-administrative kind of violence for property relations that doesn't actually either meet the rubric of culture in the ways that we think, but also addresses not the person, but the administered body. And the last thing I'll share with you is that in regard to, we can talk about it in the Q&A, is another, I'm a little worried to do this because it's another clip, but maybe I can just, I can pull it up. Transfamilia is another one of the very dominant immigrant rights actors currently, activist organizations and immigrant rights actors. They, most of their actions have not been for clear, quote unquote rights and movement. They've been mobilizing undocumented queer trans, undocumented people, trans-Latinos of all sorts, young queer Latinos to produce sort of radical street actions against deportations as well as to interrogate the current deportation regime. A regime that, in the case of the woman, I'm gonna show an image of Zoila Reyes. Zoila Reyes was one of the central young trans activists in the movement in Santa Ana. She was in the milieu of fighting the Obama era deportations. These were the deportations that gave Obama the status of deporter in chief. And it's imperative to remember that these deportations were passed as a set of 11 administrative executive orders that not only gave protections to dreamers, but created the administrative designation of the criminal alien and added new levels of violation for what constitute a criminal alien. So for example, before it used to have to be much higher crime or criminal offenses. Now it could literally be that you had a warrant for a drunk driving ticket or you had a warrant for not paying child support. So that there was this, in other words, this kind of usurpation of new tactics of direct state violence on the racialized poor through administrative designations that were never narrated or narratable in the public sphere in a conversation about who deserves citizenship and rights. And Zoila was one of the activists who was strong in this movement at the time and was tragically murdered by a person, sorry, I'll step up to say it in one second. Was tragically murdered and the clip I was gonna show just shows a upsurge of a Latino community, obviously I don't play well. I'm talking the Latino community coming together again, Zoila's the murderer. And Zoila's the murderer of the community using loss and grief as a way of inhabiting what I would call these new administrative infrastructures of loss, where a street cannot be an infrastructure to lose a community member, where a workplace becomes another infrastructure for the state transformation of communities into conditions of loss. And you see them using Latino tactics and Latin American tactics of public mourning to write over the transformation of social space into administrative orders. Thank you. It is titled Reclaiming the Vulgar Queen Toward a Crip of Color Critique. And in the spirit of access, I have access copies for those of you who would prefer to follow along. I have nine copies in 12-point font and two in 18-point font. Did we get these? So it's still playing. You'll be the shut it off. Oh, it'll cost a scratch. All right. What was your copy cost? Okay. So in her pathbreaking article, Punks Bulldagger's Vulgar Queens, which I feel like I don't have to summarize for this crowd, but just bear with me, Kathy Cohen famously invoked the figure of the welfare queen in order to intervene into then dumb and understandings of rare politics. Her invocation marks a departure from a single-issue activist framework that, in her words, rejects any recognition of the multiple and intersecting systems of power that largely dictate life chances. By broadening the category of queerness to encompass the lives of poor women on welfare, quote, non-normative and marginal subjects whose, quote, sexual choices are not perceived as normal, moral, or worthy of state support, Cohen envisions that queer politics attuned to regulatory regimes of power, that is the ways in which states sanctioned and extralegal systems of oppression interlocked to circumscribe, exploit, and police black and brown lives. In so doing, Cohen's article gestures toward the intellectual formation we now know as queer color critique, a framework that rejects identitarian rights-based or nationalist modes of organizing to underscore instead the regulatory logics of normativity and respectability that determine which lives have value and which are disposable. I invoke Cohen's article in order to perform a parallel move in the field of disability studies, a field that has weathered similar accusations of centering a single-issue politic. This presentation maps out an intersectional feminist disability framework I term, a grip of color critique, ripping off, of course, of Rod Ferguson's queer color critique. This is a cross-categorical analytic that links together critical disability studies, feminist of color and queer color critique, and materialist analysis, and that further advances a burgeoning disability studies to which race and class have become central. Following Cohen, I ask, how my disability studies shift if the welfare queen occupied a focal point of analysis? And in turn, how might a grip of color critique highlight the little-acknowledged ways in which discourses of disability have fundamentally shaped the figure of the welfare queen and imbued her with rhetorical power? Through this line of inquiry, I joined disability scholars such as Leslie Fry, Lea Ben-Mosha, and Normala Aravellis, who, like Cohen, have called for a, quote, the recognition and confrontation of the more direct and concrete forms of exploitation and violence rooted in state-regulated institutions and economic systems. More specifically, I joined Leslie Fry in reading the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, which is largely cited as ushering the rise of disability studies into the academy, right? Alongside the passage in 1996 of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, a federal law in major U.S. reform. Rather than framing the state as a haven of protection for people with disabilities, as the ADA does, I pay attention to how the state itself operates as an instrument of racialized disabilment through group differentiated processes of resource deprivation and ableist rhetoric of public dependency that frame racialized, impoverished, and disabled populations as parasites on the state. Using the frame of disability studies to the context of welfare reform, I view the welfare of the queen as a central figure for a crimp of color critique. While feminist scholars have thoroughly outlined the racial, gendered, and class elements of the welfare queen, I argue that this narrative gains much of its traction through the negative invocation of disability. That is, the welfare queen becomes legible as a rhetorical figure and epistemological object primarily through narratives of disability. She is defined necessarily as a pathological mother, a social abarancy to be rehabilitated through work-care programs. Through her alleged inability to mother or reproduce properly, she furnishes a useful story for global capitalism to propagate itself through the dismantling of social safety nets. Indeed, alongside the rhetorical mainstays of anti-blackness and misogyny, the language of disability, pathology, and disease wrote the welfare queen into public legibility. As Sanford of Tram observes, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act contributed considerably to the, quote, medicalization of welfare, as the act, quote, helped accelerate the tendency to construct welfare dependency as an illness, thereby transforming welfare reform into a set of therapeutic interventions designed to cure people of immality. In other words, the dominant ideology of welfare dependency, rather than need for public assistance as itself a disability, one then subject to state management and cure. Further, as both Linda Singer and Alexis Pauline Gums have observed, the Reagan-Ary discourse around racialized reproduction frames black teenage motherhood as also a disease, an epidemic that justified the, quote, wars on poverty and drugs that combine to situate disease and enmity in the bodies of four women. The black mother as disease, Gums argued, as Gums argues, posed a threat on privileged populations through tax burdens, crime, and the general erosion of quality of life, representing a path of infection that moved from, quote, oppressed sites to privileged ones. Represented as both epidemic and threat then, the narrative of racialized reproduction positioned poor black mothers as disabling to the nation writ large. As the origin story for resource privatization, the welfare queen thus operates as perhaps the definitive disability narrative of late capitalism, a cautionary tale of state dependency that enabled the reallocation of public resources toward a lead interest. So given her centrality to the rhetorical operations of global capitalism and its domestic counterpart of welfare reform and further the centrality of disability to her mythology, I again claim her as a primary figure for a grip of color fatigue. To continue this act of reclamation, I will now turn to Sapphire's 1996 novel, Push, a hugely controversial novel set amongst the eroding infrastructural supports and social safety nets of Reagan era in New York City. I want to say at the outset that I recognize the limitations of using push in this context as it potentially reaffirms welfare queen mythology, even as it simultaneously condemns the deadly politics of welfare reform. However, regardless of these limitations, I nonetheless turn to push because it is one of the few literary works that enables an exploration of Crip affinity as Leslie Fry puts it between disability studies and the targeted populations of welfare reform. As Michelle Jarman has noted, the novel's protagonist, 16 year old Clarice Precious Jones is haunted by disability as she must navigate the conjoined forces of quote poverty, sexual abuse, illiteracy, HIV and having a daughter with Down's syndrome. Precious is the product of a relentless abuse to a hyperbolic degree, twice graved and impregnated by her father, tormented daily by her mother and warehoused by educational and social services. She amplifies the violence of patriarchy, racism and state neglect, besieging black urban communities in the 70s and 80s. And as a Crip of Color critique highlights, push entangles disability with the mechanisms of state violence specific to Reagan era reform, the insufficient public infrastructure, state agencies and municipal services that allegedly aimed to support vulnerable populations that in fact were to reproduce social and material violence. Insofar as push might support a critical disability politic, it is a disability politic grounded and the acknowledgement of the state as itself a mechanism of group differentiated disabling it. In this way, Sapphire's push renders particularly evident the relationship of disability to anti welfare rhetoric as well as the usefulness of a critical disability politic to overturning that rhetoric's operative logics. Push invites a kind of intimacy with state infrastructural apparatuses that function in the words of Alia Abdurrahman as the novel's quote, dramatic core. The novel recounts its teenage protagonist heroin journey through Harlem's educational and social welfare systems and mobilizes the figure of the single black mother and welfare queen to map the purposeful failures of public infrastructure and state regulatory agencies. A literacy narrative par exemplar, the novel is organized around Precious's acquisition of reading and writing skills in spite of her subpar public education. And while the literacy narrative may evoke mythical associations with progress and self ownership or the quote easy and unfounded assumption that better literacy necessarily leads to economic development, cultural progress and individual improvement, end quote, Push in fact, disarticulates the simple association of literacy with social mobility. Rather, it crux the genre of the literacy narrative by foregrounding the public institutions that reproduce illiteracy and vulnerable populations, thus reformatting the genre of the literacy buildings Ramon to serve ultimate political ends. Indeed, the punitive logics of Harlem's public educational system make up the initial framework through which readers come to no precious world. Quote, I was left back when I was 12 because I had a baby for my father. That was in 1983. I was out of school for a year. This is gonna be my second baby. My daughter's got Downsender. She's retarded. I had got left back in the second grade too when I was seven because I couldn't read and I still peed on myself. These opening lines document the interrelation between family abuse and insufficient state infrastructure or the perpetuation of abuse by a system not only unable to offer necessary interventions into clear cases of trauma, but that actively worsen precious's situation through the punishment of leaving back. Despite precious's clear signs of aptitude, she is suspended due to her two teenage pregnancies, thereby exposing the ethos of an educational system more invested in punishment than student development. So while Push has been frequently read as a linear progress narrative, I contend that the novel functions equally as an account of anti-progress and socioeconomic stagnancy. The novel then furthers a critical disability politic that highlights the structural reproduction of illiteracy, irrationality and trauma through insufficient state support. Rather than regarding literacy as a transparent quality tied to reason, progress and by extension humanity, Sapphire's Push instead foregrounds the material conditions of possibility for literacy itself. In other words, if disability is a historical event, as Normala Aravellis has argued, then Push narrates how precious comes to be again haunted by disability through purposeful reductions in public support. By illuminating an infrastructural ecology of disablement which ranges from inadequate school systems to abuse of public hospitals to overworked welfare offices, Push writes conversations regarding the quote urban underclass away from the explanatory nexus of family, race and culture and toward the workings of inequality and power. In terms of disability, it identifies eroding public supports as the cause rather than the result of the cultural, behavioral and familial pathology described by welfare reformists. Precious's illiteracy and familial trauma are facilitated by inadequate state infrastructure which subsequently also works to foreclose access to social mobility. In other words, the dwindling public resources upon which precious depends produce the signs of seeming pathology that then transform into the mythology of the welfare queen. In this way, the novel offals a reversal of the punitive discourse of public dependency that distinguishes between deserving and undeserving subjects. Distensively the reason for welfare cutbacks here dependency is presented as the result of state divestment. We witness communities mired in municipal systems unwilling or unable to support them. I will now conclude by gesturing toward a horizon of current affinity between disability politics and the targeted populations of welfare reform. I do so by drawing focus on Precious's relationship with her disabled baby daughter, Lil' Longo, whose disability functions as a cipher for Precious's own compromise self-worth. Perhaps this may be a surprising sight to explore political coalition as Precious warms her daughter's disability and uses horribly ableist language to describe her. Yet I nonetheless locate this affinity in Precious's recognition of their shared relationship to power. Indeed upon introducing her daughter and her disability, Precious reflects on how the systems of white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and ableism work together to conduct them both. My mother don't love me. I wonder how she could love Lil' Longo, that's my daughter. Longo sounds Spanish, don't it? Yeah, that's why I chose it, but what it is short for is Mongoloid down cinder, which is what she is. Sometimes what I feel I is. As Michelle Jarman has argued, Precious is ableist assessment of her daughter as not only having Down syndrome, but being Down syndrome, reflect her assessment of her own circumscribed potential as well as a static nature for life circumstances. Reliant on state support, both Precious and Longo are embedded in oppressive state systems, the welfare office, the public school, the psychiatric institution that work to retrench their poverty. Just as Precious attends a school that prioritizes punishment over education, so Longo is kept in a, quote, retard house where she, quote, lay on the floor in pee clothes. Through the paralleling of Precious's life experience with her daughters, Precious highlights the ways in which to cite Cynthia Lou and Jennifer James, the, quote, social, political, and cultural practices of resource erosion work to keep seemingly different groups of people in strikingly similar marginalized positions. The novel does demonstrates how a value system that idealizes a productive, white, economically independent, and able-bodied subject similarly works to both, to empty both Precious and her disabled daughter of life worth. Yet, in bridging the systems of heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and ableism through a fraught mother-daughter relationship, the novel also generates possibilities for an insurgent alliance between feminist queer of color and disability politics. In this way, it speaks to the radical potential outlined in Old Diver's punks and welfare queens through which co-inhibitions of politics in which, quote, one's relation to power and not some homogenized identity is privileged in determining one's political comrades. In other words, only by recognizing the links between the marginalization of welfare queens and disabled daughters can we develop critical analytics like a grip of color critique that can, quote, confront the linked yet varied sites of power in this country. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. Hello. I will be giving you a talk today that is not really about RuPaul, although we will start there. And in case you don't know who RuPaul is, RuPaul is a drag queen who came to fame in 1993 with the song Supermodel, You Better Work, and then has been famous since then, in case you don't know who RuPaul is. This is about glamor and precarity, but also the glamor of precarity. It's about person's burning of poverty and health. I want to start with a quote by Jose Esteban Munoz from 1999. That's important. It's from 1999. With the advent of mass commercialization of drag, evident and suburban multiplexes that program such films as Tu Wong Fu, Thanks for Everything Julie Numar and The Birdcage, or VH1's broadcasts of RuPaul's talk show, it seems especially important at this point to distinguish different modalities of drag. Commercial drag presents a sanitized and desexualized queer subject for mass consumption. Such drag represents a surface strand of integrationist liberal pluralism. The sanitized queen is meant to be enjoyed as an entertainer who will hopefully lead to social understanding and tolerance. Unfortunately, this boom in film and television drag has had no impact on hate legislation put forth by the new right or on homophobic violence on the nation's streets. Indeed, this boom in drag helps one understand that a liberal pluralist mode of political strategizing only eventuates a certain absorption and nothing like a productive engagement with difference. Thus, although RuPaul, for example, hosts a talk show on VH1, one only need to click through remote control and hear about new defenses of marriage legislation that protect the family by outlawing gay marriage. Indeed, the erosion of gay civil rights is simultaneous with the advent of higher degrees of queer visibility in the mainstream media from 1999. I wonder, we might think about RuPaul's presence at this moment. And I wanted to think a little bit about RuPaul. RuPaul in the last, let's say, two years or so has been doing a lot of press. And one of the thrusts of RuPaul's press off, always done in male drag is that he is an outsider and that he is not mainstream. I was just watching an interview with him on ABC Nightly News where he was explaining how he was very, very non-mainstream. His show was non-mainstream and he would never be invited on Ellen or on mainstream Nightly News shows to interview. The host said, well, I'm the mainstream Nightly News and I'm very glad to have you here. But RuPaul's presentation and especially in the last two years has been one of being a minoritarian subject against and outside of the mainstream doing radical work. In some ways, you could sort of say that what RuPaul is doing is resisting the burden of libeless that Munoz talks about, which Kareem had sort of introduced earlier today about this cultural imperative from the majoritarian public sphere that denies the subaltern's access to larger channels of representation. Well, calling the minoritarian subject to the stage, performing his or her alterities as a consumable local spectacle. And I was always very interested in, because I'm interested in history, the ways in which Munoz says that it's equally important to understand the ways in which the burden of libeless structures temporality. The burden of libeless affords the minoritarian subject an extremely circumscribed temporality to be only in the live means that one is denied history and futurity. If the minoritarian subject can only exist in the moment, that subject needs to focus solely on the present and can never afford the luxury of thinking about the future. And RuPaul of late has been thinking about the past and the future quite a lot. It's interesting to note that RuPaul's drag race, according to RuPaul, is a show of the Obama era and cannot really exist in the era of Trump, right? Sort of really framing it in this moment. And RuPaul continuously places herself in a lineage, in a past lineage. I would like to sort of think about the impossibility of RuPaul's acceptance of the mainstream and noting the ways in which all of these interviews about her precarity and outsiderness have all happened around the moment when she won her two Emmys for outstanding hosts of a reality reality competition program. And I don't know, maybe you don't know this, I bet you do, that all those interviews are also Emmy campaign interviews. So all of these interviews on mainstream media, which he's been doing recently, are part of a campaign in order to get an Emmy, which then she got. So now that we are in the age of Trump, that it's not the age for RuPaul's drag race, RuPaul's drag race has left logo, it's still there, if people still have logo, but it's now being shown on BH1, she now has Emmys and she is thoroughly mainstream. And her mainstream book is that she is not mainstream. But I think what's very important for me to sort of point out in this moment that in order to sort of work as a non-mainstream figure, you need to have modes of authentication, right? You are not in yourself authentic, you are authenticated by authentication processes, people, groups. And one of the things that RuPaul does is to connect herself to history. Now, she does not connect herself to her own history. In the 80s, RuPaul was an Andrew trashy club kid doing go-go dancers of the pyramid club with crazy wild hair. But that is not the RuPaul that we know, we know a RuPaul that emerges in 1993 as super glamorous with the blonde hair and the amazingness. And so when RuPaul creates a narrative of precarity and history, the precarity and history that RuPaul always goes back to is Paris is Burning. The documentary from 1991 that was filmed in 87 and 89 that documents the Harlem black and the teen extra drag trans scene. And the role of Paris is Burning is crucial and important to RuPaul. RuPaul continuously references Paris is Burning in RuPaul's DragCon, a huge big convention for drag that RuPaul presides over. Paris is Burning is shown. That documentary screen is part of this documentary for all of those who know nothing about drag culture as under the aegis of RuPaul's DragCon. And of course, RuPaul continuously references Paris is Burning within the show RuPaul's Drag Race. For example, I would like to give you an emblematic moment where we can see this connection. And this is from RuPaul's Drag Race season seven, the mini challenge. Why do I have volume? Oh, I know why. Why do I have volume? Volume? Yeah. Let's go back so that we can have this moment. Now in the great tradition of Paris is Burning the library is about to be open. Yeah! Because it's dark, but it's open at all. That's right, children. Reading is so great. It is fundamental. It is fundamental. Reading is great. And we dance and we laugh and it is this moment of joy and excitement that we get to do this really fun thing, which is reading. And of course, Ru loves to quote Venus extravaganza quite often on that show. But I thought I'd just, just for a little bit, sort of note how Paris is Burning frames what reading might be. Shay comes from reading. Reading came first. Reading is the real art form of insult. You can ever smile and crack. Everyone laughs and kikis because you found a flaw and exaggerated it, then you've got a good read going. I have a personal, just like you. You got me, I've made the same way you do. I've made the same. If it's happening between the gay world and the straight world, it's not really a read. It's more of an insult. Vicious slurflip. I think they go mess with the right thing. I mean, you don't need more than any of me. That she messes with you and pulls back. But it's how they develop a sense of how they read it. I'm not going to mess with the right thing. And that's my girlfriend right there. They may call you a faggot or a drag queen. You fight them to call them. But then when you are all of the same thing, then you have to go to a fine point. In other words, if I'm a black queen, and you're a black queen, we can't call each other black queens. Because we're both black queens, that's not a read. That's just a fact. So let me talk about your ridiculous shape, your savvy face, your techie clothes. And reading. So in this moment, we have a moment of reading that is done in a moment of danger on the streets, where it's just a late potential violence and disruption and discrimination. But it has become a celebration of fun, right? It is fun within RuPaul's Drag Race. And in many ways, RuPaul's Drag Race has been emblematic of the shift of understanding of Paris' burning. From to what is now, we can give the opulent aesthetics of balls have been preserved and widely distributed in a now commoditized gay culture where dragon and sling are popular, right? So now we think of RuPaul's, we think of Paris' burning as glamorous. Now, of course, we all know about Venus extravaganza who was murdered. And this is always part of the story of RuPaul's Paris' burning. But the murder of Venus extravaganza is also glamorous because it's murder. She was strangled in her body found four days after. And the murder of someone who's working as a sex worker as the tragic mulata has a kind of excitement and authenticity to it. It's part of narratives that sort of work with large structures, what we imagine, the glamorousness of danger. It doesn't really disrupt things. And to have a kind of a Paris' burning where we have this tragic murder, but where we spend most of the time thinking of, this is Pepper LaBeja, who I really want to talk about. Where we get some clothing on the show, Pepper LaBeja of the legendary house of LaBeja who started creating a set of gay violence for some trans women. But this is this amazing recuperation. And there are things that are not talked about. Of course, we don't talk about that, most of the people in this film all died two years later. Dorian Corey, who was speaking, died of AIDS. And Jake Shreveganza, one of the other legendary mothers also died in 1993 at the age of 27 of AIDS. And while we can think of AIDS, deaths, I think that sort of works in this story. The realities of it are often not discussed. For example, one of her friends spoke of and Jake Shreveganza and said, she died of her liver failure. She said she had spots all over like a Dalmatian. And she had to stop taking the hormones that made her look soft because they are what really ate her up. In later pictures, you can see the masculine lines where face reemerging despite the high collars and makeup. And Willie Ninja, who also died of AIDS, really, the heart failure. He had been taking care of his 70-year-old mother who was wheelchair bound with Parkinson's when he succumbed. And friends said, in the end, the famous dancer had lost his sight and become paralyzed. But that didn't stop him from being fabulous. And of course, the CDC reported last year that one half of all black and gay and bisexual black men and a quarter of gay and bisexual Spanmen will be diagnosed with HIV in their lifetimes. A story that's not discussed when we repulse Drag Race. And the problems for black and Latino and Latinx people involve poverty, involve black women health insurance, as Willie Ninja did not have. And sort of being in locations where they do not have access to care or health insurance. But it isn't just AIDS that is running through Paris' burning. Kim Pandavas, who has been reported in Spain, some spaces to be a trans man died of a heart attack, also in 1993 at the age of in his early, early 20s. But I think I would want to just talk, go back to our fabulous Pepper Levesia, who... It's been really unbelievable, my life. If I was to die today or tomorrow. I need to skip by that clip, if you don't mind. Pepper Levesia died of diabetes, type two. And Pepper Levesia had, who we saw dancing in that opening, so fabulous, for the last 10 years of her life, was bedridden because she had her feet amputated. And, of course, diabetes is prevalent among people who are living in impoverished locations and who are of color. And this is one of her last appearances, something that we don't talk about, it's not as glamorous. And then she died of a heart attack at the age of 54. Looking at the history of the bald community, Pepper was one of the last to survive in the legendary mothers. We were going to all, all for a special event. They didn't have them every month. If they wanted to a year and prepare for herself for that night, you couldn't come and make it through the motion. It was like a shock to you. Because she's been doing that for over three decades, we're well able to let you be honored in this part. It was truly an icon. Pepper Levesia had two children and a beautiful mother. There's a whole new generation of bald kids in Arrow, and very few of them knew Pepper's struggles and the survival skills she had acquired to live her life. In addition, Pepper has seen the coming. Many of our fabulous drag queens are disabled. They are poor, and they struggle. The problem is, that's not the kind of precarity that's romantic. That's not what we find glamorous. Murder is pretty glamorous, but not having food being in a food desert, having your feet amputated, being paralyzed, that's not glamorous. And so that is not the Parisis burning that we remember. And I just want to note that this romanticization of Parisis burning is not happening only in majoritarian culture. It's happening here on campus. It's happening among primarily white gay male spaces who want to reclaim a culture that was never theirs and have drag balls, fixing ball culture in the 1980s and not in the present, and fixing it without issues of poverty, issues of structural racism and classism. And so Parisis burning has become the celebration that allows us to ignore the ways in which disability and poverty and class has impacted this document that we end these people's lives. I would say we have a Parisis burning now through RuPaul and then propagated as an artifact wherein we look at glamour and we take it as a fact when indeed at this moment it was an act. It was an act to cover all of this disparity and we have now taken it as something. And so I would like to ask us to rethink our heroes and what we're here rising for and to ponder the ways in which we're able to sort of look through the act to re-see the facts of oppression and not just glamour. Thanks for all of the perspectives that you all have provided. And then I really wanted to speak to Nagea. Thank you personally as just viewing here our work like sitting here has moved me as somebody who has been a black student who has been subjected to the violence within academia who also acknowledges the fact that to be a black student in academic spaces is to teeter between like a constant state of this association trauma resistance and sickness that often goes so unacknowledged constantly in this realm but is also profited off of constantly while you still have so many of like my friends who I know identify as that are struggling to eat right now and knowing that like that is just a conversation that is not had but we all have the privilege to sit in this room and have conversations about people who experience systematic harm every day. So thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you all for those presentations. It was very, obviously very thoughtful but also very sobering. My question is for Chandan, I really like how you're thinking about the administrative state, the administrative place within this impact on rights and lack thereof. So a question I had, I'm not questioning that. I like that logic. The question I have then is what do you think is the logic behind the administrative state? So if it's outside of politics, it's outside of the public sphere, what is the governing logic or the logic behind the kinds of acts, not saying policies but acts that you're referencing that we see impacting bodies outside of civil rights logic. So for instance, could the administrative state be, for example, how policy has itself become neoliberal? That is, we've taken policy outside of the public realm and now it's become in the hands of unelected bureaucrats or non-elected bureaucrats. Is there some other kind of logic regarding white supremacy? There's so many ways to disframe it. I don't know if you could go on and on. If you'll elaborate on that. Thanks, Kevin. I think that's a really great question. So a few thoughts. One is that I'm not sure I want to go as far as to describe this as an administrative state, but more maybe sort of the intensification of administrative powers of governmentality and governance that even push beyond what we think of as kind of biopolitical governmentality to create these sort of hyper reified proceduralisms that kind of circulate state effects, but I don't think are similar to a state formation. So I don't know what to call it. That's the first thing. I'm still thinking it through. But one thing that I would say is it's been very tempting in the context of this kind of destruction of the political state that we narrate and know as the liberal political state behind these forms of rationalizing procedure to desire returning to a liberal political formation. And so, for example, with rights movements, what you see is the pressure, the ways in which people narrate rights movements, impoverished and racialized rights movements is as if they are inhabiting the position of the possessive individual whose rights have been transgressed. So to take the examples of the panel, the ways that people narrate HIV, for example, is that transmission and death from HIV, but also the conditions that produce cofactors like diabetes and so forth are sort of a lack of resource distribution and a kind of a violation of a of a sort of liberal right of security and life. And all the narrative of a kind of individualism possessive subject that also constitutes our conception of the political sphere and the political space. And I think what is interesting about the resistances that are emerging from this kind of administrative power is that it's that ensemble that Tori Russell was talking about where he said, you know, we're gay, we're black, we're queer, we're poor, where these are these are folks trying to imagine not how to inhabit the more traditional political subject of rights, but how to narrate forms of relationality that are impossible to narrate as political in the public sphere. And so we need to kind of rethink the rubric of the political so that dying from you know, diabetes isn't merely seen as an inequality of life chances, but also a kind of the way in which the political sphere has so thoroughly dominated our capacities to narrate relationality that we don't have a different conception of the political. And so yeah, so that's what I'm trying to work out if that makes sense. Thank you for all of your presentations. What you just said makes me feel like all of your pieces are connected so profoundly, and I'm sorry I don't remember all your names, but I'm thinking about disability and illness and what it means not to be able to get out of bed. As someone who has experienced a lot of depression and hospitalization and that being kind of the most unmentionable illness there is in Agedini in particular where you know, it's all about our intellectual capacity etc. So I'm just curious to know where mental illness so to speak might get into what you're talking about and kind of the over individualization of that and the with disability in general I would say, but as a particular one that I have to say I see so prevalent around my students and it's just overwhelming so I guess I just wonder what you might say to that incoherent question. First I'd say thank you for sharing. I think I'm trying to grapple with two things like your question and then the comment about opacity and the quote about opacity and then just like the sort of container in which we have to relate to each other and to share these narratives and might also in relationship to the keynote and the state of that everything will be co-opted that even once lack of capacity then becomes something that is co-opted in this sort of like repetitive cycle and then through making because it is what I think about all the time and obsessive about it I'm trying to understand sort of like ways in which to not think about cure but also to think about I don't know, being in a way thinking about community but the community that is in many ways impossible to once again reference the keynote because of displacement but also because of a like in many case undiagnosed and untreated mental health and emotional like challenges due to maybe lack of healthcare, right of housing that also create within community like layers of hurt and pain trauma and lack of accountability processes or accountability processes where people aren't able to be present for various reasons and I return once again to how can I in performance have a private practice in which I am practicing that opacity and then through the need financially find remnants of the things that I'm working on to share with other people that may be a pixelated version of something that has been maybe working for me helping me leave the bed helping me be professional and share up on this panel today and in that way maybe be inclusive and create a space where me and other black and brown people can talk about how we can create maybe a space for ourselves to feel maybe better even if it is for a little bit and I know that's kind of what I'm thinking I mean it's always great to think about these like large swooping things I often think about like Fred Moten's under comments and sociality and all those things are really wonderful but like I can't even get people on the phone you know so I am trying to figure out through the modes that we currently have really just those glistens and those pixels and I would love to be living in 4K but I really am in Nintendo like pixelation and anything just like that is where I'm at and it's like in many ways barely surviving and not getting well soon but the beating um thank you for that I thought that was really generative for me in thinking of mental illness and cure and cure is not really being the end point you know it's more about thinking of how to live with a wellness rather than trying to overcome it so to speak um and part of what my project is trying to do is rethink what disability even means when race and class are centered so um typically it's defined as any kind of like deviation from a physical or psychological norm right but then given the prevalence of so called mental illness what happens when illness becomes the norm right um and what implications does that have for um social movements right which often you know uh privilege of being in public right um what is that what implications that have for um knowledge production right um and so yeah I mean I think that um mental illness right and its prevalence is a really good place to think through some of these questions that disability puts at the center right I mean how would we have to like rethink scholarship and activism all together when we're actually centering um disabled bodies as norms right and we no longer think of a cure as possible um and we also recognize that actually it makes total sense to be mentally ill in given our current conditions right that's a completely logical so rational response to the world we're living in today so yeah thank you to sort of to get to this question of like how do we rethink of the political subject I'm just going to get super old school uh in honor of my mother the personal is political right if you think like what do we do at the administrative state or like how do we think of the political subject well the personal is political that for me that is where it always comes back to uh sort of the second wave feminist about it and when I think about sort of mental illness I think about this in relation to physical illness my mother who there was a time and I was overseas and I did not know this but my mother was here in Voices and she was getting paranoid and she thought people were taking things people were coming into the house and my sister and my father were dealing with my mother who was unraveling psychologically and it was getting scary and it was getting really distressed my poor sister was like 13-14 and my father didn't want to take her to the hospital because he did not want my mother a black woman into mental care because he was afraid of what they would do to her and because he wouldn't be able to stay there but it got so bad that she did go he had to take her and it turns out she was suffering from liver failure and it was all those chemicals coming into her brain and so they were able to treat her and of course my mother did eventually die of liver failure um and so the mental and the physical like let's not listen to the mind body split you know then we should think about the ways in which these things are all connected yet we have body minds and her not getting the care in the beginning was because she was a black woman it wasn't when she gave birth to me alone in the hospital room because she said to the doctors I'm going to give birth now she was 19 and black and unmarried and they said no you're not in the hospital room because there was nobody there because they didn't believe her or when she was on her death bed and the doctors were like well there's nothing we can do and of course your thought is is that actually true is there something you can do maybe you can give her some kind of liver transplant but no not for her and so this is where as a political subject she herself as an extriper woman on welfare impoverished black woman who then was in an interracial relationship right that is completely political and so for me to think how we find the political subject well we just have to go back to our mothers who told us who the political subject was and the political subject is always always implicated and he was a personal subject which is not to say individualism right that's not just noting it like I'm not doing like the and then bootstraps individuals but that we are within structure is Michelle Visage the administrative state I think Michelle Visage is the beard for RuPaul's administrative state it's very easy to be like oh Michelle she's the problem RuPaul is the one who's using who's using the facts of trans people as villains and young people as villains and he's the one who's saying no no we can't have drag kings because drag kings are not ironic and all drag is ironic we can't have bioqueens because bioqueens aren't doing anything we can't have trans people and we can't have hormones he's the one who's doing all of that but it's easy to have the white woman be the one that you want to attack and isn't that convenient in this moment of hypoglycosogy but what about RuPaul's own trauma of like when he had to disappear during the Bush era like I think about his own mental illness and thinking of like he wants like it's a sort of denialism for himself and his own survival I think he's very generous and thank RuPaul look at him on you I also think about that he emerged when all of those other people died they all died and he comes to the forefront sort of taking on a ball culture that was not his I noticed how rarely he is generous to other people of his generation how rarely they are on this show how no one who is his peer gets to be on that show long or at all he gets to set himself up as a particularly glamorous version of this scene and become the expert of all of it and then he gets to exclude people he gets to exclude people from that show and then also from the economic possibilities that that show entails and then he also gets to narrow what gets to count as drag for people who have not been to a scene and that involves regional drag he's not very nice to people who are Puerto Rican at all he's very very bad to Latina queens in the first language so there's a whole bunch of stuff that's happening and I think we are in a moment we're attacking women especially white women is an easy convenient distraction from men who are behaving misogynistically and I think we should keep our eyes on the prize on that a little bit and empathy to Mamaru let's just say a little bit of shade a little bit of tea thank you all so much Nick Cave this question is for you and you mentioned a practice an exercise and which made me think about what you know you get ready to do the thing that you need to do sort of by doing them and so I was just curious about your own practice like what is it that convinces you that today was a good day to get out of bed or what is it that that what is that practice there's so many ways to answer this question but I think I'll do it in two ways this more I think what I try to do for myself with the knowledge of black performance history is understand that like they're actually for me I'm not looking for transcendence on the stage I'm not looking for validation on the stage that my job as a performer is a job and that like validation and being fulfilled has to come from someplace else and I think through studying black performance I can really really intrinsic to being able to I think be successful is to differentiate those things like Paris is Burning was research material for me before I understood that I was doing that type of research because I knew those people and they were me and we came out together and we went to the same programs and I understood what also was expected of me in the sort of performativity of my being and then also the performativity of me being the black the queer on stage so that is a part of the practice that continuous research and rematuring as well as like to reference also another statement that sometimes the community you believe you're positioned in or speaking to you to isn't interested in what you have to say and or is in opposition so I love the bottom community down they praised me but they haven't treated me very well and don't necessarily care for my work so I think that is also something that I've had to in my practice come to terms with which definitely helps with the sense of belonging and or not belonging and owning that sort of and at the same time I share identity I try to add some sort of playfulness because you know thinking about black death and reading, theory about black death and afro-pessimism isn't necessarily like a huge pick me up so thinking about certain aesthetics that can be interesting like this morning I went I got some balloons inflated at CVS and it's like a very it's part of my performance but that within itself provides a moment of sort of like job like curiosity I also got to talk to the woman at CVS and have like a very person-to-person sort of exchange I think it's really important and I couldn't put that into a tech writer and ask someone else to do it but it was something important for me as part of my job so those are sort of things and I would say one last thing in terms of the practice in terms of get well soon is really trying to be as abstract in some ways I feel like a lot of the black arts movement work that I study were in some ways against abstraction but I feel like when doing the research and theory and doing the work and step back and think about form and think about ways in which you can convey the things with emotion and girth really helps right? I'm like trying to reduce in certain ways turning up the volume in other ways and that really helps me specifically when thinking about movement and thinking about the memory that is held in the body and also like resisting the urge to make, to entertain I feel like it's hard because we want to see people enjoying themselves but as a black performer the very thing in which people enjoy is the very thing that is your slow poison so it's like how do I learn to build a practice that is fighting against that and abstraction for me has been very helpful for this wonderful panel I have a question for Dr. Reddy does your paper have any space for maybe the mutual dialogue between immigrant labor and a white supremacy state so for example there's a volume, the sun never sets there's an ethnography about Indian immigrant labor in Indian restaurants and how they are exploited through the discourse of family so they're family but we're just going to exploit you like family and that's my question thank you and that connected to the white supremacist state administrative state administrative, oh I see I've written about the way that immigration policy uses the rubric of family reunification to recruit the massive low wage labor sector in cities like New York or Los Angeles or elsewhere and that in doing so they also transform the family institution into an apparatus of labor socialization and you know the conditions that shape and make work so I could easily see for example that precisely this discourse of family could be the ways in which you achieve co-ethnic exploitation and produce the conditions by which the exploited is foreclosed from speaking of the exploitation in ways that give it political purchase so if you're doing traditional labor organizing you're not going to capture that modality of exploitation but if you're doing forms of maybe queer organizing where you're thinking about the ways in which the family form is a social institution and it's conjoined in important ways with state power and other formations then what looks like private indignities or private inequalities or the kind of patriarchal logic actually become the place where a kind of politics can emerge so again I think it's not about keeping it in family it's about seeing the milieu of social relations that that's working within so I hope that helps Thank you to be a whole panel really amazing my question is also rich on them as well so I was really struck by that dichotomy between the two photographs and I appreciated that that you were also sort of drawing these kind of affective differences between the two as well so you have this moment of massive political mobilized outrage versus boredom so that leads me to wonder if we're talking about this coagulation of administrative power what is this relationship to the current state of affect in this particular in this particular era especially when other authors are talking about how affect is proliferating beyond all you know beyond all precedent thanks to digital media and yet you're sort of pointing to boredom as sort of characteristic of the administrative coagulation so anyway I think it's fascinating so could you talk a little bit about that that's such a great question and so suggestive yeah I would say that there's a kind of interesting economy of where affect lives so on the one hand affect is possessed in these on the one hand affect is possessed in these technologies and objects like the telephone that can be highly isolating even as they promise forms of sociality so that you have to social networking is an interesting possibility but it's a highly individuating meaning it takes your attention to just the screen and you live in the isolation of that attention to screen for your access to sociality so there's a kind of diminution of the objects that place affect in our lives diminishing meaning making it smaller but lack of them but the proliferation whereas I think that there's at the same time this interesting way in which the affects that we have had around social identity like to go to the first presentation the affect of blackness that organized black power and the blackness beautiful movement and the incredible work that came out of that the affects that come from those types of physicality those are now the milieu of boredom and it's a kind of what happens in these administrative forms is that they don't have to re-script the past the way more classical liberalism to transform past social grievances into kind of contractual solutions but they actually abolish the past by creating a certain kind of affect of oblivion in the very categories that transact your relationship to social institutions like state power so gender becomes affect less you know it becomes more of a recording of whether you are in the permissible bathroom or not it's not people have affect for things that are biopolitical like affect that you are a U.S. citizen and you can walk somewhere with somebody who is undocumented is going to have fear and trepidation so you are affect less you feel it as a joy of birth so there are these weird ways in which this new kind of administrative transformation of social identities into a kind of data formation is producing the kind of affective subject socially here in the inhabitation of social identities that that image suggested yeah may I ask you a question maybe a little bit I think we are over time so maybe if you want to throw the question in the next part we can start from there do you want to throw the question? I think we are much beyond time so thank you for your time thank you