COARSE Spring 2024 Edition

spring 2024

CONTENTS 2

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

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MI LUCHA FEMINISTA

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LOVE, KARNI

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DEAR STRAIGHT MEN

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LOVED BY A WOMAN

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POWER IS IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

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Nach Insaurralde

Valeria Obregón Díaz

Karni Keushgerian

Agata Faran & Allison House

Alice Yuchang Zhang

Renate Jakobsen

‫فلسطين حرة‬

Alessandro Marangelli

FEELINGS TO REMEMBER Nach Insaurralde

FROM THE EDITOR With this edition of COARSE, my main concern as a founder is to make it a sustainable project, which is why the team has expanded, and why we chose to work under the topic of ‘feminist politics’ for this issue. It might sound too self-evident: isn’t all feminism about politics?

Well, it is and it isn’t. Some feminism is definitely about politics. It prods at our relationships, at our common sense, and at our worldviews and asks: Isn’t this kind of messed up? Isn’t this unfair? Isn’t this a contradiction?

This kind of feminism is not easy to ignore. It breaks down the very fabric of existence by pulling slowly at the threads and begging us to accept that a better world is possible.That is what I want to highlight as feminist politics: those acts and practices of solidarity that aim to build networks of sustainability, mutuality, sentiment and safety for everyone to live with dignity, which is achieved by observing the needs of those most disenfranchised in our communities first. In short, a feminism that is fiercely committed to the future.

On the other hand, there are definitely apolitical feminisms. These are the corporate, and sincerely empty, attempts at selfaggrandizement, awareness without systemic change, and hierarchy. The feminism that sees women in positions of power in the government and celebrates as the United States supports yet another genocide. The kind of feminism that preaches self care as a fix of symptoms where there is no effort to address the underlying problems. The kind of feminism that sees itself making an effort and stops for congratulations, never making it to the end goal, or to meet whoever is waving at the sidelines.

Seeing all of this unfolding as we witness some of the largest tragedies our world has to offer, it feels even more important to establish ourselves as feminists. Not only that, to ground ourselves in the soil of a feminism that feels coarse. I’m not against politics that feel softer. I think it’s important to have a time and place where one can engage with others in joyful, pleasurable, and loving manners. Feminist thinkers have demonstrated time and time again that this is indeed necessary, and valuable. In a way, a coarse feminism shouldn’t take space away from this kind of feeling.

But the focus is different; the case for a coarse feminism points to a different need. This is the need to stop being so satisfied with our own takes, our own actions, our own ways of engaging with each other. We need to be shaken off the ground by feminism, to be put in difficult positions, to shift in our seats at the discomfort. If there is so much to change about the world, then we do not only need a feminism that can help us change it, we need a feminism that can change us. I hope COARSE changes something for you.

P.S. As a final note, I’d like to offer you a trigger warning. This edition of COARSE contains discussions on sexual assault, porn, solidarity, feminicide and genocide, love, and feminism.

Nach Insaurralde ‘25 Editor-in-Chief 2

Mi lucha fem Print Series by Valeria Obregón Díaz

My first semester at SLU was in the Fall of 2020, and because of the pandemic and embassies being closed I couldn't get my student visa on time, and had to do my first semester remotely. I took an art course called "Thinking Outside the Print Studio" that semester. This class invited us all to be resourceful and try to make prints with the materials we had around us. Taking this class all the way from Mexico allowed me to explore my identity as a feminist, and it was my first opportunity to share what it meant for me to be a woman in Latin America with the SLU community.

“América Latina será toda Feminista” [Latin America Will All Be Feminist].

October 2020.

Mixed media print in linocut and stencil.

The text in this print translates to Latin America will all be Feminist, Legal Abortion to not die.

The year 2020 was an important year for the feminist fight in Mexico, as it was a year where the number of people at the International Women's Day March in Mexico City exceeded previous numbers and received a lot of media coverage. The intention behind this print was to express how the feminist movement in Latin America is growing every year, and to share the dream that one day, everyone will be a feminist. The part about legalizing abortion calls attention to the urgency of the demand and how every day that passes without legalizing it results in hundreds of women dying. Only one year after I made the print in 2021, abortion was decriminalized in Mexico, which was a big step in the right direction, and several states in the country have legalized it since then. We are currently still fighting for its legalization at a federal level.

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inista

“Corazón feminicida” [Femicide Heart].

November 2020.

Mixed media print

This was my final piece, where I explored different techniques learned throughout the course, including hand-carved stamps in different materials. Corazon Feminicida is a memorial to all the women who were murdered during the first half of 2020. Only in the first six months of 2020, 549 femicides took place in Mexico. This means 549 women were killed because of their gender. This piece is inspired by the card of the heart from the famous Mexican game "La Loteria", which initially represents pain. Instead of adding only one arrow as the original card, I decided to add six in total to represent each month of this year. The labels on each arrow represent the number of femicides per month starting from left (January) to right. In the background, I added a tally mark count to represent the total number. Since 2020 when I created this piece, according to the Department of Security and Civil Protection in Mexico, 3286 women's deaths have been categorized as femicides. Sadly, this piece is still relevant today, four years later, which is why I am sharing it and bringing attention to the still pressing issue.

“Luchar hoy para no morir mañana” [Fight Today, To Not Die Tomorrow].

October 2020.

Stencil spray paint.

I made this piece of art during the unit on stencils.

Continuing with the theme of exploring my relationship with feminism, I knew I wanted to share this design beyond my class with my local community in my hometown, Tijuana. I was able to put ten different spray paints around my neighborhood. The decision behind making this art piece public was bringing attention to the urgency of the fight because it is a matter of life and death. By putting the design in the street, I hoped to make people reflect on the feminist fight and what the absence of this fight could mean to so many women, which could range from microaggressions to death.

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Love, Karni Digital collage and poem by Karni Keushgerian

Heartache looks different for everyone, granted.

But what does heartache look like for those in the world whose lives are halted, lost, and frozen across borders, and across the indefinite margins of what people call “home?” When one’s fundamental ideas of home and love are fossilized in memories that once were and are now lost, where does one look for comfort and for peace?

Often, I wonder if I am capable of loving people whose experiences do not give them access to understanding my life and my region beyond what is on the screens of the West, about the “orient.”

When love is not radical enough to battle the bombs that drop on my childhood room, like a kite making its way to greet me, I refuse to welcome it. The word “solidarity” disguises itself as that kite and dances in the wind reminding me that someone might slightly, artificially, and barely feel the whirlwind of the Beirut Port blast but will never seek to reach its strings beneath the rubble and pull me out.

Do not dilute the love you are asked for by characterizing it as being something you cannot offer. I say this because the disorientation and the disconnection you feel is caused by your fundamental understanding of nationalism, globality, belonging, citizenship, and humanity. All of which I need you to violently and disruptively question.

To love me is like being in a protest: Loud, tireless, and visible.

Often, I wonder if it is fair to ask another to wait when what is coming next is so unsure.

Often, I wonder if I am capable of being and staying in love with someone who, within the system that keeps clawing at our humanity, lives in their power as though it is a cloud floating above; resting on the bed of power that gives them the gifts of mobility, stability, consistency, and love.

As an immigrant, my first heartbreak was marked when I left home for the first time. And, throughout the years, Beirut, my first lover, has made sure to always inject herself in the ways I look at my other lovers. For when one only has memories of a place that no longer exists, those feelings transform into an everlasting heartbreak.

The last time I fell in love, my lover could not wait for me. It would take me too long to find my way to a place of consistency, to find my way back to them. I could love them in time but not in space. And, in the moment of this realization, I turned around to look at Beirut. The curse of her love making its way, yet again, and coating my heart in a layer of unreachable, unseeable mist.

To this, I wonder how one is supposed to love and be loved when the ritual of waiting takes up so much of our spaces on this Earth: Waiting for the war to end, waiting to see a friend, waiting to get a better job, waiting to finish a degree, waiting to have enough energy to make a meal... waiting to learn to love.

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My last lover asked me what it meant to “build” love knowing that time would never be present and willing. Thanks to the conversations I have had with my current god of time, my legal status in the country that bombs my home, I have realized that there is no such thing as time being against you. However, it is true that its kisses leave different marks on the cheeks of many. Time will always be on your side but not everyone will understand your relationship to it. Because, when minutes run out, some will return to their bordered haven. You, on the other hand, will return to an indefinitely long and lonely walk through the margins.

Often, I wonder, is it fair to ask someone you love to always be ready to battle against a system that might tie your hands, when you say words that not many will want to hear? Words such as From The River, To The Sea Because while you make up your mind on what is fair and what is not, I sit on the floor of my room with my phone gripped in my hand and tears running down my cheeks.

I cannot breathe as I see my people go through a genocide.

So, frankly, I no longer care about my immigrant heartbreak, and I no longer care if you are willing to wait or not. I have many things to do, and I am tired.

Love me politically, or do not love me at all.

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Dear Straight

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Men

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“Dear Straight Men” Photo series by Agata Faran Artist Statement by Allison House April 2024 In high school – with my first couple boyfriends – I was a cool girl. “You can watch porn!” “I watch porn, it’s normal.” “These are normal feelings; it doesn’t make me insecure that you watch porn.” “What is your favorite kind of porn?”

I studied, I learned, and I mimicked the behavior. At 15, “you can choke me.” At 16, “you can bruise me.” At 17, “you can pull my hair.” It made me feel sexy. It made me feel desirable.

But then, I became an adult.

My sister just turned sixteen. She is a child in my eyes. Why would anyone want to choke, hit, and pull on a child? Why would a child find this desirable? Was I a child when I was recreating those videos? What is porn doing to us?

Most young boys that I knew watched porn.

They had unrestricted access to it, and their guardians were often none the wiser. It was not just at home; it was at school, and at hangouts, and at practices. As a young adult or teenager, you cannot escape it. Porn was force fed to me.

It was not just me, as a woman, who was force fed porn. Many boys have a nonconsensual first experience with porn – told by both personal stories and studies (Grueter, 2023).

The first time you watched pornography, was it being shown to you or did you seek it out on your own? As a boy, if porn is forced on you, you learn that some things can be forced. You are told that it is normal, it is healthy, that you are a man, and you will enjoy it.

Not only will you enjoy it, but you will learn from it (Grueter, 2023). It will teach you. You will study and fantasize about recreating the scenes. He is in charge. He takes – often a young girl – and He shows her what He can do.

She begs to be brutalized. She begs to be hurt.

She begs for Him to take and take and take.

You expect this to be the case. You find a girl and you take. You take her breath, you take her hair in your hand, you take her throat in your grip. Many times, you will take her voice. She might not say she feels violated or abused or raped. She wanted to try it, too. But just as porn 9

has taught you to take, porn has taught her to please.

Porn has taught her that this is normal in the same way porn taught you that it was normal.

Your willingness to take reinforces this idea.

She must enjoy pain and brutalization. She learns to moan when it hurts, to ask for the things she sees in the films. She will learn that it’s what you want.

Seriously ask yourself: Is it what you want?

Does causing pain turn you on? Does infantilization, the naivete of a virgin make you hard? Or were you taught that? There is a difference between kinks and fetishes and desires, and learned behaviors.

How much are we taught from porn and how much are our own desires? If we can be convinced to follow trends in clothes and hair and food, what makes you think that your sex life is any different?

From, A girl who has had sex Excerpt from John Greuter’s “The Positive and Negative Impacts of Exposure to Pornography during Male Adolescence, and Implications on Sexual Education Policies” from a female subject with a male, pornography consuming partner.

“[The position is] with me laying down on my stomach and him laying down on top of me. It often, um, I know it is kind of extreme, but it feels like rape. Like, I don’t know [laughs]. I just feel like I can’t move. I feel like even if he’s not being rough or anything on me, I just feel like stuffed, like it’s not right. I feel like that’s something that – it just doesn’t – it just doesn’t feel like ... it’s not comfortable. Yeah, it doesn’t feel like that’s what couples do [laughs]. It feels like I’m being forced. I don’t like it.”

Source: John Greuter, Stephanie Sitnick, and Beatrice Turenne. 2023. “The Positive and Negative Impacts of Exposure to Pornography during Male Adolescence, and Implications on Sexual Education Policies,”

Fill in the spaces, add your feminism!

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LOVED BY A WOMAN Essay by Alice Yuchang Zhang

When I think about you, I think about love; along with all the most beautiful things this world can provide. I love them deeply, because they are loved by you (Sappho, Fragment 16).

What a divine portrait of lovingness, and of course, this is coming from a woman’s perspective, and from her desire to love another woman. It was not coming from just any woman, but from one of the greatest lyric poets in history, the “Tenth Muse”, “The Poetess”, Sappho of Lesbos.

What is the most beautiful thing on this dark earth? Sappho expressed that men claimed it to be a marching of horses, ships, or armies; but to her, it was what her love interest loved.

“The most beautiful thing… I say, it is what you love.” (Sappho, Fragment 16). She put her on the crown of love, giving her the power equivalent to a Goddess, because what a God loves is something divine and beautiful.

Sappho recognized that her love’s heart is the origin of beauty. It is not even love itself that is most beautiful, but it is what the loved ones love that has the power to define beauty, an intimate and passionate claim. Sappho was willing to shift and adjust her own morals and judgments according to what the love of her life desires, because she had full trust and adored the heart of her loved one to give her this power of love, the power to define beauty.

She offered acceptance and willingness to see the world through her love’s eyes and to love what she loved.

In a patriarchal world, what men worship is the resemblance of power, but what Sappho worships is beauty itself, and it is represented by the woman she loved. This world, from ancient Greece to the modern day, put the

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love for power over anything else, and praised power to be the only thing worth pursuing after.

Instead of love for power, Sappho justified the power of love.

What we should be going after is love itself.

According to this woman poet, the masculine narrative has tried to use love to justify violence and war, treating women as either a trophy or a possession. Yet, in the end, women always ended up taking the blame for the consequences of war and destruction. Helen, the woman behind the great Trojan War, was put to the court of blame when two men were fighting over her love. However, Helen’s own motivation and reason were always left out of narratives from male authors. In Homer’s Odyssey, he spent pages explaining how Helen is the reason behind the Trojan War, while barely letting her speak for herself, even when Odysseus met her. No one tried to look behind her own will and desires to leave her home and everything behind in the name of love. She was condemned, blamed, or neglected in history for going after what she loved. The Trojan War was allegedly started in the name of love, yet the common narrative somehow leaves out the only part where love takes initiative, because behind the heart of this love, was a woman.

Sappho not only saw the irony in this, but she also provided understanding and compassion for Helen.

Sappho’s compassion for Helen is significant in history because she attempted to justify this most criticized woman in many historical literary works. She noticed how Helen never

got a stage to express and defend herself.

Instead, Helen was only given the recognition of “the most beautiful woman” of her time, as her beauty was what started the war – but not men’s own arrogance; men fell in love with her physical attractiveness, but not her mind or her heart. Then, a man’s love seems so superficial, violent, and dangerous. They claim to love in order to possess, to show power and dominance. If they cannot get the love they desire, they would cast a war at the cost of sacrificing other men’s lives to take back what is lost. The love they show lacks emotion and understanding. On the contrary, Sappho’s love was gentle and respectful. She loved not for the beauty on the outside, but more for what a beautiful heart was attracted to.

She did not praise love itself, but preached for her object of love, and for everything covered by it. She imagined Helen running away, putting her responsibility aside. At this moment when she was after love, she was finally her own individual, free from the rest of the world. According to Sappho, Helen’s love is worth praising because her love involved sacrificing. She was willing to give up everything under her royal name and fled from comfort just to be with the man she loved.

(Sappho, Fragment 16). To be loved by a woman, it is an accepting and gentle love out of appreciation; to love what she loved because she believed in the power of beauty.

To love what she was because she believed in the power of love. For beauty herself should also love and attract other fine things and that is enough reason to justify and believe in love.

It is not the case that Sappho is calm and loving because she received the love back. Similar to Menelaus losing Helen, Sappho lost her love, Anaktoria. “Let her astray,” (Fragment 16).

Sappho keeping her promise to recognize what her lover loves is more divine than anything else. She let Anaktoria go to pursue her own happiness and love because she knew nothing would compare to what a beautiful heart desires. Anaktoria was gone and Sappho was still longing for her, yet that should not be the reason to force her to stay, even in the name of love. Sappho is letting her beloved carry herself away, along with her love and blessing, because to love is to sacrifice and to let the woman you loved go after what she is loving now. However, drifting apart does not

take away the love that was once shared between them.

Through the metaphor of Helen, Sappho set herself and her love free. These three women’s paths intertwined at this very moment as they all carried the desire to love and to be loved, as well as the burden of not being able to be loved by what they loved. Maybe this poem is also a reminder for Sappho herself, just like Helen and Anaktoria. Sappho still had a choice to move forward with the reminder that she was what her lover once loved, which made her something divine and beautiful as well.

In a male predominant world, Sappho’s narrations for love were evolutional and inspiring. Instead of being the object of love as a woman, Sappho took the pen and became a powerful voice to express this beautiful feeling.

She truly worshiped women and treated women as divine beings themselves, giving them power by giving them love. Femininity took the stage in history, showing the soft side of love in comparison with men’s aggression.

Men choose war while women choose love.

Sappho’s queer representation in history serves as a powerful encouragement for the modern-day revolution and feminist movement. Without her and her words, many of us would be lost and blinded by the blandness and sterileness of the patriarchal hetero-normative way of expressing love.

Sappho reminded us how accepting and gentle it can be to love and to be loved by a woman.

Source: Sappho and Stanley Lombardo. Sappho: Poems and Fragments. Hackett, 2002.

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Power is in the eye

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of the beholder i

By Renate Jakobsen March 2024.

Collage.

Where men are more likely to be assigned leadership attributes such as analytical, competent, and dependable, women are more likely to be described as scattered, indecisive, and compassionate; all words that are used to make them less powerful.

Studies show that in mixed gender groups, men speak 70% of the time (Chemaly, 2015). Women are rarely viewed as the most powerful, influential, or relevant speakers, yet they are stereotyped as being too talkative (Doyle, 2014). A study of U.S senators shows that men who spoke more often, showed a strong relationship between power and volubility, while women who did the same did not show the same relationship (Brescoll,, 2011). Men who talk more in professional settings are likely to receive a proportional ncrease in perceived power, while women who do the same are not. Women are not only less likely to be in positions of power, but when they are, they are viewed differently. The perspective of women in positions of power is evidently biased, as shown on websites like Rate My Professor. Terms such as “brilliant” or “intelligent” appear in men’s reviews, according to research, while words like “annoying”, “harsh” or “unfair” were more common in reviews of women (MacNell, et. Al., 2015).

Women are constantly in a fight to be perceived as serious and respectable due to gendered prejudices constantly putting them at a disadvantage.

For men, power is something they are given.

For women, power is something we must take.

Power is not something unbiased, but something subject to the views and biases of the viewer.

Power is in the eye of the beholder.

Sources: Brescoll, V. L., 2011, Who Takes the Floor and Why: Gender, Power, and Volubility in Organizations. Administrative Science Quarterly, 56(4), 622-641. https://doi.org/10.1177/0001839212439994 Chemaly, S., 2015, In Mixed Gender Groups, Can You Guess Who Talks The Most? Role Reboot, http://www.rolereboot.org/culture-and-politics/details/2015-10-in-mixed- gender-groups-can-you-guess-who-talks-themost/ Doyle, J. E. S., 2014, The ‘Feminized Society’ Myth. In These Times. https://inthesetimes.com/article/our-feminized-society Jaschik, S., 2015, Rate my word choice. Inside higher ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/02/09/new-analysis-rate-my-professors- finds-patterns-words-used-describemen-and-women MacNell, L., Driscoll, A., Hunt, A.N., 2015, What’s in a Name: Exposing Gender Bias in Student Ratings of Teaching. Innov High Educ 40, 291–303 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10755-014-9313-4

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“‫”فلسطين حرة‬

By Alessandro Marangelli [Free Palestine].

March 2024.

Linocut print.

Millions of people across the world are calling for a free Palestine. Free from colonialism. Free from Western imperialism. Free from Zionism.

Free from all the intersecting oppressions Palestinians endure on a daily basis. As I write this statement, it is hard to convey a message that tries to stay true to the resistance and the horrors that have been unfolding since October 7th, since the Nakba in 1948. Rather, since British colonialism before then.

Palestinian and non-Palestinian activists, scholars, parents, students, workers and countless more advocate for Palestine as also a feminist struggle, and I too believe it to be one. People on the ground, as well as NGOs and international organizations have been documenting the abuses that the genocidal, western-backed Zionist state of Israel has been committing. The liberation of Palestine is a feminist struggle because Zionism, like all forms of injustice and persecution, oppresses people in intersectional ways, such as through pink-washing genocide. Israel is proven to target reproductive rights by intentionally forcing pregnant people to give birth at check points, forcibly sterilizing women, and forcing Palestinians in Gaza into living in a mass concentration camp (Eid, 2023), sexualized torture (i.e., rape, denigration, stripping, etc.).

Yet, until Palestinians are treated with humanity, or even as citizens, Palestinian liberation struggles will continue to be a feminist struggle. Until we stop ignoring Palestinian men as if their suffering doesn’t count, it will be a Feminist struggle. Until Palestinians are not returned the rights to selfdetermination, Palestinian liberation will be a Feminist struggle. Until all Palestinians are free, it will be a Feminist struggle. Without a free Palestine, there cannot be free women, men and non-binary people.

Writing this statement has been hard as I reflect on my geopolitical position in all of this.

As I wonder what I can do amidst all the lies spread by the US, my own government, and

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mass media, I ground myself through the solidarity, empathy, and compassion that I see around the world and experience within my own community. Still, the knowledge that billions of tax dollars are being sent to Israel to carry on its abominations also makes me question my actions, together with all the falsehood that I feel I have to debunk. There is more to this than what is being said, especially in understanding broader political economic structures; like the deals that Israel has with fossil fuel companies on the reservoirs of natural gas in the Gaza Sea. Making the piece not only took a vast amount of time because it was my second linocut print and first reduction piece, but mostly because of the emotional energy it required. The Palestinian struggle has been closer to my heart than many others. I do not know if it is because of the geographical proximity, or the similarity between Palestinian towns and hills and my home, or because of all of this and more. Every day I think about Palestine, and every time I worked on this piece, I thought more about it. At times it felt too overwhelming, forcing me to stop the carving.

In the last session, as I was writing the title ‫ فلسطين حرة‬on the prints, I was feeling very emotional to see it all come together. As I was listening to shuffled music from my playlist of liked tracks, the song Rossa Palestina by Mahim Ahmed started playing on my phone. At that moment, I almost burst into tears.

Source: Eid, H. (2023, December 30). On the Gaza ‘shoah’ and the ‘banality of evil.’ Al Jazeera. https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/12/30/o n-the-gaza-shoah-and-the-banality-of

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‫فلسطين حرة‬

FEELINGS TO REMEMBER: COMPLICATING SOLIDARITIES Essay by Nach Insaurralde

Introduction I sit at the table in front of my laptop writing this and I get distracted by the inundating presence of my phone. I turn to social media for some relief from the burden of thinking and I see Gaza. Bisan, a young storyteller turned journalist, tells us about the current genocide against the Palestinians. She speaks of her people being bombed, about losing hope in her own survival. It creates a puncture in my heart, a rush of anguish in my body. I turn my phone off, yet the anguish remains.

I don’t want to forget, but even if I wanted to, my body wouldn’t. I may not know the pain, but I will remember it.

As I envision what this essay is going to look like, I feel the need to establish a couple of remarks on my own positionality. My name is Ignacio Insaurralde, and I come from José C. Paz, Argentina, one of the most dangerous cities in the country. My parents, and myself, are working class, and I identify as South American white, locating myself in the privilege of my skin color in my own native town and in diverse steps of subjugation of international racism and ethnocentrism at the same time. I am also openly gay, and visibly androgynous, non-binary. My home country has been and continues to be exploited and looted by imperial powers of the Global North, which is where I live. My unique position as someone who has lived most of their life in the Global 17

South yet speaks the language of the colonizer, lives at the home of the empire, and moves through different axis of power and subjugation with certain fluidity has led me to develop a very specific kind of solidarity, one that is based on feelings. The contradiction of the different interstices that make up my positionality creates contradictory feelings, which in turn nurture a complex, yet fertile ground in which the fruits of solidarity grow.

After a discussion on the work of Kaplan, feminist theory professor Clare Hemmings argued that sometimes empathy in the context of feminism turns to a “cannibalization of the other masquerading as care” (Hemmings 152). I want to avoid this. So before writing this, I want to be clear with both myself and the reader: this essay will not be about Gazans. It will be about me, and about how what I feel about Palestine is rooted in my own history, my own feelings, and my own experience of structural oppression and power. I will, from the honesty of my knowledge and my feelings, mobilize concepts pertinent to memory work and affect theory to answer the question: How can local affective memory practices sustain transnational anti-imperialist solidarity with Palestine?

This will be done through an exploration of emotion, touching on concepts such as wonder, perplexity, affective solidarity, and sorrow. I explore how my experience of history and my own positionality connect me with these feelings, and how I reach solidarity through them, arriving at a collective and pluralist solidarity rooted in emotion.

This essay will not, however, attempt to outline ways to act upon that solidarity.

That is a path each of us must labor for ourselves.

Feelings The initial question to answer when introducing affect theory is: Why care? This is led by the assumption that reason and emotions are separate, and that reason is more valuable, hence, one shouldn’t be paying much attention to feelings. This is, however, not true.

Feelings permeate every single choice we make, and we experience them all the time. In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, critical feminist theorist Sara Ahmed breaks down the basis of this assumption. She argues that “focusing on emotions as mediated rather than immediate reminds us that knowledge cannot be separated from the bodily world of feeling and sensation” (Ahmed 171). What she, then, calls a mediated feeling, is one that resembles ‘bodily knowledge’ (Ahmed 7), where our memory of a circumstance comes back to leave an impression on the body as we react to the repeated circumstance in the present. In this way, feelings can be an avenue to explore knowledge differently and vice versa. If “in order to know differently we have to feel differently” (Hemmings 150), then familiarizing ourselves with the texture of our own and other’s emotional landscapes can be more than just personally enriching, it can be informational.

Clare Hemmings articulates in a reflection of standpoint and affect theory that “knowledge is created through struggle between dominant and marginal voices and perspectives, and between one version of the truth and another” (155). In this sense, the contradictory experiences of privilege and oppression I embody can be an instrument for epistemology, one that embraces a plurality of experiences and allows space for others to do the same. This, I’ll argue, can be practiced through wonder. As defined by Sara Ahmed, wonder “is about learning to see the world as something that does not have to be, and as

something that came to be, over time, and with work” (180). Through wonder, we can move beyond simpler narrations of history as a linear, fixed timeline into affective experiences of events and circumstances. Wonder demands a humble curiosity and a responsible reading of historical memory, one that embraces the contradictions of emotion to foster plurality.

Wonder stems from a feminist ‘passion’ (Ahmed 183) that illustrates a commitment to futurity –we can examine history by engaging the feelings of the past with the feelings of the present, inspiring a desire for something better for ourselves and others... Inspiring solidarity.

Perplexity, like wonder, can be a useful tool in exploring historicity. Perplexity marks “the tension between overlapping, opposing, and asymmetric forces or fields of power”, manifesting itself as “individualized feelings of loss, anxiety, [and] confusion” (Ramamurthy 525). In “Material Consumers, Fabricating Subjects: Perplexity, Global Connectivity Discourses, and Transnational Feminist Research”, anthropologist Priti Ramamurthy explicates perplexity as a consequence of contradictory consumption practices. I wonder if for the purposes of examining my own relationship with history through perplexity, I could also explain my anxieties, unfolding the contradictions and heterogeneity of my own historical memory practices, using this concept. That is to say, if other kinds of contradictions, like the contradiction between our historical identity and our physical context, can also produce perplexed subjects. In the context of historical memory, perplexity could be a more materially specific way of explaining the consequences of contradictory feelings produced by conflicting circumstances. It can speak to the overwhelming feeling of realizing there are things that shouldn’t be happening, but they are, and open pathways to ask pertinent questions through wonder.

When considering my own relationship with history, my positionality takes once again center stage. As a young Argentinian, growing up meant understanding the plea for memory, truth and justice that tried to repair the damage done by the last military dictatorship, which governed us de facto from 1976 to 1983.

The number 30 000, after the forcefully disappeared, was etched in my memory as a

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reminder that the state could inject terror onto civilians, and they did.

As a queer individual, learning about our own specific suffering was another layer added to this mobilization of memory in the pursuit of justice. The different efforts carried out by the Archivo de la Memoria Trans, with which I have a personal relationship, and the movements that change the number 30 000 to 30 400, honoring the at least 400 people who were targeted by the government because of their queerness, who didn’t make it to the official count, informed my understanding of where I stand. As far as ‘knowing my history’ can go, the truly transformative experience was engaging with these emotional narratives, and learning that in a very literal sense, it could have been my body that didn’t make it to the count. But it wasn’t.

Instead, my body is the one that works and pays taxes in America, the country in which this terror was planned. My body is the one that gets on a plane and leaves after having learned all of this. My body is the one that enjoys the privilege of continuing with my life, businessas-usual. But thanks to all of these efforts, I remember. These strategies to “counter forgetting” (Hirsch 3) gesture at the desire for a better future, something that remains consistent throughout feminist literature (Hirsch 4, Ramamurthy 543, Hemmings 157), and something that consistently informs my anti-imperialist struggle. If my body is here, perhaps I can use it to struggle against the empire, mobilizing whatever strength I accumulate to use my emotional understanding of the past as a bridge toward a better future. In this way, perplexity and historical memory lead to solidarity as a solution for the contradiction, and as a way of aligning myself once again with who my own experiences of historical narratives tells me I am.

The contradiction of my experience of history comes from my living as an expat in the Global North for the last five years. Because of this, the content of my emotional historical experience doesn’t match the context I’m in. I respond to things as a queer Argentinian, as a Latin American non-binary person, and as someone who grew up with white privilege

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even if the way I’m read and the context I’m in doesn’t require, and many times, doesn’t have space for that. In fact, many times the context I’m in in the Global North requires that I forget this history so that I can more easily engage with imperial politics as an insider, producing feelings of loss, anxiety, and even despair. The usefulness of perplexity is that it describes feelings that are easily located on the body, and thus, it can give us clearer clues to understand how it is that my body, its discourses, and its “experiences are shaped and contained by culture and language” (Ramamurthy 525). It is thus that I can comprehend my specific relationship with history is a product of being born a non-binary Argentinian, and that my body’s physical uprooting and consequent more direct engagement with Globalization and colonialism impacts me. An example of where all of these concepts come together is affective solidarity.

Mobilized by Clare Hemmings in “Affective solidarity: Feminist reflexivity and political transformation”, this concept “draws on a broader range of emotions [...] and the desire for connection, [and is] proposed as a way of focusing on modes of engagement that start from the affective dissonance that feminist politics necessarily begins from” (148). This dissonance is where perplexity comes in, produced by a disagreement between who we are and who we are expected to be, something Hemmings posits as an essential struggle to realize the need for mobilization. This is an essential notion, as it allows us to move from the individual to the collective.

Sorry is not a feeling. It can be appropriate in certain situations, but it’s mostly something we say to deflect, to end the conversation.

‘Feeling’ sorry requires little effort, little action, little searching beyond the five letters of the word. Sorrow, instead, can be a consequence of solidarity, or lead us to it, and I will define it as a visceral experience of emotional suffering that shows up as grief, sadness, loss, and anger. As a powerful stance in aligning ourselves and our energy with an experience of suffering, whether ours or someone else’s, it requires a response. Sorrow has a direction, and as thus it has potential to guide us toward or through action into solidarity. The key

difference between this feeling and perplexity or wonder is that it is mostly felt with others.

One of the most popular kinds of mobilizations for the queer and Argentinian communities I belong to are public performances of grief such as mass funerals, candlelight vigils, and marches. It has been the same for manifestations in solidarity with Palestine throughout the World. That an enormous amount of people can mobilize similar affects to show up in solidarity is, to me, a sign that the feelings they are going through are marked by similar emotions of perplexity, empathy, wonder, and sorrow. As ways of knowing through feeling, these emotions can be powerful tools in the drive toward activism.

Focusing on the Third World or Global South from which I come, this solidarity stems from our own historical memory. In Argentina, one of the few public figures to pronounce themselves against the Palestinian Genocide has been Norita Cortiñas, one of the mothers who stewards the demand for memory, truth, and justice over the last dictatorship as part of the Mothers and Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo. As someone who refuses to forget, she brings the picture of her forcibly disappeared son, Gustavo Cortiñas, around her neck to march for a Free Palestine, and mobilizes the affects of an Argentinian mother, as well as of the history of terror, to demand for justice.

As Viviana Beatriz MacManus powerfully illustrates in “Gendered Memories, Collective Subjectivity, and Solidarity Practices in Women’s Oral Histories”, state terror imposes a trauma that is shared and cyclical. By recovering this trauma through historical memory and oral history, women “recuperate their positions as protagonists of this history and reveal the radical politics of solidarity” that are buried through state-sponsored olvido, or forgetting (MacManus 137). Memory work seeking to struggle against “daily acts of forgetting” (Hirsch 7) highlights the cyclical character of both trauma and violence to expose the effort that forgetting entails. As feminist activism has time and time again shown,

sometimes remembering is the only option, and it can only happen in community.

That the Third World can picture itself in solidarity as a community was proposed by Chandra Tapalde Mohanty. After Benedict Anderson’s reflections on nationalism, she posits that an “imagined community of third world oppositional struggles” can emerge to trace alliances and collaborations transnationally (Tapalde Mohanty 4). An important lesson to learn from transnational feminist activism is that the narrative seeking to binarize categories and establish discrete concepts is, in reality, masking a continuum of existence that can be embraced as a whole. In this way feelings, specifically sorrow, can be a form of illustrating that continuum. In aligning ourselves with Palestinian suffering we are forming transnational connections, where oppression, or at least the feelings it causes, are shared. While the author argues that a common history of struggle with empire can be a stronghold of solidarity (Tapalde Mohanty 8), I think we can consider how that solidarity is built through emotional experiences and connections.

Conclusion In this essay, I’ve explored my own connection to different concepts pertaining to affect theory, how I make this connection through history, and why this leads me to solidarity. I have observed that a pluralist epistemology can emerge from feelings, and that my contradictory experiences of privilege and oppression can be productively explored through wonder, perplexity, affective solidarity, and sorrow. This allowed me to move between two different spectrums: one of feeling, history, and knowledge, on one side, and another one defined through personal, political, and collective aspects of solidarity on the other.

The utility of this analysis is that it fills in the gaps when it comes to understanding why we do activism, by providing us with language to speak to the connection between emotions and politics, as well as providing platforms for connection toward justice for Palestine, and for all other oppressed peoples of the world. I prefer to embrace the contradiction and the difficulty of my own complexities as an avenue to solidarity rather than give my energy over to social apathy and disassociation.

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After understanding that solidarity is affective, and it can be individual and communal, and knowing we can move with certain fluidity between these ideas, it’s easier to understand why Bisan hasn’t pierced just my heart, but many others. What we feel for her is not only sadness, it is sorrow. As such, we are moved to act, because us Third Worlders have felt it in our historical memory. When I say I may not know the pain, but I will remember it, I mean I will remember it just as I remember the story of so many Argentinians, especially Trans Argentinians, who were also crushed by imperialism, and this memory will make me perplexed whenever I am asked to forget.

This memory will change me, and if I can’t change the empire, then who can?

Sources: Ahmed, Sara. “The Cultural Politics of Emotion.” Edinburgh University Press eBooks, 2014, https://doi.org/10.1515/9780748691142.

Hemmings, Clare. “Affective Solidarity: Feminist Reflexivity and Political Transformation.” Feminist Theory, vol. 13, no. 2, Aug. 2012, pp. 147–61. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700112442643.

Hirsch, Marianne. “Introduction: Practicing Feminism, Practicing Memory.” Women Mobilizing Memory, edited by Ayşe Gül Altýnay et al., Columbia University Press, 2019, pp. 1–23.

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” Boundary 2, vol. 12/13, 1984, pp. 333–58. https://doi.org/10.2307/302821.

Ramamurthy, Priti. “Material Consumers, Fabricating Subjects: Perplexity, Global Connectivity Discourses, and Transnational Feminist Research.” Cultural Anthropology, vol. 18, no. 4, 2003, pp. 524–50.

Viviana Beatriz MacManus. “Gendered Memories, Collective Subjectivity, and Solidarity Practices in Women’s Oral Histories”. Disruptive Archives: Feminist Memories of Resistance in Latin America's Dirty Wars. 2020, pp 133-161.

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the team

contributors

Managing Editors

Valeria Obregón Díaz

Allison House Agata Faran

Contributing Editor Cas Bernardini

Editor-in-Chief Nach Insaurralde

Class of 2024.

Karni Keushgerian Class of 2025.

Allison House Class of 2026.

Agata Faran Class of 2026.

Alice Zhang Class of 2025.

Alessandro Marangelli Class of 2024.

COARSE is an independent publication brought to you

by The Dub, the feminist resource center at St. Lawrence University.

Canton, N.Y., U.S.A. Spring 2024 issue.

Renate Jakobsen Class of 2026.

Nach Insaurralde Class of 2025.

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