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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Monday, October 24, 2005

Aide-memoire


The children’s game, “My Grandmother's Trunk,” a storytelling website
explains, goes like this:

The first person begins by saying, "In my grandmother's trunk there is an airplane," or any item beginning with the letter "A." The second says, "In my grandmother's trunk there is an airplane and a bottle," and so on until you reach the end of the alphabet. Each person must concentrate and really listen to be able to repeat all the items and add a new one. If you are playing with young children, keep it simple, and let them know you'll help if their memory fails.


UD remembers playing this game. It’s a lot of fun. And now that UD’s getting up there in years and beginning to worry about keeping her memory sharp, it seems to her that she might benefit from a more challenging version of the same game.

For instance, she could use this description of a paper recently given at the University of California, Santa Cruz, as a source of new items in her grandmother’s trunk:



Professor Anna M. Agathangelou will be participating on a collaborative panel on the questions surrounding racialized sexualized politics within the neoliberal political economy through an understanding of empire. Professor Agathangelou’s work on geographies and migrations aims to make visible the relations of power within the production of knowledge, in its disciplinary and interdisciplinary forms. It aims to locate these processes with the larger geopolitical contexts of the production and reproduction of empire. For this discussion, Professor Agathangelou will draw on her book in progress, co-authored with L.H.M. Ling, Seductions of Empire: Complicity, Desire, and the Insecurity in Contemporary World Politics.

The Politics colloquium utilizes a transnational feminist Marxist analysis to examine the role that desire and desire industries have come to play within the re-structuring of the neoliberal political economy, with particular focus on racialized, sexualized formations within “peripheral states.” This discussion builds upon Professor Agathangelou’s book, The Global Political Economy of Sex: Desire, Violence, and Insecurity in the Mediterranean Nation-States to pose broad questions about the politics of exploitation, violence and desire, and the role of transnational feminist praxis, feminist International Relations, and cross bordered social movements challenging the racialized, gendered violences of transnational capitalism, neocolonialism and empire.

Anna Agathangelou is Assistant Professor of Women's Studies and Politics at York University and the Co-Director of the Global Change Institute based in Nicosia, Cyprus. She has published numerous articles on issues of migration, reproduction and formal/informal economies, transnational desire industries, decolonizing feminist methodologies, security and militarization, and cross-bordered feminist interventions into the neoliberal political economy. Her work engages in debates within the fields of feminist and cultural studies, international relations, international political economy and sexuality, human rights and trauma studies.



Okay. So.

“In my grandmother’s trunk there is a transnational desire industry.”

“In my grandmother’s trunk there is transnational desire industry, and a decolonizing feminist methodology.”

“In my grandmother’s trunk there is a transnational desire industry, a decolonizing feminist methodology, and a cross-bordered feminist intervention.”

“In my grandmother’s trunk there is a transnational desire industry, a decolonizing feminist methodology, a cross-bordered feminist intervention, and a transnational feminist praxis.“

“In my grandmother’s trunk there is a transnational desire industry, a decolonizing feminist methodology, a cross-bordered feminist intervention, a transnational feminist praxis, and a politics of exploitation, violence and desire.”

“In my grandmother’s trunk there is a transnational desire industry, a decolonizing feminist methodology, a cross-bordered feminist intervention, a transnational feminist praxis, a politics of exploitation, violence and desire, and a transnational feminist Marxist analysis.”



Not bad! Old UD hasn’t lost her knack.