Viscous Expectations
Free

Viscous Expectations

By Cara Judea Alhadeff
Free
Book Description

Orchestrating text and color photography through the lens of vulnerability, Viscous Expectations explores embodied democracy as the intersection of technology, aesthetics, eroticism, and ethnicity. Cara Judea Alhadeff integrates the personal and theoretical with the visual and textual, she mobilizes a comprehensive exploration of our bodies as contingent modes of relation. She cites philosophers and artists from Spinoza to Audre Lorde, Louise Bourgeois, and Édouard Glissant, who have explored collaborative and uncanny conditions of becoming vulnerable. In the context of multiple constituencies, creativity becomes a political imperative in which cognitive and somatic risk-taking gives voice to social justice.

Table of Contents
  • Cover
  • Half Title Page
  • Copyright
  • Title Page
  • Table of Contents
  • Philosophical Congruencies
  • List of Abbreviations
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction
  • Part I: Embodied Energies: Convenience Culture and the Violence of the Everyday
    • Chapter 1. The Illusion of Neutrality in 21st Century Democracy
      • Mediocrity, Morality, and The Sanctity of Normalcy
      • Self-Censorship: Toxic Mimicry, Internalized Fascism, and Phallic Norms
      • Internalized Apartheids
      • Institutionalized Anti-Intellectualism
    • Chapter 2. Entitlement and Equality as Submission
      • Difference as Contamination: The Insinuating Body
      • Post-Humanism: Digital Visualizing Technologies
      • Irrational Wombs
      • Fictional Bodies: Probing The Private and The Public
      • Prostheses and Parasites
  • Part II: Intermedialities: De-Solving the Tyranny of Normalcy
    • Chapter 3. Vulnerability and the Politics of the Imagination
      • Becoming-Vulnerable
      • Audre Lorde’s Erotic Politics: The Erotics of the Uncanny
      • Inhabiting Ambiguity and Contradiction
    • Chapter 4. Violence and the Sacred: Julia Kristeva and George Bataille’s Archeologies of Prohibition
      • Entropic Excursions
      • The Spectacle of the Invisible: Ob-scenity and The Explicit
      • The Passion According to Teresa of Avila
      • Digesting The Stranger Within: The Dialectics of Self-Sacrifice
      • Practicing the Abject: Molecular Meat Round One / First Course
      • “Articulations of the Unconscious” / le monstre du carrefour
  • Part III: Embodied Democracy:Vulnerability and the Potential of Socio-Erotic Ethics
    • Chapter 5. Rhizomatic Vulnerabilities for Radical Citizenship
      • Practicing (Anti-)Critique: Emancipatory Pedagogies and Becoming the Impossible
      • The Scandal of Ekphrasis: Transfiguration, Collaboration, and Transdisciplinarity
      • Unfixed: Anomalies and Aporias
      • Pedagogical Promiscuities
      • Coercion of the Real: Détournement and Unrepresentability
      • Protean Sexualities: Spinoza’s what a body can do?
      • Female Ejaculation as Social Emancipation
      • A Pedagogy of Trauma: Visualizing the Uncanny Ménage à Trois: ars erotica, ars theoretica, ars politica
    • Chapter 6. Disfigurement: Somatizing Our Liberation
      • Aesthetic Obscuratism: The Ineffable, The Incomplete, L’Informe
      • Anxious Interventions and Uncanny Improvisations: Molecular Meat Round Two/Second Course
      • (De)Construction of Sight: (Dis)Assembling (Un)Becoming-Animal
      • Gestating the Unknown
  • Conclusion
  • Epilogue
  • List of Illustrations
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • Filmography
  • Index
  • Back Cover
The book hasn't received reviews yet.
Also Available On
Categories
Curated Lists