Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference 14-17th December 2016 Program Index

Fiona Lee
(1959)
National Archives, Racial Repertoires: The Afterlives of Chua Mia Tee’s National Language Class
National Language Class, a painting of Chinese students learning Malay in anticipation of making a new
nation, occasions a reflection on what Singapore has become and what could have been. This paper
examines the theatre company, Spell#7’s dramatization of the painting into performance, asking what
analyzing inter-media translation offers in understanding the politics of race, language, and nation. If active
forgetfulness is essential to nation-making, then Spell#7’s dramatization materializes these memory erasures
as a set of bodily gestures through which teacher and student communicate. These actions constitute a
racial repertoire, underscoring the performative, embodied nature of race, and present racial subject
formation as a pedagogical exercise that facilitates the nation’s active forgetting. Developing new
methodologies for thinking the relationship between aesthetics and politics, I consider how the forms and
histories of painting and performance—usually studied separately—shape one another while illuminating
their respective blind spots in producing cultural knowledge.
2K
Reshaping Contemporary Gender (Chair, Margaret Mayhew)
Kaisu Hynnä
Communicating fat pride and fat sexuality in the Finnish fa(t)shion blog More to Love
Although activism is often seen referring to demonstrations, activism has, from the late 1990s, intertwined
with popular youth media. Popular context makes activism visible, but also affects the way things are
presented. One example of this is “fat activism” – activism that fights against fat-discrimination in society.
Due to the claims of popular media, fat activism puts an emphasis on the attractiveness of fat-identified
subjects. This paper analyzes the Finnish fa(t)shion blog More to Love (2009–2013). The blog’s quest to
change its followers’ reactions to their bodies is discussed as “fat pride” (in comparison to gay pride). Pride
and shame are understood as affects with both discursive and material dimensions. Central questions
discussed are: how are fat sexuality and pride communicated in the blog texts and photographs, and how
may pride and other affects be realized in the living, breathing bodies of the bloggers and their followers.
Naomi Merritt Queering the Pose: The Disruption of Heteronormative Visual Pleasure in Drag Fashion Modelling
Fashion modelling is an important frame of reference for drag queen culture in two key ways: firstly, in
terms of the bodily stylisation that endows models with a gendered identity, and secondly, through fashion’s
promotion of idealised female bodies as sites of heteronormative visual pleasure. In conventional fashion
modelling, poses and gestures associated with either masculinity or femininity are rehearsed and repeated
to become culturally accepted (and potentially problematic) signifiers of gender. This paper draws upon
theories of gender performativity and the gaze in order to examine the “queering of the pose” in drag queen
culture: that is where the pose is “made strange”. This paper will argue that while poses that serve to
reinforce gender norms dominate mainstream fashion, moments of resistance and subversion that move
beyond the gender binary and disrupt heteronormative visual pleasure can be found in the “queer” poses of
drag models.
Kristy Seymour Briefs: Gender bending in Australian Contemporary Circus
This paper reports on a case study from my doctoral research: Bodies, Temporality and Spatiality in
Australian Contemporary Circus. The focus of my paper will be investigating how the work of Australian
contemporary circus collective “Briefs Factory” pushes the boundaries of gender and identity through
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