Cultural Studies

This paper discusses the guerrilla gardens planted at the University of Victoria using Félix Guattari’s concept of singularization. Rather than explaining reasons for planting the garden, or speaking on behalf of others who were involved, this paper argues that these forms of representation are complicit with hegemonic procedures of classification, judgement and decision-making. Instead, this paper puts forward a conception of relational politics, in hopes of interrogating the procedures that classify and contain processes of political transformation. This paper interrogates processes of habit, recognition and judgement in the context of the University of Victoria, and the ways in which they were problematized through the guerrilla gardens. Protest, bureaucracy and resolution are conceptualized as interlocking forces that inhibit radical political transformation. It is argued that the guerrilla gardens were enveloped by a process of open-ended change or singularization, which seems inchoate because it does not fit within established categories of political analysis. Political theory can affirm processes of singularization by connecting and deepening political problems, rather than seeking their resolution. The article concludes with a more general discussion of singularization and the promise of relational political theory.

What makes it possible (and maybe even inevitable) for protesters to be condemned, dismissed, or infantilized? I will suggest that these tendencies are built into the structure of protest itself, and the types of questions that are asked about it. This paper seeks to destabilize these questions by tracing out some of their assumptions, and situating them within broader historical tendencies. I will argue that these questions reproduce assumptions about politics that have their roots in liberal notions of civil disobedience and Marxist imperatives of counterhegemony, and that these assumptions create serious difficulty for thinking creatively about the politics of (and beyond) protest. These discourses help to produce a narrow form of politics that is centered on the state as the locus of politics. However, I will also argue that anti-Olympics activists have avoided capitulating to this form of politics. Although they make use of these dominant discourses, contemporary anti-Olympic practices also point to alternative forms of politics that destabilize sovereignty and open up new political possibilities. If we continue to ask the same old questions of protests and protesters (Who are they? What do they want? How do they propose to get it?), we will miss these alternative politics at work. New questions are called for, questions that call into question traditional forms of politics, as well as enabling an understanding of the way new activist practices destabilize these traditional forms and point to new ones. This paper ends by seeking out different sites of anti-Olympics activism where politics works differently.

This thesis presents a critique of counterhegemony, arguing that imperatives of unity and coherence in social movement theory and practice tend to limit potentials for transformation.  I use the ‘new social movement theory’ of Alberto Melucci and Alain Touraine in order to foreground the problem of intelligibility.  Laclau and Mouffe’s conception of articulation is used to develop the problem of intelligibility, and helps to avoid reification.  However, I argue that their concept of counterhegemony presents a blackmail where social movements either represent themselves in universal terms, or are cast as merely fragmented and particular.  The Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts molarization and molecularization are used to argue that social movements that appear fragmented or vague may in fact be transformative in unexpected ways.  The final chapter focuses on a recent guerilla garden at the University of Victoria, and I argue that it is significant in its capacity to foreground problems and suspend commonsense habits, without presenting a coherent and unified programme.

The central question for this collection, as we understand it, revolves around deciding whether the actors involved in the most powerful currents of contemporary social movements are best understood as People or Multitude. In this chapter, we will take on that question by arguing that neither the People nor the Multitude is appropriate here, based primarily on our experience with, and understanding of, decolonization and indigenous-settler alliances. We begin by discussing the Empire and Multitude theses, as advanced by Michael Hardt and Toni Negri, in the context of the closely related concepts of Exodus and Common. While we find much that is of use in the Empire hypothesis, as a critical description of the currently dominant world order, when it comes to prescription – to the question of What is To Be Done? – we find that we must part ways with our autonomist comrades. We do this for different reasons, however, than some of Hardt and Negri’s other critics, such as Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek. We find that both the People and the Multitude are too totalizing for our purposes, despite the pretensions of the latter to heterogeneity. Most importantly, given our focus, the Multitude’s universalizing tendencies lead Hardt and Negri to dismiss all forms of nationalism, identity, and borders as corrupt and reactive, and therefore to exclude the aspirations of indigenous peoples and their settler allies.
To deal with these limitations of the biopolitical Multitude, we suggest that it is necessary to revalue the concept of the Common, arguing that it needs to be rematerialized, feminized, indigenized and localized. We then draw on the Two Row Wampum model as a way to begin thinking differently about autonomy, as well. Having done this work, however, rather than staking out a position ourselves regarding how the totality of contemporary radical social movements is to be properly understood, we advocate abandoning such metatheoretical arguments altogether, in favour of a return to a plurality of practices, including, but not limited to, those oriented to People(s), and Multitude(s) (revalued), and many others, as well.

The following thesis provides an empirical case study in which a group of 6 first generation female Afghan Canadian youth is studied to determine their identity negotiation and development processes in everyday experiences. This process is investigated across different contexts of home, school, and the community. In tenns of schooling experiences, 2 participants each are selected representing public, Islamic, and Catholic schools in Southern Ontario. This study employs feminist research methods and is analyzed through a convergence of critical race theory (critical race feminism), youth development theory, and feminist theory. Participant experiences reveal issues of racism, discrimination, and bias within schooling (public, Catholic) systems. Within these contexts, participants suppress their identities or are exposed to negative experiences based on their ethnic or religious identification. Students in Islamic schools experience support for a more positive ethnic and religious ide...

This Ph.D. is an ethnographic-activist-based project. It first examines the genealogy of popular nationalist-statist and religious enforcements of postcolonial cisheteronormativity in Egypt through the examination of two case studies, the Cairo 52 case in 2001 and the transgendered case of Sally Abd Allah in 1982. It then presents my fieldwork, which documents my ethnographic narrators’ resistance to these narratives. Specifically, my fieldwork investigates the neocolonial/neoimperial conditions that inform the circulatory geopolitical relationship between Islam and queerness in non-Western societies such as franchise-colonial Egypt and settler-colonial U.S./Canada, in an age where sexual and gender diversity is a hallmark of neoliberal ‘secular’ modernity, whose advent historically exposed Arabs, North Africans, and Muslims, if not all non-Europeans, to a plethora of false competing dualisms, such as secular/religious and heterogeneity/homogeneity, as well as discourses such as homonationalism (al-qawmiyyat al-mīthlīyat) and pinkwashing (al-ghaseel al-banafsajiy). My fieldwork participants offer decolonial, gender-based, readings and formulations of queerness through their diverse and complex experiences, which evade the apparent tidiness of European feminist and narrow LGBTIQA categories that characterizes most Western/non-Western political queer scholarship. While the spiritual initiatives of diasporic queer Muslims clarifies the urgent need for a radical, decolonial, reinterpretation of Islam, the revolutionary participation of queer Egyptians in the so-called ‘Arab Spring/Islamist Winter’ offers crucial challenges to both discourses on gender/sexuality in the Middle East and academic and activist literatures on radical and revolutionary social action. In this dissertation, queer Egyptians, and queer Muslims in particular, appear as single theorists of radical political activity, not the co-opted and duped, colonized pawns of the ‘Gay Empire’. This exploration of queer interventions in revolutionary Egypt will force radical social theorists to consider postcolonial/decolonial queer politics as a primary basis for determining the shape and course of future revolutionary theory and praxis in this current xenophobic and Islamophobic geopolitical moment. Utilizing intersectional/assemblage based theories, I argue that strictly adopting sexual discourses, in the absence of accounting for colonialism/imperialism as well as engaging postcolonial, critical race and feminist discourses, is insufficient to narratively/analytically understand the dynamic nature of Arab and Muslim gender and sexualities in these Islamophobic conditions.

*The Ph.D. is a forthcoming book. Nonetheless, in an effort to provide an overview of this interdisciplinary and transnational project I’m offering the table of contents, this chapter, the Bibliography and Appendix till the impending release.

As an anarchist and a Muslim, I have witnessed troubled times as a result of extreme divisions that exist between these two identities and communities. To minimize these divisions, I argue for an anti-capitalist and anti-authoritarian Islam, an ‘anarca- Islam’, that disrupts two commonly held beliefs: one, that Islam is necessarily authoritarian and capitalist; two, that anarchism is necessarily anti-religious. From this position I offer ‘anarca-Islam’ which I believe can help open-minded (non- essentialist/non-dogmatic) Muslims and anarchists to better understand each other, and therefore to more effectively collaborate in the context of what Richard JF Day has called the ’newest’ social movements.

SHORT DESCRIPTION
This course will focus on the insurrectionary movements for social change that are currently sweeping across the Middle East, from Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya to Bahrain, Syria, Yemen & Saudi Arabia. These movements, which have been seen as part of a broad political ‘awakening’, have led to what has been called ‘the Arab Spring’ and, according to some Western commentators, also portend a coming ‘Islamist Winter’. In order to better understand these forces for social change, this course will trace their roots in Middle Eastern history, European colonialism and resulting anti-colonial struggles. We will also engage with the theory and practice of current and previous social movements, with particular attention to the relevance of Islam, in local, national, and global contexts.

COURSE DESCRIPTION
This course will focus on the theory, strategy, and tactics that guide certain 'insurrectionary' movements for social change across the Middle East – from Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya to Bahrain, Syria, Yemen & Saudi Arabia – and that earned these events the epithets ‘the Arab Spring’ and ‘Islamist Winter’. Although many commentators in the West see these developments as some kind of ‘surprise awakening’, they are in fact deeply rooted in longstanding local and global trajectories. Therefore, in order to understand their specificity, the course will begin with an overview of the history of the Middle East, and Islam, in a global context.

We will explore the contention, for example, that while the 2011 uprisings are rooted in
different local realities, their shared resistance to the status quo and their creation of new
socio-ethical and political horizons harken to the cultural and historical memory ushered
forth in the wake of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1798, and the subsequent tug of war between pan-Islamic and secularist pan-Arab stirrings in Arab and Muslim imaginaries. Thus we will address the role of colonialism, and the present situation of ‘post-colonial’  (in)dependence of the various nation-States of the Middle East. The objective of this historical work is to map out the historical trajectories of these movements, to show where they have come from, and potentially, where they are headed.
This is not to imply, of course, that each nation-state has its own ‘movement’ that could be considered in a monolithic way. In all cases, one finds many contradictory currents, e.g. secularist and liberation theologist, conformist and nonconformist movements, as well as differences in political goals, from reformists to others taking on a more radical autonomy-oriented strategy focused on the creation of sustainable alternatives to the dominant order.
In order to comprehend these complexities, we will familiarize ourselves using a rough
periodization based on the dominant mode of social change advocated during each period.
We will therefore be studying the history of Arab and Islamic social movement theory and
practice, as we explore genealogies of ‘Islamist (Muslim Brotherhood, Salafist)’ and ‘secular (revolutionary socialist, anarchist, and liberal)’ movements with a primary focus on the role Islam plays in modern political, cultural and economic discourse, not only in the Middle East but rather intercontinentally. Questions subject to examination include but not confined to: What are the social and political origins of reformist and non-reformist democratically inclined ‘Islamist’ and ‘secular’ parties and movements? How do they envision their relationship(s) to democracy and ‘development’? How do these parties and movements understand the concept of democracy, ‘development’, and what is their level of commitment to their respective practices? What are the future prospects of conformist and nonconformist politics in the region and how will the confrontations play out? What are the commonalities and differences in comparisons between how the questions above uniquely shape each country thus far?
At heart, we will address Islam’s all too often association in the West with violence,
irrationality, patriarchy, capitalism, and authoritarianism, given the rise of ‘Islamist’ political parties advocating democracy, pluralism, freedom of expression, social justice, development, and civic society. Examples include, but are not limited to, the Freedom and Justice and AlNoor parties in Egypt, AKP in Turkey, the Nahda Party in Tunisia, the Islamist Constitutional Movement in Kuwait, the Justice and Development in Morocco, and the Da’wa Islamiya in Iraq. The very meaning of the terms ‘Islamist’ and ‘secularist’ will be scrutinized, as we examine and contextualize the reasons behind the collapse of some authoritarian regimes and not others in an Arab Spring & Islamist Winter still raging in more than one country.
The course concludes with an examination of affinities between these movements and the Occupy and austerity movements of the Global North. We will discuss radical works that examine alternative autonomous oriented ‘newest' social movements of the 90s and 00s, and that go beyond global divisions of North and South, and beyond Fundamentalist and Orientalist stereotypes associated with the movements this course examines. We will identify how these ‘newest’ social movements differ and transcend revolution-oriented paradigms (modern marxism, anarchism, anarchist feminism from the 1850s-1950s) as well as the reform oriented 'new' social movements of the 1960s-1980s in the Global North. In responding to these questions, we will rely on primary and secondary sources, while being critical of social media worlds (blogs, YouTube videos, Face-Book & twitter entries).

This article was published in the peer-reviewed Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies Journal in 2010 (https://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/adcs/article/view/17102). It was re-written and revised in the PhD based on new historical-archival research and interviews w/Sally Abd’Allah.

In 1982 Sayyid Abd’Allah, a 19-year-old transgender medical student, at Al-Azhar University – a pre-eminent institution of Islamic  religious studies in Cairo, Egypt – ‘consulted a psychologist , Salwa Jirgis Labib, claiming to suffer from deep depression’. Salwa examined Sayyid concluding that ‘Sayyid’s sexual identity was psychologically disturbed’. Clinically, Sayyid was considered ‘a psychological hermaphrodite (Mu-Khunath nafisyan)’. Following three years of psychological treatment and in carrying out ‘every effort to restore back Sayyid’s male sexual identity’ yet failing , Salwa decided to refer Sayyid to a surgeon, Izzat Asham Allah Jibra’il. This was ‘so that Sayyid could undergo the process of sex-change surgery, which eventually took place on the 29th of January 1988’. Prior to conducting surgery however, Izzat referred Sayyid to another psychologist, Hani Najib, ‘who reached a similar diagnosis to Salwa, agreeing that surgery would be the best course of action’. In preparing for surgery, Sayyid injected ‘female hormones, while experimenting with dressing like a woman, living with the other sex’. This lasted a year, after which Izzat removed Sayyid’s ‘penis, creating a new urinal orifice and an artificial vagina ’ (Skovgaard-Peterson, 1997: 320).