This paper troubles positivist and pathological discourses surrounding youth suicide through critical engagement with young adult fiction: Skim and 13 Reasons Why. These texts offer opportunities for readers to dwell on and question youth suicide prevention and intervention through an engagement with affect, gender, queerness, and race. Skim (2008, Groundwood) and 13 Reasons Why (2017) counter ‘it gets better’ stories: they interrogate the inevitability of bullying, question the predictable approaches that schools take in their response to violence, and assert that the issue at hand is more systematic. Together, these analytics que(e)ry youth suicide by asking: how does the biopolitics (or necropolitics) of livability fit into popularized understandings of youth suicide? Read together, Skim and 13 Reasons Why provide opportunities to meaningfully question livability through the characters of Skim and Courtney—two Asian girls who bear the brunt of racist and sexist violence. Skim becomes a ‘project’ of white girls’ anti-suicide campaign and Courtney is barely living as she attempts to secure the plaform of ‘model minority.’ Both girls are queer, too. In its entirety, this paper arguse that popularized models of suicide intervention continue to ignore the pressing needs of queer Asian girls—such as Skim and Courtney.
{"title":"Que(e)rying Youth Suicide: Sexism, Racism, and Violence in Skim and 13 Reasons Why","authors":"Jocelyn Sakal Froese, Cameron Greensmith","doi":"10.5130/CSR.V25I2.6182","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5130/CSR.V25I2.6182","url":null,"abstract":"This paper troubles positivist and pathological discourses surrounding youth suicide through critical engagement with young adult fiction: Skim and 13 Reasons Why. These texts offer opportunities for readers to dwell on and question youth suicide prevention and intervention through an engagement with affect, gender, queerness, and race. Skim (2008, Groundwood) and 13 Reasons Why (2017) counter ‘it gets better’ stories: they interrogate the inevitability of bullying, question the predictable approaches that schools take in their response to violence, and assert that the issue at hand is more systematic. Together, these analytics que(e)ry youth suicide by asking: how does the biopolitics (or necropolitics) of livability fit into popularized understandings of youth suicide? Read together, Skim and 13 Reasons Why provide opportunities to meaningfully question livability through the characters of Skim and Courtney—two Asian girls who bear the brunt of racist and sexist violence. Skim becomes a ‘project’ of white girls’ anti-suicide campaign and Courtney is barely living as she attempts to secure the plaform of ‘model minority.’ Both girls are queer, too. In its entirety, this paper arguse that popularized models of suicide intervention continue to ignore the pressing needs of queer Asian girls—such as Skim and Courtney.","PeriodicalId":51871,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Studies Review","volume":"38 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73670560","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
What does it entail to foreground water flourishing as a stance toward the Anthropocene? During an exercise at the Anthropocene Campus Melbourne, about twenty participants individually drew images of ‘water flourishing’ leading, with only one or two exceptions of Edenic representations, to a wall of images depicting no humans. That small experience reproduced a larger cultural and environmental management configuration: people-less water flourishing. If we face such constraints in imagining, representing, and enacting hydro-flourishing, we remain stuck in familiar loops either of: 1) elemental thinking that excludes the human; or 2) anthropocenic thinking that too often addresses the human primarily as destroyer. How do we imagine our being with water in different ways? How do we move away from pervasive narratives of water crisis without, at the same time, romancing water? Feminist, decolonial, and Indigenous approaches to water and its cultural politics ask us to consider the elemental not only in substance, but also in rights regimes and in the project of flourishing. In this paper, we present examples of water flourishing projects and impasses from three sites: Kathmandu, Nepal; Perth, Australia; and the Florida Everglades, United States. All show both the problems and the promise of co-centering the human and nonhuman in their interdependent relations when it comes to water flourishing.
{"title":"Water Flourishing in the Anthropocene","authors":"Jessica R. Cattelino, G. Drew, R. Morgan","doi":"10.5130/CSR.V25I2.6887","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5130/CSR.V25I2.6887","url":null,"abstract":"What does it entail to foreground water flourishing as a stance toward the Anthropocene? During an exercise at the Anthropocene Campus Melbourne, about twenty participants individually drew images of ‘water flourishing’ leading, with only one or two exceptions of Edenic representations, to a wall of images depicting no humans. That small experience reproduced a larger cultural and environmental management configuration: people-less water flourishing. If we face such constraints in imagining, representing, and enacting hydro-flourishing, we remain stuck in familiar loops either of: 1) elemental thinking that excludes the human; or 2) anthropocenic thinking that too often addresses the human primarily as destroyer. How do we imagine our being with water in different ways? How do we move away from pervasive narratives of water crisis without, at the same time, romancing water? Feminist, decolonial, and Indigenous approaches to water and its cultural politics ask us to consider the elemental not only in substance, but also in rights regimes and in the project of flourishing. In this paper, we present examples of water flourishing projects and impasses from three sites: Kathmandu, Nepal; Perth, Australia; and the Florida Everglades, United States. All show both the problems and the promise of co-centering the human and nonhuman in their interdependent relations when it comes to water flourishing.","PeriodicalId":51871,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Studies Review","volume":"224 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79227678","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The concept of the Anthropocene confounds Eurocentric distinctions of natural and human history, as Dipesh Chakrabarty observes. But who are ‘we’ in the Anthropocene, how do notions of our shared humanity contend with the cascading global inequalities of place, race, class and gender. Oceania is often said to have contributed the least and suffered the most from climate change. Pacific women, and especially those living on low lying atolls, have been portrayed as the most vulnerable to the disastrous consequences of climate change. This focuses on sea level rise and the toxic mixing, the elemental confusion of salt and fresh water caused by atmospheric changes and global warming. While not negating the gravity of present and future scenarios, how can we move beyond the pervasive fatalism of foreign framings and seemingly opposed clichéd evocations of ‘resilience’? The moniker of the Pacific Climate Warriors 350.org ‘We are not drowning, we are fighting’ evokes a contrary trope of resistance and resonates with Oceanic activism in politics and the creative arts.[i] Tracing such a genealogy of resistance might start with a greater respect for Indigenous knowledges and embodied practices in contemporary understandings of ‘climate cultures’ in Oceania which do not routinely distinguish between natural and human history.[ii]
{"title":"Engendering the Anthropocene in Oceania: Fatalism, Resilience, Resistance","authors":"Margaret Jolly","doi":"10.5130/CSR.V25I2.6888","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5130/CSR.V25I2.6888","url":null,"abstract":"The concept of the Anthropocene confounds Eurocentric distinctions of natural and human history, as Dipesh Chakrabarty observes. But who are ‘we’ in the Anthropocene, how do notions of our shared humanity contend with the cascading global inequalities of place, race, class and gender. Oceania is often said to have contributed the least and suffered the most from climate change. Pacific women, and especially those living on low lying atolls, have been portrayed as the most vulnerable to the disastrous consequences of climate change. This focuses on sea level rise and the toxic mixing, the elemental confusion of salt and fresh water caused by atmospheric changes and global warming. While not negating the gravity of present and future scenarios, how can we move beyond the pervasive fatalism of foreign framings and seemingly opposed clichéd evocations of ‘resilience’? The moniker of the Pacific Climate Warriors 350.org ‘We are not drowning, we are fighting’ evokes a contrary trope of resistance and resonates with Oceanic activism in politics and the creative arts.[i] Tracing such a genealogy of resistance might start with a greater respect for Indigenous knowledges and embodied practices in contemporary understandings of ‘climate cultures’ in Oceania which do not routinely distinguish between natural and human history.[ii]","PeriodicalId":51871,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Studies Review","volume":"35 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85274247","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Views of fire in the contemporary physical sciences arguably accord with Heraclitus’ proposal that ‘all things are an exchange for fire, and fire for all things, as goods for gold and gold for goods.’ Fire is a media, as John Durham Peters has stated, a species of transformative biochemical reactions between the flammable gases found in air, such as oxygen, and those found in fuels, such as plants. Inspired by an ignition source, these materials react and transform themselves and their surrounds into light and heat energy, carbon dioxide, water vapour, char and much else besides. Fire is conjunctural, durational and transformative. Fire is a dialectician, at once consuming living and dead organic matter and providing both the space and ingredients for new and renewed organic life. In this article, we draw upon our experience of combustible contexts—Australia, Canada and the Philippines—to consider the diverse ways in which fire is today framed as a social problem, an ecological process, an ancient tool, a natural disaster, a source of economic wealth and much more. In this way, we seek to explore the value and limits of ‘elemental thinking’ in relation to the planetary predicaments described by ‘the Anthropocene’.
{"title":"An Eternal Flame: The Elemental Governance of Wildfire’s Pasts, Presents and Futures","authors":"T. Neale, A. Zahara, Will Smith","doi":"10.5130/CSR.V25I2.6886","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5130/CSR.V25I2.6886","url":null,"abstract":"Views of fire in the contemporary physical sciences arguably accord with Heraclitus’ proposal that ‘all things are an exchange for fire, and fire for all things, as goods for gold and gold for goods.’ Fire is a media, as John Durham Peters has stated, a species of transformative biochemical reactions between the flammable gases found in air, such as oxygen, and those found in fuels, such as plants. Inspired by an ignition source, these materials react and transform themselves and their surrounds into light and heat energy, carbon dioxide, water vapour, char and much else besides. Fire is conjunctural, durational and transformative. Fire is a dialectician, at once consuming living and dead organic matter and providing both the space and ingredients for new and renewed organic life. In this article, we draw upon our experience of combustible contexts—Australia, Canada and the Philippines—to consider the diverse ways in which fire is today framed as a social problem, an ecological process, an ancient tool, a natural disaster, a source of economic wealth and much more. In this way, we seek to explore the value and limits of ‘elemental thinking’ in relation to the planetary predicaments described by ‘the Anthropocene’.","PeriodicalId":51871,"journal":{"name":"Cultural Studies Review","volume":"7 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-11-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89016116","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}