Inter. Trans. Anti. Dis. Un. Disciplinary: New Prefixes and Methods

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

It is a story often told: Disciplines (e.g. history, English, anthropology) and their methods were forged in empire; in contrast, Critical Disability, Queer and Trans Studies, Ethnic, Gender, and Indigenous Studies created new spaces in opposition to these very formations. We, interdisciplinary scholars, have articulated the relationship between these disciplines and our emergent decolonial ones predominantly through prefixes such as “multi,” “inter,” “anti,” and more recently “trans.” As interdisciplines and interdisciplinarity have been institutionalized within late imperial institutions, we have lived awhile (un)comfortable with the in-between. Our relationships with inter/disciplinarity are more vexed than ever. Why have we limited ourselves to these particular prefixes? What happens to disciplinarity and our interdisciplines, when pursue other possibilities? This panel considers how we produce new modes of knowledge production and rethink the sly prefix that has remained intact for over forty years.

“The subversive intellectual, we learn, is unprofessional, uncollegial, passionate and disloyal. The subversive intellectual is neither trying to extend the university nor change the university, the subversive intellectual is not toiling in misery and from this place of misery articulating a “general antagonism.” In fact, the subversive intellectual enjoys the ride and wants it to be faster and wilder; she does not want a room of his or her own, she wants to be in the world, in the world with others and making the world anew” (Undercommons Moten and Harney 10). As we are and our fields are under attack and under the threat of epistemic violence and eradication, how can this be a moment to both rethink our fields further and produce knowledge with care. Undisciplining is a becoming and becoming. As Christina Sharpe writes, “We must become undisciplined. The work we do requires new modes and methods of research and teaching…” (Hartman 2008, 6) and that live into the present.” (In the Wake, Sharpe 13). We offer new methods – messiness, promiscuity, intimacy, care, desire, and co-creation – to orient the multidirectional, multirelational, and variant ways we need to navigate both disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity in a moment when we may want to make our work be everywhere simultaneously while the state and empire seek it to be nothing at all.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Carlos U Decena, Rutgers University

Panelists

• Jigna Desai, University of California, Santa Barbara

• Margot Weiss, Wesleyan University

• Martin F Manalansan, Rutgers University, New Brunswick

Comment

• Carlos U Decena, Rutgers University

Biographical Information

Margot Weiss (Discussant): Margot Weiss is Associate Professor of American Studies and Anthropology at Wesleyan, where she coordinates Queer Studies. Past president of the Association for Queer Anthropology (AQA), she serves on the board of CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies and the Society for Cultural Anthropology (SCA). Margot’s research, teaching, and writing move between queer theory and cultural anthropology, focusing on queer methods and epistemologies, ethics and the politics of knowledge, and left critique and
the contradictory relationships between queer sexual cultures and contemporary US capitalism. She is the author Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality (Duke University Press, 2011), which won the Ruth Benedict Book Prize and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in LGBT Studies. She edited Queer Then and Now: The David R. Kessler Lectures, 2002-2020 (The Feminist Press, 2023, with Debanuj Dasgupta and Joseph Donica) and Unsettling Queer Anthropology: Foundations, Reorientations, and Departures (Duke University Press, 2024). She also edited a collection on “Collaboration” for Cultural Anthropology and on “Academia and
Activism” for American Quarterly (with Naomi Greyser). Margot has published in a broad range of anthropology, queer studies, and American studies journals, including GLQ, Cultural Anthropology, New Labor Forum, Sexualities, American Anthropologist, Anthropological Quarterly, and Feminist Anthropology. She is currently writing a book about desire and the politics of knowledge production in queer, left activism, based on many years of ethnographic research with activists and public intellectuals in New York City, Chicago, and Montreal. Outside of her research, Margot cofounded the Wesleyan University Chapter of the AAUP and organizes around academic freedom and collective liberation.

Martin Manalansan (Discussant): Martin F. Manalansan IV is Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He is President of the Association for Asian American Studies. He is the author of Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Duke University Press, 2003). He is also the editor/co-editor of five anthologies and several journal special issues. namely, Filipino Studies: Palimpsests of Nation and Diaspora (New York University Press, 2016) , Cultural Compass: Ethnographic Explorations of Asian America (Temple University Press, 2000) and Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism(New York University Press, 2002), Eating Asian America: A Food Studies Reader (New York University Press, 2013) and Q & A: Voices from Queer Asian North America (Temple University Press, 2021). His current book projects include the ethical and embodied dimensions of the lives and struggles of undocumented queer immigrants, Asian American immigrant culinary cultures, affect and nationalism, urban studies, and the politics of decolonizing social science in the Global South.

Jigna Desai (Discussant): Jigna Desai is Professor in the Department of Feminist Studies and the Department of Asian American Studies and the director of the Center for Feminist Futures at the University of California -- Santa Barbara. She is also a promiscuous interdisciplinary and dis-disciplinary scholar whose current research examines neuronationalism, the biopolitics of global mental health, and critical disability studies. They also focus on feminist speculative fiction and film, critical and disability pedagogy, and community engagement and public scholarship. She is the author of Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film (Routledge 2004) and co-editor of several collections including Bollywood: A Reader (Open University 2009), Transnational Feminism and Global Advocacy in South Asia (Routledge 2012), and Asian Americans in Dixie: Race and Migration in the South (University of Illinois Press 2013). They have written extensively on issues of race, gender, and sexuality in media. With Dr. Kari Smalkoski , Desai is the co-founder of MN Youth Story Squad (a K-12 University partnership) and former PI for Minnesota Transform, a $5 million higher education Mellon-funded racial justice initiative addressing decolonial and racial justice at the University of Minnesota.


Carlos Ulises Decena (Chair/Facilitator): Carlon is an interdisciplinary scholar, whose interests include critical theory as well as social and cultural analysis, with a particular emphasis on transnationalism and diaspora in the American continent, US Latinoamerica and the Caribbean. His first book, Tacit Subjects: Belonging and Same-Sex Desire among Dominican Immigrant Men, was published by Duke University Press in 2011. His book, Circuits of the Sacred: Faggotology in the Black Latinx Caribbean, articulates Latin@, queer, and Afro-diasporic spiritologies in the service of a non-denominational, sex and body-affirmative notion of the divine for queers of color. The book was published in 2023 by Duke University Press. The author of several single and co-authored articles published in peer-reviewed publications in the United States and in the Américas, Decena serves as Professor of Latino and Caribbean Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University. He is also Director, Office of Undergraduate Intellectual Life, at the Rutgers Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice.