Be
Longing: Towards a Feminist Politics of Relation
Aimee Carrillo Rowe, Rhetoric Department, The University of Iowa
Aimee
Carrillo Rowe joined the Rhetoric Department in the
fall of 2001, bringing a cultural studies and postcolonial
feminist perspective to our faculty. Her research and teaching
are informed by third world feminisms, whiteness and antiracism
studies, critical pedagogy, and the politics of spirituality and
justice. She is actively researching feminist alliances across
lines of difference; popular representations of white
femininity; transnational perspectives on Latina/o issues; and
the militarization of popular culture as containment of dissent
in the wake of 9/11.
Her teaching
interests include cultural studies approaches to Introductory
and Advanced Rhetoric; Immigration and the Latina/o Experience
(travel graduate seminar offered in Patzcuaro, Mexico);
Postcolonial Feminist Theory; Race, Class, and Gender; and
Whiteness and Antiracism. Her writing appears in a variety of
interdisciplinary outlets, including: Feminist Media Studies
3:2 (July 2003); Intercultural and International
Communication Annual, 25 (2002); Communication Theory, 10,
1 (2000); Red Seminars: Radical Excursions into Educational
Theory, Cultural Politics, and Pedagogy, Peter McLaren,
editor; Our Voices: Essays in Culture, Ethnicity, and
Communication, Third Edition, Alberto Gonz‡lez, Marsha
Houston, Victoria Chen, editors (2000); and Labeling: Power,
Pedagogy, and Identity, Glenn Hudak, editor, (2001).
Paper
Description: This paper seeks to think location from
the perspective of belonging. I draw upon literature from a
multiracial feminist and cultural studies in order to ask these
texts what gets left out when the conditions and effects of
belonging to an identity or location are mapped out and
interrogated and not already assumed as a starting point. I seek
to demonstrate that these texts begin with assumptions about
belonging that skip over some vital components of accountability
and critical agency. I draw attention to belonging as a process
that both hails subjects and through which subjects can
interpellate resistive modes of belonging, especially those that
disrupt lines of race and heterosexuality.
Note to POROI
readers: This is an early draft on a theme that I’ve been
thinking about for a long time, but find difficult to write
about. Are you convinced by the argument that the texts I
examine “assume belonging,” or does my text just assert/assume
that they do? (How) does this paper evoke a new understanding of
“location as belonging” that you never thought of—or has this
already been said and done? (How) does the paper encourage you
reflect upon the politics that surround your own affective ties?
Which rhetorical strategies, or what voice, do you find
evocative, annoying, performative, inviting, (dis)engaging? —ACR
[Thursday, November 14,
2002; 7:30-9:30
PM; 204 Jefferson Building]
