Aimee Carrillo Rowe is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric and POROI at The University of Iowa. Her teaching and writing address the politics of representation and feminist alliances, third world feminism, and whiteness and antiracism. Her book manuscript, Power Lines: On the Subject of Feminist Alliances (Duke University Press, 2008), offers a coalitional theory of subjectivity as a bridge to difference-based alliances. Her writing appears primarily in interdisciplinary outlets such as Hypatia (Summer 2007), Radical History Review (Summer 2004), and NWSA Journal (Summer 2005).

Current Course Syllabi:

Postcolonial Feminist Theory — Rhetoric 10:264; Women’s Studies 131:264; POROI 160:280

Critical Ethnography: The Politics and Poetics of Representation
Rhetoric 010:332:001; Communication Studies 036:378:001; POROI 160:332:001

Research Areas:
Transnational and U.S. Third World Feminisms
Cultural Studies
Rhetoric
Critical/Performance Ethnography

Courses:
Feminist Cultural Studies (grad.)
Critical Ethnography: The Politics and Poetics of Representation (grad.)
Postcolonial Feminist Theory (grad.)
PDP: Teaching Rhetoric (grad.)
Issues in Rhetoric and Culture: Whiteness and Antiracism
Issues in Rhetoric and Culture: Latina/o Cultural Studies
First-Year Seminar: Whiteness and Antiracism
First-Year Seminar: Love, Loss, and Empire

Book Projects:
Power Lines proposes a theory of coalitional subjectivity designed to interrupt the race/gender divide within academic feminist theory and praxis. Placing the works of Jean Luc Nancy, Stuart Hall, Chela Sandoval, Gayatri Spivak, and Kamala Visweswaran in conversation, I offer a post-essentialist theory of subject formation. I theorize how the politics of belonging challenge knowledge forms that reify the individual and thus elide the relational contours that shape subjectivities. Moving beyond the individualism of the “politics of location,” I develop a “politics of relation” to account for how belonging and identity interact to produce experience, agency, and consciousness. This framework enables rhetorical readings of ethnographic interviews with twenty-eight academic feminists from a range of regional and institutional, racial, national, and sexual locations. I tease out the institutional politics at stake in segregated and “transracial” belongings, considering the mutually productive dynamic between the politics of representation and relation at work within both ethnographic inquiry and Women’s Studies as a field formation. Attending to the affectively charged micro-politics through which institutions and identities become solidified, Power Lines offers feminist, antiracist, and cultural workers a set of critical, practical, and theoretical tools designed to decolonize these very sites.

I am also writing a manuscript that investigates the formation of new global subjectivities in Indian call centers. In Making the Call: Mapping New Global Subjectivities in Indian Call Centers my coauthor, Sheena Malhotra, and I analyze interviews with Indian call center agents from Bangalore and Mumbai to consider how new time/space relations form these agents’ subjectivities within the globally mediated contexts in which their labor is produced and consumed. Call center agents, who speak to Americans by night and live restricted social lives by day, inhabit multiple and often competing modes of identity, space, time, and belonging: American and Indian, global and local, “first world” and “third.” These new time/space relations compel us to rethink concepts fundamental to cultural, postcolonial, and globalization studies. For example, attending to the experiences of these agents, we might reconsider whether transnational mobility is a condition of the diaspora, or if diasporic communities may form within “first world” spaces that increasingly arise within the “third world.” Building on the work of Inderpal Grewal, Aihwa Ong, Partha Chatterjee, and Carla Freeman, this text extends the emerging work on the transnationalization and feminization of labor within the regional and national contexts in which these call centers are situated to consider the local transmutations at stake in this iteration of “the global.” Because we understand globalization as materially influencing space/time relations for a new transnational labor force, our study attends to the nuances and contradictions of agents’ lived experience, contributing to the growing body of theoretical scholarship in feminist studies of temporality (Halberstam, Grosz, Freeman). Like Power Lines, this project integrates grounded ethnographic study with theoretically informed investigation of the problematics of feminist knowledge production in a transnational world.

Race for Redemption, a project that I am currently developing, cultivates the relational theory of subjectivity outlined in Power Lines as a critical reading practice in the study of popular culture. A chapter from this project, “Feeling in the Dark: Empathy, Whiteness, and Miscege-nation in Monster’s Ball,” appears in the recent issue of Hypatia. Drawing on the work of José Muñoz, Gayatri Gopinath, Robyn Wiegman, Lauren Berlant, and Patricia Williams, I pose a relational viewing practice that attends to the interrelation between the politics of identification and desire in order to decipher decolonizing and recolonizing representations in contemporary popular culture. I deploy and cultivate this reading practice by teasing out the politics of love at work in interracial relationships in such texts as Monster’s Ball, The L-Word, Crash and representations of Barack Obama. The analysis reveals the interconnections between color-blind racism, post-feminism, and neoliberalism that underwrite U.S. American multicultural nationalism and imperialism.

Teaching Statement:
My pedagogy traverses the potentially transformative terrain of intersecting differences—those of race, class, gender, sexuality, and (trans)nationality. I teach students to read their daily lives as texts in order to understand themselves as embedded in power, privilege, and subordination. This approach empowers students to internalize cultural theory and criticism as a “methodology for living,” inviting them to become fluent in a range of practices through which to critique power relations and to express and imagine alternative, more just, social arrangements.