Past Present | Future Imperatives: Queer Space Time / Los Angeles / Feb 25 – Mar 24
Past Present | Future Imperatives: Queer Space Time
Việt Lê, Genevieve Erin O’Brien, Jai Arun Ravine, Tina Takemoto
Sabina Lee Gallery (Tumblr)
971 Chung King Road, Los Angeles CA, 90012
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Opening (Screening, Food & Performances) Friday, February 25, 2012, 6-9pm
6pm start | 7pm short screenings | 8pm One Night Band
Exhibition February 25-March 24, 2012 | open Wednesday – Saturday 11-6 pm
imperative grammatical mood:
• give an order
• express a desire
• make a request
• offer advice
• recommend something
What is queer time? What is colored people’s time? And queer people of color time?
Crossing, cruising time zones and erogenous zones, this show explores transnational queer Asian bodies through space and time. Queer time challenges standard notions of linear progress and biological time. There is no single, straight-forward model of development (pun intended) but rather a multiplicity of movements and moments. Queer temporalities collapse the binaries of time, sexuality, and progress. The past, present and future is blurred. Gendered divides are re-imagined. First and third worlds meld.
The Global South is stereotyped as “backwards” while the “advanced” Global North is the forward-moving engine of development. Political economist Timothy Mitchell observes that “the experience of modernity is . . . a relationship between time and space.” Shifting city skylines trace timelines of progress. The exploitation of gendered, raced labor is built upon this uneven terrain. Labor is the site of multiple oppressions.
At work and play, queer time reconfigures institutional and intimate relationships. “In a Queer Time and Place,” gender theorist Jack Halberstam argues that “Queer uses of time and space develop in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction.” The past, present, and future meet through queer bodies of color and their imagined communities. “Queer subcultures develop as alternatives to kinship-based notions of community,” Halberstam notes. Enmeshed within trans-local communities, these four artists explore time, space, race, and translation. Through queer postcolonial time, they reexamine still-present pasts and offer possibilities for dystopic/ utopic futures.
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VIỆT LÊ’s sexperimental music video for an original trilingual hip pop song entitled “love bang!”–shown with related large scale photographs and relics—conjures a time-traveling transgender love triangle set in Việt Nam and Cambodia.
Lê received his MFA from UC Irvine and his PhD from the University of Southern California. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. Lê received fellowships from the Civitelli Ranieri Foundation (Italy), the Banff Centre (Canada), Fine Arts Work Center, Fulbright (Việt Nam), PEN Center USA, Center for Khmer Studies (Cambodia), and the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs. www.vietle.net
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GENEVIEVE ERIN O’BRIEN‘s piece “GEO Work”—a series of 8-hour durational performances and video installations—investigates and explores the unseen overlooked labor of the service industry, and troubles the viewers’ relationship to labor.
A Queer Vietnamese-Irish American interdisciplinary artist, community organizer, and popular educator, O’Brien received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute Chicago as well as a Fulbright fellowship (Việt Nam). Her solo performances and installations have toured nationally, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. www.erin-obrien.com
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JAI ARUN RAVINE‘s experimental film “Tom/Trans/Thai” approaches the silence around female-to-male (FTM) transgender identity by addressing tom and trans-masculine identities in Thai and Thai American communities and the transnational relationships between gender and language. Ravine’s experimental karaoke music video—a mis-translated cover of the song “Faen Christy” by Dutch artist Christy Gibson—explores the term “Faen,” a non-gendered Thai word for romantic partner, purportedly derived from the hybridization of the English words “fan” and “friend.”
Ravine is a mixed race Thai American writer, dancer, video and performance artist who received an MFA in Writing & Poetics from Naropa. A recipient of fellowships from ComPeung, Djerassi and Kundiman, they are the author of “แล้ว and then entwine” (Tinfish Press, 2011) and the chapbook “Is This January” (Corollary Press, 2010). http://jaiarunravine.wordpress.com/
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A timely commentary on American citizenship and militant xenophopia, TINA TAKEMOTO’s musical mash-up “Looking for Jiro” looks to the past to find a gay Japanese dandy incarcerated during WWII. The “Gentleman’s Gaman” installation evokes found-object art and craft produced in the internment camps.
Takemoto is an interdisciplinary writer, theorist, and performance artist whose work explores issues of illness, gender, race, and queer identity. She has presented artwork and performances internationally and has received grants funded by Art Matters, James Irvine Foundation, San Francisco Arts Commission, Andy Warhol Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. www.ttakemoto.com
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Collaborators Việt Lê and Genevieve Erin O’Brien dream of an *ALL-ASIAN AMERICAN QUEER BAND FROM THE FUTURE* that performs RETRO COVERS. In a spectacular one night-only event, this futuristic band teleports to 2012 to disrupt the dystopian present with their musical genius.
***Special guest stars*** LESLIE MAH, KAREN TONGSON, SHERI OZEKI, JENNY SAN ANGEL, CELESTE KIM and others make up this imaginary all-star ONE NIGHT BAND.
For further inquiries please call 213/ 620.9404
Or info@sabinaleegallery.com
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This exhibit made possible in part by support from the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs (DCA), VAALA (Vietnamese Arts & Letters Association), DVAN (Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network), and Claremont Colleges.
sex: unknown / a digital zine by and for intersex folks / call for submissions!
SEX: UNKNOWN
A Digital Zine By and For Intersex Folks
Call for Submissions! Deadline: April 1, 2012
*Please forward widely*
As intersex people, we often feel alienated from queer and trans communities, our identities invisibilized within the discourse of “LGBT.” Because our experiences are portrayed as highly medicalized conditions in most forms of popular media, we want to give voice to our personal experiences and create a more complete picture of our emotional and social lives as intersex folks.
Our purpose is to create a digital zine in which to share our stories and our struggles, build a network of community support and foster transformative healing. We want to show a broad spectrum of our backgrounds with regards to race, ethnicity, class, sex, gender, sexuality, sexual orientation and nationality. This is about who we are and how we feel. We are not alone.
We invite self-identified intersex folks to send us stories, poems, narratives and visual art pieces on the feelings, experiences and struggles of living in our sexes/genders. What does intersex mean to you? How does being intersex affect your relationships with family, friends and partners? What is your experience to coming out? How do you connect to your sex and/or gender?
Send us your poems, stories, memoir/autobiography/non-fiction or other writings (limit 1,500 words, as .DOC attachments) and visual art (as .JPG attachments) to intersex.zine [at] gmail [dot] com. Please submit no more than 5 pieces total. Include your preferred name, location, age and email address. Anonymous submissions are acceptable. Let us know if your pieces have been previously published. We look forward to connecting with you!
DEADLINE: APRIL 1, 2012
The Editors:
This project is put together with love by a group of queer POC writers and activists living in Oakland and Berkeley, California. Chi Mei Tam is an intersex genderqueer Chinese American immigrant who grew up in Oakland. She is a passionate organizer for social and economic justice, specifically for immigrant and queer communities. Dylan Casama is a tomboyish boy Pinoy. He writes intersex love and ghost stories. See him published here. Jai Arun Ravine is a trans-identified mixed race Thai American artist and ally to the intersex community. They are excited to support Chi Mei and Dylan in the production and design of this zine.
Review: j/j hastain’s LONG PAST THE PRESENCE OF COMMON
long past the presence of common
perhaps I could rant better if a pronoun felt safer for me (77)
j/j hastain’s long past the presence of common (Say it With Stones, 2011) contemplates infinity, dark matter, pronouns, fucking, non-linear flesh and how a “cyborgian gender” could “become body.” Both hastain and I studied at Naropa University during the same time, and I can sense in this book residual resonances with kari edwards (NO GENDER) and Bhanu Kapil in the book’s soundings and saturations. This project is, as hastain writes, a “yearning to become a quantum gesture” and a “brutal somatic effort at materializations of flesh by way of non-linear narrative.”
Language in this book tears through skin and cloud “[a]s an ethereal angel trying to tear through the human realms.” The book grounds itself through interspersed, prosaic scenes and text and image collages, which create supplementary visual layers. (See some of these collages in PANK.) In the filmic scenes, a “viewer’s” perspective allows the reader to span/scan/pan into a future world in which the grafting of a cyborgian skin is required in order to survive a glacial climate.
hastain investigates how bio matter could attain sentience and become material, whether sense alone can have form—how to embody without “body.” In hastain’s stitching and threading, I ask myself: Is gender the body? Or is gender that sentient goo moving within us? hastain asks, “is there a gender to these words? / or to their wounds?”
For humans who do not fit into either-or models, dominant culture’s structures do no provide us space. I want to speak deeply and authentically of the dilemmas of difference—of being categorically considered the ‘opposite’ or the ‘other’ in polarist systems—of the damage that this can do to pulsating, mixed, cyborg entities (of which I am). [...]
As a reaction to breakage…it is possible to increase breakage. I am saying that we can add wave to wave.
I have learned…that one can actually go so far into the dis of any seeming dislocation, that we become a new kind of located [...] this embodied dis [...] I am aware that you can die at the moment of dis. You can stop. But if instead, you decide to breed continuance in yourself, that is the beginning of being uncolonizable and unownable. (53-4)
I think about how physical and psychological wounds embedded in the bodies of queer, trans, intersex and gender non-conforming folks are the result of duality’s damage, and how these wounds show the startling pulse of sex and gender in cells and fluids. To heal, to become whole, to continue, hastain proposes a linkage, hinge or merge with “our own accessible beyond,” to inhabit a future body, to “turn all exiles into eclipses.”
The way hastain inscribes the multiplicity and transformative power of queer sex conjures to mind Octavia Butler’s ooloi and a hybrid futurity in which DNA helixes, intimacy and communication have a shared intelligence—”we become … every country ever corpuscle genre” “peeling the body / as one would an / edible / audible / silhouette.” Through continuance inside the “embodied dis,” through binding, bondage and Tatsumi Hijikata‘s weakened body butoh, hastain posits a presence “long past.”
this is the pronoun for liquid and lipid [...] / our enjoin is the offered pronoun / for the development / of new entireties
Blood-Jet Writing Hour: Listen in Jan. 25 11am PST/2pm EST
I’m way too excited to be on The Blood Jet Writing Hour—my first ever web radio show! Thanks to our host, the one and only Rachelle Cruz, the luminous Margaret Rhee and myself will be talking Tinfish Press fabulosity and reading from our new books! Listen in on Wednesday, January 25 at 11am PST/2pm EST here!
Goodbye Rabbit @ 826 Valencia
I’ll be welcoming the dragon at GOODBYE RABBIT, a reading curated by Miranda Tsang and Sally Wen Mao! Friday January 13, 7:00 PM, 826 Valencia (between 19th and 20th), San Francisco! With Rona Luo, Dan Hossain Lau, Carolyn Ho, Gein Wong, Debbie Yee, Vickie Vértiz and more! Bring your rabbit.
Review: Jenny Boully’s “not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them”
My review of Jenny Boully’s not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them is live at Lantern Review! Jenny Boully and I share Thai mothers and the same alma mater. I am thrilled and honored to engage this fierce-weird feminist remix of Peter Pan–you’re going to want to read this book! Thanks to editor Iris Law and the folks at Tarpaulin Sky Press!
Open Letter to Harriet Staff at the Poetry Foundation
On Thursday December 8, 2011, I saw that Poetry Foundation’s Harriet the Blog had posted, under Poetry News, a piece that quoted from Craig Santos Perez’s amazing essay on the publication of my book, which wove in my past and present selves, and from my essay on Doveglion about the making of the book, which Barbara Jane Reyes asked me to write.
Out of the Harriet post’s entirety, only 4 short paragraphs were written by its author. And in 3 of those very short 4 paragraphs, I was mis-gendered 4 times.
My questions to you, Harriet Staff member, are: Did you actually read our posts? Did you bother to read my bio? Craig uses my name, Jai, throughout his essay, and uses the gender-neutral pronoun, ze, once. In my bio on Doveglion I use they, ze and hir.
So really, why did you decide to use she and her, not once, not twice, but four times?
This violent act of mis-gendering is absolutely unacceptable.
By 12:36pm PST on Friday December 9, 2011, Craig had been able to contact someone among you to change the pronouns. However, you still missed one. You still missed one! Four times in 3 very short paragraphs, and you still missed one.
I would like to reiterate that this violent act of mis-gendering is absolutely unacceptable.
I request that The Poetry Foundation issue an apology regarding this post and detail the steps they are taking to educate their Staff members to ensure that trans and gender non-conforming authors written about on their website are referred to and represented appropriately and with respect.
Jai Arun Ravine (December 9, 2011)
Canessa Park Reading Series: DiPietra, Leto & Ravine
I’m looking forward to reading with Amber DiPietra and Denise Leto to celebrate their new book, Waveform, at the Canessa Park Reading Series on Monday, December 12! Thanks to Monica Peck for curating this event!
CANESSA PARK READING SERIES
708 Montgomery Street (at Columbus)
San Francisco, CA 94111
“2nd Monday Nights”
December 12, 2011
Amber DiPietra
Denise Leto
Jai Arun Ravine
Doors open at 7pm. Reading at 7:30pm.
Admission $6. Refreshments.
No one turned away for lack of funds.
***************** Read the rest of this entry
Small Press Distribution Year-End Open House
I’m honored to be reading at the Small Press Distribution Open House next Sunday, December 4 at 2PM with the famous Donna de la Perrière, Judith Goldman, Pamela Lu and Marvin K. White! I’m going to read from แล้ว and then entwine and my Yul Brynner sestinas. I think there will be red velvet cake.
Review: Kim Koga’s LIGATURE STRAIN and Margaret Rhee’s YELLOW / YELLOW
My review of Kim Koga’s Ligature Strain and Margaret Rhee’s Yellow / Yellow is now live at Lantern Review! I engage Cunt-Ups, Yellow Apparel, index cuts and typography to celebrate these fiercely feminist chapbooks recently published by Tinfish Press’ Retro Series!
Acts of Love, Gifts for Change
I’m excited to be performing with the fabulous GRIOT NOIR in the ACTS OF LOVE/GIFTS FOR CHANGE fundraiser and silent auction benefiting Our Space and The Living Room Project and hosted by Gina Gold and Flynn May!
Friday November 18
8-10 PM
Eastside Arts Alliance
2277 International Blvd, Oakland
$5-100 sliding scale
PANK Magazine, Queer Two
Three visual poems from a working project KAH RAH OH GAY are up at PANK Magazine’s Queer Two issue! These pieces are still frames extracted from the collision between karaoke VCDs, Thai-English pocket dictionaries and recurring dreams about my ballet teacher. Thanks to the editor Tim Jones-Yelvington. Thanks also to Monica Ong Reed for valuable feedback.
Review of The Spiderboi Files at Hyperallergic
I’m super floored by this awesome review of The Spiderboi Files at Hyperallergic by Emerson Whitney, “Exploring Gender in an Unexpected Package“! Emerson, who gave you a copy of the book? Hmmm, I wonder!
AALR’s Special Issue on 9/11 and My People Film Series
My review of The Asian American Literary Review’s Special Issue Commemorating the Tenth Anniversary of Sept. 11 is now live at Lantern Review here!
Also, my short films Tom/Trans/Thai and TomboiGatoeyMango Episodes 1 & 2 will be screened as part of the Kelly Strayhorn Theater’s 3rd Annual My People (queer people of color) Film Series in Pittsburgh, PA on November 8! View the schedule here! Many thanks to Soham Patel, Colleen Jankovic and Joseph Hall! I’ll be Skyping with the audience live from the Djerassi residency! Fellow Hollins University alumni Jillian Peña’s work will be shown as well!
Djerassi Resident Artists Program
Ravens in the Sun
I just landed at Djerassi this afternoon. I’ll be spending the next four weeks here on a residency fellowship with other writers, visual artists, composers and choreographers. My goal is to make major headway on my next book project! Many thanks to the folks at Djerassi for the honor of being a fellow here. The ravens have already said hello.
Lantern Review Staff Writers 2011-2012
I am excited to announce that I will be joining the Lantern Review team as a book reviewer for 2011-2012! Read more about the amazing staff here! Many thanks to Iris A. Law and Mia Ayumi Malhotra! First review coming soon!
Fan Christy (Cover) [Karaoke MV]
Fan Christy (Cover) [Karaoke MV] from Jai Arun Ravine on Vimeo.
“Fan Christy” is an experimental karaoke music video and a mis-translated cover of the song “Faen Christy” by Dutch artist Christy Gibson. “Faen” is a non-gendered Thai word for romantic partner, purportedly derived from the hybridization of the English words “fan” and “friend.”
As a Super Queer Trans Half Thai/Luk Kreung Diasporic Alien Conspiracy Theorist, I must be an Obsessed Fan of Dutch Luk Thoong/Mor Lam Pop Star Christy Gibson in order to possess The Deep Personal Understanding of Thai Culture and Life.
[...]
Christy Christy Christy your super cool
Christy Christy Christy plz teach me too
Christy Christy Christy I wanna be you, I wanna fan you, I wanna be fan you
[...]
Music: “Faen Christy” by Christy Gibson
Video Projection: Jorrit Poelen (with samples from Christy Gibson’s “Ngiew Dtong Dton Ohn Poo Bow” music video)
Costume Elements: Iraya Robles
Performance: Jai Arun Ravine
Created by Jai Arun Ravine and Jorrit Poelen, 2011
SPD Open House; and then entwine travels
I am honored to be reading at the Small Press Distribution December Open House with Pamela Lu, Marvin K. White and Donna de la Perrière! Thanks to Laura Moriarty! More information from SPDetails:
SPD DECEMBER OPEN HOUSE
Pamela Lu, author of one of SPD’s all time best-sellers, Pamela: A Novel, will be one of the readers for the next SPD Open House. Pam has a new book from Kenning Editions called Ambient Parking Lot. Ambient Parking Lot also happens to be one of the first SPD books available as an ebook—check it out through the Kindle Store at Amazon.com and other ebook providers! Also reading will be Marvin K. White, Donna de la Perrière and Jai Arun Ravine, all of whom have hot new books at SPD. It will be fabulous! Save the date!
The SPD Open House will be Sunday, December 4th. Readings at 2, doors open at 1, 20-50% discounts all day!
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แล้ว and then entwine travels!
I am incredibly excited to announce that แล้ว and then entwine will be taught at SUNY Binghamton, University of Pittsburgh and CalArts during the 2011-2012 academic year! Many thanks to Jeffner Allen, Soham Patel, Jenny Johnson and Jen Hofer for the honor of being taught. Jeffner Allen will also be teaching Tom / Trans / Thai.
Gratitude to Jen Hofer for teaching Is This January and The Spiderboi Files, Volume 1 at CalArts in Spring 2011, and Danielle Vogel for reaching Is This January at the University of Denver in Spring 2011.
Staff Pick Sale at Small Press Distribution
Thanks to Zack Tuck for selecting แล้ว and then entwine as a Staff Pick! You can buy it now through Small Press Distribution for 40% off!
