You're Skating on Native Land: Queering and Decolonizing Skate Pedagogy

This paper draws from a new materialist interpretation of Maya Angelou’s Caged Bird to analyze how Queer and Indigenous skateboarders develop critical and community-responsive ways of knowing and being. This analysis is contrasted with the implications of skateboarding’s Olympic debut to theorize how non-dominant groups build self-supporting enclaves in spite of concerted efforts to regulate and exclude them from public life. Skateboarding is herein conceptualized as a critical pedagogy which enables participants to reclaim space, achieve self-defined learning goals, and challenge the authority of oppressive institutions built upon what Angelou calls “the grave of dreams.”

Andrei Tarkovsky, Or the Thing from Inner Space

This chapter offers a Lacanian reading of Tarkovsky’s films in terms of an encounter with the radical otherness of the Kantian thing-in-itself, illustrated by the planet Solaris or Stalker’s Zone. This motif, the author maintains, is structurally quite similar to more commercial horror movies dramatizing an encounter with the unknown. The chapter emphasizes the importance of a materialist interpretation of Tarkovsky’s films in which an encounter with the impossible and traumatic Thing is thoroughly devoid of religious and mystical connotations that often accompany commentators’ discussions.

‘MSM’ as a ‘doing thing’

Drawing upon long-term ethnographic research in Namibia, I examine the label ‘MSM’ through a materialist interpretation of affect, viewing ‘MSM’ as a ‘doing thing’ that unsettles the boundaries between subjects and objects. From this analytic perspective, I reconsider the ‘MSM’ label as an inadequate signifier that overlooks, conceals, or erases social complexity. Instead, this perspective reveals what happens when the MSM label travels, thereby better accounting for the socialities it is instrumental in making up. Its very design and appearance – which portray bodies and behaviours in universalistic ways – allow this ‘doing thing’ to gain entry to diverse spaces where it comes to exist alongside some contentious postcolonial political formations, such as those surrounding LGBT rights. I argue that although the label is designed to be insulated from politics, as a ‘neutral’ behavioural category, when ‘MSM’ travels it is still highly relational, continually entangling itself in contexts, stirring up postcolonial anxieties, and reinforcing global inequalities, while also setting the stage for global health worlds coming into being.