Paige Sweet Week 11 Venceremos

I find Allen’s statement that he is conducting a “genealogy of the possibilities of the present moment” (10) intriguing. Presumably, Allen is speaking specifically about doing a genealogy of subject formation – what are the historical conditions of possibility that allow for specific subjectivities to arise, paying particular attention to race, gender, and sexuality. If we can consider this a methodological position, it is useful for my research because it allows for a relatively open-ended analysis that is simultaneously historical and contemporary. For my research, this subjectivity-specific genealogical method would allow for syncing macro and micro conditions, as well. What are the cultural and political conditions that allow for subject to form and reform in particular ways, which are contextualized in their own specific circumstances (i.e. race, gender, sexuality)? It seems that analyzing subjectivity is a useful tactic for syncing macro conditions with individual experiences in general, but the genealogical method contributes the necessary axis of history to this type of analysis.

Allen also theorizes subjectivities as oppositional or confrontational to structure from the get-go. He asks, how do black Cubans reinterpret racialized and sexualized interpellations of their identities in the current moment? In this sense, he analyzes the “freedom dreams” of ordinary Cubans via their relationships with transnational “flows” of discourse and people. In essence, his studies of subjectivity assume subversion. From a feminist methodological position, this makes some sense – to theorize identities and subjectivities as partial, disjunctured, always-already political and yet irresolutely resistant. On the other hand, does Allen’s analysis of these subjectivities as innately resistant belie his methodological position of conducting a “genealogy of the present moment,” which seems quite open-ended? Perhaps his assumption of a “natural” subversive core to subjectivity is related to his theorization of erotic self-making as beyond or underneath structure/discourse, which seems problematic from the Foucauldian lens that he employs. If we turn toward complex and contradictory subject formations in our own research, must we assume a “core” to our subjects? If we do not, do we risk writing them as types of “pawns” in the system? Further, does Allen’s analysis of erotic self-making get really beyond this agency/oppression dichotomy, or does it just rewrite agency as innate to oppressed persons?