Papers by Shannan L Hayes
Camera Obscura, 2024
This essay develops a theory of Mika Rottenberg's video art by attending to both the content her ... more This essay develops a theory of Mika Rottenberg's video art by attending to both the content her work represents (neoliberalism's logic of gendered labor) and the formal characteristics by which her art affects (sensibly drawing the viewer in while resisting assimilation into conceptual critique). Rottenberg's art flirts with a logic of cognitive mapping by suggesting the structures of global production and gendered labor that characterize our neoliberal world order. Through editing and documentary-like international filming, her works suture seemingly disparate locations and activities within an international division of labor. At the same time, her art is neither didactic nor a means to gain abstract, maplike vision of the networked global production system. Rottenberg's art disorients the viewer through pleasurable, haptic, and nonsensical proximities that provide a felt sense of enmeshment within the viewing experience. Rottenberg's art recasts what we might understand not only as the political affectiveness of contemporary art but also the role of aesthetics within feminist practice and critique. This theory of political aesthetics privileges the value of sensible revitalization found in the encounter with art, while departing from established (left) expectations that art's most pressing political relevance is in its ability to raise consciousness or perform critique. This article builds this argument by moving in detail through three of Rottenberg's recent videos: NoNoseKnows (2015), Cosmic Generator (2017), and Spaghetti Blockchain (2019–24).
Finance Aesthetics: A Critical Glossary (Goldsmiths Press), 2024
This essay presents a brief history of the US-based student loan industry. Understanding student ... more This essay presents a brief history of the US-based student loan industry. Understanding student lending through its pivotal public-private entity Sallie Mae provides important detail to the oftencited "neoliberalization" of the university. Doing so makes clear the extent to which the university functions as a technology of private wealth extraction. Contrary to accounts that pose higher ed's progressive notions of social equality against its neoliberalization, the financial operations of student lending thrive on the liberal ideal of universal inclusion. My aim here is to render narratively accessible the process by which the university came to function as a tool of financial extraction by maximizing private profit 'at scale' while reifying college as a universal good. This account adds teeth to critiques of the neoliberal university and challenges the progressive aesthetic of higher ed. It also platforms the need to confront higher ed at the level of financial infrastructure, not just labor organizing, diversity inclusion, and/or curriculum reform.
The Johns Hopkins Guide to Critical and Cultural Theory, 2025
Forthcoming keyword in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Critical and Cultural Theory
Journal of Visual Culture, 2020
Members of the Haverford Community, The Covid-19 crisis has forced Haverford College, like other ... more Members of the Haverford Community, The Covid-19 crisis has forced Haverford College, like other institutions of higher education, to make a series of difficult decisions about its finances and operations. The recent popular outcry against ongoing anti-black violence and structural racism has also precipitated a need for the college to reflect on its operations and commit to justice-oriented change. We write this letter as employees of the college who see this as a crucial moment for institutional transformation. We are invested in shared governance and in collaborative thinking about the values that will shape how such decisions are made...
differences, 2020
This essay interrogates the forms of feminist political desire and subject formation being reprod... more This essay interrogates the forms of feminist political desire and subject formation being reproduced under the heading of contemporary feminist art. The author considers two recent exhibitions, similarly organized around the theme of intersectionality, that took place over two consecutive summers in New York City: Simone Leigh’s The Waiting Room at the New Museum (2016), and the group exhibit We Wanted a Revolution at the Brooklyn Museum (2017). While both exhibitions importantly promote the work of black women artists at the center of their institutional program-building initiatives, each exhibition forwards a notably distinct version of what counts as “revolutionary” feminist politics. Hayes argues ultimately for an interpretation of Leigh’s work as a prefigurative, utopian feminism that demands more—for example, than mere inclusion—from progressive institutions and feminist art.
Keywords: feminist art, intersectionality, prefigurative politics, Simone Leigh, social reproduction, utopian feminism, The Waiting Room
Women & Performance, 2019
In this paper we explore the space that dyadic intimacy plays within the counterpublic world-buil... more In this paper we explore the space that dyadic intimacy plays within the counterpublic world-building of political activism. We reflect on a particular encounter between the artists and ACT UP activists Zoe Leonard and David Wojnarowicz by offering two readings of what we call the “counterprivate” relation between the two. In the first part of our argument, we contend that the counterprivate couple form (found in our case study of Leonard and Wojnarowicz) occasions a space of provisional leave from the normative affective, aesthetic, and identity-based impulses which tend to emerge in social movement group formation. Despite established critiques of the private, dyadic intimacy of the couple within social movement theory and queer and feminist cultural studies, we highlight the value of counterprivate couples – not in place of the collective world-building that is made possible by political organizing and collective identity, but as a necessary aesthetic complement to collective, participatory politics. In the second part of our argument, we read the intimacy between Leonard and Wojnarowicz as a private moment of expressed doubt that has subsequently been institutionalized into a public discourse through the context of art. Here the counterprivate couple form in turn becomes a counterpublic mode of collective world-making once more. This transformation from counterprivate relation to public discourse occasions a practice of collective subject formation (in the institutional terrain of art) that affirms doubt, curiosity, and poetic beauty as part of the reproductive labor involved in political participation.
Feminist Formations, 2013
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Papers by Shannan L Hayes
Keywords: feminist art, intersectionality, prefigurative politics, Simone Leigh, social reproduction, utopian feminism, The Waiting Room
Keywords: feminist art, intersectionality, prefigurative politics, Simone Leigh, social reproduction, utopian feminism, The Waiting Room