In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Feminist Studies 42, no. 3. © 2016 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 757 Ramzi Fawaz How to Make a Queer Scene, or Notes toward a Practice of Affective Curation Let me begin with two stories. In spring of 2013 I organized a semester -long, undergraduate film series at George Washington University titled “Acting Up: Queer Film and Video in the Time of AIDS.” At semester ’s end, after participants (...) had watched nine films about the AIDS epidemic —among them classic AIDS documentaries, activist videos, and mainstream Hollywood productions—I chose to conclude the series with the 1991 documentary Silverlake Life: The View from Here. Silverlake Life documents a year in the lives of Tom Joslin and Peter Friedman, a gay couple living in Los Angeles in the late 1980s who share an HIV diagnosis. At the time I made the selection, I did not realize that Silverlake Life documents one of the most devastating lived experiences of the AIDS epidemic ever filmed: during the course of taping, Tom, the initial documentarian, becomes gravely ill and dies on camera while lying in bed after a week-long convalescence. Reviewing this scene before our official screening, I found myself overwhelmed by intense feelings of anxiety. On the one hand, I felt a deep responsibility to expose my students to the aesthetic and political work of this daring documentary, and on the other, to protect them from witnessing forms of suffering that might traumatize them more than illuminate the social history of AIDS. When we convened to discuss the film, many students expressed how devastated they were by what they had seen. Rather than shutting down conversation, however, the depth and intensity of their viewing 758 Ramzi Fawaz experience galvanized an extraordinary conversation about the ethics of documenting the lives (and deaths) of people with AIDS. What they witnessed expanded the very possibilities of what they could feel about issues of collective concern such as the AIDS epidemic, while also transforming their ability to reconsider productive encounters with pain, suffering, and trauma. In my fear of negatively impacting students, I had forgotten both their capacity to respond with generosity and openness to traumatic images as well as my own careful curation of nine previous films and the attendant conversations held around them, which had laid a groundwork of shared affective openness to difficult content. One year later, as a newly minted assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, I taught a large lecture course on American fantasy. In the fourth week of class, I screened The Wizard of Oz as part of a unit on the Hollywood musical, and I devoted a lecture to a gay and lesbian interpretation of this classic film. I highlighted the movie ’s camp aesthetics, its gender play and drag elements, and its derailing of traditional heterosexual romance plots. As a gay man well versed in queer media scholarship, I took it for granted that this was a pleasurable but patently obvious interpretation of a film that I assumed most people recognized for its exuberant and visually spectacular gayness. Yet as I spoke, I sensed a visceral tension build in the room. Half the students seemed mesmerized by the possibility of a queer aesthetic underlying the movie, while the other half frowned at me in silent fury, outraged by my daring to desecrate the presumed innocence of a childhood escape. The seething resentment of this latter group was confirmed for me when, weeks later, my teaching assistants disclosed that numerous students had expressed feelings of anger and frustration that my interpretation had “ruined” their pleasure in a beloved film of their youth. This circumstance prompted me to confront my students the following week: microphone in hand, I strolled the room and asked students to account for their feelings of discomfort. I wanted them to explain why their personal pleasure in The Wizard of Oz hinged on the diminishment of alternative viewing possibilities, including unexpected queer delights in transparently “straight” narratives. Students were clearly jolted out of their complacent belief that no one would hold them accountable for their perspective, or that their view might have political or ethical consequences: yet the resistance of some to being called... (shrink)

Animal welfare is an importantsocietal issue in Switzerland. Policy makershave responded with a strict legislation onanimal protection and with two programs topromote animal friendly husbandry. Alsoprivate actors in the meat industry initiatedprograms for animal friendly meat productionto meet consumers' expectations. Labeled meathas a market share of over 20%. Depending onthe stakeholders responsible for the labels,their objectives vary. While retailers want toattract consumers with meat produced in ananimal friendly and environmentally compatiblemanner and with products of consistently goodsensory quality, producers want to (...) keep marketshares and increase their revenues. (shrink)

Crop cultivation is one of the oldest activities of civilization. For a long time, crop production was carried out based on knowledge passed from generation to generation. However, due to the rapid growth in the human population of the world, human knowledge-based cultivation is not enough to meet the demanding need. To address this issue, the usage of machine learning-based tools has been studied in this paper. An experiment has been carried out over 0.3 million data. This dataset identifies 46 (...) prominent parameters for cultivation, which is collected from the Department of Agriculture Extension, Bangladesh. Comparison between neural networks and numbers of machine learning algorithms has been carried out in this research. It is observed that the neural network outperforms the other methods by maintaining an average prediction accuracy of 96.06% for six different crops. Other contemporary machine learning algorithms, namely, support vector machine, random forest, and logistic regression, have average prediction accuracy of around 68.9%, 91.2%, and 62.39%, respectively. (shrink)

The authors discuss the political, moral, cultural, and legal aspects of the United States' response to the attacks of September 11.

We investigate cluster-delay synchronization of a directed network possessing cluster structures by designing an intermittent control protocol. Based on Lyapunov stability theory, we proved that synchronization can be realized for oscillators in the same cluster and cluster-delay synchronization can be realized for the whole network. By simplifying the obtained sufficient conditions, we carry out a succinct and utilitarian corollary. In addition, comparative researches are carried out to show the differences and the usefulness of the obtained results with respect to other (...) similar controllers from the recent literature. Finally we provide two numerical examples to show the effectiveness of the control schemes. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:preface That an overtly white-nationalist misogynist demagogue was voted into power in the United States is cause for alarm and despair. As the election results sink in and analyses take shape, we at Feminist Studies mark this moment via poetry, a tradition of feminist expression that we have long nurtured. We include in this issue a special section on poems responding to the election. Raw by necessity, they allow (...) for a collective processing of feelings experienced in this moment, even as we prepare for the courage and acuity needed in days ahead. The scholarly works in this issue offer reflections on the travels of the term gender: in French Canadian feminist circles; the misreadings of gender and sexuality in histories of post-WWII New York City; and the gains and gaps in activism against gender-based violence and inequality. Geneviève Pagé recounts how the term gender was taken up in French Canadian scholarship, while Alix Genter offers a visual history of what butchness meant in 1950s and 1960s New York City. Julie R. Enszer tracks the representation of women writers through literary grants offered by the National Endowment for the Arts and in Norton anthologies, making the case that gender parity remains an elusive goal. Elizabeth Jean Hornbeck narrates the 1980 horror film The Shining as a commentary on violence against women and child abuse that uses the Gothic form to salutary effect. Nikki Lane reviews recent scholarship in black queer ethnography, and Jennifer A. Wagner-Lawlor introduces us to the feminist eco-art of Pamela Longobardi. Our featured poets, apart from our special section, are Hannah Baker Saltmarsh and Karen An-hwei Lee. Our closing forum on trigger warnings narrates the innovative practices that Alexis Lothian and Ramzi Fawaz propose in response to a contentious pedagogical debate. 560Preface Geneviève Pagé describes the history of the journey of the term gender in feminist circles in Montreal, using this case to comment on the dilemmas that arise from Anglocentrism in feminism. Pagé argues that in many ways, the term gender was not well suited to the context she highlights: Quebec feminists already possessed an intellectual infrastructure for referencing the meanings of the term gender through alternative phrasing, such as rapport sociaux de sexe. Furthermore, the grammatical concept of genre was “a concept central to the French language, but only peripheral in the English language,” and therefore, its use in French carried a potential “naturalizing” connotation. Nonetheless, given the dominance of English in feminist theory, Pagé concludes that “the polysemic nature of gender” allowed “for a fluid and multiple account of the local and global processes at work in the construction of women and men” in this context. Alix Genter gives us a nuanced understanding of butch genders and butch-femme aesthetics. Rather than relying on a stereotypical version of the 1950s queerly legible butch in masculine clothes, Genter argues that butchness itself was visually nuanced and coded in different ways than expected. Referencing a rich archive of 1950s-era photographs, Genter demonstrates that butch-identified women “conveyed their identities through alternate means that included clandestine codes and plays on women’s fashions.” This approach to butch aesthetics and lesbian self-representation opens up the common notion of a strict butch-femme contrast and introduces the concept of conscious mutual survival between the two lesbian identities. The appreciation of nuance continues in Nikki Lane’s review essay of reflexive ethnographic research about black queer communities. Lane’s review of recent work by Jafari S. Allen, Marlon Bailey, Mignon Moore, and Mireille Miller-Young highlights the attention these authors give to the complex politics of sexuality in everyday experiences of black communities. With an emphasis on the illuminating potential of ethnography and qualitative methodologies, Lane discusses how each text adds to our understanding of processes of “racialization, gendering, and sexualization.” Lane concludes that black queer and feminist ethnographic methods help accrue an embodied knowledge—the “flesh”—of black queer experience. Preface 561 The art featured in this issue is by Pamela Longobardi, who uses found-plastic objects to create painting, sculptures, installations, assemblages, photographs, and community-art projects. As an artist with training in biology, Longobardi focuses on the... (shrink)