Judy Rohrer

This article considers how walls stake settler claims and scale from individual property (home) to national borders (homeland). Examining Donald Trump’s U.S.-Mexico border wall and a sea wall in front of beachfront property Barack Obama has purchased in Hawai’i reveals the inherent instability and impermanence of settler colonialism, and thus this particular form of imperialism.

That instability manifests in three ways: 1) settler colonial anxious, repetitive insistence on its dominion, its claims, especially via the law and physical intervention; 2) the multiple ways human and other-than-human actors resist the walls, refuse capture/containment, call out the fiction/myth of the border and sea wall’s power to divide; and 3) the way “once and future ghosts” haunt settler claims; unsettle territorial and temporal assertions of possession/domination/belonging.

In 2020 the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) announced it was filing for bankruptcy after hemorrhaging money for years due to insurance and the legal costs associated with sexual abuse lawsuits. This set off a flurry of news articles that continue today. I use a queer feminist analysis to argue that we must look more closely at BSA history to learn how the organization has always been broadly bankrupt.

This article centers the simple declaration: “where life is precious, life is precious.” In the liminal time-space of COVID-19, breath and life have come into high relief. We are challenged with how to scale macro and micro questions about how we live with ourselves, our communities, our institutions, other living beings, and the environment. What sort of life truly matters? Whose lives matter? In what follows, I use the breath and life to weave some thinking from Black and Indigenous feminist scholar-activists on the pandemic, the collapsing capitalist economy, the uprising for racial justice, and how all of this is coalescing in an historic moment.

I wrote this article to share ways I have seen Native colleagues and their knowledges (Native, feminist, and otherwise) denied and rejected in feminist academic spaces. I also write to think through my responses to these incidents, in the moment and after the fact, as I grapple with my responsibilities as a non-Native feminist.

Overall, this paper argues that feminist academic spaces are often hostile territory for Native scholars who face attempts at elimination upon entering them. “Survivance” and “resurgence” assist these Native academics in their navigation of these territories, in their refusal of erasure, in their struggles for decolonization. Non-Natives wishing to facilitate that navigation and Native presence in the academy can learn to recognize these acts of resurgence and deepen our understanding of, and commitment to, decolonization.

This article explores “compulsory civility” as a contemporary tool used in the denial of access and belonging to the academy. Compulsory civility is explicitly written into personnel policy, tenure and promotion processes, and student codes of conduct. It is implicitly enforced in institutional culture by way of discoursesof “collegiality,” “following proper channels,” “the way we do things,” and “being a team player.”

Compulsory civility can sometimes be difficult to identify and is often mobilized through gaslighting strategies that make us feel wrong, isolated, and alone. Imposter syndrome (tied to histories of exclusion), lack of labor consciousness, and academic (rugged) individualism predispose us to self-doubt and self-blame. The goal of this essay is to share a few different examples across constituencies so that we might be better equipped to identify, and resist, compulsory civility as it operates today. It suggests solidarity and (un)civil disobedience as modes of resistance.

Teaching in the Trump era calls for a reevaluation of the seductions of neoliberalism and a reinvigoration of critical pedagogies that necessarily expose and challenge structural oppression. I address ways Women’s, Gender, Sexuality and Studies and other interdisciplines have furthered the neoliberal corporatization of higher education: (1) the institutionalization of diversity talk; (2) exhaustive attention to meaningless (but allegedly quantifiable) student learning objectives; and (3) undo concern with compliance rather than safety and accommodation. I offer a pedagogical framework I call ‘It’s in the Room’: (1) implementing access syllabus statements and discussions; (2) sharing mistakes or revelations that caused me to change my teaching and/or thinking; and (3) encouraging student sharing of lived experiences. By collectively recognizing that it is ‘in the room’, the true diversity, differences, inequalities, and privileges attached to our lives are offered for examination in ways that can be deeply transformative for students and instructors.

This short essay is about my experience as faculty in a mid-size university in the immediate aftermath of the Trump election.

Recognizing the tensions between decolonial and postcolonial frameworks, this essay argues that a combined post/decolonial approach can illuminate colonial processes and reassert indigeneity. Writing as a Chamorro and a haole scholar, we weave together examples from Guåhan and Hawai'i to illustrate how a joint mobilization of decolonial and postcolonial approaches expose settler colonial processes and resistances. This essay also considers how combining these frameworks rearticulates and positions identities—in similar and distinct ways—to recenter indigeneity. Our conversation engages intersectional theorizing and resistive practices to perform Pacific moves beyond colonialism.

This chapter explores the histories of the Boy and Girl Scouts and how they tie to contemporary firestorms over gender and sexual normativity. Utilizing queer theory, culture, and activism, I analyze existing and possible modes of playful resistance to scouting’s normativity. I argue that fun and fantasy--especially as practiced via irony, parody and camp--has been, and can be, a critical part of thinking queerly through the politics of futurity. From queer merit badges, to camp parodies, to scouting-themed gay male porn, to cub scout drag kings, I scout (out) alternative strategies and visions for American futurity that push beyond arguments for inclusion of the “good” gay scout/citizen.

Grounded in critical race studies, intersectional theory comes from a field that values narrative, a field that courageously brings stories into legal discourses. Intersectionality has traveled, more or less successfully, into other areas but is often divorced from narrativity. In this essay I attempt to bring the two back together to assist in exploring the beginnings of my disability awareness. I bring the two into conversation by juxtaposing journal entries with some information about disability that they help illuminate.

On November 4, 2008 we elected the first African American/biracial/nonwhite president, Prop 8 outlawed gay marriage in California, and Hawai’i rose in national prominence as the childhood home of the new President. These three election moments offer productive sites for thinking about how citizenship in this country has long been (re)produced through the violences and exclusions that establish normalcy. This article explores the ways dominant narratives regarding citizenship are being reinforced through colorblind notions of a postracial nation (including a reinscription of the myth of meritocracy), an emphasis on civil rights claims by gays and lesbians, and resurgent American exceptionalism and assimilationist narratives.

This issue of American Quarterly received a Special Recognition award at the American Studies Association awards ceremony in Nov. 2011

• Reprinted in Alternative Contact: Indigeneity, Globalism, and American Studies, Paul Lai and Lindsay Claire Smith, eds. (Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 2011)

American law in particular, renders indigenous claims inarticulable by racializing native peoples, while simultaneously normalizing white subjectivity through invocation of a colorblind ideology. This is played out in the frictions surrounding lawsuits against native Hawaiian entitlements. This article will look at recent litigation and political mobilization aimed at forcing Kamehameha Schools to eliminate the admissions preference it gives Kanaka Maoli (native Hawaiian) students. Kamehameha Schools was founded in 1887 for the purpose of benefiting Kanaka Maoli youth. The attacks against Kamehameha Schools can be understood in the context of a recent discourse that represents all Kanaka Maoli preferences or entitlements as illegal racial preference, rather than part of efforts toward native recovery from the violences of colonization.

This article is part of a larger project in which I analyze haole (whiteness and white people in Hawai‘i) as a neocolonial American form of situated whiteness. Here I explore some possible elements of a genealogical stance toward haole, understanding genealogy both in the indigenous sense of connection to people and place with its temporal and spatial fluidity, and in the poststructuralist sense of remaining attentive to our will to power, cautious of truth claims, and privileging of nondominant perspectives.

This chapter asks not just how it is that marriage has come to monopolize gay politics, but also how that phenomenon is productive of certain ambivalences among particular queers. What might we learn by centering those anxieties, by beginning to think through the questions they raise and taking them seriously rather than discounting or denigrating them? In other words, what can we learn by leaving the limiting binary framework of the dominant discourse and investigating the borderlands of gay marriage?

Feminist anti-war/peace activists incorporate feminist principles into their direct action in creative and effective ways. They are not just protesting injustice, but modeling the world they want to inhabit. Use of irony, humanization, humility, and vulnerability characterize their actions, and differentiate them from more militant, masculinist anti-war organizing. In this chapter I think strategically about this activism, to encourage critique, but more importantly to facilitate its continued development and our involvement.

This article analyzes two dominant discourses of racial politics in Hawai'i and the work they do naturalizing haole (white people or whiteness in Hawai'i) in the islands. The first is the well-worn discourse of racial harmony representing Hawai'i as an idyllic racial paradise. There is also a competing discourse of discrimination against non-locals that contends that haoles and non-local people of color are disrespected and treated unfairly. As negative referents for each other, these discourses work to reinforce one another and are historically linked. I suggest that the question of racial politics be reframed towards consideration of the processes of racialization themselves - towards a new way of thinking about racial politics in Hawai'i that breaks free of the not racist/racist dyad.

This article is part of a larger project that explores haole (white people, foreigners) as a colonial form of whiteness in Hawai'i. I use the recent Supreme Court decision in Harold F. Rice v Benjamin J. Cayetano, 528 US 495 (2000), as an entry point into the interrogation of haole. The Rice case illustrates how Western law renders indigenous claims inarticulable by racializing native peoples, while simultaneously normalizing white subjectivity by insisting on a color-blind ideology. The inherent contradiction in these two positions—race matters/race does not matter—is played out in the frictions surrounding the Rice decision and is evidence of the cracks in the hegemony of Western law that complicate any easy binary of colonizer–colonized.

• ​Reprinted in Women, Culture, and Society: A Reader, 5th Ed., Barbara J. Balliet, ed. (Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Co., 2007), 132-147
• Reprinted in Disability: Major Themes on Health and Social Welfare (4-Volume Set), Nick Watson, ed. (Oxford, UK: Routledge, 2007)

This article is a feminist exploration of disability studies and the movement that gave it birth. I explore possible paths toward feminist theorizing and praxis that are inclusive of disability. These paths offer expanded theoretical landscapes and additional tools for use in feminist social justice struggles. I begin by briefly sketching the context in which we find ourselves as U.S. citizens, scholars, and activists since the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the founding of the Society for Disability Studies. I then focus on a few illustrative theoretical tools and sites of feminist inquiry and activism that are deepened and challenged through the deployment of disability analysis: simultaneity, irony, interdependence, body politics, and “choice.”