Baker A. Rogers is an associate professor of sociology at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro. Baker is the author of King of Hearts: Drag Kings in the American South (Rutgers University), Conditionally Accepted: Christians’ Perspectives on Sexuality and Gay and Lesbian Civil Rights (Rutgers University Press) and Trans Men in the South: Becoming Men.
The talk explores the convergence of the de-generation of film celluloid and videotape as highly-unstable visual materials that inevitably break down and the concept of gay male generation, where the important political gains of previous generations are taken for granted, rejected, or entirely forgotten. My case studies range from an anti-Vietnam War porn film from 1973, award-winning “safe sex” VHS porn videos from the 1990s, and social distancing digital porn during the Covid-19 pandemic. I argue that it is through recording and re-dubbing old images anew that will enable and ensure the preservation of sexual memory and the expansion of sexual possibilities for future queer generations to come. The talk will be supplemented by a screening of short experimental videos.
Nguyen Tan Hoang is an experimental videomaker and writer based in San Jose, California, USA. Nguyen’s videos include Forever Bottom! (1999), PIRATED! (2000), K.I.P. (2002), look_im_azn (2011), I Remember Dancing (2019), and Sad Porn (2024). Their research interests include Asian American visual culture, Southeast Asian cinema, queer cinema, experimental film, race and pornography, and videographic criticism. Nguyen’s experimental videos have screened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Getty Center in Los Angeles, and the Pompidou Center in Paris. They have programmed film, video, and performance for MIX NYC: New York Queer Experimental Film Festival and the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival. Nguyen is a member of the working group International Videoessay Research Network (IVERN). Nguyen teaches film, media, and cultural studies in the Department of Literature at UC San Diego.
“The logistics revolution” was not a revolution at all. It was a counterrevolution. Beginning in the 1950s and '60s, multinational corporations facing a period of falling profitability began to experiment with innovations in logistics management and infrastructure that could speed products to their destinations, cut transportation costs and aid the relocation of production to the low-waged Global South.
As supply chains have sped up and snaked across the Earth in the last half century, turning suburbs, coastal zones, and oceans into a network of warehouses stretched across global space, scholars have largely told the history of logistics as a history of increasing efficiency:
Yet whether critical or celebratory of the logistics revolution, both approaches assume that corporations and states in the Global North are the primary drivers, excluding the agency of Third World actors and their role in these transformations. In "The Logistics Counterrevolution," I ask: What does the rise of logistics look like from the vantage of anti-colonial struggle in the Global South?
Drawing on archival research in Indonesia, Singapore, and the United States and United Kingdom, I provide an alternative story: global supply chains acquired their contemporary power not only because of powerful corporate actors or functionalist shifts in capital’s accumulation strategy but also in response to the rising threat of anti-colonial nationalisms and internationalisms in the decolonizing world. Approaching the history of logistics from the standpoint of the Global South illuminates a more political reading of supply chains not simply as results of corporate ingenuity or economic structures for smoothing the fast circulation of goods but also as forms of slow violence that produce social, political, and market access to the labor, resources and geostrategic locations of Asia.
Charmaine Chua is acting associate professor of geography at the University of California, Berkeley. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on political economy, postcolonial development, and technological change with a specific interest in how the rise of the logistics industry has reconfigured the contemporary relations between supply chain capitalism, race, and empire. They are currently writing two books:
Her work has been published in Environment and Planning D, the Socialist Register, Theory and Event, Antipode, The Review of International Studies, The Boston Review, The Nation and Jacobin, among other venues. She also co-founded the Marxist Institute of Research, is an editor of EPD: Society and Space and serves as the chair of Labor Organizing at the Council of UC Faculty Associations. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including being named a Marguerite Casey Foundation Freedom Scholar in recognition of movement leaders who participate in academia with a demonstrated commitment to supporting social movements.
