Author: sophushelle

A Cultural History of Anti-Masturbation

sophushelle

“No Fap: A Cultural History of Anti-Masturbation,” Los Angeles Review of Books, November 1, 2023. Link.

If you’ve been on the Internet, you’ve undoubtedly heard of “No Nut November”—an annual challenge that dares young men to abstain from ejaculating for a full thirty days. The challenge has become a viral meme, but its origins can be traced to the online NoFap community, whose male adherents tout its pseudoscientific benefits, as a tool not only to quit porn addiction but also to regain autonomy and masculine power. Though it stylizes itself as a self-help group for men, it has gained a negative reputation in recent years for its connection to right-wing and white supremacist groups that condemn the emasculating, pathological effects of masturbation, ranging in severity from Jordan Peterson to the Proud Boys. However weird this men’s forum may seem, anti-masturbation rhetoric has a surprisingly deep history.

This article was featured on POLITICO Playbook’s Weekend Reads (guest-curated by New York Magazine journalist, Olivia Nuzzi) as well as Lit Hub Daily.

Monstrosity, Masturbation, & Motherhood

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“Monstrosity, Masturbation, and Motherhood: Assia Djebar’s Fantasia and the Fight over Algeria’s Feminized Body.” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 42, no. 2 (2023): 237–80. Link.

This article analyzes Assia Djebar’s 1985 novel Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade as a counter-theory to what Marnia Lazreg calls “French revolutionary war theory,” which transformed civilian life during the Algerian War (1954-1962) into a battle front. Djebar pushes back by “de-fronting” the entire Algerian landscape; rather than protecting the pre-revolutionary binary of combat/civilian or acquiescing to the all-front of guerrilla revolutionary war, she engages in a “sexual translation” that casts Algeria as a stage for love, sex, and reproduction. Djebar offers an alternate history of somatic, maternal plenitude, rejecting the colonizer’s theory of Algeria without ejecting him from it, instead absorbing his body and the bodies of his victims as a form of enrichment of the feminized land itself. Djebar’s generative sexual translation thus highlights the mutual obligation of French and Algerians towards the products of the colonial encounter: the hybrid, “monstrous” offspring (in both Homi Bhabha and Tarek El-Ariss’s senses of the term) that manifests new desires as a result of their combined lineage. Though these hybrid monsters speak new, colonial languages, Djebar insists on their indigeneity through the primordial language of the body, in both its masturbatory and maternal modes.

GATE: Between Babylon and Berlin

sophushelle

Project curator and co-organizer at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, Germany. 2022-2023.

A community event held on August 23, 2023, which invited migrant Middle Eastern artists to reflect on their unique connections to the ancient Babylonian past through original poetry and musical performances in Arabic, Turkish, Kurdish, English, and German. The event was held under the Ishtar Gate in the Berlin’s Pergamon Museum, drew a crowd of over 1,500 people, and was covered in Tagesspiegel in the following article.

“GATE” is a project that seeks to rediscover the Ishtar Gate as a monument to movement that has a particular resonance for modern migrant communities: once a sacred threshold through which people from across the ancient empire passed to enter into Babylon, and now a expatriated and reinvented artifact, it is a perfect site for poetry about the pain and creativity of exile. 

Event curated and organized by Aya Labanieh and Dr. Sophus Helle, featuring original poetry by Ghareeb Iskander, Widad Nabi, Liwaa Yazji, and Abdulkadir Musa, and a musical performance will be by Emrah Gökmen. Translations by Aya Labanieh, videography by Ghazal Aldakr, photography by Aram Al-Saed.

The success of this event led to a book contract with Wesleyan University Press for a multilingual poetry anthology on the same themes, titled Born in Babylon. The anthology includes the poems performed during the event, along with many other poems in Arabic, Kurdish, Farsi, Turkish, and Hebrew, all of which have been translated into English. We aim to bring together experiences and languages that are often separated by colonial legacies, by national borders, and by sectarian divides. The dialogue between the ancient past and the troubled present can thus provide a new framework for cross-cultural exchange, and a new vision of the rich, multi-ethnic, postcolonial, and polyphonic future(s) of the West and East alike.

Can the Subaltern Laugh?

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“Can the Subaltern Laugh? Humour, Translatability, and the Inequalities of World Literature”, Journal of Postcolonial Writing 58, no. 6 (2022): 869–82. Link.

This article discusses translatability and the figure of the illiterate “fanatic” – in the context of the Muslim Egyptian fellah – as the limit of World Literature. The illiterate/fellah’s words cannot reach global readers due to crises of access and translation that characterize the world literary periphery, and forms of “killjoy” critical reading that can silence “subaltern” voices in the written text. Using as case studies Waguih Ghali’s Beer in the Snooker Club (1964) and Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land (1992), it argues that one can side-step the modernizing binary of literacy and fanaticism and hear subalterns “differently” by listening for humour. Humour becomes an instance of surprising translatability between the fellah and global literary centres, allowing him to shed the pejorative connotations of “fanaticism” and highlighting points of resistance in the form of laughter that crosses barriers of literacy, nation, religion, and power.

Zip Code Memory Project

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Public Humanities Fellow, The Zip Code Memory Project: Practices of Justice and Repair, Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Social Difference, 2021-2022.

This community-based public humanities project focused on memorializing the disproportionate effects of Covid-19 on black and brown neighborhoods in the Harlem, Washington Heights, and South Bronx zip codes of New York City. As Public Humanities Fellow, I assisted with creative and performance workshops in these neighborhoods, and served as the Assistant Curator to Işın Önol on the final art exhibition, Imagine Repair, which opened at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine on April 23, 2022 and featured the works of local artists alongside more established names such as Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Carrie Mae Weems. The project was led by Marianne Hirsch and Diana Taylor, and included partners and funders from across the city. Below are selected artworks from the exhibition, which was covered in the following article in the New York Times.

Flat Earth vs. Hollow Earth

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“Global Conspiracy Without a Globe? On Earth Shapes, Vaccines, and Conspiratorial Thinking in the West,” Culturico, February 28, 2022. Link.

This essay explores shifts in modern conspiracy theories that reflect growing mistrust of science—mistrust that has recently manifested in anti-vax sentiments and protests against coronavirus lockdowns. I analyze as my case-studies fringe theories about the shape of the Earth, particularly the shift from Hollow Earth in the last century to Flat Earth. The change in these esoteric theories ultimately reveals a mistrust of government institutions, an emphasis on first-hand experimentation, and a disenchantment with science– all of which I argue are now part of the mainstream zeitgeist.

Book Review: Politicizing World Literature

sophushelle

“Traveling Underpants: On May Hawas’ Politicizing World Literature,” Politics/Letters, November 14, 2021. Link.

The humor the meme conveys is near universal in its pluralistic possibilities, while providing a local idiom for that universality to anchor itself: through the creative process of comedy (not so different from fiction-writing), Drake’s face, Sisi’s face, and stifled giggling over underwear humor alter the comedy canon, paving the way for Hussein to cite them as inner-text in future episodes, and for other comedians, Arab or otherwise, to access and drape them over the nether regions of their own respective demagogues. 

May Hawas’ book Politicising World Literature: Egypt, Between Pedagogy and the Public (Routledge, 2019) takes an interest in precisely this kind of global cultural exchange, this time on the level of the literary text. Hawas writes her book in defense of World Literature as a discipline that can encompass and transcend the postcolonial; that can surpass “the question of literary representation” that has stymied many an academic or political project and can venture to ask: what can these books achieve in their various “pedagogical locations in our present time?” (4).  In her view, World Literature goes beyond the binaries so integral to the postcolonial tradition without forgetting them—it absorbs the terms and contents of those binaries but asserts that the journey towards cobbling together one’s self (or one’s selves, as she insists) is not only more individually fulfilling, but more politically subversive.”