Love as an Active Choice

For this assignment, my professor asked us to find an image and to analyze it for its accurate (or inaccurate) depiction of love based on the works we read from Eric Fromm and bell hooks. I found this three-framed image of a moving statue by Tamara Kvesitadze and thought it was a great representation of Fromm\u27s paradox that in love \u27two beings become one yet remain two (19). From there, I began to examine the other ways the image aligned with Fromm and hooks\u27 concepts of love and discussed with my professor the best way to organize my ideas

Affect and Manhattan’s West Side Piers

Derek P. McCormack (2010) argues, Affect, is like an atmosphere: it might not be visible, but at any given point it might be sensed ... Emotion, in turn, can be understood as the sociocultural expression of this felt intensity (643). This paper puts McCormack (2010) and Ben Anderson (2009) into conversation to think through the ways in which atmosphere in relation to affective and emotive life has been conceptualized. I center the affective atmospheres that happen with queer bodies that make New York\u27s west side piers queerly affective. I use queer bodies to signal the dis-identification with heteronormativity or binaristic sexualities. Queer sexualities carry political weight with regard to the comments that the politically loaded term queer brings to public consciousness. So queer sexualities and queer bodies substantively challenge cisgender and heteronormative social institutions that are disgustingly oppressive to the queer bodies that, perhaps, use the piers as a space to mark their affective and emotive capabilities. Ultimately, my aim is to situate atmosphere as an analytic to explore the socio-spatial meanings that are attached to spaces and places. As a result, I wish to further spatial knowledge that considers atmospheres as a legitimate dimension of space and placemaking

Torsos, Selfies, and Blanks: Grindr as a Research Tool and a Field Site

Torsos, Selfies, and Blanks: Grindr as a Research Tool and a Field Sit