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In this paper I explore the cultural politics of memory and longing in northern New Mexico. The paper begins by examining the ways that, for many Hispanos, land and identity depend on remembered Spanish and Mexican pasts. It continues by showing, through the case of the violent takeover of an old land grant, the political possibilities and contemporary identities that are enabled through the linking of distant past and contemporary land politics. It also demonstrates the ways in which deviating from the past dilutes these same formations and possibilities that accompany these histories‐clearly delineated by treaties, deeds, patrimony, etc. The paper then explores--through the contemporary political struggle surrounding the dismembering of a statue erected to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the Spanish arrival in northern New Mexico—the ways in which these very memories also tie Hispanos to alternative violent histories of conquest and colonialism. Ultimately, the paper demonstrates the ways that contemporary land and identity politics in northern New Mexico trap Hispanos between what they need to remember and what others will not let them forget. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent work in disability studies has drawn attention to the changing relationship between the visual representations of disability and contemporary US capitalism. One change identified is a newfound cultural recognition of disabled sexuality. In this paper I extend these arguments by considering the kinds of sexuality projected onto the disabled body at the intersection of regimes of disability, sexuality, and neoliberalism. I provide a governmentality/queer reading of visual representations of disabled sexuality and of two self-help disabled sex manuals to argue that interest in disabled sex may witness an investment in the ongoing production of normative sexualities, what Foucault called a 'truth of the self', within the context of neoliberal spatialities of disability. Based on dominant cultural understandings of sex as 'natural', 'predictable', and 'representable', these self-help manuals serve to produce a framework that depoliticizes the claims of disability culture movements. These manuals render the project of disabled sexual liberation a personal project of self-governance that scarcely challenges contemporary structures of (neo)liberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the political fortunes and identities of Irish Catholics in US and Canadian cities are explored through a comparative study of Buffalo and Toronto. Local spaces of political administration in the urban arena, such as wards, were significant in affecting the generation of sociopolitical networks of power which in turn had implications for the sense of political identity and involvement felt by Irish Catholics within these two places. The importance of such spaces, however, was also contingent on the interaction between these cities' Irish Catholic populations and wider geographies of social, economic, and ethnoreligious relations over time as well as on the topographies and traditions of political power that extended beyond the municipal scale in both societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]