I tend to run a somewhat tight and unsentimental email ship – except for my occasional sloppiness in getting rid of jokey and interesting correspondence that may or may not be of utilitarian value to me. I delete mass emails, things that are too abstract or belong to alternative trajectories that, I’ve decided, don’t belong to me anymore. Dry-eyed, I delete petitions on behalf of starving kids in Africa, raped and mutilated women in the Congo, pleas to sign a protest against the corruption in Chicago, newsletters for upcoming events of social and cultural import – these days, there’s very little that I don’t delete. For that which I truly need to save, I archive and file emails under labels – my favorite and most useful one being the long-winded “deserving of a response soon” – and then click the label and pull up those red-alert emails, those that need my direct attention. All others may get a star, which signals importance but is lower on the hierarchy than the aforementioned “deserving of…” and finally, for arcana that may be important somewhere down the road, I apply a more categorical label (“dissertation,” “theatre 369,” “Central America,” and the slightly chilling “JOB MARKET”).

And yet I awoke a few weeks ago to the notice that I was nearing the end of my Google cache. Even with my organizational systems in place, I was accruing emails at a rate and volume that were surpassing the capacity of the system. Google asked me to buy additional storage space. I gnashed my teeth and started deleting, going back in time to almost 2005.

We all knew that this would eventually be an issue, right? A person can’t forever gain information and yet stay within a limit. Isn’t there a mathematical theorem that might tell us something about our use of this space? And what of the coming demise of net neutrality?

Anyhow, as the warning repeatedly cropped up, I started trying to delete everything in sight, and today had me doing the same. I thought about that large stash of old, musty (or the virtual equivalent of) emails between myself and L., at first flowery, playful, and exciting, as we strutted our words and knowledge to impress each other – as we showed off, knowing that we were both incredibly smart and interesting, winning, sexy, lovely, humane individuals with synthetic abilities to integrate and share vast amounts of data. Then, a bit later, melodramatic, wistful, affectionate, ironical, jokey, masked, accusatory, bitter, frank, pointed, cutting, and sometimes abrasive…finally, utilitarian or occasional, and often indirect, as in “I think that your mother might like this link.” Those types of emails, as many of us might agree, mark the moribund end of the email chain, when the patient has all but flatlined.

Anyhow, today I decided, what the hell, might as well delete them. I knew what most of them said, and I didn’t take pleasure in retracing their dialogic lines and reacknowledging their cutesy bursts of cleverness, signs of a more naïve attempt at love and relationship-building. My own forays into that sort of sentimentality, especially with people who I might hope to date, have since been few and far between. I know how taxing it can be to shape and structure one’s words so lovingly, in a show of epistolary extravagance, and then later to note the diminishment of pleasure in that activity, as the vocabulary is shaved to the minimum, the written/verbal equivalent of throwing on an old sweatshirt and spending the night sedentary. I also wonder about the value of words – as words, especially the exchange of them, in media like email and physical letters, or phrases and references scribbled on the backs of old photographs and mementos lovingly dug up from strange archives to present as individualized gifts, were such an important part of our connection on many levels. I remember my extreme delight upon receipt of a letter from L., when we had just met, and I wasn’t sure about my level of interest in being with him. My occasional, sneaking feelings of tepid trepidation turned into certitude and joy as I followed the letter’s scrawl – his handwriting endeared itself to me, and I always recognized and recognize its inimitable structure and distribution. I remember feeling extremely fortunate and experiencing euphoria. Real euphoria, like I’d never had it.
Is it necessary for me to have that kind of wordy, emotive intimacy with a lover now? Even if I felt that our verbal exchanges were pitch-perfect, what about the other factors in the relationship that were off-kilter? Time and space were working against us, and those seemed to really overtake and embitter anything that words could sweeten. Either way, I know two things about the relationship, which I’ve established conclusively: 1) it was real; and 2) it ended because it needed to. So that’s my closure there. And I remember that even when we broke up for real, and I stared down into the Greek salad that I had ordered, suddenly unable to eat even a piece of lettuce, he laughed at a joke that I had just made and complimented me on my capacity for wordplay and verbal comedy.

In retrospect, ‘après le delete,’ I feel that maybe I should have saved all of the emails into a text file – but that thought did not occur to me, and I don’t even know if exportation of that magnitude is possible. When I hastily went back and ‘checked all that [applied],’ I found that there were almost two thousand emails between me and this person – a formidable volume, and something that suggests that we were very important parts of each other’s lives, and still should be, to some extent. Well, I already knew the former, but perhaps the latter isn’t possible…? I would hope that it is, but at the end we’d really run out of things to say, in the truest sense. A casual look at the emails’ volume and heft charts that precipitous decline, an almost embarrassing fall that parallels the protagonist’s arc from genius to mentally disabled subject in that book, Flowers for Algernon, that we all had to read in high school. (At least I think that that’s what happened. I may have skipped it.)

So I erased all 1938 emails – many more, really, if you consider that many of these were email chains with over 100 threads – and I guess that I want to monumentalize or commemorate this in some way. I can no longer access the information, and something about the action feels cold or even foolish, although part of me also knows that I’ll likely never read them again, and pragmatically speaking, I needed the space. Another part of me feels that the other person has likely done the same thing, and maybe years ago. I also feel that maybe it’s not a big deal to flush out these old things. Hoarding is unhealthy, or so the saying goes. In the past, I’d felt reluctant to delete so voluminously, so voluptuously, but now I felt okay about it, granted myself the permission, and there it went, and I don’t feel so bad. More like I’m watching a ship slowly pass through the Panama Canal. A kind of elbows-on-the-railing type feeling.

So consider this a verbal marker, paltry monument that it is, to what was an extremely rich conversation in my life. Hopefully I can find one as wonderful as that one was, or maybe I no longer need something of that exact nature to be satisfied. Maybe I’m romanticizing fruitlessly, for the sake of feeling worthy of being in love (especially because I haven’t really loved someone naively and fully like that since the relationship ended about 3-4 years ago). Maybe I’ve moved on and matured in my conception of what love or a relationship needs to function. Either way, I now have 17% empty space in my inbox, which I will doubtlessly fill in a year, at most.

The title of this post refers to my high school friend’s eponymous blog, although he tends to write about very different subjects. I chose this title, however, because I find myself thinking about and/or invoking this phrase on a semi-regular basis these days. In particular, I feel like we are currently living in a time in which too much is being said, all of the time, in all places, to everyone. And yet I’m not ready to propose a solution, so what follows will perhaps just gesture toward some of the points of the debate, namely around freedom of speech/censorship/incitement to violence or provoking words.

United States: Nation of Bombastic Immigrants

Exercising verbal discretion has never been a prized trait of the USAmerican citizen: if you think about it, over centuries the nation has been composed of migrants who forcefully elbowed their way to the front of the line, spoke well and charismatically and glibly to get what they needed, and otherwise employed many rhetorical tactics and flourishes to be in this country. (Note: I like taking a somewhat facetious cue from evolutionary psychology and thinking about the evolution of the U.S. nation-state, even if it is sort of tongue-in-cheek.)

I’m not entirely dismissive of attempts to theorize the culture of the journey, or the transformative processes by which immigrants become immigrants, and then participants in a new citizen body. I do feel that attempting to get a word in through the din and clamor of our public life has historically been, and continues to be, a central goal of representative ethnic politics…and now it’s transforming into something entirely different as the civil rights struggle gives way to partisan rivalries and weird little splinter groups form, like black and gay Republicans – capitalism seems to slice through the political pie, attempting to make certain identities intelligible but perhaps resulting in more illegibility where it counts.

Brief Background: Theories of the Left/Right Split of the 1950s (Plus Di/Transgression #1: Capitalism/Affirmative Action Rant)

There’s an interesting theory put forth by some people whose names I don’t recall that I remember reading in an undergraduate course called “Politics and American Film.” Helpful reference, I know – but the authors’ argument has stayed with me even during my tedious 6-year trudge through grad school. The argument goes like this: before the 1950s, there existed in the United States a sort of coalition between the middling classes with the radical left (Eugene Debs, the Pullman strikers, and people like the characters in Odets’s Waiting for Lefty), those who would be Communists, European style. However, during the Cold War and anti-Communist scare (not the first one in the U.S. by far), the middle class began to distance itself from the Left, using ethnicity and racial politics partly as a cover for its intensifying conservatism. Hence, the political life in the U.S. began to take a notably centrist turn, which it carries on today, implicitly using civil rights as a sort of screen for an unequal socioeconomic stratification. I don’t entirely buy this, but I do think that often ethnicity and racial identity are often used as attention-getting screens preventing the populace from confronting class hierarchies, which are often claimed not to exist in the U.S. At the same time, racialized groups, like African Americans, are notoriously marginalized in terms of class. Although this is the case, I think that the discourse tends to make the marginalization all about race – and yes, it is often very much about race – and not at all about class. There should be a political economy argument there as well. Until there is one, people will be promoted to positions of leadership based on racial taxonomy with the full knowledge – theirs and everyone else’s – that they have no intention of multiplying the effects. Why would they, in a society that rewards individualistic boot-strapping? To take on inferiors as a charity project, simply because they share the same skin color or through bonds of empathetic affinity, could result in these mentor figures’ lowered productivity, for which they’d be punished. What incentives, therefore, are they given to do this good work after having been promoted? Anyhow, clearly the capitalistic unfolding of affirmative action is one of its most troubling aspects, placing those who have benefited from a combination of their talents and the fact that they comply with a specific identity category in a difficult bind. I am totally in favor of affirmative action, don’t get me wrong. Despite its flaws, I think that it is a much-needed corrective to long-perpetuated sins in the United States. But one person cannot be relied upon to rectify the structural defects of a national system, right? For even one person placed in a position of substantial authority, the systemic race/class nexus is too powerful to be vanquished through, say, acts of grassroots community outreach and mentoring. What is needed is for racism to be acknowledged even as ethnic politics are put in their places and given over to a discussion of class politics, as these are shot through with widespread and institutionalized racism.

Digression #2: On the “Ethnic” Arts:

On the subject of ethnic cultural politics: Lately I’ve been hanging out with and translating some of the work of this really excellent Mexican-American playwright who is very interested in questions of the identities and psychic landscapes of migrants to the United States. Although Raúl has been chastised for his subject matter – apparently the lives of Mexican-Americans are considered by Mexican intellectuals too gauche and prosaic to be fitting objects of inquiry, and in the United States, Mexican immigrants, though extremely numerous, are basically invisible, or only sporadically glimpsed as they scramble between various work stations with differing degrees of legitimacy – he insists that the obligation of the artist is to figure/feature a certain community and be concerned with the problematics presented before that community – in other words, not to escape or be somewhere else, creatively speaking or speaking of the space of the mind, but to use art as a means of grounding oneself in the here-and-now and fostering a space for the analysis and processing of events that might otherwise fly by as news tickers and headlines, imbued with just enough novelty and gravitas to disturb our frames of reference but too rapidly for us to ingest on a more profound level.  Take the recent shooting of Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona, for example: unlike many news stories, this one is receiving somewhat of a more nuanced treatment by editorialists and bloggers asking questions about how mental illness – conceived as a personal affliction – may link to the political debates unfolding in a society (ours) beset by a heated partisan rivalry. There is no question that the far right’s inflated rhetoric, interlarded as it is with paranoia and a sense of almost Manichean necessity to take the structural events of the world into one’s own, pasty/flabby/misanthropic hands, has attracted people who are already fermenting their own brands of crazy – this is, in fact, something that Jim Gilchrist complained about regarding the Minuteman Project, i.e., that in calling for the formation of a border vigilante group, he suddenly found himself surrounded by some serious, should-be-locked-away psychopaths looking to unload their clips into the targets of his cause, and oh, these people were not like him at all, he just being your average, harmless, mouth-foaming racist. Hm.

Anyhow, the point being that my friend Raúl’s sense of what an artist is obligated to do, at least in regard to his own creative output – which output, I should note, evinces a sort of fluctuating realist-absurdist mode, in which emotions are often superficially legible but sometimes the signscape isn’t, or isn’t as immediately accessible as we might initially assume it to be – leads me to ponder the ‘character’ of the USAmerican, in the here-and-now, and how that character has changed given certain circumstances. One of my major issues, which spends a large amount of time propping up my soapbox, is that the United States has everything to do with Mexico, and not just because of the beauty of theorizing the master-slave relationship, or the identity of the subject and its ‘other,’ on the margins, world-turned-upside-down, etc. Yes, people are often defined by that which they push to their farthest outskirts, the marginal, the abject/subaltern, and then which continually returns to haunt them, in the ‘return of the repressed.’ And of course cultures reassert themselves when faced with their unraveling, so that borders exhibit a dynamism practically unheard of anywhere else. The notion of “the border” ties into some integral human psychic formations. But I would hasten to bring into focus the issue of the actual border between the U.S. and Mexico, so that the symmetry and beauty of these border dialectics do not cloud the actual politics of the local context.

In 1848, the United States acquired a substantial portion of its current land holdings – including Texas, California, Colorado, and the Southwest generally – and delineated the U.S.-Mexico borderline at the Río Grande. The Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War and brought about the sale of land from Mexico, intersected with some nationally-defining strands: the national project of Manifest Destiny, for example; the California Gold Rush (essentially, a rebuttal to the naysayers of the westward push, who had in fact been multitudinous); Native American massacres and forced relocations; the slave trade (as many of those who had opposed Manifest Destiny rallied their forces into abolitionist causes, sparking the Civil War); and other events in some way tied to the very crux of the U.S. imaginary. Racism, genocide, self-assertion, settlement, and land-grabbing are all, and have been for a long time, important parts of what constitutes the U.S. citizen – his/her identity traits and sentimental meanderings and apocalyptic fulminations, privatizing privations, prurient prudism, and conservative backwater nostalgia trips. To think that these strands are lessening, loosening, or are in some way non-intrinsic to the U.S. character (or ego-ideal, really) is to essentially miss what went on in our nation for the past, oh, 250-odd years.

And freedom of speech is crucial to the mix. On the face of it, anyone can agree on the importance of fostering a society in which people can speak their minds without fear of persecution. Words are just words, after all, and deeds are what will put you in jail (and in Hell!). Many are the political theorists who have held forth on the ins and outs of ‘freedom of speech,’ the “performatives” (Butler, Rawls, Derrida, Austin) being perhaps the latest wave, or the latest wave of which I am aware. I agree with the performatives, specifically Judy Butler, in her classic work Burning Acts, Injurious Speech, and feel that Butler makes an excellent case in ascribing new force and power to the word (as performative utterance). Rather than limiting herself to a mediating rumination on the texts of our times – as if textual analysis is really the best way to get at ideas about politics, I mean, come on now, really – Butler addresses a Supreme Court case involving a cross-burning by the KKK on a black family’s front lawn and, through her discussion of the conservative and liberal justices’ statements about this act, manages to create a fascinating argument about the ways in which hate speech can or cannot approach criminality, revealing in the process the lengths to which U.S. conservatives will go to hide behind ‘freedom of speech’ as a means of asserting the rights of provocateurs and supremacists of varying sorts. The polemic deserves to be read on its own merits and not paraphrased here, but suffice it to say that I consider this to be a major intervention in scholarly and philosophical considerations of what constitutes free speech and when speech crosses over into action, as well as the ethics of speech.

Palin’s Crosshairs: The Violent Tastelessness of Right-Wing Rhetoric

Recent conflagrations, in which people testing injurious speech incite (or, okay, fine, “just happen to coincide with”) actual physical violence, make me long for a new contouring of the U.SAmerican ability to hold forth, a curb on our collective national ability to speak. Perhaps we should all stand at the national mirror, American flag reflected in the background – one hand on the heart, the other holding the tongue. I wonder if it would be possible to inculcate a national “rhetorical mutuality” that would exercise discretion without everyone being legally mandated to do so. Already I think not. Even beyond the idea of political correctness – which is fundamentally flawed, as it only brings forth the impish desire to name that which has been excoriated and expunged from the increasingly anesthetized ‘proper’ speech of the public sphere – I wonder if we could potentially bring into visibility this connection between speech and actions by unleashing a storm of commentary on it, debating the methods and the ways in which speech acts have moral correlates as to physical acts. We do not all refrain from murder simply because it is illegal; neither should the illegality/legality of speech acts prevent us from saying that which we know will provoke an enraged response – speech acts designed to anger and incite rather than stimulate dialogue or move the conversation forward.

The news is always liberally peppered with idiotic questions about the connection between simulated violence – on TV, in video games – and actual violence. I think of these kinds of discussions as a leap directly into the void, or the masturbation of an oil slick, in which you will just get your hands full of slime and possibly never really emerge from the black whorl. A pointless endeavor that amounts to wheel-spinning and countless other clichés. Debating an issue does not always have to mean endlessly feinting or throwing out cues that your audiences will understand because of their well-trammeled familiarity; true debating might actually occur with the introduction of a radically new (and therefore thought-provoking) concept, and the search for these kinds of landmarks and landmines constitutes a lot of philosophical and humanities-oriented research. Anyhow, not to say that this is a new framework, but I want to shed light on the porousness of the public sphere, which endlessly fascinates us, and the ways in which what is not supposed to be said aloud is often said anyway, and is even more powerful for not being authorized. What is not supposed to be said but is said anyway is often the thing that actually rivets the nation, and yet because it is not supposed to be said, we are not allowed to talk about it – at least not in the civil, clipped speech of the public sphere – and ask whence it derives such power. This cycle of censorship, of marginalization of the comments on the margins (or underneath blog posts, or in chat forums) instead of placing them in the center of our national investigations into what is truly absorbing the USAmerican mind and acquiring all of its preoccupations, like a sponge filled with toxins, reduces us to a certain helplessness, in which the ‘high ground’ does not begin to touch at the festering wound off which the ‘low element’ – the far right – gleefully feeds, and from which it gains power. Case in point: Obama chastised the Democrats for being sanctimonious purists in wanting to reject the continuance of the Bush tax cuts. The tax cuts for billonaires suck, but the majority of the nation seems to be in favor of them, and politicians who want to keep their jobs are beholden to the people. In this case, the mass of the people are wrong and gaining power. In other words, wrongheadedness is holding sway. By ignoring this and voting their consciences, are the Democrats helping to reverse the tide? Are they? No. They are only being sanctimonious purists, further ensconcing themselves in their quiet Vermont homes and practicing their peaceable ways while the mob effectively rages outside. Obama, in his venal and self-interested way, was actually heeding/taking note of this mob. It is an important first step to recognize or acknowledge the ways in which power is actually shifting, even if you don’t agree with the orientation of the shift.

Has This All Been Said Before?

One thing that becomes noticeable after 29 or so years of life: people will take any opportunity available to come out with some of the worst, vilest ideas and thoughts. In the age of political correctness, they do this under cover of internet anonymity or among groups that they consider like-minded. We are actually seeing a reversal of PC culture, as people just increasingly start adding distasteful smears and provocative flourishes to the public sphere itself – a movement that is skewed rightward. You don’t see liberals calling for members of the oppositional party to be shot, while right-wingers’ language tends to be more violent and overtly racist, note Rachel Maddow and others. And then the release of the Nixon Tapes, for example – in which Nixon goes on an extended paranoiac diatribe against the Jews and Henry Kissinger, that penguin-shaped interloper, roundly agrees – demonstrates the extent of the hate speech, behind closed doors/inadvertently captured on tape/bursting out in public like the explosion of a raw, chapped blister’s contents.

Examples of the ways in which inappropriate speech oozes out of the lower and into the upper signscape abound. I will give some quick examples for easy reference:

Example A: Don Imus’s incendiary comment about “nappy-headed hoes.”

Example B: Speech hate groups like the Westboro Church

Example C: the Wiener Circle, Chicago*

*Note: I can go on about this, because I have actually experienced this licensed outpouring of hate speech that occurs nightly, needlessly, fruitlessly (and fruitfully for the employees, who make good on copious guilt-tips), but for purposes of expediency I will just direct you to Ira Glass’s televisual segment on it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vo1LPf9mnyU

The question is, then, what to do with all of this. We can’t eradicate the thinking of these things in some of the population and, thus, the speaking of them. If we try to shame people into holding their tongues, the irrepressible hate-speech becomes more urgent in its need to exit their bodies and find a recipient or receptacle, occasionally emerging in the most inopportune ways. Yet we cannot condone hate speech or even give it a venue, as it will quickly grow out of control and overflow the constraints, as in the Wiener’s Circle example.

The first step must definitely be to take it seriously, and place it not just in the realm of speech. Speech must be seen as in some way on par with actions – not the same as an action, but an alarming sign nonetheless. Does speech offer a safety valve against harmful action? Here I might say yes, but I think that speech can lead to dangerous actions on the part of listeners. No one would argue against the power and influence that speech and writing can sometimes possess.

Is speech more effective an instigator than images of violence? I have no way of knowing or even speculating, so I’ll stay out of that quagmire.

To go beyond this for a second and get back to question of art/cultural production: I’m interested in the fact that everyone is continually delivering his/her opinion about every topic and text, regardless of whether he/she is qualified to judge…someone was complaining about this in a magazine that I read recently, framing it as a sort of elitist reaction to the popularization of literary/art criticism through organs like Amazon user ratings, IMDB, Netflix, Yelp, etc – consumer ratings are supposed to make us feel empowered or something, but the democratization of critique doesn’t always work. An extreme example is the market-based proposal for healthcare, in which we patients are supposed to review our options and choose the best one, without possessing a modicum of professional expertise about medical matters. The obvious pitfall here is that 1) as ailing healthcare recipients, our lives are in question, leading us to compound our lack of knowledge with the irrational knowledge of the moribund; and 2) while reason would seem to dictate more tests and diagnostics, we hear frequently now that too much testing is itself a menace.

Anyhow, the author of the article on the excess of popularized ratings systems was bemoaning the death of formal criticism, but I don’t care about that so much as what I see as an informational glut with no alternative but censorship/restriction (which isn’t really a valid option either). These days it seems that everyone is slavering with eagerness to deliver his/her opinion on everything, which leads me to want to write a novel or create an installation focusing on a character who bucks the trend, Bartleby-style, by remaining opaque and unreadable to his/her peers, finding strength in the withholding of information and the retention of a sort of private internal sphere/climate over and against those who would desire his/her opinion on all worldly matters. I am envisioning a character whose very inscrutability contains his/her power, in a way that mingles strands of Taoism (the potential of the uncarved block) with those of Stoicism, for maximum Eastern-Western fusion buffet.

I say all of this as one embedded in what I’m calling an ‘information competition industry’ (ICI), in which the sharing of information and opinions is what defines the discipline and sets the successful candidate apart from the failed competitor (unclear sharing, non-novel information, uninteresting interventions)…in light of that, the character who would refuse to share his/her information and inner thoughts, despite the need to do so and the screaming public demanding it, attains a new sort of heroism, that of the unreadable blank space.

And of course I recognize the irony in writing such a great deal on the need to not write so much. But in a way, I’m exercising my national cultural rights, and perhaps cartoonishly so. I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m very much the ideal of the U.S. citizen: child of immigrants who built themselves up through a family-owned, multi-generational plumbing company, wanting nothing flashy – just a house in the Midwest and some kids through college. And even when it became more complicated than that, we retained a sense of our middling-class status (totally unsustained, I’d say, by this point, after our ivy league educations and entrepreneurial spirit, plus the inbuilt privileges of whiteness and general phenotypic desirability that got us in the doors of the ‘Big Houses’ of the New World). Anyhow, you know the story, because it’s the classic story – a fantasy, really, blowing into the desert winds of our direst longings…

So here I’ll stop. Perhaps I’ve laid out some rationales for ‘saying nothing,’ and my long-winded treatise might hopefully enlighten you a little bit about the peripheries of many topics, while not giving you a comprehensive knowledge of any one…but I think I’ve said enough. Following Lauren Berlant’s forthcoming book (Cruel Optimism) on the new ‘ambient citizenship’ exercised in a public sphere of audition (as in listening), lurking, passively spying, and quietly scavenging amongst the ruins of the American Dream, I’d like to hear what you have to say. Talk back!

-k

Ever so long ago, when I first met her, S. introduced me to a subgenre of bounce called sissy bounce. Bounce is that type of hiphop that’s really popular in the south, predicated on rapid beats and women jiggling their asses really, really fast without really moving the rest of their bodies. A lot of mainstream artists, like Ludacris and maybe Juvenile (?), became famous as purveyors of bounce. It’s now in the general hiphop repertoire and known to many.

But sissy bounce is probably the most inspired iteration of the bounce umbrella category, at least from the perspective of this white, middle-class, female armchair expert. I don’t really know what I’m talking about, but this is just what I’ve seen/observed. The thing that really makes sissy bounce something extra is that it’s very much live – as in, the artists sing and rap the syncopation, the downbeats and breakbeats and all that, so they need to be keeping up with this very fast, like ass-shakingly fast, beat. Another quality that’s attractive about it is that the tracks are extremely catchy and original mashups of things, studded with rap solos or gospel-like song, with call-and response and incredible audience interaction. All of this might explain why sissy bounce artists like Big Freedia and Sissy Nobby consistently attract large crowds, and also why they don’t get beat up or even killed. Because sissy bounce also foregrounds the sexual and gendered identities and expressions of its artists: they’re gay, queer, transgendered, or however-identified, and that is at the crux of sissy bounce. “sissy,” as you may know (but which is worth stating all the same) is a derogatory term for homosexual. Despite this, they appear to have a very large mixed-gender and also mixed-sexuality following, including heterosexual couples and – again, I’m conjecturing here, and there deeeefinitely needs to be a reception-oriented study around this – perhaps even straight-identified men who have homophobic tendencies. Perhaps. I don’t know, but their audiences do not seem super gay-friendly. More about that in a second, since I really don’t know who attends a sissy bounce show in New Orleans, or how the demographics have changed now that SB has been “discovered” by a bunch of white, wealthy, college-educated hipsters. More about THAT in a second too. Essentially, I want to explore some of the complex vectors of this genre and ask questions about how it’s changing now that the audiences and touring structure are changing. Then I want to talk a bit about my own experience and see how it might have related to the whole concept of sissy bounce as it is now.

Pop-ethnomusicological treatments of sissy bounce: casually browsing, I found two: XLR8R’s documentary and mixtape and a short documentary clip made by Diplo, former partner of MIA and a deejay who is really into searching out genres, like baile funk carioca, and incorporating them into his performance to produce a sort of postmodern globalized techno music that is kind of fascinating in its way.

And I want to say that I feel personally that it’s cool to want to do this. Being inspired by street dance forms is a sign of being aware of people and taking them seriously even if they’re not white, straight, or rich. It can contain an element of exotification, or a hipsterization that might be even worse, but there’s a fine line. I think that XLR8R walks this line better than does Diplo, because the former took intensive time and resources to the task of appreciating the sissy bounce genre, attending and performing at concerts, getting to know the artists, and helping them to make more money. I feel like the work done by the XLR8R crew was, in a way, the best example of how scholarship (call it what you will) can actually benefit the ‘research subjects’ (so to speak. I know, puke in my mouth. But that’s what they are in this framing). So I am not trying to throw out wholesale the idea of doing pop-ethnomusicology because it’s cool. I do, however, think that there are better and worse ways to do it. Diplo’s little doc seems rather uninformed, as if he’s the only person who has ever seen this form and he’s TELLING you about what it is. He doesn’t say people’s names or give them much credit in the film, and he doesn’t seem to spend much time in New Orleans. It feels pandery to me, like some sort of insufficient and superficial lip service that is essentially chapped (and chapping my ass). He also cites this white, hipstery friend as the expert on sissy bounce, when there are clearly copious black people in NOLA who know more about it AND can dance to it. I’d like to see that skinny white kid ‘shake [his] ass/shake it fast.’ More on that later too.

-who are/were sissy bounce’s original fans?
I don’t know who the genre’s fans were before it was discovered, but from XLR8R’s interview (which is actually very good, an in-depth and respectful treatment that contextualized the genre) as well as some footage during Diplo’s visit to the club and the youtube videos, they seem to be black people, straight queer and gay, with a variety of body shapes (ranging from the Panamanian-skinny to giant mountains of flesh with tiny features submerged in them) and of many socioeconomic groups. Black people, and blacks in New Orleans specifically, are often portrayed in the media as globally poor, but I am just going to refute that one a priori, because I can assure you that there is a huge black middle class in NOLA, as in other cities in the south (Atlanta being the mecca, or so I hear), and professional classes and upper classes and republicans and everything else. Nevertheless, the XLR8R folks discuss gunbattles at night and the essential poverty of these artists of sissy bounce, who are products of the ghetto innovating their way out and making their queerness the centerpiece of this.

One would think that when a societally disparaged figure – the gay black male or transwoman, for example – is entertaining an enormous crowd of oppositional folks, that his/her identity might be denigrated (apposite word choice there, hm) as part of the act, in the inverted way that, say, an obese woman can make a lot of money by consistently being “Fat Woman #2” in a movie. Or the classic example: black blackface (often called “ethiopian”) minstrelsy. This is always the paradox of parody: the person – or persona, rather -  being mocked and scoffed might in fact be having the last laugh, both because of the effect of the “minstrel mask,” by which the actor distinguishes him/herself from the persona who is the object of audience scorn, and materially, which becomes visible when one does the infrastructural analysis, i.e., examines the money changing hands and connections made, asking questions about who the impresario/producer is (because if the artist IS the producer or manager, what you have is essentially self-representation, and there’s a lot more room for lucrative profiting – as with henry “box” brown – even if the act itself is demeaning).

But IS sissy bounce demeaning? I would say profoundly no. I say this admittedly not knowing its former context in the mostly-black (? Not even sure if they are) clubs in New Orleans, but I would assume that it was not terribly derogatory even then. For one thing, the XLR8R people note that the dance form brings in women, including sexy women who are really adept at shaking their asses, which in turn brings in het or het-identified men. With these sorts of sexual networks forming, and with the respect and affection that the women seem to have for the queer performers, there are plentiful reasons for the het men to enjoy the show without enjoying the queerness, per se. Because the queerness is so obvious, there’s no need to call it out with mockery: like the classic purloined letter, it’s transparently available and therefore somehow hidden, or screened. This might change if the performers also shake their queer or trans asses onstage, as did Big Freedia during my show. I get the sense that they do. I don’t have the ethnographic data to understand whether 1) there are segregated queer and straight shows; or 2) whether gay men and trans people shake their asses alongside the hetero show of female ass-shaking. I don’t know how the spectacle of queerness incorporates itself, or doesn’t, into the shows. Again, there really needs to be a study ! and I smell funnnnding…and fun.

Autoethnography:
Okay, so this next part is going to describe a little bit of my experience at the show in Chicago and ask some questions. At first when I saw that Big Freedia was touring with a variety of non-sissy bounce acts, I was like, “hm, cool, whatev.” But then, closer to the show, I wondered if it would be weird, like if the show could possibly transcend irony and identity politics and avoid landing us in a kind of minstrelsy trap. This actually became a palpable fear for me when I saw the crowd, the opening acts (one of which was terrible, like TERRIBLE – a totally uninspired and unrelated act that had nothing going on. The other one, with its amazing Second Life projections and tutus with burlesque whiteface, was awesome, though). So then I started to feel nervous about abjection, the other, crowds, etc. But then Freedia herself came on, with her amazing hair (one side shaved in a design, the other hanging long with white-streaked bangs) and her very Panamanian-looking clothes – namely, a silver belt and jeans that were somewhere between baggy and skinny, Panama style. With her were a backup dj, a big-bodied water dude, and a white (or white-appearing) female assistant dancer wearing a sort of aquamarine satin unitard with fishnets. The thing that I could not get over was the female dancer’s makeup and expression, which was VERY sassy and definitely could have had something satirical/parodic going on. Simply put, she exhibited the exaggerated features of a blackface minstrel female figure. I am not bullshitting; she did. Or perhaps a white trash/po’ white minstrel figure? And when she flashed us the finger, twice, the impression was even more striking. Weird. I wondered what the relationship between Freedia and her was – whether she was the dancer for the entire tour, or just to places serving a mostly-white clientele, or what was going on there. Would it have been strange if Freedia had brought a black dancer to shake her ass for us? Was that too exoticizing? It’s not that this dancer couldn’t booty-dance as well as a black person – not at all, she was amazing. But her whiteness, or appearance of such, combined with the makeup, was very strange to me. I am still processing it and would honestly like to hear the interpretations of people of color in the audience.

Unlike the sassy backup dancer, Freedia projected a persona that was, I feel, very “pure” in a way – dignified, earnest, and honest. For example, at the end, she explained to us that she was very ill and therefore was sort of cutting it short but that she tried to hold out because she loved Chicago. This was all very touching and cool. Also, she was a class-A ass shaker but wasn’t arrogant about it. The whole vibe of her sissy bounce persona was, I felt, very put together and with the right amount and KIND of presence. The feeling that I had after the set was essentially that Freedia is a consummate performer, pardon the cliché, who really knows how to work with a variety of audiences. Not that this one was tough or turgid at all, however. The mood of the crowd was also very open to communing with the whole situation.

And I think that that provides one reason that the show transcended irony. As presented within the production/promotion of Decibelle, the event was queer-friendly, and gay rights were clearly on people’s minds there. I feel like gay rights and expression trumped race and class in this context, or rather created a venue for them, that people could relate to and that quashed hostility, to some extent. There was a sense of empathy, and I don’t say that lightly. Very few people were observing, arms crossed, from the sidelines. It was less hipster and more freak. Which I liked.

In addition to being very gay, and therefore very awesome, the show was very interactive, with participants of all shades and stripes getting up onstage and shaking their asses in various configurations. This presented a sweaty, drunk, and lusty subsection of the queer fe/male audience dancing together, on boxes, gyrating on the floor, humping and grinding against each other and the stage, eyes half-closed, in what turned out to be a very charming shambles.

But meanwhile Freedia would go through the crowd and physically point to the best ass-dancer, drawing the audience’s attention away from the poor imitators and to the one who really understood what to do with his/her body. What this did was several things: 1) established an embodied hierarchy, so that if anyone was to be mocked, it was the people trying to dance and doing so badly; 2) it prevented even those hacks from being mocked because of the eye-turning power of Freedia, the ass-connoisseur. She showed us that she was totally in control of this hierarchy, that this was TOTALLY a skill that required intensive practice and, often, athleticism, and that there were other types of power available to people. I saw quite a few people getting flustered or embarrassed when they realized the distinctions between those who really could shake their asses and those who were thinking that this was going to be something fun and casual. It’s actually a very serious thing, this dance. It involves keeping most of the body completely immobile while revolving your ass-cheeks like a washing machine. Even more tricky are forms in which the participant bends over, lies on the floor, or gets up on a structure and whirls her ass. It’s totally mesmerizing and extremely easy to pick out immediately who’s doing it well and who badly. In any case, this rearranged hierarchy defeated any attempts to mock the performance, as we saw what sexual power was also contained in this incredibly erotic dance (and it is!), which probably also explains its appeal at straight black clubs in NOLA.

To summarize, I had a great time and emerged feeling okay about it too. I’m not sure what other stops are on this tour, and I hope that there aren’t any to, like, frat boy bars in rural texas. That might produce an entirely different reception, and one that would bring out some of the worst and most racist and homophobic undertones of U.S. society and culture right now. I can say in our case that I was satisfied with the reception that we audience members gave Freedia. Despite the the mixed race but mostly queer-identified, white, middle-class audience members, the performance managed to transcend irony (while not ditching the realm of camp – using camp somewhat to its benefit, although this could have been more played up) due to its the inclusive nature, as well as the coalescence around issues of queer identity that went on, AND a hierarchy of movement that emerged and would definitely smack down any sense of irony cultivated by the lip-curling sneerers hanging on the periphery (not that there were any. In fact, the concert was remarkably upbeat and sincerely, wholesomely enthusiastic, which is a rare feeling to have from a show, especially one in Chicago, espECially one in wicker park.) I only had the sense that the organizers of the show might have wanted Freedia to directly invoke an aspect of queer politics and/or rights, but she didn’t. I’m not sure how much of a spokesperson she has been, is, or is becoming, but being linked to Decibelle, contrary to what you might think, does not seem to imply that she is incorporating their message in her work. But that is not to say that she should be: I think that Freedia knows who she is: that is to say, she is walking politics, there’s no need  to say it out loud. That’s the sense I get. I’m sure that she has views on gay marriage and DADT, but sometimes body politics are more powerful and transformative than npr’s talk-radio approach. and sometimes performance studies can be really validating, i think.

Her name is Lady Gaga. She’s a big baby.

And more to my horror, an article in harper’s (faludi’s piece on feminism’s ritual matricide, an excellent read) quoted  Judith/Jack Halberstam, the gender studies professor at USC, on the future of feminism being the “brave new world of Gaga girliness.” gulp.

For real? Is this really the direction we’re going in? She seems to me to be but a revival of Madonna-style subversiveness, yet so much less shocking, all about design and appropriation. I appreciate her eccentricity, but I also feel like dancing around in a thong, shooting her glamor vibes throughout prison is a problematic image.

What does it mean for us for Gaga to be the representative of the next wave? Any of you Gaga fans out there, please enlighten.

c

i invite you to read this essay that i wrote on my own homegirl blog: http://funlandfunfunfurryfun.blogspot.com/

it’s about my grandmother’s death and life. i hope that you learn & enjoy. xo, katie

At the art school where I teach, there’s a lot of talk about “multiple subjectivities.” … While the word “personal” is generally used as a pejorative, multiple subjectivities—the knack of being everywhere and therefore no where in particular— are seen to be a very good thing. (79, 1999)

[Writing about the artists Carol Irving and Jennifer Schlosberg] Perhaps because they are female, it is both Irving and Schlosberg themselves and not their works who are critiqued…

The willingness of someone to use her life as primary material is still deeply disturbing, and even more so if she views her own experience at some remove.  There is no problem with female confession providing it is made within a repentant therapeutic narrative.  But to examine things coolly, to thrust experience out of one’s own brain and put it on the table, is still too confrontational.  Like the most canonical conceptual art, Schlosberg and Irving’s work forges an interaction that implicates its viewers.  It’s the distancing of female experience that drives art critics crazy.  Refusing the realm of abject memoir/confession, Schlosberg and Irving’s projects presume to treat female experience universally. (63, 1999)

It’s best, of course, for the artist to be heterosexual and monogamously settled in a couple.  This guards againt messy leaks of subjectivity which might compromise the work and throw it back into the realm of the “abject,” which, as we all supposedly agree, was a 1980s excess that has long since been discredited.  If imagery of a sexual subculture is to be deployed… it’s important that any undercurrents of desire be cooled off and distanced… the viewer is led into that most desired state of neocorporate neoconceptualism: the empty space of ambiguity, which is completely different from the messy space of contradiction.  (17, 2004)

The artist’s own biography doesn’t matter much at all.  What life?  The blanker the better. The life experience of the artist, if channeled into the artwork, can only impede art’s neocorporate, neoconceptual purpose.  It is the biography of the institution that we want to read. (21-22, 2004)

so i read this article in slate. it made a lot of observations i have made: that there is a lot of sex-negativity in my generation, that there is a conservative backlash against baby-boomers, the ’60’s and ’70’s, sexual liberation, feminism, etc. and that these reactionary turds lurk like shit-smelling explosives in a minefield that is ostensibly ‘liberal.’

here is an illustrative quote from lady gaga, who i must say i do not give two shits about: “It’s not really cool any more to have sex all the time. It’s cooler to be strong and independent.” um riiiight, whatever the fuck that means. like i say, no two shits. but anyway …

the article does not point out anything new because i observe these trends in my everyday life. i live in the world and probably do not come across many people in my urban milieu or what have you who are not ‘down’, ostensibly. yet dig a milimeter deep beneath this culture — and even the loose web of counter-culture, where i spend much of my social time — and the same old shit explodes in your face. duh.

so mainstream culture is pretty clearly the steaming pile of repressive poop it tends to be. and youth culture, even the freakier nooks, doesn’t always smell so great. so what are we pro-joy/pleasure folk to do? and what motives might we — ‘decent’ dudes and self-respecting, smart women alike — for seeking out the sexual underbelly of our society?

i found some worthwhile and insightful nuggets in this collection of essays about stripping: Flesh for fantasy: Producing and Consuming Exotic Dance. it’s edited by three lady academics, r. danielle egan, katherine frank, and merri lisa johnson, who have all spent some time as dancers. one interesting thing is they include essays both by sex work providers and sex work clients. we all know that 99.999% of these clients are men. and of course the outlook is largely hetero. let’s start with one of these nuggets. katherine frank interviewed a bunch of strip club customers; here’s what one had to say about why he kept coming back:

“Many of the men that I spoke with discussed their confusion as to what was expected of them as “men” in relationships with women. … “Other men complained that they were expected to be strong and assertive, both at home and in their workplaces, but their female partners were at the same time interested in greater communication and emotional expression. Joe summed this up very succinctly:

My wife expects me to be strong emotionally, physically, and I expect spiritually, too … But emotionally, she wants me to be strong but she doesn’t want me to be overbearing. She wants me to cry and be sensitive, to be the leader and the rock … I’m confused as hell. I wouldn’t say that openly in public but I’m definitely confused about what it is to be a man.”

boo fucking hoo, why don’t you dial 911 and call the waaaambulance, right?  it is so hard to be a man in this world, why don’t you cry me a goddam river.  no, seriously folks.  this is a pretty typical example, but i see this crisis of contemporary masculinity play out in the troubled psyches of even atypical men i know.  and i do not envy it, and i have SHITTONS of sympathy.  although we women often get this shit end of this shit stick of confusion, i have a fair amount of compassion for men honestly navigating the morass.

which leads me to my next nugget.  it is a patent fallacy that women who do sex work, especially professional domination, suffer or delight in the agonies and ecstasies of man-hatred.  quite the opposite.  plenty of them seek a place, like men, where the ‘confusion’ of real-world gender relations can be tabled.  or at least troubled. women can unabashedly be sexy and powerful, and (hetero) men can be unabashedly men.  sexual appeal and erotic desire can be openly celebrated, without all the landmines that we have grown to associate with such things. here is what one lady, merri lisa johnson, said about why she became a stripper:

“ In the context of an American culture defined by its intensely contradictory responses to sex – the lasciviousness and puritanism – as well as in the context of my own personal life which was, when I first entered the profession at age twenty-one, defined by an unexpected divorce that had thrown my moral framework painfully into question, this stripper sexuality offered a welcome alternative to marriage and the church teachings that had left me angry and freaked out about sex.  Other options were, I’m sure, available – tantric sex, swinging, etc. – but stripping was the venue through which I realized the possibilities of a freer sense of sexuality.”

you can easily substitute BDSM or what have you in place of stripping here.   let’s dwell on “a freer sense of sexuality.”  huh.  now i know i speak from a privileged position as an independent domme working out of a female-run space.  i come from a middle-class background, have no kids, and could be doing other things.  but Flesh for Fantasy also makes some good points on this front.  one, that there are plenty of women like me, who seek out sex work reasons other than poverty and desperation.  and two, that the danger associated with the work says more about the larger culture, the stigma and ghettoization, which leaves workers vulnerable to exploitation.

and how about the alternative, the straight professional world. here is johnson again:

“The abusiveness of a sexual script that encourages us to repress what Naomi Wolf calls our ‘inner slut’ cannot be compartmentalized as the product of the sex industry.  It is all around us, perhaps even worse in nonstrip-club spaces.  When I check the neckline of my blouse or blot my red lipstick before going to work, when my hips begin to ache from keeping my legs crossed for eight hours under my desk, I am living out a sexual script that prohibits the erotic in everyday life.  It can be seen in the ‘tight and constricted posture’ of conventional femininity, to borrow the language of Sandra Lee Bartky’s critique of patriarchal bodily disciplines, and unconscious physical ‘expression of [the] need to ward off real or symbolic sexual attack.’  In the strip club, there is no such thing as too much lipstick, and it is worth noting that my joints don’t hurt as much from spreading my legs as they do from crossing them.”

i must say, for a long time in real life i experienced my sexuality as a burden that i felt i was constantly shielding others and myself from.  while an unspoken asset, professionally and socially, i sensed it to be a kind of grotesque wildcard, threatening for everyone involved.  the elephant-with-a-boner quietly lurking in the corner of the room while we discuss work or bands we both like.  the playroom, in contrast, is a space where the elephant, in all his absurdity, is fully acknowledged.  which is to say, the eroticism that pervades much of human interaction is given free reign and not violently and awkwardly repressed.  yeehaw!

with love,

midwest mistress

and now i will leave you to chew on those nuggets.  and also to chew on this creepy and delightful gem:

feminist psychoanalytic theory holds that basic gender roles and differential gender characteristics are not innate, but develop out of the earliest relationships through the oedipal conflict. all infants (within a normative family, with a dad and a mom, although the ‘dad’ role and the ‘mom’ role don’t need to be occupied by a man and a woman, respectively. even in same sex couples, one parent usually fills one role more than the other) create their first identification with their mother, as she births them, then continues to feed them. this primary relationship is defined by nurturance, tenderness, love, need gratification, caressing, etc etc all those things that are supposed to be essentially maternal. as the child ages, she or he must then separate and individuate from the mother, while also undergoing the oedipal transformation, which should result in the child establishing a stable gender identity. as boys have to superimpose an identification with their father on their identification with their mother, a kind of rupture takes place, in which they reject those qualities that they associate with the mother, and take on what they believe the mother is not. whereas the female child, coming to identify as a female, does not need to define herself so separately from the mother, and hence does not face the same dissonance as a male child, regarding intimacy and affection. then other cultural practices and associations involve themselves in the almost universal valuation of the role of mother and “female” qualities, such as relatedness, as inferior to the “male” qualities of personal growth and manifesting destiny or whatever, prioritized over attachment.

so, of course, a great problem lies in mistaking the maternal role for the actual mother. people who occupy the role of mother are obviously much more complex than their role, but young children can only take in parts at a time, and so the essentializing begins very early on and is supported outside the home. i find this model helpful in understanding how culture and family structures interact to reinforce the status quo.

anyway, we were discussing this in my class, and a taiwanese woman pointed out that many asian men, who grow up without a father, never fully individuate from their mothers, and so behave in “feminine” ways, staying close to home and really attached to their mothers, being more sensitive than aggressive, and so on. another classmate, a former anthropology student, pointed out that this relates to our stereotypic conceptualization in america of asian men being effeminate. then, another woman spoke about how in her community, and in african american communities in general, boys whose fathers are not in the picture have to project an image of masculinity, and so for them to be male means to reject everything that their mother is to them. in the absence of an actual father-man-person, their identification as male becomes an extreme marker of the opposite of relatedness: they must be the lack of kindness, sensitivity, nurturance, providing, support, guidance, emotionality, warmth, trust. the anthropologist then commented that this too is consonant with our stereotype of african american men as ultra-masculine to the point of being scary.

while i understand that these dichotomies are problematic, i wanted to proffer them, to hear your thoughts.

from, c

In this paper, I examine the types of Western technologies that women have appropriated and re-appropriated from men. It is my goal to focus primarily upon the relatively recent phenomenon of Internet pornography designed for and by women, and to provide a critical analysis of a number of feminist texts regarding feminist pornography. This analysis will seek to prove that Internet pornography is in the process of being ‘reclaimed’ by women by means of independently made pornography, self-made female porn stars, the Feminist Porn awards, and an array of websites, including hotmoviesforher.com. In addition to examining women’s appropriation of Internet pornography in the context of the history of pornography, I intend to discuss historical examples of men’s appropriations of female technologies, as in the cases of the novel and the landscape painting; women’s appropriations of male technologies, as in the case of women’s progression in the field of computer technology and fashion; and women’s re-appropriations of technologies, as in the cases of feminine hygiene technology, vibrators, and sex industry communities, such as BSDM dungeons. Ultimately, this paper aims to predict future trends in Internet pornography.

I have always been a person with a low threshold for consumer options. If I walk into a supermarket and see three types of jam, that’s fine. Seven or more produces a sort of dazed clenching-up in my muscles, as my brain starts to flat-line and reaches an inevitable asymptote, shutting down my capacity to choose. This often results in my selection of none of the above: I just can’t handle the sheer variety. At my very best, I prefer that others whose judgment I trust – the philosopher-kings (and queens) of the fashion/connoisseurship world – choose for me, and I’ll plunk down the cash.

In love and dating, my life has of late been following the same trajectory as the jam example. Sad to say, the world of human interaction is becoming more and more a vast supermarket, with people flashing you a little leg and throwing their “selling points” in your face, leaving the slimy stuff under their rocks well submerged until the fifth date.  I don’t know if there’s a concise saying that would encapsulate the following sentiment, but lately the more new people I’ve been meeting, the more painfully cauterized my romantic organs are becoming – a sort of emotional constipation reaching the point of near-impaction – as I come to understand that there are so many hues and aromas in the infinite marimba of human emotio-sexual insanity and desire only to turn away to the quietude of my virginal bower, sleeping between pristine butter-yellow sheets. It’s as if the more I see, the more I DON’T want. Being in the world and encountering a round of new faces has seemingly exposed me to more types of romantically hazardous materials than I’d lately desire, to possibly culminate in a sort of conspiracy-theorist celibacy that I’m trying to ward off, a crazed “Army of One” sort of thing, wherein my pelvis is encased in an amalgam of chastity belt and machine gun. No, but seriously, I sometimes feel like a boat buffeted on all sides by crazies who are wanting to get in my pants. And if there’s anything worse than an irritating, infuriatingly crazy person, it’s one who wants to involve him/herself in some kind of romantic entanglement with you. Here I would quote Grace Jones: “Your private life drama, baby, leave me out.”

Meanwhile, there are people whose pants I want to get into, and they probably think that I’m one of the aforementioned crazies. Which I may well be – the whole Jacob’s ladder of angel-punching sex/dating is lately throwing my forces of judgment into doubt.  I wish that I could bring potential suitors before a panel of disinterested judges, so they’d evaluate the person’s credentials, prod his/her head with calipers, and the like, giving me concrete wisdom and insurance against foreclosures of the heart. Shadowed by my mistrust of my own instincts and reasoning capabilities, I increasingly opt to disengage from the fleshly ruckus, gather my wits, and write my goddamned dissertation. But shutting out the noise, especially when my body is acting fecund and feral like something out of a Bjork video (circa 1998) – think unfurling, animated maroon tentacles that turn into flowers with claws – is difficult.

I remember taking a road trip to Romulus, Michigan during my sophomore year of college with a friend and some guy who really wanted to date her but was clearly not worthy. She thought that he was irksome to begin with, but his romantic overtures soon began to crescendo, reaching a crisis-point after about the hundredth mile. As we rocketed down I-90 in our crammed little hatchback, she began to roll her eyes and kind of moo like a frustrated ruminant, bellowing, “annoyed!” at various intervals. The message was loud but also subtle, and I don’t think it ever penetrated his frenzied scrim of lust. Lately, I’ve also been lowing and rumbling with this phrase, an homage to her private-public howl of anguish in the face of banal, unwavering, loving miscommunication. Because that’s all that these untimely affections are, at base – misdirected vectors of impossible futures, blueprints for edifices that can and will never be built, romances being the closest that capitalism can come to a utopian arc of social constructivism.

And now, after that lengthy prolegomena, for the types:

-1. The Crazy Train:  You know this type well. This is the person to whose life you’d love to adjoin yours, except that he or she happens to be permanently wedded/welded to some sort of crazy vision for which you don’t have a great deal of patience, time, or respect. You meet this person incidentally, perhaps, and the two of you click – until she points out that her life goal has been to live in the Arizona desert and build cybernetic dolphins out of scrap metals and use them to communicate with the moon and create alternative energies through the constant vacillating of their dorsal fins. Don’t you want to go to Oracle, AZ with her and do this? Well?

Sometimes the “crazy idea” that makes this person’s eyes shine is present from the beginning of your engagement with him/her, and you think, “oh, soon enough this person will come to his/her senses and forget about that batshit-insane plan to XYZ in the ABC for all eternity.” Other times, the moon mission/radical vision comes creeping out over time like an insidious worm, because the other person has sensed that you might not be wild about the idea and is introducing you to it slowly. In still other cases, you might sort of like the idea at first – “okay, planting trees in the ghettoes of Michigan sounds like a good idea to me” – but then become sick of it, because it wasn’t your idea to begin with: it was your partner’s, and now it has become a sacred quest for a holy grail that to you feels like cheap Styrofoam, which you would have tossed out long ago. But you feel bad disrespecting your lover’s dreams, and so you try to uphold them and even start to be convinced by your own Goffmanesque performance. Whatever the case, you must soon consign yourself to the role of “tag-along sex partner” or even “Sherpa guide” as you truck through the desert/mountains/oceans/cities/restaurants with your other, hoping to dine on some crumbs from his/her table of joy. You wish that you could steadfastly follow an idea to its demise in that way, but you were not built for such things. But (sigh of resignation) you have to admit that you were built to carry a roll-up sleeping bag, some snorkel gear, and a few energy bars.

Warning to potential lovers: I am becoming increasingly convinced that I am this type. Is Katie the Crazy Train? The wild ride that leaves you dizzy and begging for more even while you acknowledge that less IS more? Discuss!

-2. The Moses, or the Jewish Homesteader: sorry to duck into ethnic enclaves here, but I am a culturally Jewish woman, and this identity permeates my being in some way that I am always still exploring. Non-religious – although I like the songs a lot – I nevertheless feel implicated in the social/political/cultural morass that is the “Jewish identity” in this current day and age. I also wouldn’t preclude myself from some sort of spirituality, because I don’t watch TV anyway, so what else is there to do.

Anyhow, but I would characterize the social aspects of my Jewishness via the following metaphor: until the age of 20 or so, I felt myself sublimely floating in a calm and tepid sea, the water the same temperature as the air, producing an unreflective feeling of contentment. Then my parents and I had an earth-shattering conversation at a Chinese restaurant, the Szechuan House, in Milwaukee. (Why is Jewish life punctuated by epiphanies at Chinese restaurants? This should be the subject of a dissertation.) This created the undertow that forever left me questioning my very bathwater.

They sat me down and simply said that, in their individual and collective experience, people tended to settle into things – habits, ideas, and ways – by the age of roughly 23. They acknowledged that I was a late bloomer and asked me about my future plans. They told me that, from their perspective, I had a few years yet to figure things out for myself.  I was stunned, and I believe that a few green beans fell off my fork as I pondered an answer. They told me that I didn’t have to respond right away. It was Bastille Day, I recall, and they were seated in a bloc opposite me in the red vinyl booth of the S.H., to which we had gone because of its spectacular (and reasonable!) lunch buffet.

Anyhow, so at the time this moment just filled me with unadulterated fear, like God Himself was wielding a gun and telling me to stand up straight. But for some reason, the eerie conversation lingered and has continued to inform my thinking. Late bloomer? 23? Settled? Bullshit! Nonetheless, there was something about it that produced a sort of current, the aforementioned undertow, making me aware of the water in which I had been floating: that in its temperate sameness, it was structuring my existence in ways that I could not possibly control. Nothing was arbitrary; I could not be absolved of culpability; the matrix of power-knowledge was fast closing around me and spreading its sandy tentacles into the seams of my bathing suit. It’s not incidental that I was reading a lot of Foucault at this time.

Another lengthy rumination! But so at this point, I started to truly understand the perils of Dating Jewish (DJ). Because dating, marriage, and child-rearing are major points on the normative Jewish roadmap to adulthood, and clearly I was engaged in none of these things. So I started to think about my relationship to Jewish men, around which I had always grown up but which I had not really thought about in a serious way, being somewhat repelled (albeit amused) by them. I started to think about Jewish men as potential objects of sexual attraction and desire. I also started to think about what Jewish men wanted in a Jewish woman, and I entered into some self-loathing identity complexes – not to mention the very present queerness factor, which I’ll touch upon in a second – and started to develop a particularly fierce aversion to what I’ll call the “Moses,” the type of Jewish man who is secular but seems to hold a lot of commanding authority in his arching nose and furry eyebrows, his denouncements and holdings-forth ringing with the knowledge of the ancients. There is something about the Mosaic Jew that attracts me, but I am ultimately afraid that he’ll raise his hand and produce a hail of locusts (emotionally speaking) or something like that, after having parted the Red Sea (heh heh). Because Moses was pretty belligerent, you know, and at times he could lay down the Law. I could go further with this half-baked hamentaschen, but I’m going to leave you here, with flour on your hands.

Why did I not consider Jewish women at this juncture? I can’t say, but I can tell you that I have later come around to Jewish women. Whereas my early interactions with Jewish women produced a sort of frustration and anxiety, I have, in later life, begun to really enjoy and value my friendships with JW’s. In fact, there are many Jewish women with whom I feel affinities in fundamental ways, and I could definitely see myself dating a Jewish woman, baking challah, wearing whimsical caftans, and sharing “life moments”  while dancing the hora. Jewish Moseses, however, continue to intimidate me with their protocols, shaggy salt-and-pepper manes, brooding brows, and their commanding words. And of course the way that lightning zigzags over their heads when they talk to God. In sum, I’ll say that I am still open to Dating Jewish, but the Moses is always looking for his little Gertrude, or whatever (? Did Moses have a lady friend? Or was he too thunderous for such petty things? Can’t recall), and so probably wouldn’t make it to my Promised Land.

-3. The Parent Trap: Who among you remembers the Unmothered Mother-Wanter in Disguise, or the Happily Untrammeled Wilderness, of previous blog post fame? To refresh your memory: the bumbling child in need of parental guidance and a reintroduction to the womb? Well, the Parent Trap is the exact opposite, residing at the chilly heights of the spectrum’s other end. The Parent Trap provides you, the (ostensibly) malleable and infantile figure, with a precious and seemingly unlimited quantity of “helpful,” “inspiring,” “encouraging,” and “productive” judgmental criticism, wielding his or her moral compass as the ultimate sex toy. Where the former type (and the Manchild) needed you to apply your superego to their orifices, the Parent Trap has a little too much in the way of superego but is only too happy to furnish said superego on your behalf, you eager and puppyish acolyte. You are initially drawn to this superego – the clear-eyed rational faculties of this person who seems so much more mature than you, able to see far into the distance and understand human nature in ways that will forever elide you. This is all bullshit, of course, but you are touched by the PT’s willingness to martyr him/herself to your cause and exert some effort to help you help yourself. But when the superego goes to work, you feel yourself immersed in an acrid, burning asepsis that has dissolved the structures of your very being.

I have to say that I am VERY susceptible to this type and have come under its sway frequently in my past dating experience. I’ve come to certain points in my life in which I just wanted my sexual/romantic partner to clean up my messes and show me the way forward. But then his/her critical faculties become too much, closing in on my source of light, as all of the things that I consider sacred come under the piercing scrutiny of one with a Superior Vision and are shown to be tawdry and flighty, ephemeral and indulgent.

You can only take so much of that treatment – and so soon enough, I would flee from the constant revelation of my flaws in the public square. I would typically follow a cleansing stint in the arms of the Parent Trap with a romp through the Untrammeled Wilderness, in which no one was scrutinizing nothin’, and my libido could run free and dirty, like water tainted with giardia. Then back to the Parent Trap with a hangdog expression (and a hangover).

But the PT will inevitably tire of these abusive ablutions, feeling his/her trust to be ever more egregiously strained and wondering why he/she became interested in you in the first place. The PT will, in other words, almost feel pushed to the brink of moral compromise and turn YOU into a figure of Satanic temptations. Readers, I can say this with certitude: one day, she/he will not invite you back. The ultimate moral rejection, branding the heart in ways that constant negative reinforcement never could! The superego’s threshold of tolerance will have been reached, and in the face of your repeated comings and goings, all patience with the patient will be lost.  You don’t want to let things get to this point. Stay away, and let the PT pursue his/her vision of world order without the complication of your morally ambiguous presence.

-4. The Blood Type: There are people who enter into relationships thinking in terms of “Alpha” and “Beta,” of A and B. Their constant exertion of energy in trying to figure out who has the natural upper-hand in the relationship, and whether there is the possibility for ‘upward mobility’ (by which the Beta turns into the Alpha, forcing the Alpha into the submissive Beta position), begins to produce poisonous strains of manipulative passive-aggression that eventually make things extremely sour while obscuring the social order of their dating life even more. They start to make wolf moves, dominating and forcing you down, while also dodging and feinting around you like some kind of post-Parkinson’s Muhammad Ali passive-aggressive shadow boxer. All of this, you eventually feel, is a mere smoke screen for their insecurities, and you find that you need to flee before they abscond with your emotional diamonds.

I’m sure that you’ve thought about the alpha/beta thing at some point – or maybe you haven’t, and you’re a lot less venal than I am. So let me spell it out for those of you who still believe that America is a classless society: in any social situation, you’ll encounter people who you feel are out of your dating league and people who you feel are below you, dating-wise. This doesn’t need to do with class, race, sex, age, weight, or any of the above – or those could be factors. As a sapiosexual, for example, I often instinctively dismiss candidates who I feel are not smart. That’s mean and prejudiced and blah blah blah – and there you have it. At the same time, I also routinely dismiss candidates who are only smart – nerdy but lacking in a skillfully calibrated sense of humor, for example, or an openness to some of popular culture’s lesser evils. This is a recipe for eternal solitude, I know.

But back to the main point: sometimes people start dating and, while in the process of beginning a relationship, try to assess where they and their partner stand vis-à-vis this alpha-beta thing: who is the top dog, who the underdog. Now, there are people who spend about a second on this question – and then there are people who obsess about it continually throughout the entire relationship, to the point that it ultimately causes the undoing of the partnership in question, along with an outpouring of substantial resentment, guilt, insecurity, and scars that remain to trickle into (sorry, mixing metaphors there) other, future unions once the malignant boil that was your relationship has been lanced. The Blood Type is this: constantly trying to figure out if you or she is the A or B, and reining you in with her insecurities like some kind of Medusa figure.  Usually, she envisions herself as the Beta and spends substantial time building a shrine to you, the supposed Alpha, and worshiping your presence/stating her luckiness to be with one as special and desirable as you, and otherwise building you into a formidable figure, the one with the power. In the meantime, she is undercutting that very power and making you a slave to her affections through the very application of those affections – all of this flattery is going to your head and making it swell like a balloon, but one with a minute hole in it, through which tiny amounts of air are imperceptibly leaking. This is a pretty Hegelian type, it occurs to me. Maybe you have never considered yourself the Alpha before – in fact, maybe you have never even thought in those terms before. But now you’re in the matrix, and you find that you increasingly rely on her recognition of your greatness to believe in this supposed greatness.

In the best case scenario, you’ll become wise to her jive early on and get the hell out of that manipulative coven. In the worst case, you’ll eventually BECOME the Beta, as you’re sucked under by her manipulative praise and support, so that the withdrawal of that affirmation will make you crave it. Bad voodoo!

-5. The Cosmopolitan: This person is not actually a cocktail but probably has spent a lot of time drinking these sweet-and-sour concoctions at fancy bars throughout the metropoles of the world. For a while now, I’ve been searching for structural embodiments of our current epoch, and I think that the Cosmopolitan, and perhaps the Hedge Fund (see below), are it. The Cosmopolitan is that person who has lived in so many places and traveled around so much that his/her sense of self is entirely distorted, if not obliterated. Often a well-dressed loner reveling in shades of heather grey and soft wools, the Cosmopolitan possesses no real center – in fact, prides him/herself on this point – and is the personification of an airport, albeit a fancy airport, with luxury stores and decent food. S/he is always passing through, leaving well-cut gems of wisdom or thought in your presence, but soon having to leave on the next flight to the up-and-up. This person is born of privilege and alienation, overexposure to high-class people and things without the sense that s/he has actually possessed those things: the postmodern flâneur, endlessly window-shopping.  His/her constant desire for greatness of sorts- whether this be in terms of epicurean experiences, aesthetic beauty, intellectual development, or career ambition – leads him/her to continual heights of study, travel, and consumerism that push the limits of his/her human relationships and leave you, the would-be interlocutor, feeling like you’re engaging in a monologue while witnessing a juggernaut on a high-speed train through multiple layers of tempered glass. Some part of you knows that the Cosmopolitan values you as a person – because s/he is not completely vapid – but another part of you is well aware that you can never satisfy his/her craving for more, better, newer, and sleeker. At an extreme, you feel like you might remind him/her of death (though he/she would quickly refute this idea), and somehow you know that your very presence is abhorrent to him/her through no fault of your own.  Nothing produces existential, mediated, resounding loneliness like being with a Cosmopolitan. Stay away, get your fingers into the earth.

-6. The Hedge Fund/The Rover: this person is the socially apt equivalent of the Cosmopolitan. For him/her, you are but a pixel in an ever-turning color wheel of faces and experiences, a chip migrating down the intestines of the world’s pachinko parlor and dropping into this slot, or that. Eventually, inevitably, s/he will tire and move on to the next. Of course, this person will also end in existential loneliness, but because s/he resembles a beautiful animal not entirely in control of its motor functions, you feel the fleeting need to entrap it and make it yours. Possession of the unpossessable – that is the driving force here. Whereas the Cosmopolitan gives you flashes of coldness when you come near, the Hedge Fund/Rover is an essentially warm, inviting creature excited by any and all possibilities of human interaction, in ways that may even strike you as dangerously egalitarian. Unlike the Blood Type, this person has long ago thrown out any notion of Alpha or Beta, or maybe his/her understanding of it has been through the washing machine one too many times and is fuzzy beyond legibility. Aphra Behn spoke of this person – a fleshly outcropping of the Will, or one who is in perpetual social motion and often sleeps with a lot of other people, giving you the feeling that somewhere s/he is marking down numbers or checks in a little book or trying to remember your name (as distinct from the Katie with whom s/he slept with last week). Despite the enticing nature of this sexual animal, you are left with a sense of vampirism: in being rejuvenated by new encounters with heretofore unencountered people, the Hedge Fund/Rover is sucking the very life out of you, hedging his/her bets, accumulating numbers, playing trick cards, trying to strategize around you, making excuses not to see you, up to no good when you’re not around, ingratiating when you are. You are a rock, and this person pools around you like liquid, sidling up and offering sexual solace but then ebbing without warning. Beware of the Hedge Fund, as interest rates run high and leave substantial debts.

upon discovery of first grey eyebrow-hair

long and regally white, in fact.

going to pretend it’s an eagle feather…?

-poetess k.

been wanting to write about this for a while, but haven’t gotten around to it. what more paradoxically nice a time to write about the steamy sex galleries of amsterdam than on this white-out snow day?

around xmas time i was wandering around the cobblestones and canals of amsterdam. and i was totally fascinated by the sex shops: literally, tiny twin-bed sized shops that men can enter in order to buy sex. women, mainly non-dutch natives of all shapes, sizes, and colors in lingerie of all shapes, sizes, and colors, stood before windows that doubled as doors. they beckoned with lustful expressions to all the men walking by, including tom, whom i was clearly with. men would pause to window shop, in which the flirtation, the non-physical foreplay would begin.

as i’d been reading about the netherlandish sex business in my guidebook i thought how cool it was that this age-old profession, in the past one of the few ways that women could be financially and sexually independent (well, sometimes), was recognized as a legit economy, and that women weren’t criminalized for the choice of how they used their bodies. this became an uncanny experience for me of theoretical orientation split from gut feeling. walking around the district, i was totally fascinated and totally creeped out. the whole spectacle was like the most banal, cliched representation of sex, like a tableau in a porn museum. and for some reason i found that this seemingly open, playful exhibition functioned as an antierotic for me: like the museum of sex which ana and i once had to go to, or naked parties that i went to in college.

i wonder if this is the less-conscious conventional side of me coming out, but i think what is a turn on for me must be in private spaces. i started reading cosmo (for the first time since early teenagedom, and since i started actually having sex) at the hairdressers, and it felt so racy, and almost inappropriate. but i recognized that no stranger was surreptitiously sharing in that moment in my fantasy, and so i could let loose with my secret thinking. i couldn’t imagine walking around the streets, seeing a sexy lad, who was conveniently selling himself, catch my eye and then walk into his sex space, while being fully aware that both i and he were on public view for everyone to see, before and after. totally not a turn on: more like a disingenuous public display of sexuality.

but my personal (non)kinks aside, what is it beyond that, which miffed me so much? i dunno. since these women were charging by the minute, maybe the idea of women as becoming just a human sized masturbation aide, possessed mannequin. no time for relationship-building, which even the most random hook-ups or sex-plays have at least the beginnings of. also bothersome was the fact that men are distinctly not invited to do the same self-promotion, for either male or female johns.

what do you all think? prostitute window-shops: empowering, or pathetic?

xc

I miss you guys! I want to hear about the rom-com and bossy bottoms and wildebeests and STD furies…what’s cookin? And is it macrobiotic?

My recent reflection has been weighted in a whole different direction. Lots of things here, to unfold in time. But hello-o-o-o….let’s unearth our bodies from the snow.

-xo, k

Both Zoe Beloff and Marnie Weber have made work about the mid-nineteeth century American and European spiritualist movements, and both connect the mediums with feminist performance art.  In interviews, Weber and Beloff  talk about women “having a voice” through their performance as mediums.  Beloff also draws a connection between mediums and the women who provided the first case studies for hysteria, claiming that both spiritualism and hysteria were modes in which women could perform and be expressive.  Weber and Beloff are also interested in what is being spoken in spiritualism and hysteria, and address the ventriloquism of these performances. In an interview, Weber says of her interest in the spiritualist movement, “Women were finally given a voice publicly on stage, but it was in the context of a sideshow performance — they were put on stage to channel the voices of spirits”.  Speaking of her film and video representations of hysterical patients, Beloff says, “I wanted to give them a chance to speak, rather than be spoken about by the men who wrote up their pathologies. I see myself in some ways as attempting to give them a voice. I think of them as visionaries.”  Beloff claims that she is allowing the women to speak, as though she herself could channel their voices.  In a discussion at the University of Chicago last year, Beloff clarified her connection between medium and artist, stating that her installation The Ideoplastic Materializations of Eva C. came out of an interest in the medium Eva C. as a proto performance artist.  She writes, “I think of the séance as a model for a new form of storytelling that includes the audience” (here), positioning the medium herself as storyteller, creative director, and performer.  By aiming to give the long-dead woman whose stories she tells both “a voice” and “a chance to speak, rather than to be spoken about” she situates herself in the disjointed position of both medium, artist, ventriloquist and doll. In Weber’s 2009 film The Sea of Silence , the protagonists, five ghostly Spirit Girls (who are also an imaginary rock band) find life-sized dummies of themselves through which they are able to communicate to an audience, reversing the usual relationship between ventriloquist and doll.  About this work, Weber says, “Ventriloquist dolls were originally used to channel spirits but in this film it’s reversed because the dolls are doing the channelling and are the manifestations of their human selves” (Time Out London, Interview with Marnie Weber, Helen Sumpter, 9/11/2009).

It looks like “No Secrets” is a sleeper hit. New songs coming soon; I hear that Cervixon is brewing some goodies, with assistance from Super Ova.

one thought about the wedding landscape, and the actual wedding experience from which the screenplay derived (a thought inspired by a classmate of mine who is interested in the concept of ‘mother earth’ and how that unconscious association mediates our treatment of the earth) is all the septic trucks sinking in the field behind the house: so we’ve got the shit-baggage metaphor, what about the earth-action? there’s an enveloping going on, that can take on a positive or a negative spin: when we marry i’ll accept your crap along with everything else?

forum established. can you tell i’m fantasizing about summer and happy endings?

c

Today in Traditional Marriage

Posted by Dan Savage on Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 8:14 AM

Check out this video that Ana and I made.  We would love to hear your thoughts.

~Sophia and Ana

Cassie – a disclaimer. I was just about to follow up my impulsive response with a more reasoned wording of what I was thinking about. I don’t want to police experience with theory, but I also think that there’s a lot to unpack there, which is a good thing. I also feel like even though writing your comments may feel unpleasant, it might be therapeutic and also courageously open up important questions that many of us have been thinking about in a variety of ways. So I didn’t mean to shut you down, because your observations and interpretations should be front and center in this dialogue. The suggestion was meant to help, and I’ve been on a major bender of recommending that people read that article lately. I really do think that everyone should read it. Reading feminist theory in general should be part of more people’s lives – my post-dissertation-structural-transformation dream is to teach many young and middle school-aged children concepts from feminist and queer theory so that these things would not seem alien or academistic to them, since issues of gender and sexuality, especially as these intersect with race and class, are central in our lives, and growing more so every day (I’m convinced). Actually, my ultimate, ultimate dream would be to force my dad to read feminist theory (and like it). That doesn’t seem like it’s going to happen, but the idea is to widen the compass, not to “improve” your observations and thoughts. That’s not what I intended, and I’m sorry if it came across that way (as it does to me as I reread it now). Anyway…

Despite your stated weird feelings about processing your responses to India for us here, CK, I think that your admissions of anger or discomfort are very honest and important. Not only do they raise crucial questions that immediately made Toni, Ana and me (not to mention all these other fine ladies) prick up our ears, but they didn’t shy away from implicating your body and experience in areas where many Deleuzian Dr. Tenures do not dare to tread. To me, your well-conceived observations are part of what makes feminism something other than the moribund and euthanized (or even eulogized) patient stretched out upon the table that so many self-titled “postfeminists” declare it to be. Despite the seeming obviousness of structural inequalities besetting women around the world, I have encountered many (white, privileged) women who declare feminism to be dead, its problems solved (because SOME women can work, play sports, and become president of Pakistan, say). Recently I got into a multi-hour argument with a young woman who said that she was not a feminist and felt “disgust” at the word “feminism,” because feminism was too essentialist, too old-school, too this or that. My long-winded and enraged (not to mention extremely wine-soaked) response to her was that her disavowal of feminism was playing into the hands of all of those – and what strange bedfellows they are, jockish men and needle-nosed academics – who had dirtied the word itself, attaching negative connotations of the bra-burning variety that made people like this woman, D., run away in fear and avoid confronting women’s inequality, which still exists all over the world and in our backyards. Words were flung and mud was slung, and I’m still raging on in my head against those who take umbrage with feminism and slight its many accomplishments. I know all of the charges, but to me there are some things from which even the haute trendiness of the academy will not separate me. “Old-skool” feminism is one of these, because despite getting caught up in the question of what women are or are not, we still haven’t solved some fundamental problems, material and conceptual.

I want to throw in a few moments from the conference that I attended in Bogotá, Colombia. This conference is put on biennially by the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, based in New York, and it’s in a different place every time. If you’re interested in performance art, political performance, aesthetics, and Latin American/North American relationships, you must attend this conference. It’s a completely derailing experience, in some very good (and bad) ways.  At many points, we (or at least the wonderful women with whom I was sharing a room and I) felt that our experiences were directly contradicting all that we had learned to dismiss about feminism (like the “universality” of women’s suffering, for example). At many junctures, we were feeling icky about representations that reinforced the disempowerment of women, even though women are still regularly disempowered.  We couldn’t ignore what we were observing, and we couldn’t ignore our own experiences, which have been largely free of such maltreatment (though already I want to take this back. One of the women had been in a three-year abusive relationship, and several of my friends have either been raped or threatened with rape. Violence against women is still endemic in the U.S., just harder to see, particularly because the representational “face” of violence against women is often a face of color, as is the face of poverty).

As I was riding in a taxi alone through the streets of Bogotá (something that I do not advise a young, privileged, white, naïve, and idiotic woman like myself to do EVER EVER AGAIN), I had a moment of real primal fear. Like “I am going to die painfully, and soon” fear. Basically, I had got into the cab because I was late to a meeting, and no one else was around to share the ride with me. But as soon as I stepped inside, I felt that something was wrong. The air was charged, and the driver was looking at me and saying things to me that were more than faintly disturbing – in fact, he was purring sexual compliments at me, like “You are so beautiful, I love your eyes, blah blah blah,” and even something that sounded like “I want to sleep with you.” Despite my initial self-barraging with intracranial telegrams ricocheting off the outer edges of my fear center and saying things like “DO NOT. FREAK OUT. STOP. HE WILL. SENSE THIS. STOP,” I flipped out immediately and put on the hardest face that I could, which was not only my Fear Face (which I hoped did not come through to the driver) but also my I Will Bite Your Balls Off Face (this was what I hoped DID come through), and then a layer of I’m a Really Vulnerable Person Right Now, Huh, covered with a dewy veneer of So This Is What It’s Like to Feel Stripped of the Life Force and Suddenly Age and Shrink Considerably All At Once. So all of these things were playing across my face, and the driver flicked the locks down and started speeding up, telling me that he was not going the usual way because there was a bridge down, which I of course interpreted to mean that he was going to drive to a remote location and penetrate me roughly, perhaps in multiple orifices and with objects, and perhaps proceed to steal money from me and kill me and stuff my body with cocaine and then pretend that I was sleeping in his arms, his newfound American wife, as we waltzed through Customs in Atlanta like that Halloween costume that is half-bride, half-groom. All of this was making its way through my brain like quick-tunneling worms of panic and anxiety, and in fact we got to school just fine, and he overcharged me by about 500%, but I threw the money at him as soon as he unlocked the doors and blasted out of there. I’m sure that he was probably an okay guy, in retrospect. Leaping free, I was sucking in cool air and thinking about how precarious our relationship had been inside that stuffy hatchback. So much could potentially happen inside of a locked vehicle, with a poor man of color and a wealthy white woman carrying all of her credit cards, as well as her passport, with Bogotá looking like an unending series of ugly and decrepit high-rises punctuated by chaotic six-lane streets, nothing familiar, and no sign of stopping anyway.

To contrast that moment with some things that happened in the conference: there were many, many performances about female suffering, including those of an extreme body artist called La Congelada de Uva (roughly translatable to a meaningless phrase, “the frozen/freezing grape”), who perforated her labia with needle and thread, sewing larger and larger cowbells into her vaginal walls via a mane of synthetic hair, which she braided, equestrian-style, before walking across a table, bleeding and in visible pain. (In a more lighthearted piece, she also played her vagina as an instrument, the “pussyphone/pepáfono,” along with a female singer. Will try to post that here.) There were also numerous incidents of female performers removing their clothes and taping their breasts (by the seventh incident, it was sort of a joke among us – “Here comes the breast-taping”) and otherwise pantomiming or enacting the abject, objectified body of the repulsive and marginalized woman. See the performances of Não Bustamante for more evidence of that. There were black women kneading mud into their white clothes and pretending to feed it to their babies while white women yelled phrases about desaparecidos into megaphones; there was a woman (Violeta Luna) who injected herself with something, as a critique about Monsanto and genetically-modified corn in Mexico. She would later eat and half-expectorate, half-vomit a neon-blue faux tortilla while dressed in a metal harness, boobs taped to the nines. Among the less degrading representations of women: Astrid Hadad, the amazing and beautiful and hilarious Mexican cabaret performer, who sang renditions of old norteños and corridos while running through ten or so costume changes, each ensemble better than the last. Also, Susana Cook, the Argentine lesbian artist, performed an incredible deadpanned monologue about the wrath of God being visited upon homosexuals, bisexuals, intersexuals, and transsexuals. It was surprisingly uplifting, considering some of the other stuff going on. Real sex, I should mention, was also rampant (but not with me, sadly).

Another interesting moment came when a very well-known lesbian performer, Lois Weaver (half of this great performance duo from Austin, TX called Split Britches) hosted her “Long Table,” which she advertised as a break from the standard conference format, a table with microphones   at which anyone could sit to speak his/her mind, democracy-style. I could say more about this, but I want to say that it really worked, it was excellent and well-executed (unlike democracy), and stimulating ideas were trotted out. The theme was “gender and sexuality,” and immediately the issue of suffering and/in performance (the body in pain) came up in provocative ways. Two of the people sitting at the table turned out to be an überawesome smart lesbian power couple – Jasbir Puar and Ann Pellegrini. Read their books, if you haven’t! I am partly through Jasbir’s Terrorist Assemblages right now. Ann’s work deals with sexuality and religion (or what she terms “Christian secularism,”) and she noted that sexuality and gender were the moral hinges on which religion and the state articulate, as in issues of gay marriage, don’t ask don’t tell, abortion, and other sexual/civil rights issues. This is so, so interesting. It was making my brain steam with frenzied energy, even after like 8 days of exhausting running around and craziness from 7 am to 2 am. Another participant, this self-proclaimed anarcho-feminist queer Colombian activist named Nikita said that Colombia had just allotted selective rights to homosexuals but was not implementing them, and there had been, in her mind, no change in the treatment of women or queers despite the panache with which government leaders signed bills into law on a weekly basis. Thinking about it all, I realized that touting women’s and gay rights is akin to the imperialism of our day – a way that nation-states compete to see who is most modern, most liberal, most “democratic” because invested in human rights-speak, without really changing anything on the ground. A half-formed thought, and I’m still thinking about it.

So, back to the task at hand. In all of this muddle, I’m not sure where we need to settle between cultural relativism and hard-line moralizing. I think (and this is somewhat half-remembered, appropriately) that Donna Haraway’s idea of incomplete communication (or attempts at partial communication across irreducible differences) is salient here – that when dealing with others, we can’t assume that we know everything, but we shouldn’t assume that we know nothing; we can sort of get halfway there, but we’re never going to be completely there, and that’s okay. I remember driving around in Bogotá at a particularly chaotic point and seeing a disheveled man on the street with very sad eyes that seemed to contain quite a lot of legible meaning – and my first thought was that his face could be deciphered if I just studied it closely enough, but then I was suddenly hit by a wave of doubt, thinking that there could be no concrete understanding of what was working behind his features because of the obscuring effects of the many meshes of class and race, cultural convention, common parlance, and the like separating us. I think that in actuality there are halfway points between these deterministic ends, and it’s important to keep communication channels open even when faced with bewildering difference, or an incomprehensibility (or incommensurability) so vast that it’s like some kind of painful riddle, a dark and unfunny joke.  So often I feel this way when contemplating the radical right wing crazies inhabiting the U.S., or Israelis who hate all Palestinians…things like this. Terrorizing differences that make no sense. Your reflections aren’t easy, Cassie, and I’m glad that you’ve implicated all of us in the need to continue to assess our place in the order of things and redress unanswered grievances and claims. I also think that when faced with a situation that is seemingly at a remove from our own experiences, it’s important nonetheless to say, “What does this have to do with me?” or “how am I affected here – [to get really hammy for one second] what’s India to me, or I to India?” Mapping relationships of global capitalism to transnational feminisms is also instructive here. In any case, I think that depersonalizing the situation is good, even as we recognize that structures are not fated to perpetuate their inequalities, that continuity and change exist in (an admittedly somewhat mystifying) back-and-forth, and what we see should outrage us (or we’re not paying attention, as Audre Lorde said says) but at the same time we can’t completely trust our eyes (to paraphrase that quixotic spaceman, Henri Lefebvre), because not everything is a legible text accessible to our comprehension.  I hope that I’ve said some things that make sense re: comparative feminisms and the pitfalls and potentials therein, because I’m really invested in these questions.

um, have you guys seen this? if louis or i could get boners, we’d totally have monstrously large pillows clasped to our laps at this very moment– so large, in fact, that louis might have suffocated his small self already had i not mercifully gotten him neutered. but as we can’t, we’re stuck trying to figure out what the fuck the song means while we watch it over and over (and imitate her crazy dance moves/dry-hump the air).

*no disrespect to indi-uh!

because this is the blog it is, i should write from a gender-relational perspective; you’d imagine that should come easily, as i have been ranting about what i perceived to be the male-female dynamics there, about how fucked up they are. if i had posted a month ago, i could not have expressed much beyond my hatred of indian (though not indian american or american indian) men. i suppose the bottom line is that development is key: women, in general remaining indoors, are not given the freedom to fully develop their minds, and men dominate the outdoor space, perhaps even the interiors as well. yet having written that i want to immediately delete it, as the words make me feel like i’m not being adequetely culturally sensitive and that i have no place to sweep my judgments about a huge country that is more complex than i could possibly grasp. spoken words can feel so much less heavy; writing about women and men in india depresses me. therein lies my difficulty in being in india: wanting to reserve judgment, wanting to remain polite and act correctly, wanting to be open to every thing and every one. that got me in to trouble, as my openness would be interpreted by men as sexual availability or as willingness to buy their crap. i felt my white skin fetishized, and merely by walking down the street, i rendered myself a spectacle, welcoming photographs and a battery of questions.

no. it took me a while but i eventually began to exercise no. not that the word did me any good. my no had very little value to the indian men i came in contact with. it seemed like, to them, i didn’t know my own desires, and so they persisted to get what they wanted. i felt date raped all over again, daily, hourly. getting groped on the bus felt less demoralizing and invasive than being asked 30 times a day the same five questions with no respect for my need to wander around, unbothered. i came to wonder if privacy in public spaces is a privilege we have, here in the states, or if it is a right. the same thought comes, vaguely, on airplanes, when a seat neighbor starts talking to me, relentlessly.

in india, my need for privacy felt much more urgent, as the assault of attention had a destructive effect on my sense of self, certainly on my femininity and on my sexuality. stopped shaving and my legs started to look and feel like man legs; wore shapeless ugly clothing; pulled my hair back and covered it frequently with a shawl; scowled; revelled in my b.o.; lost my sex drive; felt defensive and angry whenever a man, other than a waiter, came close to me.

i think i best write this in installments. i don’t feel like writing anymore, the act of writing makes me upset.

yo yo, when it comes to drew barrymore, my heart is an irony-free zone. field trip! ( yes yes y’all, anahid j.)

PS: I am also blown away by the lyrical stylings of AD – gonorrhealist, indeed! syphilanthropist, huh! genius. I want to send that to Dan Savage…

As in:

Mother: “Oy gevalt, will you look at Cousin Marge, she’s so verputzed, with her new perm and giant silver ribbons and all those decorative schmattes.”

Father: “Yeah, but at least she’s not zaftig anymore. At the bar mitzvah three months ago she looked like a real bow-wow.”

And I want to say: this is not even an exaggeration. This is what I grew up with, and let’s not get into that. I like to think that my own experiments with the intricacies of gender and sexual identity are far removed from the sort of hair-pulling, garden-variety neurotic Freudian 19th-century Viennese bourgeois subject on the velvet couch, but they’re actually intimately wrapped up in all of that stuff, the haranguing dialogues in which I grew up enmeshed, like Orestes hounded by Furies brandishing hairbrushes and store-bought stockings. As the popular adage goes, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, and Jewish apples are often little, hard, and bitter, like premature testicles that never descended and will never undergo Matthew Barney’s elaborated Cremaster cycle but rather stay eternally bound to the parental thigh, l’dor va’dor, from generation to generation. There’s no parthenogenesis or mitosis, no mental splitting-off from the cells of patriarch and matriarch – rather, we children of the persecuted often bubble up and out like tumescent tumors, more swellings than independent life forms. If we have our own heartbeats, well, tumors do too. Rather unlike the prototypical hero we are – that hero who must strike out on his [sic] own through a series of liminal social ruptures, shattering bonds that have become oppressive obstacles in order to find his [sic] path. This account may be in large part facetious, but there’s also something undeniably true about it, at least for me – an extremely prosaic reality of endless circling far and away, outright rejection (better said in Spanish: “rechazar,” a verb that really captures the sonic and physical sensations of pushing something away forcefully with tongue and teeth) and the improvised, impetuous train-hop out of town, which turns out to lead us directly (albeit inadvertently) back, as if we are magnetized animals or characters in an intricate short story by Melville, some sort of tangled and obfuscating Gordian knot, or part of a Kafkaesque tautology that brings us back to what we know and then mocks us mercilessly for it. A lot of the authors who I most enjoy seem to write about the futility of constant human attempts to get beyond what we are and know ourselves to be, the inevitable disappointment of self-mystification or stylization.

But anyway. Longwinded digression aside, let’s jump into the details and ‘sweat the small stuff,’ as the pop-psych phraseology has it. So I’ve begun thinking lately about my gender performance, assigning importance to certain aspects of my clothing, self-carriage, and understanding of my body as a key interface with the world, a weird sort of double-sided interrogation mirror about which I’m sure Lacan has written several volumes that I’d rather not read, thank you very much. I think that in the past I felt fairly neutral about my gender identity, and I felt that this and my sexual identity could be separated, for all practical purposes. Now I no longer feel that this is the case. In fact, looking back at some photographs from college – the years when I was most deeply into a state of appearance-rebellion, into which I blundered with no conscious effort to shape myself into a recognizable character – all I could think was that I looked like a butch, butch dyke. Which was sort of exciting and sort of scary, because I didn’t have the internal experience of feeling like a butch dyke – that would come later, but in a sort of forced and distorted way that felt and feels somewhat superimposed or artificial, since it seems to have little to do with actual sex, whatever that is – so here I had this superficial interface tending toward “dyke” or “masculine,” while my internal sexual identity was more along the lines of “confused” or “easy,” and my gender identity meter was set firmly to “playful.” At this point I recall stating to someone that my purpose in terms of appearance was to surprise, shock, and amuse the world with the clownishness of my getups. Interesting. It simply didn’t occur to me that I could jigger the outer interface (the body’s surface and its heavily coded – but flexible – morphology) to project a certain identity and attract certain coefficients to that identity. Seriously. And I have the dating track record to prove this! Ugh!

In fact, I am still not that interested in matching up the left and right sides of the algorithm, possibly because I feel like the equation is so dumb and humorless– even though we all buy into it (or the idea of it) on some level or another, I think. As stated in previous blog posts, I think that our channels and tunnels of desire are delicately attuned to extremely specific (but not necessarily diachronically rigid) correlatives, with less give than we might expect or want. And this isn’t a bad thing, really – we owe it to ourselves to be self-protective and to know what we want, because otherwise we might make painful mistakes that, when repeated, can force us to dance around eternally on the tops of our toes as though the world is one giant burning-hot stove. So we jigger the knobs and adjust the levels of this or that on our homing devices, thinking about balanced quantities and jumping back at the first sign of noxious fumes (or habits).

This goes for appearance as well, of course, but, following Butler, I’m more interested in the communication of gender and sexual identity via appearance than I am in a banal discussion of ‘body image’ and people with non-normative thighs or giant noses or the like – which is usually the thing up for discussion, the shapes and sizes factor. What’s been really interesting me lately, and what I was mentioning to you the other day, SD, was the erotic quotient of “knowledge” (or the withholding of such) of someone’s sexual or gender identity. For example, sometimes spotting a defiantly out lesbian can be totally erotically thrilling even if she is not putatively sexually attractive, because she might compensate for this by being unbelievably assertive in her display of appearance-derivable information about her sexuality –unabashed and focused in a way that becomes wildly sexy. Or there are individuals who emit a sort of gendered or sexual ambiguity (not the same thing, it bears noting and repeating) that is titillating in its occlusion – perhaps purposeful, or perhaps shy/uncertain – of information.

So there’s a lot of premeditation that goes into dressing the part. Although I don’t think that Judy Butler is just talking about clothes in her discussion of the social construction of gender, I do think that clothes are not something to be taken lightly. Clothing, like any other “frontal sign” or “scenic aspect of front,” as Goffman referred to these, conveys laden and deeply coded information about all sorts of vectors along which a person might self-present. It’s significant that Goffman uses a theatrical metaphor: this is essentially a manipulable and performative space, and there are some elements that, at least for Goffman, can come under the control of the individual (which become somewhat disengaged from agency in Foucault/Rubin/Butler, shaped by structural limiting factors so that the individual’s control seems to be triangulated by the constellations of needs that this self-manipulation is serving, or something like that), though others – like race – may not always be (and even racial identity is a highly fluid and flexible, frequently “(by)passable” category of frontal representation). So here we have tension between that which can be transcended and that which cannot. And then the question of reception, so important to theatre and performance studies (sorry, a plug!) – who is watching you and how is she actually receiving your attempts to X her with your Y, if that is indeed what you are attempting?

In most studies that I read, reception proves the most elusive thing to grasp. Linda Zerilli uses the concept of reception to poke a major hole in Butler’s theory of gender performance, as Zerilli locates agency and power in the cognizing spectator (possibly a variant of Ranciere’s ‘emancipated spectator?’), who can make her own interpretations of what she is seeing (in this case, a drag show). Yet I would have to plant my flag in the middle of this debate and diagnose a constant, almost (shudder: cold wind of Marxism blowing back in our faces) dialectical oscillation in the outputs and inputs that mark the dialogic exchange between performer and spectator. Both are trying to ‘read’ the other – although we usually think of the spectator as the reader, the performer has also designed her performance through multiple and repeated acts of ‘reading,’ as she attempts to interpret the wants of ideal and actual spectators and partners, through past experience that shapes and frames the limits of what ‘passes’ (pardon the pun) in this identity show.

Does it seem to you that fashion and beauty magazines practice a sort of Platonism, upholding a concrete yet diaphanous set of ideal, utopian, and thoroughly unattainable Forms after which many women strive eternally, reaching ever upward in inevitably failed acts of mimesis? And for whom do they enact these difficult, time- and labor-intensive, and traumatizing mimetic acts, which closely resemble some sort of biblical mortification of the flesh? Not for men, I don’t think, because men are usually okay with the shoddier facsimiles. It’s for the Forms themselves, so that the whole feminine gender identity thing just feels to me like a closed circuit. Maybe even a solar panel – one end extending to the sun, the other into the ground. Just watch 5 minutes of Sex and the City and you’ll see the closed circuit in action. The women transmit energy via their Fashion and Beauty conductors, and it does not go anywhere, fizzling into its own expenditure. This is the conservation of energy! Post-feminists might crow that this energy is ‘nonreproductive,’ but look at it, traveling up and down the closed circuit, fizzling into the Sun! This is angels dancing on the head of a pin, for chrissakes!

Anyhow, into this apocalyptic landscape of Beauty and Fashion I have recently jumped, albeit with a playful attitude, or an attempt at one. A question: is playfulness possible here? Can women play with femininity like drag queens can? I say: yes, wholeheartedly yes – and this produces a crossing of the wires that fucks things up even more re: communication of gendered and sexual identity and desire. To some degree, I think that this play is coming at my own expense, as I’ve been attracting people who I’m clearly not interested in attracting but who will inevitably flock to my shoddy and ironic faux-facsimiles, and I know this to be true. Is the joke actually on me, then?

Or is there a certain self-protective purpose to coming out in “high drag?” Lately in my class on festive culture in Latin America and the Caribbean, I’ve been teaching some of the more interesting poco high-theory stuff surrounding masking and mimicry, and the subversive pleasures thereof. “Not quite/not white” and that sort of thing. And I’ve been feeling that my hair is a wig, and my fashionable, feminine costume (complete with jewelry and often makeup) is one large body mask that directs and reorients my identity while I am ‘possessed’ and ridden like the horse of the orixá Oxum, deity of vanity, making my gender projection laser-sharp (but totally off-target, or so I feel) to unsuspecting spectators and allowing me to hide certain aspects at will. Is this something akin to ‘the pleasure of the closet?’ Is the closet always such a bad space, anyway? Couldn’t that be a really productive space of interiority and power? Or is it ‘cowardice,’ as in the Parsifal-esque heroic narrative of the queer who slowly comes to know herself through a couple of well-timed omens, comes out (first with copious, then diminishing fear), breaks a few eggs to make an omelet, tears herself away from home and hearth, and sets off on a journey of self-knowledge through the bars of Andersonville, her knapsack on her back? Isn’t that actually the most heteronormative, clichéd narrative in the world? Isn’t that trajectory of mounting action-climax-denouement just the male erection asserting itself again, and Cixous be damned? I’m just asking rhetorical questions here, because I’m on both sides of this debate, really. And maybe the debate is, like, 20,000 years old at this point. But I like chewing on woolly mammoth! That is not a euphemism, though maybe it should be (?).

Anyhow, I must say that I’m currently enjoying my flirtation with femme, sort of. Where before I felt that it was the scariest and most vulnerable position that one could hold – this eviscerated object of the male, pale gaze – now I’m constantly laughing at the discrepancies of knowledge that emerge all around me like exploding methane bubbles in a peat bog, as onlookers look on and see what they see and scramble for definitions and assurances. Class and race assignations may come easily, but gender and sexuality? Hm, isn’t that fun? Or is all of this actually dead serious, frivolity being part of the “Sex and the City” closed circuit frivolity? But, then, isn’t this the definition of citationality?

I can’t help but feel a bit of internalized pressure from my allegiances with various parts of the feminist/queer movement – sometimes I can’t entirely rationalize this as “empowering,” according to the convoluted logic above (I’m taking drag away from drag…?) Sometimes that horrible pop-country song sweeps through me automatically – “Man, I feel like a woman” – and I have to shudder and restrain the gag reflex. So, for the time being, the experiment continues.

the other day i was thinking about my preferences/tastes/likes and dislikes, and i realized that i’m at the age where things that i don’t like are both becoming apparent and sort of settling into the eternal – tics that will last forever, and against which little ground will be made. and i thought that i’d do something that i’ve never done before and that might seem like a bad idea on the face of it but was in fact very liberating in the initial doing of it. that is, i’ve started making a list of things that i HATE. now, at first i was even loath to say “hate,” but i think that it’s a good idea to involve that word and see what kind of work it does. so i started making my list, and it’s been pretty short and elaborated – like a paragraph devoted to each most-hated thing (quality, habit, ideology, food, institution, what have you), demonstrating that these are not fleeting moments of rage but long-accumulated sediments of dislike that have crystallized into obstinate cul-du-sacs in the suburb of my brain.

i’m not going to reveal the list, because i need to edit it, and also because maybe it should remain a private thing anyway, though i don’t think that it would offend anyone in this virtual roundtable. i guess my question is: do you think that making a list of things that you hate is a productive exercise or a masturbatory process of refining one’s narcissism? or if it has the potential to be either, how can we make this a productive exercise – what can it do for us at this juncture? why, in other words, am i feeling the urge to make this list? what’s propelling that? have you ever made such a list, or do you typically know what most irks you about people and things? okay! tschus! – kz

This is my first blog posting, well, ever, and definitely the first time I’ve put my writing out there to be read by folks other than my classmates. That being said, I pull my sweater over my knees, and listen to sad, sad music as I cry if you say you don’t like my writing; I’ll be doing that regardless of what you think.

Both of these pieces were done for an Intro to Creative Nonfiction writing class I’m taking online at the New School. The first piece is a direct response to a piece titled “He and I” by Natalia Ginzburg; I used her “he is this…., I am that…” format, so I can’t take credit for that. My impression of the original piece is that everything Ginzburg writes about herself is not what she actually believes but rather what her husband has said about her. She writes that she is lazy, manages her time poorly, doesn’t know how to eat. In contrast, her husband is always productive, efficient, and has an impressive palette. This was the approach I used in my own piece, and according to my writing teacher, I missed the boat somewhat as a result. My teacher claims that Ginzburg is being true in all her self-deprecation, that she is obviously implicating her faults, and that my piece is “cool” because I reached a genuine conclusion even though I misunderstood the original work. Oh well…

(*Both of these pieces are in their rough draft form; the pacing of the class is such that, unless you specifically ask the professor, you don’t have the chance to go back and rework any of these brief, 2 works.)

He and I

He is outgoing; I am reserved.
He is good at math; I am terrible at it.
He manages his time well, and I procrastinate.
He loves science and can extrapolate endlessly about quantum physics. I cannot grasp such concepts, let alone hold a conversation about them. When we are out with his friends, I am the mute girlfriend sitting by his side as he engages the table in his theories on matter, chaos, and the Big Bang. I can talk for hours about film, music, and modern art, but he has little interest in these topics. I know how to kill a conversation. I am trying too hard.
He loves Barenaked Ladies, and Michael Bay movies, which make him universally relatable.
I love Cocteau Twins, and Woody Allen films, which make me a pretentious snob.
He is blonde haired, blue eyed, and robustly tan, even in the winter. I am raven haired, with olive eyes, and am unfailingly pale, even after several hours in the summer sun. When we first began dating, I described him to my mother as “the poster boy for the Aryan Nation.” He is unapologetically handsome, sporting a physique that would give Michelangelo’s David a complex.
He wears colors like orange and blue; I only wear black. He affectionately criticizes everything I wear, telling me my sunglasses are too big, and that I will never realize my full potential for sexiness until I can successfully incorporate colors like salmon and tangerine into my wardrobe. He is going to buy me a kelly green sundress that brings out my eyes, and thanks to him, I will finally be gorgeous.
We are both dancers, but in our field, he is vital, and I am expendable. Even his mistakes are met with applause. His real passion is science, but he happens to be good at everything he does. An Adonis in ballet slippers, he navigates the world with the blithe oblivion of someone who has never known what it means to struggle.
I don’t know how to write; he is an excellent writer.
I use my sarcastic wit as a defense; he has an engaging sense of humor.
I am melodramatic, and only know how to speak in hyperbole. He is always literal, giving everything he says a weight of authority.
As a result, I’ve learned to carefully examine everything before I say it, poring through it with a fine-tooth comb to make sure it is without my trademark exaggeration, irony, or cynicism.
He says the heart is purely chambers and ventricles, that love is your brain registering a series of positive reinforcements. I have a fanciful view of love because I am governed by my emotions.
We met when we were 16, but it would be another nine years before he told me that the first time he spotted me, he thought I was the most drop-dead beautiful thing he had ever seen. We spend nights pressed into each other in the dark of his room, and I can feel his breath on the back of my neck like a drowsy breeze. I trace the veins on his arms like tributaries on a map. If only we had remained distant admirers. He would still seem as kind and sincere as my initial misconceptions led me to believe, and I could still make him stutter with my smile. Seemingly overnight, we dropped our roles as innocently lustful teenagers, and traded them in to pretend we were adults in a real relationship.  How had it come to this?  I rest my head on his chest as though pressing my ear to the ground for a secret code, but all I can hear is his heartbeat.

This other piece was written in a matter of hours the other night when I was flush up against a deadline. The prompt was to write about someone with whom I have a shared past and still know currently, and to frame it within a format of “then” vs. “now”. I started out writing about a close friend, but I couldn’t get past the first paragraph. The piece was dragging almost as much as my feet were as I tried to crank something out. Hours before it was due, I scrapped the whole thing, and wrote about my most recent ex instead.

THEN
When he asked me out, he was wearing more eyeliner than I was. Swathed in white sheets held down by a gold collar and sporting a pair of Birkenstocks, he looked like he had wandered off the set of “Lawrence of Arabia” and happened to find himself singing in the chorus of “Aida” instead. His first name sounded like the noise you make when getting kicked in the stomach, but when he flashed me a boyish grin, dimples staple gunned into his cheeks, resistance was futile. I gave him my number, then shuffled off to the girls’ dressing room giggling to myself.

Up until that moment, I had a personal policy never to date the opera singers I met at work. Whether it was from being undersexed or oversexed, I couldn’t say, but these singers viewed the women of the corps de ballet as theirs to ogle and grab. They had turned sexual harassment into an art, which was both impressive and disgusting.  There was something different about this one though. He was young, probably my age, and a baritone.

In the beginning, all of our differences didn’t seem to matter. I wasn’t bothered by the fact that he turned out to be four years younger than me. All of his favorite music, movies, and writers would have been deal breakers to me in past relationships, but I chose to overlook them. He was a charming bundle of contradictions that made me swoon. I loved that he was an ardent agnostic who got paid to sing as a cantor in church; that he had perfect diction when singing in German, Italian, French, but sounded like the kid from Jersey that he was when engaged in ordinary conversation; that he could tickle my ears with how gently he whispered, yet scream with real bravado during a hockey game. He managed to be both pushy and needy at the same time, which only made my passive aloofness more blaring in contrast. Still, against my better judgments and instincts, I was smitten.

NOW
The trajectory of our relationship was not a long one; like a supernova, it was this luminous, lustful burst that outshined all other aspects of our lives before fading away into the ether, leaving us both blinking in the darkness. His pushiness turned aggressive, his neediness fueled by jealousy. My passiveness receded into cowardice, my aloofness cold. He probed me about my past relationships, and about my straight male friends. I loathed how frequently he called, and that I found him going through my phone, reading my texts. I resented that he said he loved me, and he resented that I couldn’t say it back.

We rarely talk these days. The friendship we both pledged to maintain is nonexistent, even though ours was a civil breakup. We’ve exchanged cordial emails that reflect none of the intimacy we once shared; our words are the written equivalent of a polite handshake. Sometimes, when I hear the arias he used to sing for me in privacy, I think about him and how romantically galvanizing our relationship was. But more than anything, I’m filled with regret not because things ended, but I don’t miss him, and I somehow feel like I should.

This happened when my friend and I were en route to Milwaukee, and we stopped to get my car’s emissions tested at the DoT (dept of transportation) for license renewal purposes. So, we were waiting in this little booth while the guy checked the exhaust – an operation that took all of 10 minutes – and this other attendant starts chatting us up– we being two diminutive women dressed in generic urban-casual wear, with nerdy academic glasses, clearly not from around these parts, socioeconomically speaking. The guy asks us where we’re from, and we say that we live in Chicago, and then he abruptly launches into this anecdote (prefacing it by explaining that he’s in fact a very rustic farmboy from rural WI) of his first trip to The Big City and how he was deeply traumatized by the sight of two men kissing in a public phonebooth. He remarked that at that time he did not know that they were ‘queers,’ but now he does. He said all of this with a chuckle, as if to show us that he wasn’t homophobic but had, in a former life, been so naïve as to experience homosexual panic from this sight that was so foreign to his rural understanding. His story came as a sort of “huh, isn’t that something” vignette rather than a straightforward example of hate-speech…yet it seemed so unmotivated by anything, so arbitrarily pulled out of the air. Very weird scene. There was an immediate, huge ripple of major anxiety and discomfort, like static electricity. He didn’t seem to notice anything, but everything sort of shifted or tilted for me. This incident sort of placed a black cloud on the entire day, raising my hackles and putting me on the alert for more policing of identities and mundane hostility to difference, not incredibly hard to find in Milwaukee and its environs.

Afterward, back in the car, my friend E. and I reflected upon the situation, wondering what we should have done, how we should have reacted, rather than just sort of sitting paralyzed, looking away, perhaps laughing softly and uncomfortably, as we did. E. felt that we could have used that moment to communicate our disapproval of and disagreement with this stance by making some sort of gesture of irritation or even intervening in a sort of political way. I felt that I personally could not have formulated an interventionist counterthrust that would have done anything other than piss off this guy, who was telling us all this in a very affectionate, fatherly, jolly tone that nonetheless seemed as though it would fall apart and collapse into reflexive rage at even a feeble demonstration of opposition. his heaviness and square-bodied nature gave me that creepy feeling of American gothic, this sort of morbidity and pathology hiding behind the open-faced friendliness of ‘the Folk’ (see David Lynch, Deliverance, et al). But I didn’t know if he would have exploded into rage or if, by chance, he would have been open to discussion – I shouldn’t necessarily turn him into Psycho Hayseed apriori. We also debated whether the statement truly was homophobic or whether he was just stating this as a benign commentary on his former ignorance of ‘big city life’ and its complexities and (potentially threatening) liberties. I felt that he was latently very homophobic, but E. thought that there was some ambiguity – although neither of these stances could explain why he told this story to us. I was left with that sad feeling that I get when I hear commonplace homophobia tossed around by, say, my parents (who are always passing judgment in their weird anxious-middle class way on the effeminate, the hypermasculine, the unmarried, the spinsterish – reproductively peripheral people around whom linger “questions”). I am always totally put off by this and wonder why it’s such a big question for them (although I know that paranoid discussions of the nonnormative are what keep the normative in business). In those cases, at least, I can play the pouty, self-righteous adolescent and call attention to what I view as abusive ideologies, knowing that I won’t trigger much violence (or, lamentably, make much change), that everything will be smoothed over with the arrival of the first course, the setting of the table. Cold comfort indeed.

So yeah, I guess that this post is really asking what to do about routine encounters with homophobia – how to figure out the motives behind them, how to ward them off and combat/confront them without being punched in the face or dragged behind a tractor through corn country. Thoughts?-kz

Anyhow, but i think that for some reason i’m out of my abjection – the storm broke or something – and i wonder what the deal is. this breakout of sluggish indifference was not event-based in the least but distinctly biochemical: i had a really crazy dream last night, a two-part dream separated by gasping, gulping wakefulness, in which both parts were seriously gloomy and morose, filled with longing and the cesspool of negative memory-energy that often seems right at hand these days, for whatever reason. but the weird thing is that i woke up feeling unbelievably cleansed, cathartic – sweaty like a moon-calf, or something newly born, sticky as if i had crawled out of a natal membrane or something (though i don’t really know how i got that way), and i just felt unbelievably better. isn’t that strange? do you ever have these kinds of psychic experiences, where something just tangibly shifts in your brain’s functioning that makes thoughts and writing (which hasn’t happened in a long, long time) go clearly and faster? very odd.

perhaps i’m making too much of this, but the shift out of some sort of abyss and into a clear-eyed consciousness is rocking my world right now. may all of you enjoy this kind of clarity as we edge reluctantly toward spring. chicago has been shuffling its feet too long! come on, tender buds/buttons!

i remain fascinated by the festering shit that has been exposed as the snow recedes/ed, all the crap that was buried there. i should also note that in recent days, i have been accosted by several people who have sort of taken me on their walks around the city. maybe things are changing, returning back into an openness…maybe it’s the weather…maybe the hope of Obama…perhaps even the loosening of restrictions on Cuba and the condemnation of Bush’s torture practices….not sure. now i want to say something cheesy in closing like “namaste,”  something that reminds me of lavender-scented whole foods shoppers with short-cropped steel-grey hair, but i think that i’ll mix it with the sound of a coyote howl to get at something more feral: “naaawwwwwwwmmmasteeewoof.” okay, ciao gals. -kz

we sang together for three days; rather we yikked, hollered, cooed, honked, yelled, lulled, glotteral-stopped, &c. at one point, we went around in an enormous circle, arranged in chronological order of our membership, and introduced ourselves, saying bits and pieces about yale, the chorus, what we’re doing now. the themes that ran through everyone’s brief self-synopsis were pro-music, anti-establishment sentiments and ambivalence verging on negativity towards yale, and, of course, feminism. many women noted that we were reflections of each other’s past and future; that in the pictures of the slavs from the 70s we saw cassie and larkin and tasha, but they were actually audrey and minta and galen. and observing the cluster of nineties slavs, followed by those from the late eighties, mid-seventies, and finally early seventies, i witnessed what my life will be like at different stages. as i told them in my own self-introduction, being in their presence made me excited for the future.

one suggested growth was that, while yale felt for many women, for many years, a totally male-dominated place, the alums of the new millennium, the ‘baby-slavs,’ claimed that it was totally not, now. i wonder about that. while i don’t believe yale was necessarily male-dominated by men, per se, there was a certain pervasive ethos that could be described as ‘male’ in the behavior and attitudes of the majority of my classmates. the chorus felt a distinctly precious space in that it was girl love, all the time, no rule-the-world ambitious out-do-each-other with time to spare for weight-lifting and binge-drinking bromance.

i thought a bit about what singing slavic peasant music has meant over the years, and how the political-social implications have quite morphed. at its inception—the group was the ‘brainchild’ of a man, i think his name was bill robbins, who was also at the reunion and introduced himself with ‘i formed the choir to meet women’ (and later, annie, an ’08 slav introduced herself, mimicking him: ‘i also joined the choir to meet women’… i’m going to try to link to an amazing duet annie does with her girlfriend that made me cry during our concert), then later changed his name to celo v’ec, which tasha pointed out means ‘man,’ chelovek, in russian…totally nuts—slavic folk music perhaps faced a threat of extinction, or at least major loss, under the soviet socialist program. making a group to sing it at yale was additionally a humanitarian preservation project in service of the underdog minority, as the early yale women saw themselves.

currently, singing slavic music falls under the ‘random’ category, as the collection of women i sang with were: a bit hippie, a bit band-geeky, a bit international, a bit pan-musical, a bit lesbian, a bit feminist, a bit escapist. not sure which pigeon-hole i fit in, feminist probably, although i wonder if a bit of my fascination, beyond the total beauty of the music, was academic: i’m curious about the balkans and a favorite book of mine is rebecca west’s epic history of the former yugoslavia, black lamb and grey falcon. the music is the black lamb’s response to the falcon’s move.

post-reunion there has been a lot of connecting over the internet, with women in the forties posting pictures of me and everyone else in embroidered blouses on the facebook and writing effusive pro-women-energy emails, and so i realize the excitement is mutual. the older women are excited to look backwards as much as i am to look forwards. and i can’t get the tunes out of my nog!

ck

EX: Hey Antonia, you remember those 3 great poets you stumbled upon when you were at the über-hellish Deutsche Sommerschule Am Pazifik 2006, Portland, OR edition? Let me refresh your memory: their names were Sarah Kirsch, Ulla Hahn, and Gottfried Benn. Oh, of course! Anyhoo, I found a few poems that I thought I’d share with you on this cloudy day. PS: You might want to read the last one before you have to milk the rubber tube sticking out of your sixteen-year-old cat’s absessed head. Tschüss!

——
3 Poems by Sarah Kirsch
Translated by W. D. Jackson

–
Celtic

I see an earth I don’t
Like the look of / summer
Birdless / cows
Milkless / men
Gutless / think I’d
Rather! say farewell.

–
Highland

I see myself on the banks
Of Loch Lomond: the vernal
Waterfalls startle / blowing
Their trumpets from
The slopes. My melancholy
Bog-heart forgets its croaking.

–

Mudflats III

I, the Erlking’s daughter / have an
Important appointment / with two
Apocalyptical Riders out on the mud / a
Tête-à-tête on shaky ground /
Now before day-break reddens.
Swirls of smoky fog / surprisingly
Hasty snow / create a nice
Sense of obligation / which imposes itself
On seagull-carcasses / coke-tins. The
Faded moon on its speedy way /
Between copulating clouds / declares
An admiration for the albatross / as it
Flies up from the South / while Jupiter
Illuminates the cow-shed / and then the oil-rig.
Happy Neujahr! signal the distress-flares /
And the boy from Büsum will never
Be found. The crows are falling /
Black apples / from the only tree.

Reeling off her darkly
Sparkling lines / she reads of melancholy, wintry,
Wind-blown, lonely places. Of lemon-faced,
Waiting, cruel,
Disappointed people. And
Of furry, hungry, hunting,
Hunted creatures. Her world is
Hostile, secretive, beautiful
And indifferent. Our lives are isolated,
Painful, amusing, violent:

——-
Poem by Ulla Hahn
Translated by Oliver Grannis

Respectable Sonnet
So why not write a respectable sonnet – St.H.

Come bite me right and bite right in again
and leave off merely nibbling. Here’s where
it’s good, and here, and you know where, yes, there,
and take my measure mouth to mouth. Paint then

considering these eyes, rings around
them, let me hide behind beneath my hand,
then spring to yours. Pleasure me in sixes and
in sevens. I scream I know no sound.

Stay with me. Wait. I’ll come again,
back to myself, to you, and once more tell
you too, I’ll be your lovely old refrain.

Rub rings of sunshine into belly’s shell
so that the warmth remain.
Then keep my eyelids open, my lips as well.

——
Poem by Gottfried Benn
A Fine Childhood

The mouth of a girl who had long lain in the reeds
looked so chewed up.
When we finally broke the torso, the esophagus was so full of holes.
Finally in a bower under the diaphragm
we found a nest of young rats.
One little sister rat lay dead.
The others were living off liver and kidney,
drinking the cold blood and enjoying
a fine childhood.
And fine and fast was their death too:
we threw the whole bunch into water.
Oh, how those little snouts squeaked!

Where has the love gone?

For lack of anything better to post, I’m showing off a few of my best essays from college, which coincidentally, are all about women.

Please forgive the many typos; these were all written (not researched)  immediately before the due date– and I disliked (and still do, egoistical moi) proofreading my own work.

PS: Attachments #s 2 and 3 are switched, and I’m too lazy to fix them. Enjoy (/Ignore)! -AD

Attachment #1: AMERICAN POETRY

Attachment #2: INTERNATIONAL FEMINISM

Attachment #3: FEMINISM AND ART

Attachment #4: RUSSIAN LITERATURE

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/fashion/19brown.html?em

except… why can’t I make it be a link? arrrggggghhhhhhhh.

ok, but seriously:

“I don’t think he’ll hit her like that again.”??

“she probly ran into a door and was too embarassed so blamed it on chris”???

I just read a fascinating and absolutely horrifying true-crime story about no crime at all- a fantasy of a crime that resulted in a thirty year conspiracy sentance. It folds in perfectly with what we’ve been discussing. At times Laura Kipnis applies a cloying and conventional pop psychology gloss to the defendant, but it’s entrancing nonetheless, both in its dramatization and legalization of the fantasy/reality interplay, and as an exposition of the trap set by the FBI to ensnare DePew. Basically, DePew thought he was engaging in foreplay with two undercover cops by spinning out scenarios of kidnapping and murdering a boy for a snuff film, but this erotic act of storytelling (which he was goaded into)– and his effective performance as a ruthless teller of violent tales– is taken as evidence of his “intent”– or his “ability” even– to murder a child. Of course, his between-adults SM sex life was taken as further evidence of his proclivity to “real” violence.

Here is a PDF, should open in Adobe…I think…bound-and-gagged1

-Sophia

wow.

i asked her why she thought so. she told me a number of things—rihanna said nasty things to him…chris brown wouldn’t have done it unless she made him do it…my daddy said so—

while subbing in the detention room the next day, i asked some of the students what they thought about the rihanna/chris brown situation, and the first thing any of the girls said was she got what she deserved. the other girls agreed: she was talking about his mother. the boys didn’t say anything.
does this change the way you feel about chris brown?
no.

where does this blame the victim sentiment come from? ajn, naela and i discussed over dinner on Friday. ajn raised the question of rihanna’s immigranthood (terrible word, i’m sorry; of course ajn phrased it much more succinctly): to what extent is rihanna at a loss for popular support, because of her barbadian background?

we commoners pay attention to celebrity drama because we find a way of identifying with the characters (they all seem to be playing roles, even as themselves: for example, the angelina-jennifer dichotomy, as my dear old roommate goose pointed out, opposes the superlative/outsider/untouchable with the everywoman, whose pathetic loss is continuously emphasized), and so where does rihanna fit in? if i’m allowed to make a large generalization, there seems to be little sympathy for her coming from a community where i’d expect it to be. i had assumed that, like me, black urban adolescent girls would side with the brutalized female, and say fuck that, hit the road jack! instead, they justify the hypocritical (to say the least) behavior of a man, who has frequently spoken about how witnessing his mother being abused by her boyfriend ‘scarred’ him. scarred him into perpetuating it… nice bit of irony here that his mother-loving attitude both won him a following of teenage girls, enamored of his sensitivity, and also caused him to tear his girlfriend’s face apart. allegedly. i suppose it is my privilege to occupy such a different head-space when it comes to violence: in my thinking, perpetrating/experiencing physical violence is not a given, cannot be dismissed. i suppose it is also my privilege to focus on issues of feminism as my racial identity does compete with my gender for recognition.

so now, after chris brown evoked his christian faith (Words cannot begin to express how sorry and saddened I am over what transpired. [!!!what transpired???] I am committed, with God’s help, to emerging a better person.), went to anger management class, and called rihanna on her birthday, they’ve gotten back together. what is most horrifying for me—please excuse the heavy-handed christian language, but this is what he seems to be going for—is that he serves as the redeemer of all abusive men: as she/we forgive him his sins, we approve the narrative for acceptable domestic violence. and who cares about immigrant women, anyway.

this shit is crazy. as are the ‘leaked’ photographs of rihanna’s battered face. give her some privacy.

ck

1) Prometheus Unbound – or, The Paradigm Shifter: This guy is sort of similar to The Weakling in that he’s also a petty tyrant, but unlike the coiled rattlesnake of the fascistic Weakling, The Paradigm Shifter has an axe to grind. He’s chosen you because you’re agreeable, but soon he begins to fixate on something about you that he doesn’t like. Maybe it’s your friends, your career choices, or some bit of ideology that has stuck in his craw. Whatever the source, he’ll start trying to ‘improve’ you by ridding you of what he perceives as an imperfection, which to you has been benign or even a source of enjoyment. Don’t let him shift your paradigms! Don’t allow his insidious view of reality to permeate your existence!

2) The Man-Child: This type is a composite of so many things. Charmingly innocuous, disarmingly simple in his desires, the manchild will waddle into your life and soon become the infantile center of your attention. Perhaps this guy is a mental two-year-old: mean, impetuous, vengeful, with poor equilibrium and lots of fort-da aesthetics going on. Perhaps this guy is even younger: messy, impulsive, greedy, a desiring machine that sucks you in with its brutal simplicity. He’ll say maddening things like “I like you, and I like ice cream,” indicating that he has no ability to exercise his frontal cortex or access a repertoire of adult emotions. His emotional range is small, but the force of his love is overwhelming at times. A dangerous figure forcing strong bonds and causing a mix of fascination/repulsion that would be better saved for the experience of childbirth.

3) The Barbarian: Similar to the manchild, but with a fairly well-formed sense of what he wants. This guy is all Klaus Kinski: skin stretched tightly over an anthropoid skull, a Cro-Magnon whose primeval grunts of ecstasy are strangely charming. He may have scruffy facial and/or body hair or other signs of his apelike nature; if you’re attracted to this type, there’s little that you can do to withstand him, as he oozes pheromones in a Darwinian fashion. But the limited emotional range of this guy will eventually wear on you, and you’ll find yourself silently screaming, “Evolve, dammit!”

I’ve talked to some of you about this, but my friend Emily and I were compiling a verbal taxonomy of wo/men to never ever tangle with romantically. placing our past bad experiences into static types was both amusing for the superficiality of the categories and truthful in the way that stereotypes can sometimes be – hence, helpful, therapeutic. i was also inspired by an article that Mr. Tom sent me about this really awful man-type, one who is not very handsome but has lots of attractive female friends who he never dates, because he “like(s) you better.” anyhow, he turns out to be horrible, as they all seem to do.

Regarding types that I’ve come up with lately: i really have some attachment to (as in, emotional investment in) the following, as ludicrous as they might be.

1) ‘Two Against Nature’ – the man or woman (in my case, man) who is highly critical of almost anyone/thing but likes you because “you’re different,” and he’s attracted to strange or unconventional women (something that he says repeatedly and that you find to be a sort of lefthanded compliment). Together, you  are at first “two against nature,” bravely pursuing unconventional love rituals in the face of the System. Yet when he inevitably turns against you, he claims, in his defense, that he’s realized that you are actually just as conventional as the rest, and he’s off to find someone with even more light in her eyes.

2) The Weakling: always ready with a quavering smile, this person seems nice but is actually milquetoast. Once you get to know this person, you realize that the reason that he/she comes off as nice is that no one has ever vested him/her with enough space or authority for him/her to exert his/her fascistic and monomaniacal qualities, which emerge as soon as you prove willing to hear him/her out. You mistake The Weakling for a kind person, but this Weakling is in fact some sort of coiled rattlesnake. I’m sure that there’s an African parable about this character.Don’t let him/her get on a soapbox!

3) The Unmothered Mother-Wanter in Denial (or The Happily Untrammeled Wilderness): This person clearly needs mothering, in public and embarrassing ways apparent to all – he/she moves like a walking pile of garbage, s/he’s charmingly sloppy, disorganized, unhealthy, and otherwise looking for a gf to structure his/her life. You probably want to avoid anyone who wants parenting, but at the same time we’re drawn by inexorable desires to nurture (sez my shrink, the transgendered-looking woman who i love for exactly that reason). Yet when the structuring of the life starts to happen, this person lashes out and claims that everything is okay, that nothing is wrong, that mothering is exACTly the incorrect thing to do, and messing with this irredeemably warped status quo has suddenly landed you in the Superego Soup.

4) The 3/4 feminist: “Just get me to the finish-line, please!” This is the guy (usually guy, I’d think) who is ‘experimenting’ with feminism (in his reading habits, perhaps, or in his armchair activism) and thinks that by paying lip-service to women in extremely clichéd ways, he can further his romantic agenda with you. He talks up second-wave concepts and exhorts you not to shave your legs or wear high heels, as that is antifeminist, and men who want women to look like dolls are clearly patriarchal. He regales you with his memorization of statistics surrounding gendered wage gaps. Your falafel falls out of your mouth, as you have never encountered anyone so sensitive to women’s issues! Soon enough, you are restructuring roles in the bedroom, as he plays “Bend Over Boyfriend” videos and buys you sex toys (which he may later revoke due to his anxiety about material possessions and property rights). Yet all of a sudden, you find that he is faulting you for your lack of liberation, and you find yourself ironically defending women who like wearing lipstick and earrings. His simplistic notions of what feminism is turn your world upside-down, and you feel like a traitor to your sex/gender system. Do NOT go through his ideological crisis with him! If anything, try to encounter him when he is past his immature fumblings with identity politics.

Okay, this is a start. Others that I plan to pursue:

-The Yuppie-in-Disguise

-The Scornful Academic

-The Manchild

-The “Pianiste” (after the Haneke film. This one relates to a scary dating episode that I once had, which I may be compelled to reproduce on this blog for your reading pleasure.)

Enjoy! KZ

Part 3: Fuck you, motherfucker…

“revisiting your email, i’ve decided

that i am not here if you want to resume things,

nor do i want to be your friend, or see you ever again.

i think you are a repressed, selfish coward in fact. so there’s that.”

-from a recent email to one of two lovers (see Part 1)

who spurned me (this one via the internet), E.M.

This one will be brief. I am in a haze, and have been for the past few weeks. The day that led up to where I am now also involved a botched dominatrix interview, being dumped by the first boy that I felt truly intimate with in about 3 years, and finding a stray kitten in a pile of trash outside my window (who is now Louis, my life-companion for the foreseeable future). It was a strange day. What was also strange was my initial reaction to being dumped. After reading this boy’s email to me, which started out this way: “OKAY. So I started dating someone else, and it’s exclusive. So there’s that”; and ended with something akin to: “I enjoyed the time we spent together. You made me think about a lot of things. DSHFJKDH I’m so confused. We weren’t SERIOUS right???”, I wrote back an email that was entirely apologetic, regretful, and supportive—to the point of utter irrationality and absurdity. I told him that I was glad that he met someone else in his own city (he was in Philly, I was in New York), that I should have done things differently, and that I would be here, waiting…in case he ever wanted to resume things.

Now I am no Ms. Softie when it comes to men. I’ve dumped a hell of a lot more boys than I’ve been dumped by (maybe), and in the recent past I have been fervently intolerant of the selfish, stupid, manipulative, misogynistic, and pathetic (of this I’m sure; I hadn’t dated anyone in more than two years prior to this January). And though that day’s events had worn me down to a degree, I can’t blame my response to his email on the hopelessness that tends to immediately follow a bout of bad luck. No, I was simply numb. I had forgotten how to be angry. Which seems to happen somewhat often to women my age.

Part of the reason that I want/ed to be a dominatrix is that I know that I have a huge amount of frustration and rage in me, so much that it cannot all come out through my art, or through writing or exercising, or even occasional rough sex. In the past few weeks, I’ve been able to tap into that rage because it has felt like a healthier alternative to the pain and horror that accompanies the loss of a loved one. Every time I write an angry email, like the second email I wrote to that motherfucker (see above quotation); every time I come down on a friend for not having responded to this very difficult time, or any previous one in the past year, I feel a little better. It’s not ideal. I have a lot to work out. But right now, I am able to ask for what I want. I am able to not respond to those awful ex-boyfriends who do not leave messages of condolences, but rather tell me to call them back to talk (two did this!) after we haven’t spoken for almost a year. I know that I’m not in my right mind, but I’d like more of this rage in the future. It feels liberating. I’d like to be able to get angry at the drop of a hat; to be able to feel my hackles rise when a word is uttered with condescension or the intention to belittle; I want more rage because right now, I can feel it protecting my hurt and my pride. I don’t think that my pride deserved less defense in the past, and I don’t see my need for self-protection lessening in the future. So there’s that.

i watched and listened to la rondine at the met the other night. the opera revolves around magda, a wealthy man’s mistress, who leaves him to realize her dream of luv with a bushy-tailed young man, new to paris. they build their ‘love-nest’; wrack up debts; sing some love songs. he proposes to her. after hearing both that old man wants her back, and also that young lover’s mother rejoices at the idea of her son’s marrying a ‘gentle, virtuous, and innocent bride’, paulette (nee madga!) leaves him, in order ‘not to destroy’ him.

the leading lady’s choices, faux largesse, and, well, largeness, all pushed a reevaluation, that my vague notion of how literature characterizes women is off. perhaps, rather than showcasing women as models of elegance, innocence and subtlety, the greater socializing tool was revealing the affliction or failure of certain women with personality. maybe instead of personality, i should say women who draw spotlights away from men…think jane, emma, anna, hester, dorothea, tess, lucy snow, clavdia, merteuil, lady macb, scarlett, and on and on… i can’t even think of a non-suffering woman, independent, in my quick catalogue of literary ‘sheroes’.

in avoidance of wading into the shady waters of lit theorizing here, i’ll cut straight to: neither position is right, per se, but what i find interesting is that through years of reading, i’d developed an idea about women, born in ages past: i perceived an almost evolutionary-biological adaptive nature, which allowed females, in societies that had no space for them to assert their personality, to not have any. and if she did, natural selection deemed: no more of that nonsense. her abnormality will be felt.

how could i think this for so long? it’s as if i believed we, a new breed of women that emerged after suffrage, are other than our mamas, on a chemical, cellular level…i think this must be a sort of self-protective defense. i tend to project myself into different worlds, time and place; yet i cannot imagine what i would do with myself if i were shut away within the structure of ‘innocence’, without blank or encoded papers, without an invitation to expression, without receptivity and encouragement. (holla back, blog)

on a completely different note: while substitute teaching today, i observed students at the high school where i used to work. i realized that many boys play chess whenever they get a chance, yet i have never seen a girl play chess there. how come?

c

Do you guys feel very “February” right now, or are we just entering the February of our lives? That’s what I keep asking myself and everyone I meet. I think that I’m finally beginning to transcend my tendency to be hysterical about life and its myriad challenges, but now that I’m giving up all of my struggles in favor of some sort of peace of mind, I’ve been feeling like a flaccid fillet of fish. Maybe this is February feeling setting in.

It’s like when the snow temporarily melts, and you can see decomposing grass and rusticating metal and lots of semi-preserved objects that people had thrown into it, thinking stupidly that it would hide those things forever. the other day, walking past my house, i saw unearthed what can only be described as a “family” of condoms, unwrapped, mixed with dirty salt and a swirl of disgusting crusted detritus. this is the end of the scorched-earth campaign – the finale morale-sucking gauntlet, which you sort of have to run without thinking about your surroundings.

Also, little snippets of things about femininity have been bobbing to the (admittedly hazy) surface of my mind lately, like half-torn magazine clippings. One of them was my fear of women who look different in every single photograph they take, like there’s no facial continuity but rather this mutable clay changed by every haircut and makeup combination applied to it, a sort of blank template that is scary for its generality. Do you know what I mean? Like women’s faces that have no definitive or maybe idiosyncratic features, nothing for the eye to hold onto. This was scary to me. Also, the idea of extended ‘bathroom rituals,’ what my friend calls her ‘beauty sequence’ (actually, she said “beauty secrets,” but I interpreted it as “beauty sequence” and liked that better), which she never lets her husband see. It involves waxing, buffing, and doing things with hair machines. I noticed today, staring into the rolling eyes of a PhD applicant who we all thought looked a lot like she was about to spray us with blood from her eyes, Carrie-style, that she was wearing this enormous ROCK, you know, one of those candy-looking diamonds, and that her ROCK was almost exactly like the ROCKS of the two other PhD applicants who were also strutting their boring selves for us. Oh, I’m so mean. But seriously. I think that I offended one of them by noting that Nicole Kidman acted like a tranquilized pony, which she does (I think). She was like, “Well – maybe sometimes.”

Also, a couple things really stuck in my head from that Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, one of them being the idea, taken using Vertigo as a case study, wherein the man uses a series of women to carry out a sort of ideal object fetish thing, mortifying the actual women in the process. This is so common – for example, there’s this big asshole in the German lit department who always dates short Jewish women with dreamy faraway looks in their eyes. It’s like he’s trying to channel the essence of some dead grandmother through his various girlfriends.

Another moment that struck me as keenly true was when Charlie Chaplin was revealed to be a tramp rather than a millionaire, and the woman who he’d helped regain her eyesight finally saw him and realized that this was the man who she had loved while blind, and there was this somewhat hysterical, highly ambiguous ending, with arched eyebrows and high-pitched violin music that overswelled the end credits…seeming to introduce major tension into what could have been interpreted as a happy ending. The idea of an object being stripped of its aura –hm. And the sense that Zizek communicated of our need for a ‘third term’ while having sex, a fantasy component to sustain our arousal, was like yeah – uh-huh. Yay for sloppy Zizek. He said everything I already knew, but in a way that I appreciated. Now every time I pee I think about the ‘return of the repressed.’

Speaking of ‘the infinite’ (though I don’t know if I was), once I was hanging out with my very good friend and her boyfriend, and they were talking about this one time when they were lying on a dock under a starry sky at night, and suddenly my friend sort of screamed and grabbed her boyfriend, almost making him fall off the dock and into the water. He said, “what?!” and she responded that she had been having a ‘vagina dentata’ moment, thinking about the deepest thing in the world, which seemed to be the Marianas Trench, and the idea of the depth of the trench suddenly made her incredibly scared, sort of intimidated. This, I think, leads back to the fatally meandering penguin clip and, perhaps, the Mystery of Bulgarian Voices. Anyhow, he thought about what made him scream and concluded that for him, the most frighteningly incomprehensible thing was the gap between feeling things bodily and being able to describe our feelings with language.

So since then, I’ve been thinking about what is the equivalent for me. A variety of potential responses surfaced, but a couple things that I might name are: 1) the notion of time infinitely stretching, and stretching me out; and 2) the idea of fully investing myself in my work; or 3) my growing hunch that everything I do is sort of silly and meaningless. But I’m sort of curious about how you might apply this to your own lives.

I also wanted to say that to alleviate some of this February feeling, I’ve been reading the most awesome lesbian comics in the world, and you should all check them out. My friend got me this book called “The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For” as a birthday present, and the lesbians in it are totally great and hilarious. It’s a compendium of this comic, Dykes to Watch Out For, written by Alison Bechdel, that is about the ins and outs of being a lefty lesbian in California (I think) in the 90s. So awesome. There’s a lot of interesting racial stuff going on and amazing pictures of cartoon tits and also lots of incestuous intracartoon affairs, not to mention extensive discussions of hilariously-named sex toys and mockery of academics and the like. There’s also a lot of social-engagement stuff in there, which made me wish that I was part of this cartoon leztopia. The one main guy in it, Stuart Goodman, is known as a guy who dates lesbians, and as a scenario, it’s highly relatable. While looking for a book for the class that I’m teaching in the spring (on popular performance and ‘festive culture’ in Latin America and the Caribbean), I came across the anthology and proceeded to burn through it in like 5 hours of highly impassioned, lost-in-a-book style reading. So good.

Anyhow, I don’t want this to be a soapbox – hey, I’ve got my own blog for that. But I did just want to rant a bit about being in a February mood. Let us revive the revolution! Or at least tell me what you’re doing with your lives these days! Well-placed exclamation points want to know!

And the classic deranged penguin scene from Encounters at the End of the World:

Happy February!

Sophia

but i hope, actually, that it won’t just be thought experiments, because i tend to hate it when people spin in little circles or make creative tautologies that wind back into themselves, so that you find yourself in a small room with like-minded folk, and it never gets larger than that. i remember coming to college and thinking, “wow, i’m excited to be here with smart people,” but soon enough i realized that intelligence wasn’t enough and, in fact, could actually be as harmful and caustic as some sort of chemically refined cleansing agent: plastered on, eating away at its owner for his/her lack of responsibility with his/her brain. you know what i mean – devoting yourself to unholy ends, using brain for gain, reveling in the powers of your personal pan pizza, that player piano inside your head. not to moralize, because i am a huge believer that if there’s something that a person can do well, no matter if it’s making tiny wicker baskets or programming robots that might potentially kill people some day in the future, this person should try hard to do it, because we never really know what the outcomes of our actions are. it’s not all a zero-sum game, like that extremely evocative passage in a balzac novel that discusses this idea of the indirect killing of a chinese man (anyone know what i’m talking about? do I even know what i’m talking about?). i guess my point here is: using mental capacity responsibly is a good thing, though it’s up to you and your friends and american idols to define ‘responsibly.’  maybe it’s like the difference between theoretical bullshitting (what my friend calls “orgasmicism”) and theory that helps us get somewhere and take stock, revisit the world, and so forth.

I think that this blog is very good for the latter – it’s helped me to process things, and it’s also reconciled me a bit with the internet and its complexities of identity-management, as Erving Goffman might say. i was talking about this with Sophia, and i think that we came to good resolutions in our desire to maintain a space that is ‘good to think with’ and does not necessarily succumb to some of the pitfalls of being virtual, which are still debatable for me (unlike my friend A’s stark insistence that entities such as facebook increase global levels of narcissism  like some sort of polluting agent). Actually, Sophia, you reassured me that not everything projected over fiber-optic cables is manicured and manipulated beyond the warm, pulsating human organs that we know and love…i was beginning to get sort of freaked out by my increasingly benjaminian suspicion of the Virtual (that ‘orchid in the land of technology’ thing) and the fascimile-of-a-facsimile idea…too scary. also, sometimes i feel like the internet is eating me alive. i think that it’s because the internet combines shock value with extreme banality and lack of physical intervention. or something like that.

anyhow, we also talked about where to take this blog as it matures, or if it even needs ‘taking’ anywhere. i felt like from time to time it’s a good idea to see where people have questions and then help them muse on potential answers in a semi-structured way. i think a huge question arose in EM’s exploration of the ethics and pain of the sex/love/dating conundrum, and that’s been a big one for me too. to be a bit twee: dipping your toe in the pool of sex/love/dating, you can never anticipate what’s in there – slime, grime, chocolate pudding, or flesh-eating bacteria. just thinking about it makes me feel like a depressive hottie.

so right now i’m busy up to my eyeballs, but i hope to “beam out” (i kind of like using terminology used in the 80s to describe outer space/the future)  some questions about ethics, which interest me hugely. i’m usually more interested in the ethics of help, philanthropy, charity, and altruism – and the erotics of all of that – as these relate to the unquantifiable American (or estadounidense /US citizen, as the PC-mongers would like us to call it) psyche. but sex ethics – sexthics – are also looming large in my mind and beetling my brow. so that’s something momentary to create a bridge (or a ‘segue,’ as my teacherly self says twice a week, several times an hour, in the class that i’m instructing). hopefully i’ll come up with concrete questions (hopefully of the meandering sort rather than rhetorical or leading) soon. or you should. at the very least, i wonder if you feel that imposing a structure is sometimes more useful than not, even if its arbitrariness beckons to be broken. again, i’m really neutral on this point, so if you’re dead against that idea, that’s cool. thoughts?

+ there is an awesome article about Jane Eyre, one of the best books ever in my opinion. I plan to read it again soon, after I overdose on female YA novels  (Twilight and The Song of the Lioness* anyone?).

-Antonia

*”I don’t want to fall in love. I just want to be a warrior maiden!”

while watching a sequence of shots in the depths of the antarctic waters beneath a thick surface of ice, i teared up. among the images captured were both undulant and jagged ice formations, sea creatures, plays of light. a bulgarian song, planino stara planino mari, was sung in the background by the Bulgarian State Television Female Vocal Choir, known more commonly as the Mystery Girls after they produced the album, Les Mystere des Voix Bulgares only a few years after i was born. a single voice began the song with an extended, melodic wail that makes me think of dido; after a few minutes of solo chest singing, a deep alto drone and a more complicated middle layer, each many-voiced, joined her. the effect lies somewhere between early polyphonic church music and a modernist string adagio.

as i listened, i heard the chorus cry, “svatba, svaaaatba” and realized, shit. this song is about marriage.

in college i sang in an all women’s slavic group (thanks larkin for the direction), whose folksy bohemian style contrasted greatly with the men’s russian chorus, formal and stiff. the lady singing group got together in the first year of co-education at yale, and from the way the alums describe those first years, being a woman at yale was like being a new immigrant in a very closed society—one woman for every twenty men or so. the slavic groun was like a feminist party club, an outpost, a sisterhood. the alumnae network is still very closely knit, and whenever current ‘slavs’ go on tour, they crash for the majority of the trip at various older ladies’s homes, no matter how unacquainted all previously were: all that matters is that we can harmonize on the same old songs.

i can’t find the extended lyrics of planino stara online, so i will share an example a similar song, minkaye, one of my favorites to sing and listen to.

the lyrics:
Minka is dear to her mother; her mother does not need to wake her early. Minka gets up early, fetches the water early, sweeps the yard early, fetches water early. Her friends come to the house and say to her, “Dear Minka, white rose, why do you get up early and fetch water?” Minka answers, “My dear friends, my beautiful ones, my mother is marrying me off young. She is giving me away. I am sad because I am so fond of my little garden and the early blooming basil.”

The wedding song is a dirge for the loss of Minka’s life, as she has heretofore known it, for the loss of her friendships, for the loss of her girlhood independence, for the loss of her basil plant. ! The resentment of daughters towards their mothers for forcing premature marriage is a common theme in the saddest sounding Slavic songs I learned. That, and there go the freedom fighters; f the turks.

The urban (rural?) legend we used to tell at our performances involved Slavic girls being paired at birth with a singing partner, and so one would eternally sing the melody, the other, the drone. The sad part: the surviving woman would sing her part, solo for the first time, at her companion’s funeral. The sad joke: what a boring song if it’s the drone who is left! Turns out this was our quaintly woven tale: in fact Bulgarian folk music traditionally has one voice singing the melody with a larger group singing various accompanying harmonies at lower registers. But what exists in either narrative is a music created by women, about being women. The collective bewails the loss of the individual to heterosexual coupling. Soon the girl will become a cold mother sending her own off too soon, forgetful of her own free, wild youth.

Ancient Latin elegiac poets employed the trope of agriculture to discuss marriage and the woman’s loss of virginity. Here the archetypical virgin was a wild fierce being, akin to the goddess Diana; the husband’s job was to tame her, to domesticate her. You can imagine marked metaphors of the farmer plowing the land, overgrown with bush, and cleaving into the soil…how far from the contemporary western notion of the chaste and shy virgin!

I went to three weddings this summer, and cried at each one. I am not a crier. I understood my emotion as a reaction to a ceremony, celebrating love. I thought I was crying because I was finally seeing that perhaps marriage, though just a legal institution and facing a pretty dire national track record for success, can actually be poignant and perhaps spiritual. But maybe I was crying because a part of me felt the loss of another huntress and her little garden?

catinka

i’ve been most fired up by a.n.’s points in the joy machine post. hipster malaise. post-post-ironic whateverness. her suggestion that this derives from a kind of anti-joy nihilism rings true to my experience and half-articulated theories.

i didn’t encounter hip people until i got to new york in 2000. it’s been a slow process of parsing them, relating myself to them, uncovering – through many bumblings, half-baked and worthwhile art events, gaffs, dumb romances, shows, gentrifying neighborhoods, drug experiences, real and dumb friendships, and more shows – the subtleties at play in these scenes. i was thrown into them almost by mistake. i was weird, in a sub-culturally unspecific way, and therefore pulled by gravitational force into a creative, youthful semi-underground.

while first encountering scenes, i was also developing an identity around ethics and politics. the two have never really jived, and i didn’t understand why for a long time. all things went hand-in-hand to me my first few years in new york. new ideas, new city, new people. if i was to stretch my brain harder than i ever had, extend my social reach by seeking out weirdos like me, then of course i would examine every value or belief i had ever taken for granted. this seemed to come naturally and led me to a very radical place. anti-corporate globalization was still going strong, and it seemed like a people’s movement was really gaining the edge over power. meetings shut down, imf/world bank policy under attack from increasingly mainstream sources. it was a total duh to me to participate in this, the obvious logical conclusion of a critical journey.

it led to a schizoid divide in my college life. i found that if i talked about politics at school – real politics, action – i mostly got glazed looks. or else it was fetishized. ‘oh, you went to that protest? coooool,’ would coo the cool girl with decorative kaffiyeh. or it was channeled into something reformist: ‘great, well come to this meeting on recycling,’ or ‘stop by this screening on fair trade.’ student activism didn’t appeal because the people were mostly still boring and normal. (and their projects lame, and their tone shrill.) artsy types were more interesting, but somehow their politics usually sucked. why?

i think ana’s right that there’s an unspoken scenester taboo against passion. cultural interests, sure, intelligence, ok to a degree, but zealous engagement, kinda embarassing. and i think sophia hit upon something (or we did in a conversation, which she related) when she said that a kind of detached nihilism was both the assumed logical conclusion of youthful meanderings and the lazy way out. when people are pit against someone challenging this, their well-buried self-doubt rears, and they dismiss. it’s a difficult age in which to flourish. a lot of young people try to buck this in some way. but most only go so far. their style might be strange, their artistic and intellectual interests varied, but their patterns of relation often fairly typical. for example, the bisexual misogynist asshole (whom i’ve also encountered). and the ‘artist’ or ‘musician’ who flinches at a passionate engagement with literature.

i had one real anarchist friend in college. we had ‘meetings’ for our ‘collective,’ at which he and i would drink a lot of coffee at the hungarian pastry shop and talk about all kinds of stuff. gossip, for one. also stuff we read, things we wanted to do. we were both influenced at the time by some kind-of situationist ideas infused with a punk sensibility. what appealed to me about anarchy was the notion of politics as practice. that the way we organize, and relate to each other, can be just as revolutionary as some kind of distant, future, political victory. and these social structures are based on a strong, radical kernal. the atomic unit? friendship. we would construct them with open eyes, carefully, weeding out as we may the oppressive structures we oppose. with that foundation, larger associations may follow. and good things can happen.

most of my relationships have failed due to practical difficulties that i believe are rooted in deep, ideological differences. the last was brief and failed gloriously. he would go on and on about culture, incessantly. movies, art, music. all things i like, but not above concerns of ethics and human values. i turned a critical eye to the two of us, and the fragile bond of shared interests and loneliness dissolved quickly. one thing that irked him throughout was that i would often refer to him as ‘my friend x.’ it’s in fact true that i was uncomfortable with being someone’s girlfriend. but it’s also the case, as i tried to explain, that the designation ‘friend’ wasn’t a demotion. it’s the highest praise in my book! and potentially revolutionary.

xor

First off, I had totally forgotten about that Lush song. Thanks! It reminded me of Elastica, old Blur, old Liz Phair, and even that Breeders song, “Cannonball.” As a rule, I need very little prompting to undergo a complete tailspin into 90s nostalgia. Don’t even get me started on the Toadies and their killing rage! “Behind the boathouse…”

I must say that I enjoyed both of your posts for the ways that, in honest and straightforward language, they present grievances that have nagged almost everyone chancing to wade through the morally dubious world of subcultures, trends, fashion, ideological production, consumer desire-pruning, so-called ‘creativity’ – in other words, through the post-Nietzschean (for lack of a better term – postmodern would do, I suppose) world itself. As anyone who’s dipped even briefly into Nietzsche (or those stoner-oriented books that synopsize Nietzsche, or the entire industry of Nietzschean memorabilia) might recognize, Nietzsche has that famous ‘god is dead’ line, in which we, at sea, must carve out our own interpretations and applications of ethics ‘beyond good and evil’ because we’ve thrown out religion and, with it, a very nice way to understand the world, actually (say the evangelicals, slapping our hands with their rulers. Except for Ted Haggard, that is). This leaves many afloat, trying to make morally-synched bedfellows while invariably pissing off others. But let me just take my reductionist sickle and carve the past conversation (enfolding Sophia’s and Cassie’s as well, because you guys also hit on issues of relationships, love/lack thereof, ethics in friendship, and the problem of knowing other minds) into some terms: Politics, Ethics, Love, Sex, and Friendship/Affinity. Now I know that friendship and affinity aren’t the same thing, but bear with me, people.

One time (to digress a bit), I had this astrology- and zodiac-obsessed friend. I’m neutral about it, but she was pretty gung-ho and had built up a sort of cottage industry in her dorm room. She proceeded to “do” my sun, moon, planet, and star signs or what have you, and to link me and everyone else along certain relationshippy lines, much like Plato had done with love. She told me, for instance, that I was better in “working relationships” with certain people, friendships with others, and sexual relationships with still others. This seemed bullshit to me, of course, but I think about it every now and then as I develop relationships that fall somewhere along these lines – a good acquaintanceship with that one, an excellent friendship with that other, and a lovers’ bond with the third.

Maybe I’m just adept at parsing my love and compartmentalizing my head (and that might be it, considering that I am sort of mannish or testosterone-addled in my sex and love practices – though this hypothesis has been torn to shambles lately by the most insane and tumultuous relationship and breakup I’ve ever had), but I feel like ethics and politics can be really great and active in business and friend relationships but often extend only so far when one is dealing with love on one hand and sex on the other. Apropos of this, I was talking with a lesbian friend, and she said, “God, I find butch dykes so unattractive,” and we went on to speculate how these ladies, who are not attractive to us (with notable exceptions), manage to find copious partners, such that ‘lesbian’ is often synonymous in the popular imagination with ‘butch dyke.’ We concluded that dating in the lesbian community sometimes conflates politics with attraction, although there’s also a huge contingent of lesbians and queers who are genuinely attracted to total butchies. But we then affirmed, beating our fists against our breasts: one should NEVER date for political reasons. Never never never. If you think that dating a gay black man will make you more politically progressive and ‘edgy,’ well, it won’t. It’ll just make you and him miserable unless there’s sexual attraction to back up the politics motivating your union. Trust me! I tried it! Though to my credit, it was pretty fun for the five or so months that it lasted, and the sex was unbelievably good. Go figure! Sorry, that last was devoid of object lessons. An innocent digression! Covering it all up now with points d’exclamation!

But now on to these bisexual men – or boys, really. Are they confusing politics with their very personal and often haywire sexual desires? Are they discovering and working through the intricacies of their sexualities while trying to classify themselves, as society is wont to make us do, and to make it with a hot depressive chick like you? Or are they being bisexual for silly fashion reasons, for example because they just listened to glam rock for the first time? Are they acting badly in response to an encounter with The Unknown? Well, the fact is that we might never know, but I do happen to know some bisexual guys who are ethically engaged and happily monogamous. I think we need to get some Dan Savage-style reasoning in here (that being akin to a Borgesian encyclopedia, this unflappably optimistic sense, outside of empiricism (though often productive of empirical evidence) that there really are at least two of everything in the world, and that’s wonderful – except for bestiality, anyway – which leads me to note: god, I love that guy) and dispel the notion that all bisexual men are horrible. For which the title of your blog beckoned, A-1, so I hope that I’m not doing you a disservice or coming to the defense of these particular apezoids, because they sound truly horrible and you have every right to be pissed off at them. A-2 is correct, I think, to shift the focus away from their putative bisexuality and onto the assholetry of those breakaway ‘subcultural’ men themselves, those who would be ‘two against nature’ with you, which invariably turns into ‘one against nature,’ you (the rejected woman) falling in with nature as another part, albeit disguised, of the System that must be subverted. Or some other horrible star wars-esque metanarrative. But that ‘two against nature’ mentality, that contrarian-ness that boomerangs back onto anyone trying to poke their faces into these dudes’ narcissistic fortresses of solitude, can happen with straight guys too. Sexuality is not necessarily the issue at all here.

And let us remember that relationships, even healthy ones, are hard and often involve pain and power play, especially when there’s sex in them. And especially when one of the people, or both, who are having the sex are slightly fuzzy (and therefore defensive) about their sexualities or any other large-looming aspect of their identities, as often occurs. Note: being squeamish about genitals is, I think, a common step along the way to accepting and loving the hell out of them. After all, genitals seem scary at first – vaginas are like hairy clams, and penises are like throbbing sinewy proboscises. Don’t get me wrong, I love penises and vaginas. But I don’t think that being afraid of them is wrong, though I do think that it’s important to get over that fear and start to accept, and then enjoy, the glistening projectile-expectorating appendage or sharp-toothed cavern (see Scylla & Charybdis, Odyssey) of your lover, along with most everything else that he/she excretes. Squeamishness cannot hold up over time, although I think it’s very common and nearly reflexive in most, especially around the young – young for christ’s sakes! – age of 20. Anyhow, being in love is bound to lead to some distress. It’s really sad when a smiling, grinning, fucking, and kissing encounter that livens up your days ends in a fireball with Kurt Russell jumping out of it, an aftermath that is messier and hairier than showering with Encino Man.

Anyhow, I have no good advice at how to avoid these life-perturbing miseries – the ethics part often falls as flat as the politics part when you mix together sex, affection, and power (and then the room explodes). I must say that it’s unfortunate when women end up as casualties of men’s inept fumblings at their identities – like that stupid heroic arc of Parsifal and all the other man-heroes, wherein the encounter with the woman leads to more self-knowledge for the man and nothing but loss for the now ‘ruined’ woman. Having done this to a couple men and women, I know that sometimes sexual desire can chafe dangerously against love and feelings when the emotional component is not calibrated to the fleshly-lust (or bloodlust, for that matter) component. These affinities are in no way elective! (That’s a nod to all you Goethe-nerds out there.)

So how to avoid such conflagrations? Or are they inevitable now that we’re no longer living with close friends and family in small villages (Gesellschaft and Gemeinschaft, anyone?) and having round-dances in peasant garb and being married off at summer-solstice cattle auctions and the like? I think that this is a question that more people should be asking themselves. I myself have embarked on a course of prudence/prudery. I like to call it “empowered caution.” For the first time in my life, I am exercising restraint and feeling like this is a good thing (and then going and watching porn). I’d rather kill myself softly than kill someone else, even with kindness. So hopefully these men will change their ways – or be rejected enough to realize that their half-cocked libertinage is not meeting with universally good press. Sorry to end with some glibly empowering magazine-style riffs, but I’ve been watching Stone Temple Pilots videos this whole time, and the catchy hooks and visceral chords are really tripping me up. Flies in the Vaseline, we are. Take time, with a wounded hand, cause it likes to heal…

-KZ

PS: By the way, listening to that Stone Temple Pilots song “Creep” after a decade-long hiatus, I realize that STP is totally ripping off half the songs on Nirvana’s In Utero. Anyone else ever notice that? Or is it that I’ve stumbled into the Bermuda triangle of 90s music, that vortex of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, and Smashing Pumpkins (and maybe Alice in Chains) into which all contemporaneous bands tend to slide? Okay, enough!

What Do Women Want? NY Times Article

conflict -> bifurcated analysis -> same ole conflict

reminds me of something a said to me, early in college: some women just want to be thrown against a wall and fucked. i also feel like this article says little more than what we discuss in our kitchen, but it’s a good beginning for conversation.

c

i’m looking for the symbolism, and find comfort in the suggestion of the cycle, as i feel when my period comes, or when i see a new moon. now i think of hibernation, of storing up to shut down: rather than death, i perceive dormancy around me, and the potential, the urge, to dream.

and fantasizing i have been, dreaming strange dreams: my family’s assassination; my own death by jumping in front of subway trains; mud igloos with bears sleeping inside; bushy-tailed insects eating each other’s detritus in turn. i suppose all dreams are strange, yet i’m still in wonderment about them—dreaming, like pleasure in the winter, has been something i have only been able to grasp in the past two years.

i read a book recently, the theory of clouds. a man seeks to classify all the clouds of the world, and as he travels further abroad, he loses the plot (a bit of a heart of darkness narrative). he begins photographing vaginas. he collects and annotates thousands of images of female genitalia, and we, readers, are supposed to connect the futility of classifying something as amorphous and variable as a cloud with the impossibility of classifying women, via their vaginas…the deeper you get in pursuit of comprehending either, the more enigmatic they become.
oh, please. thanks mr. for making the stale and absurd observation that the Woman can’t be pinned down–we’re as ethereal as clouds. hence the problem with metaphor: drawing a likeness that carries with it insidious implications, possibly more revealing than the analogizer intends. i felt a similar urge to see the infinite variability of people in snowflakes, but i wouldn’t write a book about it.

so here i come to my actual point (yes, blogs are media of digression),
well as much a confusion as a point, a jumping off point, for which i seek counter-points:
how to get around the singularity in the morpheme, love.
i heard someone say recently “The One”, to describe a lover, and i thought of the difficulty that one word presents, one word we use to express feelings that are certainly not singular. as i just read in the magic mountain, “is it not well done that our language has but one word for all kinds of love, from the holiest to the most lustfully fleshly?” where i find the most trouble is in a stubborn idea that if there is a single word, there is a single experience: i fear i will never recover from love. it will happen to me, and either stay, or go, be gone for good. i have been afraid of it for as long as I have been depressed in the winter. love immediately means to me its opposite, loss of love.

and now, happy in winter, i wonder if i am confusing cause with correlation: i am falling in love and am not effected by the natural elements, yet i am constantly, dully anxious that i will be sad in the spring, as i was last year, after i was robbed of my winter depression by a short romance that i had hoped would become love.

and reading over what i’ve just written, i can’t escape a feeling of sheepishness that i sound like a woman whose emotional life is determined by relationships with men—my boyfriend, my exes, my dad. this is where my feminism makes me ashamed of myself. i have been working these past few years to move away from over-intellectualizing my interior life, and now i’m clichéd. yet i can’t control my feelings with theory.

secondly, i am posting the artist statement i recently sent off to hunter.  it’s the first one i’ve written in a couple of years.  it appears here in a somewhat truncated version…

My work stems from my interest and belief in erotic art, feminism, and the female grotesque.  Erotic Art is a strange thing.  Its history of investment in the liberating forces of transgression and sexuality lend it powerful potential, but its more contemporary connection to pornography and the airbrushed idealization of the human body seem to drain that potential away, making it little more than an embarrassing example of kitsch.  A visual language of the female grotesque has the potential to purge the element of kitsch from erotic art.  Erotic art presents the body in an idealized form; an eros of the grotesque returns erotic art to the condition of reality.  

The grotesque and carnivalesque are classically liberating forces, due to their implicit questioning of established power structures.  They are the satirical lens through which hypocrisy becomes visible.  They share this in common with feminism, and its ensuing development of a new form of critical theory.  The consciousness-raising groups of the seventies brought women together that they might seek out cracks in the networks of patriarchal surveillance and control.  In my paintings I try to expand those fissures into a free space where new criteria for aesthetic judgment can be opened up.  Feminist art of the seventies saw painting as a lost cause because it was a language developed and spoken by an almost solely male hegemony.  But what this view did not take into account was that there were other minor histories developing and proliferating at the same time as the dominant institutional discourse from which women were being excluded. 

Illustration was and remains a field with a wide-ranging visual vocabulary where authorship takes a backseat, and so opens up expressive opportunities.  Dian Hanson’s contemporary compilations of porn and Men’s Magazine illustration are one such location. Psychedelic art in the 60′s is another of these minor histories from which I draw inspiration. While these posters and underground comics were primarily produced by men, they were not held up by a critical theory based on masculine values.  Rather, they tended to mock that value system in favor of a more humorous (and humane) approach.

Artists who I feel myself to be in dialogue with include Hans Bellmer, in whose work desire performs the function of conjuring male and female genders into a simultaneous state, an embodiment of dualism; the abject surrealistic tastelessness of Peter Saul; Rosemarie Trockel’s politics of the body and poetics of dichotomy; and Marnie Weber’s perverse, dreamlike multimedia mythology.