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Emory Religion and Sexuality Seminar -- Day 3
Not an actual write-up, since I'm supposed to be working. But I have to pimp Lynne Huffer's forthcoming book, Mad For Foucault: Rethinking the Foundations of Queer Theory. Lynne spoke about her project this morning and somehow melted all my Michel-ennui. Which, I have to admit, I didn't think possible. But anyone who can make archival work sound *that* sexy definitely deserves a close reading.
The program's been fantastic and challenging so far -- two days of seminar style writing chats in the morning, fancy dinner last night, first-days-of-camp "will you be my friend?" forays happening throughout. I'm the most junior academic here, which is an odd feeling and one I definitely haven't missed. But suddenly there's so much more to read, to know, and, of course, to write. As much as I'm looking forward to comps-studying (read: no more writing until the AAR), I'm feeling...not quite invigorated, but at least interested in my own projects again. Finishing the (last) thesis left me so burnt out on my own words; it's strange and comforting to want to lean back into writer-mode again so soon.
Bizarre side-observation: I swear there's a two-second Foucault (look-alike) cameo in The Doors movie, right when Morrison/Kilmer is talking to Andy Warhol. Has anyone else noticed this?
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This warmed my heart's overly-cynical cockles. From, of course, this week's Savage Love:
Last week's decision by the California Supreme Court upholding Proposition 8 was expected but, in the wake of so many recent victories, still saddening, and I'm getting mail from lots of unhappy people. I'm unhappy about it, too. But we have to remember that this is a long game, folks, and despite this setback, we are winning. We've heard a lot about Prop 8 over the last week, and we're going to hear a lot about the fight to overturn it over the coming months, but let's not forget about Proposition 22.
In 2000, California voters approved a law banning same-sex marriage. It was a ballot initiative, like Prop 8, but just a law, not a constitutional amendment. And it was that law, Prop 22, that the California Supremes struck down in 2008, in their historic ruling legalizing same-sex marriage. And voters in 2000 approved Prop 22 by a 22-point margin. Eight years later the same voters approved Prop 8 by just four points. That's an 18-point shift in favor of marriage equality in just eight years. That's extraordinary progress. A loss is still a loss, and a loss sucks, but the trend is so strongly in our favor that we cannot lose hope. The anti-gay bigots know that they're losing this debate, and it's why they're so hot to amend state constitutions now, while they still can, while they can still count on the votes of the old, the bigoted, and the easily manipulated.
But they are losing and they know it.
Gay marriage will be back to the ballot box in California in 2010 or 2012, and voters are going to repeal Prop 8. Fundamental civil rights should not be subject to a popular vote, of course, and the California Supremes had an opportunity to reaffirm that ideal. They chose not to, they buckled, and so gays and lesbians, unlike other minority groups, face the challenge of securing our rights at the ballot box. That seems like a daunting prospect until you recall Prop 22 and compare its margin of victory to that of Prop 8. Again, we witnessed an 18-point shift in favor of gay marriage in California in just eight years. We can gain another two points in two. We just have to stay in the fight and constantly remind ourselves and each other—and Maggie Gallagher—that we are winning. Go team. .
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On writing one's thesis about Foucauldean askesis and third sex shamanism, OR a
note to myself (list in progress):
Dear Self,
You study weird shit. The fact that you read about said shit all the time -- thus making the aforementioned shit seem, well, not all that weird -- does not change the fact that no one else knows what the fuck you're talking about. In grad school speak, you need to denaturalize this radical internal alterity. In other words: explain that weird shit before trying to analyze it.
Now get back to work.
Hearts,
You
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Thoughts after reading Orsi's "Snakes Alive"...
As belief shrinks from the world, people find it more necessary than ever that someone believe. Wild-eyed men in caves. Nuns in black. Monks who do not speak. We are left to believe. Fools, children. Those who have abandoned belief must still believe in us. They are sure that they are right not to believe but they know belief must not fade completely. Hell is when no one believes. There must always be believers. Fools, idiots, those who hear voices, those who speak in tongues. We are your lunatics. We surrender our lives to make your nonbelief possible. You are sure that you are right but you don’t want everyone to think as you do. There is no truth without fools. We are your fools, your madwomen rising at dawn to pray, lighting candles, asking statues for good health, long life. from Don Delillo's White Noise
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Self, you are writing a 12-15 page section on the person you've spent all day researching. Ten of those pages are already written. Knock off the googling and get to work, already.
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Just submitted another (ANOTHER) seminar paper. A quick peek at my current transcript says this brings me down to two incompletes.
Which would be awesome, if I didn't still have four papers outstanding and two unexpected Ps on my transcript.
For those following along at home, P=pass, which means they don't kick me out. But since P usually translates to "oh crap, I left this until the last minute and have to either turn something in or find the number for that truck driving school I saw on TV," it's not exactly a desirable grade. I suspect this semester's thesis credit might be pass/fail, so I might could leave that alone. But taking a P for an independent study--even if I did spend most of my "class" time drinking and bitching with my advisor--is doing my transcript no good. Particularly since my transcript thinks I was prepping for comps instead of reading lit theory.
*sigh*
I feel some red-tape coming on.
Outstanding Page-count Tally:- 20-25 pages on Bakhtin and Transgender Narrative (a return to and expansion of my nigh-infamous AAR paper)
- 12-20 pages on vampiric literalism
- 18-20 pages on Foucault's sneaky political agenda lurking beneath The History of Sexuality, vols. 2&3 (just have to condense another paper and throw in some specifically "political" notes, since this is for my sexual politics class)
- Massage, nuance, and augment several other seminar papers into some semblance of thesis. Should end up at about 50 pages.
Remember when "winter break" meant an actual break? Me neither... </p>
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Dear $STUDENT:
I'm sorry that you missed the final exam. Perhaps, had you attended more than 1/3 of the classes this semester, you would have known that said exam was a) take-home and b) due four days ago. Good luck explaining that one to the dean.
Regards,
Your TA
(who announced said exam's format and due date no fewer than 10 times in the past month)
PS You do know that--with a few notable exceptions--your TAs and professors are smarter than you, right? Thus what you might imagine passes for subtle sarcasm and/or criticism just reads as blatant bitchiness to people who READ FOR A LIVING. In the future, you might just want to skip right to grovelling. It saves everyone time.
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This might be the best summary of my project to date.
Standard American religious imaginary = god is singular, male, probably white, and presumably straight. He talks through books, and one book in particular. That sort of thing. My project is looking at some ways people who might not find Straight White Man God particularly redemptive are creating or discovering different ways to think about divinity.
"Straight White Man God" is, as of right this second, my new favorite phrase. I might even like it more than suck minus.
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Fine, I stole this from her blog. But she's right; Margaret Cho is outstanding.
I’m a Christian, you Fuckers
All kinds of Christians are getting mad about my Sarah Palin comments, and it is pissing me off.
First of all – you fucking fake Christians - don’t fucking question my Christianity. I grew up in the church. My grandfather was a minister, who is with God now and talks to me in my dreams from God’s corner office. I am a former Sunday school teacher. I taught the Bible to children and showed them how to love God and invite him into their hearts. I believe in God – but I don’t fear him. God is my best friend. God is my ally. God is my boyfriend. God is my best fag. I am God’s fag hag cuz didn’t you know, God is a big fag. Serious bottom too. Butch in the streets, femme in the sheets. That is my God. God is my biggest fan. God gets me, dude.
God wants us all to just get along. He doesn’t give a shit about the profanity. The bitch fucking invented profanity. He thinks it is hilarious. He just wants you to talk to him, and he doesn’t care what you have to say. He just wants to keep the conversation going. Like Jay-Z, he just wants to love you. He just wants you to be able to make your own decisions. God is all about you and what you need. God is happy that you are gay. God made you fucking gay cuz he thinks it is awesome. God understands if you need to have an abortion. That is why he created abortion, on the 8th day. God accepts. God forgives. God loves all of us, even though some of us might have a problem with each other.
Don’t fucking question my Christianity you fucking idiot assholes. If you continue to have a problem, then talk to God about it, not me, you fucking racist homophobic misogynist fake Christian shitheads. God thinks it is funny that I swear so much. He said I could use his name in vain or whatever. He just wants me to use it. He loves me. So fuck you. And I guess he loves you too. Even though you are fake Christian assholes. If you were truly Christians, you would let gays get married, and send them fucking presents from Bed Bath and Beyond!
If you truly believed in Jesus, you would try to be like him and love us, fags and dykes and feminists all. God bless you, even you. You fucking fuckers.
---
In news unrelated to Cho's potty mouth, my feminist theology prof. agreed to be my second thesis reader. Hooray! Also, crap! Now I actually have to write a thesis.
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I'm TAing a course on Heaven and Hell this semester; and my prof asked for suggestions. So, if you were teaching (or taking) this course, what would you want to talk about? Utopias/dystopias, problem of evil, life after death, other things?
Also, what would you want to read? I'm thinking classic lit and philosophy, of course (Socrates, Augustine, Blake, Milton, Dante); but also pop culture stuff. Movie, book, graphic novel suggestions?
In other news, I'm TAing for Intro to Gnosticism in the spring. I'm psyched -- I love the prof -- but I swear, my CV is going to be absolutely bizarre by the time I hit the job market.
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This, THIS is what I get either for not reading my email very carefully or for planning ahead. I'm not sure which to berate myself for first.
Okay, see, what happened was I submitted this tiny piece I'd been working on to the national convention of the AAR. (That's "American Academy of Religion," for those outside the field.) And they took it. And it was good, brother. It was god-damned good. (Being accepted. The piece, she is still in progress.) My time-slot kinda sucked--late afternoon, third day of the conference--but promised to be nice and quiet, guaranteed to leave all but the hard-core scholars of transgendered performance (all four of us) and my friends well out of the audience.
This was in March. I haven't thought about it much since.
Except today, while slacking online dutifully pricing tickets to Chicago for said conference, it occurred to me to check the program. You know, to see how early I needed to get there to do the cool stuff (hopefully with the other Pagan Scholar Kids -- the conference is on Samhain this year) and how late I needed to stay after my presentation was over. And then it occurred to me to check the program for my name, because I'm shallow like that. And then, oh then, I got quite a shock.
It seems, through very little fault of my own, I have landed myself on a real panel at the AAR. Know who's presenting right after I do? Patrick Califia. (Short version: big ass name in trans studies. Potentially the name, since it's not a particularly big field.) Know who's responding to the papers? Amy Hollywood. (Decently big name in gender and performance. Her essay on performativity, citationality, and ritualization was on my reading list for my MA exam.) Know who I'm planning to reference in my own paper? Yeah. See above.
This is not exactly the same as when a woman of my acquaintance took classes with Mary Daly at BC, wherein the final exam consisted of sitting down at a table with--as she was sometimes known--"Scary Daly," having her open one of her own books, hand it to the student, and ask her what she, Mary Daly, meant when she wrote a particular passage.
However, it is not enough unlike the above for my comfort levels, either.
Gulp.
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Random bits of update:
Conference paper on The Invisibles drafted. Disgustingly overdue seminar papers in progress -- if things continue apace AND I give up sleeping for the next, oh, week or so, I might just not fail out of school.
I was also offered and have happily accepted the Women's Study TA position, though oddly, it doesn't start until Spring 2010. Huh. I suppose I can wait...
Back to the ways in which Marx uses vampires to both demonstrate the function of capital and act as a cautionary tale against capitalism. Or Angela Carter. Or sleep. I haven't quite decided yet.
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I don't think I mentioned this, but I also interviewed with the Women's Studies department last week. They're looking for TAs; and I thought it'd be a good way to expand my teaching base.
Haven't heard back from them yet, but I did just hear from my advisor. He said they were "impressed." Which sounds like good news, no?
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The Queer Theory/LGBT Studies panel accepted my paper on Northern Trad neo-shamanism. Hooray, and also yikes! Still waiting to hear back on my Milton paper. Fingers crossed.
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Advice on how to make sure your kids turn out gay, not to mention your students, your parishioners, your therapy clients, or your military subordinates, is less ubiquitous than you might think.
It doesn't matter how many times I read Eve Sedgwick, or how impenetrable I often find her prose. Bitch still cracks me up.
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the reason why i do it
though i fail and fail
in the giving of true names
is i am adam and his mother
and these failures are my job.
~Lucille Clifton
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Only mostly dead. My paper on Morrison's Invisibles and Chaos Magic got accepted for the Graven Images conference ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) queenofhalves organized, so I'll be in Boston at the beginning of April. Presenting for the very first time in Atlanta next month, allegedly to explain what JBut (err, Judith Butler) is talking about in Bodies That Matter re: why her model a) doesn't exactly work and b) perhaps more importantly, why it doesn't work in constructing religious bodies.
Frantically reading and prepping for my field exams. I have no more brains, just a direct connection between my eyes and my typing fingers. So...many...notes....
Random I heart academia moment of the week: Duke's search engines turned up a conference paper on bodies in Judith Butler's work that sounded interesting. We didn't have it. Duke didn't have it. So I emailed the author--a polisci theorist at UWales Swansea--fully expecting never to hear back. Not only did he email me hours later; he sent me the new-improved-prepublication expansion of the conference paper as an uncorrected journal page proof. Thus, smarty shout-out to Sam Chambers at Swansea. One of my favorite things about academia is how close you can get to the people who influence your thinking. Doesn't really happen in writing or in music, but in scholarly circles it's not even unusual to have drinks with the authors who rocked your world in undergrad.
Okay, I'm rambling. Time for sleep. Or more reading. Probably sleep.
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My roommate found this earlier this week. I think it might be the most heartbreakingly accurate description of grad school I've ever encountered.
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
~T.S. Eliot, The Four Quartets, "East Coker"
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Got my teaching reviews for this semester back today. When calculated with my fancy Plato finger-puppet, they officially add up to I WIN! I'M NOT THE WORST TA IN ALL THE LAND!
One of my favs actually drew me a picture; and another (as yet unidentified) student said my teaching was "incendiary." (Then hastened to add "in a good way" parenthetically.)
*whew*
Yay!
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Recitations finished this week. I'm really going to miss my kids -- which is something of a miracle, considering how abysmal my reviews were last year. But they learned so much, and they were really fun. Andandand...I got hugs after my last section.
Yay!
Definitely worth the cupcakes.
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