I've got the worst headache, and it's Kate
Bornstein's fault. Well, hers and Caitlin Sullivan. I just slogged
through their novel Nearly Roadkill: An Erotic Infobahn
Adventure and I
feel sure that it's done some kind of damage to my synapses. I realize
the novel was written in 1995, but was it necessary to write
the whole goddamn thing as a series of e-mails, chat sessions,
and "private messenger" logs? In multiple fonts?
I'm reading the novel for evidence. That is, (white) feminist and
queer theorists have especially hailed cybernetic space as a liberatory
space - disrupting the social determinism of the body (sex) from the
identifications of the self (gender), allowing for sex play/gender fuck
transcending the unidirectional implication of "sexual orientation." In
these accounts drag is always subversive, but optimistically (or
forgetfully) race-less - foregoing the vexing dilemma of blackface, or
yellowface, or "playing Indian," forms of racial "passing" or drag that
have in recent U.S. history implicated Jim Crow, imperialism, and
genocide in their performance. Nearly Roadkill is hardly
an exception, as "passing" --and in terms of racial being, a
supposedly neutral and abstract "whiteness"-- is uncritically valorized. In one
of the few passages that even mentions race, a main character argues
that "one of the cool things for black folks on-line is that they are
assumed to be white, too." Argh. Don't get me started. (For now.)
So (and this is for my second position paper)
I'm trying to work out how theories of drag are formulated for an ahistorical white subject -- that while race and gender are both social
constructs inscribed on the body, they are not equivalent (and
yet not discrete) processes. (I would also want to reiterate Judith
Butler's distinction between performativity and performance/parody.) It's too much, I know.
And by the way, are the sex sessions in the novel ever boring--all played
out via chat room sessions. So you're an Anne Rice fan/self-mutilating
cannibal in one scenario and a skateboarding forest imp (or
whatever) in the next. Yawn. Not much erotic.
The last week has been packed with:
-- a women's studies job talk by Jacqueline Berman called
"(Un)popular Strangers: The European Political Community, Discourses of Sex-Trafficking, and the Panicked State of the Modern Nation,"
-- The Vagina Monologues with several of my students (free
tickets courtesy of Iraya/Aloofah) in San Francisco,
-- another job talk by Ara Wilson called, "The Go-Go Bar and
Economies of Intimacy in Thailand,"
-- an afternoon spent with my eBay purchase of The Legend of
Billie Jean, fast-forwarding to all the parts that make me cry,
-- and seeing Save the Last Dance, Billy Elliot, and the absolutely terrible
Shadow of the Vampire. No more German expressionists with their
willingness to sacrifice ethics for art, please.