mission | archive | zine | manifestos | weblog | links | contact

March 20, 2001, 3:08 p.m. || vicarious

My brother just got a job at Pixar working in the production department! I'm so excited! I get to visit him at the studio and learn top-secret spoilers for upcoming films! I thought A Bug's Life was adorable!

1:10 p.m. || you could make a killing

Oh, I should mention that Mark has strung up his laundry in the apartment with yarn, and my socks are drying on the rungs of the ladder to the loft bed. I have to walk down to the corner TV/VCR repair shop to pick up the video of a live show by the Australian band X we dropped off yesterday, and later calculate my zine-making abilities -- will I be able to finish the second Race Riot and the eighth Slander by this weekend for the Anarchist Book Fair? Doubtful, but maybe a miracle will save me.

Tonight: a lecture by N. Katherine Hayles called, "How To Do Things With Code: Rethinking Processes of Signification in Digital Media," and a screening of Evil Dead 2 at the UC Theater. Meanwhile, my second position paper languishes, waiting for completion or some semblance of it.

11:12 a.m. || feminist round-up & some notes on meridians

Everyone is chatting about feminism and "how to do it:" Helena, Kat, Haley, Wendy.

==

Bored with non-lectures, minimal reading, and the lack of a theoretical framework, my students are asking me, "This isn't typical of women's studies, is it?" I rush to reassure them -- no, no, I learned intellectual rigor in this very same department, I promise the other classes are very much worth taking, next year, next year.

==

I'm pretty unapologetic about my love-object, poststructuralist feminist theory. (Yum.) At the Meridians conference I learned that as a woman of color, however, I'm supposed to be more "real," whatever that means. I was disappointed because I wanted an academic conference, not affirmation ("women of color finally have their own space") , admonitions ("academics need to be involved in the community") nor contests of authenticity ("as a black/Asian/Latina feminist..."). I suppose I wanted to interrogate the grounds of all these claims but there seemed to be little space for it.

Meridians put me in mind of the now-popular disclaimer ("I'm a feminist but I can still wear lipstick and be sexy!") but on another register -- "I'm a feminist academic but I can still be real!" Complete with references to "the street," "real women," "real lives," and an array of self-deprecating gestures and "earthy" poetry. (Lauren and I felt as though our presentations would be off-kilter with the rest of the panels due to the lack of uplifting prose.) And even though most of the academics there would have probably conceded that to some degree, "woman of color" is socially and politically constructed, they also seemed to want to preserve some variant of consciousness-raising as a model for discerning and delivering "reality." And so these (undeniably deliberate) presentations of self/autobiography were read/received as "authentic" because they made appeals to an interior space of "truth."

There's some kind of confession in the "but..." -- the sin being an intellectual one, a transgression against some more "authentic" position or superior source of knowledge, the supposedly empirical experience of oppression, maybe. (But wait, didn't we do this already with Marx and his beloved proletariat?) Absolution is found in submitting to the imagined authority of "the real," and/or (in this case) to a younger audience (typed as the "next generation") who will learn that there is a theory/practice divide after all. A tenured professor climbed on stage to announce that, "We academics screw stuff up that you fix in the streets," which was greeted with much applause.

Which inspires the question: do some feminist academics reify/romanticize something imagined as "more real"? And is "the real" actually any less complicated, nuanced, problematic, divergent, fragmented, contradictory, uneven, constructed, or misrecognized than, say, its representation?

K, a Filipina lesbian academic/activist, argued that the black/white binary is relevant to Asians, which seems unfathomably reductive to me, and derided the last twenty years' worth of feminist theory of subjectivity with, "I don't have multiple identities! I don't know about you, but I don't act in complex or nuanced ways!" (I think I must have groaned, or rolled my eyes.) And she repeated the imperative: "You have to be an activist, you have to care. Otherwise you would just go become a computer scientist and just make lots of money."

This pronouncement, oddly enough, came after my panel on "Engendering Science, Race-ing Knowledge," during which three principled feminist scientists spoke. (I was the only lay person on that panel.) I bristled when I heard her say this; the implications are incredibly short-sighted and prescriptive. It demonstrates no familiarity with the political contests that occur within scientific communities, and assumes that the character and politics of an individual can be judged by their occupation with no reference to their actual research or interests. (And I like computer scientists and theoretical mathematicians and quantum physicists because they know how to do things with codes and light waves and black holes, which are neat.) But it did feel indicative of the dominant impulse at Meridians -- to authenticate a certain political position and social location without the "messy" complications long ago offered by poststructuralist feminist theory and since rejected as (supposedly) politically debilitating. What then emerged/emerges feels limited, hemmed in by what gets to count as "authentic" opposition by "authentic" subjects and a moral economy precariously qualified by the display of guilt/confession.

It was weird, and Wendy, Yumi, Lauren and I found ourselves bored (and/or asleep) and critical of the gaps. Lauren's paper on the exclusions built into notions of safe spaces --using riot grrrl and the Michigan Women's Music Festival as her examples-- was old hat to us but apparently "new" for much of the audience. We collectively shuddered when an older white woman suggested that safe spaces might be "safe" if we entered into them with "open hearts" and "tolerance," and when another hopefully noted that her students are asked to write voluntary autobiographies, and so because they were "voluntary" wouldn't that mean that her classroom was a safe space--?

So what Wendy saw as "the weirdness of academics at the Meridians conference having a hard time with issues that I've seen bounced around in zines for years" has a lot to do with their intellectual trajectories and political choices. And while we sat in awe of ourselves and the work we'd done in zines, I also thought, "Haven't these academics ever read Joan Scott's essay 'Experience'? What about Trinh Minh-ha or Chandra Mohanty or Stuart Hall?" It was disorienting; I still don't know what to make of my simultaneous sense of time-warp ("Wait, didn't we do this in the 1980s?") and dis-ease (dis-ease with being a "woman of color" in a nominally "inclusive" space in which my theoretical stances make me inauthentic, dis-ease with feeling "over it," dis-ease with the politics of performing "woman of color," et cetera).

Still. A young woman approached me, excited after my talk because I am Vietnamese and she didn't know of any other Vietnamese women in women's studies, and I'm reminded that for so many, this kind of representation (counting) is still so important.

But hey, here's a secret: I don't write my zines out of thin air. I'm a theory fiend, and it sneaks into everything I've ever written. It's been that way since I began and I'm not at all sorry.

==

Please note that not everything at Meridians disappointed. I enjoyed the following presentations: Maria Josefina Saldana-Portillo, Sharon Hom, Kamala Kempadoo, Evelynn Hammonds, Lauren Martin (of course), and Banu Sabramaniam. I thought Kamala Kempadoo's stony face as an older white woman in the audience argued that de-criminalizing sex work would only continue to "degrade women, girls, and animals" was hilarious. Watching "Behind the Music: Alice Cooper" and "Undressed" in our hotel rooms revealed that Yumi and I know way too much about the personal lives and productive output of too many celebrities, and discussing our favorite moments from The Legend of Billie Jean with Wendy after the lights went out made my weekend. Pat Benetar rules.

I also learned that there's nothing like a chorus of "PENIS" (or alternately "FREEDOM") led by a spoken word artist named Queen Godis (no more of these, ever, please) given to epigraphic performances (variations on "I am woman, hear me roar") to turn me off forever. Thankfully, Lauren, Yumi and Wendy were also not inspired, so I didn't have to feel like the only cynic in the room.