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March 23, 2001, 12:33 a.m. || REVISED

I probably shouldn't be doing this kind of thing past midnight anymore, but I revised the "angst" entry (all the way down) to encompass more "internal dialogue" and will probably do so again. I felt it was really uneven, because seriously, if I didn't want to be useful or responsible at all, why would I do any of this?

Oh, and how brilliant is Paperson's MATRIX/oral exams nightmare?! Not only does he explain Lefebvre's The Production of Space using Angel Island (I usually stop with "social space is a social product"), but I get to be the one who makes him scream with my question at the end!

March 21, 2001, 5:13 p.m. || digital art i like

I am actually working on my paper, I swear, and thinking hard about how to answer my set of questions for the MIT panel on race and digital space. But I wanted to post this site, a simple animated series of black words and sentences on a white screen:

http://www.yhchang.com/PERFECT_ARTISTIC_WEB_SITE.html

2:41 p.m. || u.s. supreme court rules against drug testing

The Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) in Charleston, starting in 1989, began working with local police and prosecutors to gather evidence of drug use by pregnant women, testing the urine of a targeted group of their maternity patients -- black women -- without patient knowledge. In all, some 30 women --29 of whom were African American-- were arrested and put in jail after testing positive under the anti-drug policy. A lawsuit was filed in 1993 by ten women whose urine medical results were disclosed to law enforcement authorities without their consent.

Today the Supreme Court ruled that such drug-testing was a violation of the women's Fourth Amendment rights: http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010321/ts/
court_searches_dc_3.html.

For more detailed coverage of the case, please visit The Center for Reproductive Law and Policy, the firm that brought the suit to court on behalf of the women (and is also responsible for preserving what few reproductive rights women in the U.S. still have): http://www.crlp.org. Check the "press" and the monthly newsletter.

9:04 a.m. || repetition

Okay, apparently I have talked about this many, many times before, and in more articulate ways. I just perused my own archives, and it occurs to me that writing has gotten harder for me. Argh. 

And why did Girlfriends magazine have to editorialize a photo spread of Viet Nam with "she captures the timeless playfulness of the Vietnamese"? "Timeless playfulness" is a ridiculous phrase -- especially considering the last one hundred years of war in Viet Nam. And seriously, those photographs were generic "I'm taking pictures of the Third World" snapshots. How many more adorable, "playful" children hard at work do we need?!

1:08 a.m. || war zone in my head

I promise: I will stop having lengthy meta-conversations with myself about my academic purpose on this site. Tomorrow, when I wake up.

Don't get me wrong. I have warring internal dialogues about academic culture (i.e., I'm completely impatient with literary criticism and I can't stand graduate students who ruminate endlessly, out loud, about nothing or the plainly obvious), but I suppose I'm cynical about the imposition of "use value" upon feminist (or ethnic studies) scholarship, when the determination of what counts as "useful" is often arbitrary and serves particular political and ideological (even professional) purposes. Of course everything we do serves some purpose or motive, but let's not pretend that "usefulness" is some abstract measure, or is somehow ideologically transparent or neutral.

And I admittedly have a bad reaction to certain terms: "usefulness," "accessibility," "community" among them. Not because these are "bad things" but somehow they always seem to at the center of volatile struggles over meaning, and "community" especially, because with "community" and membership there is always an "outside" against which these notions are defined. We define nations this way, of course, but also those communities we feel are closer to us: punk rock, riot grrrl, feminist, queer, Asian American, Vietnamese, et cetera. It's the terms of inclusion/exclusion that I'm interested in, terms that are often naturalized or normalized to serve one position or another; I think it's the assumption that the parameters of "access" or "community" are obvious or fixed that bothers me, that the parameters themselves aren't under investigation. And how many times have I been accused of being a "traitor" or outsider?

Well, most recently, by a right-wing Vietnamese individual who saw fit to send a vitriolic (and wholly unimaginative) third-grade curse: "YOU FUCKING WHORE! HOW MANY AMERICANS FUCKED YOU TO GIVE YOU AIDS! YOU FUCKING TRAITOR!!!" (But don't worry about my health -- I am STD-free!) My membership, obviously, in the Vietnamese diaspora is subject to a political contest, dependent upon my performance of a certain position or social identity; I'm subsequently wary of certain calls to be responsive to "the community" because of the kinds of violence (ideological, social, and physical) they often enact.

The question of access then becomes not just material (there is still that) but social and ideological -- what kinds of investments in which political positions and social locations do some individuals harbor, that prevent their "access" to critique? For instance, women's studies and ethnic studies classes are formally accessible to all students at my university. Any person may enroll at whim, but the fact is that the majority of students don't -- is it because women's studies is not accessible (i.e., is it more theoretically dense than English/literary criticism? are its material resources not available, or exorbitantly priced?), or is it because women's studies is not accessible (i.e., do hegemonic notions about women, feminism and women's studies block ideological access to feminist critique)? Or both?

Still, I felt like a party-pooper after writing up my notes on Meridians, what with my critique of the use of "the real" to qualify authentic commitment or politics. Because I do want to believe that my critique is useful in some way, and it's not as if I don't feel responsible somehow for my work. I agonize over classes, columns, and essays --researching suplemental bibliographies for discussion, annotating my columns with references for further reading or potential action, etc.-- to the detriment of both partner and pet.

(Mark is good about it, he crawls into the loft to read Harry Potter or compiles his own complicated bibliographies on rock journalism or obscure punk publications, but Morton is a bit more resentful, being a cat and all.)

I worry about making critical theory (ideologically and materially) accessible; there's a reason why my entry point pedagogically is so often talk shows and pop stars, both of which allow me to intervene around gender, race, sexuality, capital, and even liberal political ideology and the construction of the self. It gives me a platform to begin to talk about the complicated and often contradictory ways we are invested/alienated, how we as bodily subjects are made and remade in the articulation of certain desires (for love, for sex, for fame, for celebrity, for community) and how this so-called "fluff" is deeply political. Jerry Springer and the deliberate crafting of episodes to showcase a series of recognizable sterotypes: black male playas, white trash cousins, welfare queens and a wide variety of "hoes." Oprah and the mythology of boot-straps and American entreprenuership. Montel and the disciplinary complex of discursivity ("Don't you want to look like a girl?") and state apparatus ("Out of Control Teens Go to Boot Camp"). Don't even get me started on pop stars, those icons that make meaning and unleash desire, or constrain it. A discussion about Britney Spears --sparked by a familiar question posed by a student, "Does Britney Spears degrade other women?"-- turned into a rollicking hour-long dialogue about the so-called "culture industry," the politics of reception, "in/appropriate" sexuality, the meaning of agency, and the problematic configuration of "bad girls"/"good women." This is only "meaningless" if you've never been moved by pop culture (don't get all elitist on me now), and wondered at the source of its affect.

Still, feeling a bit glum, I revisited "Like Being Mugged By A Metaphor" by Wahneema Lubiano:

"Consider how many times certain Black intellectual work has been dismissed because (a) it won't save crack babies in the ghetto, or (b) it won't reach the brother on the street corner selling crack. This dismissal depends on the renarrativization of all possible effects of change by virtue of a larger narrative that is so highly visible before us that we think everything through that narrative. The socially, economically, and politically constructed issue of Black pathology becomes, then, the extended metaphor that explains the world and delimits what we could do to change it....That metaphor prevents us from understanding the general power of the state to provide, to the public imagination, metaphors for explaining how the world works." 

What bothers me then is the circumscribed nature of many calls to "be responsible" as academics or intellectuals, as if there is a "correct" way to go about the work or a more "legitimate" narrative to explore. This makes me uneasy, and sometimes even angry because I want to see social and cultural justice, and we can hardly improve our political project by neglecting the sociopolitical desires articulated in the imaginary or limiting our points of entry/inquiry into uneven relations of power. The study of representation --a lot of the work I do-- is the study of reality and its affect/effect, which bears responsibility for the contests of meaning attached to "welfare queens" or "American the Beautiful." The ideological and material dissonance, the disjuncture between recognition and disidentification, can have profound significance -- in the making of citizens, for instance, from refugees or immigrants, or electoral politics. (Does anyone who voted for Bush now shudder to think of, say, arsenic in their reservoirs and a new Cold War dawning? If not, why not?)

So maybe I've quoted Meghan Morris before too, but I'll do so again:

"One of the most 'political' things that I can think of doing at the moment, pitiful as this may sound and small as it undoubtedly is as a gesture, is to plead against a possibility looming on the horizon...namely -- the return, under pressure, of the same old calls for plain-speaking, common sense, hard facts, immediate practicality...the tendency to say that things are too urgent now for serious people to be bothered with idle speculation, wild theorizing, and lunatic prose. I think precisely the opposite: that things are too urgent now for the Left to be giving up its imagination, or whatever imagination the Left's got left; and that the nature and the originality of today's urgency is such that any large-scale succumbing to that temptation is likely to bring politically catastrophic results." 

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I think it's funny that Paperson has entries in his Flower Drum Song guestbook from individuals who believe he wrote the lyrics to the musical.