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March 29, 2001, 8:49 a.m. || library fun

I'm meeting Paperson for another go at the library -- he's got his second position paper to write and I've got to work out the kinks in mine. (See below.)

ME: "I'm really frustrated with my prose, I don't think it flows. It reads like cut-and-paste."

PAPERSON: "Um, you know that the committee doesn't actually read the paper, don't you?"

==

I can't fucking believe this shit. Anti-abortion activists post doctors' names, addresses, phone numbers and even the elementary schools their children attend on WANTED posters, and this is ruled by a U.S. ferderal appeals court as "free speech"? This isn't a threat?! Why was Dr. Barnett Slepian's name crossed off the list when he was assassinated in 1998 by a sniper in his own home?!

And of course, Bush follows up with eliminating the women's office.

March 26, 2001, 4:31 p.m. || i'm not very authentic

Here's an afterthought -- I get impatient with the repeated admonition to be an activist because a) I have been the type of activist who was "on the streets" and literally putting my body on the line, b) as an activist I found that we could have used some theoretical space to understand what it was we were doing and, c) I am still involved with activist work, but I don't believe that the (so often romanticized) "street" is the only place to do it. (In fact, the politics of "the street" need serious deconstruction, as well as what we mean when we attach a euphoric aura of public space to "the street.")

K said she didn't mind the vibe at Meridians because, as she put it, "Well, they're kind of like our grandmothers, you know? So good for them, they're finally getting what they want."

The last few days have been a whirlwind of socializing and studying. I bought the latest issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies and I'm horrified by "Don't Stop the Music: Roundtable Discussion with Workers from the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival." Ack. The flurry of justification for the anti-trans policy is disgusting. Not to mention bizarre comments like, "The fest is a postcapitalist venture" and "I didn't know physical labor could be so sexy!" (This last comment is from a professor.) I'll be writing more about this "discussion" soon.

I'm reading (finally) Rosemary Hennessey's Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities With Late Capitalism . I like her analysis as long as she isn't broadly attributing political irresponsibility or ahistoricity to poststructuralist feminist theory, which she does quite often. However, I do agree that "when desire is naturalized as lust, it functions much like other transcendent categories to provide an ideological safe haven from the historical conditions in which sexuality is inevitably entangled."

Of course, Foucault (whom she seems to dislike) said as much in The History of Sexuality; that is, sex is a dense transfer point of power with the greatest instrumentality. I'm interested in someday producing a partial mapping of race, sex, and desire in contemporary feminist and pro-sex discourses, through a transnational lens, but uh, you know, after I write that book-length dissertation.

Along similar lines, Heather Findlay has noted the constructed-ness of (racialized) desire for the black dildo; Laura Kipnis has produced a fabulous video about the material and psychic production of desire and sex; Carole-Anne Tyler has written about the class relations that make certain drag performances possible; and countless numbers of postcolonial feminists have analyzed at length the making of bodily subjects and sexuality implicated in and inherent to colonial frameworks.

Some things I mean to do: make an annotated list detailing my issues with "experience;" finish my goddamn position paper on race and digital space; start my third paper on globalization and the circulation of the "fair trade" commodity; wrangle grant money to take the Global Exchange "reality tour" of Viet Nam; make copies of Slander, Race Riot, and the GLQ roundtable.