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April 13, 2001, 3:28 p.m. || anxiety dreams

I am headed to the University of Surrey (UK) in June for a Sexualities, Medias, and Technologies conference, organized by Nina Wakeford, and this will no doubt be the site of my third fit of "screaming teenage girl" in the last six months because Lauren Berlant is speaking. (My first two fits were thrown for Wahneema Lubiano at the American Studies Association National Conference last October, and for Evelynn Hammonds at the Meridians conference this last March.) I'm such a dumb fan girl, for real.

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One of the worst aspects of working for a professor with absolutely terrible pedagogy is that I don't know how to make it better. As the semester wears on, my small efforts to provide theoretical frameworks feel futile. This week was themed "talking back," and two four-page, personal essays were assigned from Making Face, Making Soul. There was again no lecture, just videos (poets reading, er, their poetry) and lists. The list this week consisted of: "What constrains you from talking back? What does 'talking back' mean?" L divided the blackboard into sections and fielded suggestions from the class, noticeably diminished these last few weeks to an average of fifteen students from thirty (which is twenty less than were enrolled in January). I found excuses (real ones, like allergies) to leave the classroom in now-familiar despair.

How do I recuperate this? I typed up a two-page handout about the false binary of speech vs. silence. I made reference to poststructuralist feminist theory about speech and subjectivity, noted how the lecture offered a simplistic understanding of the act of speech or "talking back" as necessarily "self-expression" or "truth," and discussed briefly how potentially transgressive speech could be constrained and contained by institutional incitements to speak within dominant structures and signifying systems. Who knows if any of it made sense, since the only time all semester they've gotten any theoretical background is from me, and I can't very well explain the tenets of poststructuralist feminist theory in discussion section with no syllabus and no lecture to back me up. L's failure as a professor is starting to make me feel like a failure as a GSI because I can't possibly make up for her inattention, her lack of preparation, her terrible pedagogy, or her disrespect for her role and responsibilities.

How repetitive is this complaint? At least my students are sympathetic. (I think I detect a few looks of pity as well.) It's not as if my frustration isn't obvious. When L assigns arbitrary response papers without telling them what exactly they're responding to, and only says, "I'll give Mimi the instructions to give you in section," and then doesn't, what else can I do but throw my hands up in the air when they ask me for those instructions? When the readings aren't in the reader or she grades down on the mid-terms for generalizations when she hasn't taught them anything but generalizations, how can I defend her, or pretend to be objective?

I want to be a good teacher. I want my students to come away from me thinking hard. But I'm not learning how to be a good teacher, I'm learning how to seem like a desperate GSI, which is what I am. And I may seem like an amazing GSI in constrast (it's not hard), but this experience is only demonstrating what not to do --most of which I already knew-- and not what to do. 

 April 6, 2001, 3:01 p.m. || the arrival of a new renegade

listening: Huggy Bear, Taking the Rough With the Smooch CD, God Is My Co-Pilot, Best of... CD, Team Dresch, Personal Best CD 

For an hour I was on the radio. Well, hmm, let me be more specific -- I was on the radio for about half an hour, but I sat quite patiently for the first half, listening to Dan Sinker (editor of Punk Planet) and Johnny Temple (publisher of the collected Punk Planet essaysWe Owe You Nothing) chat with our host, C.S. Soong, on "The Living Room," a KPFA (the local progressive radio station) program. If you're wondering why I didn't mention this earlier, it's quite frankly because I always sound like a Valley Girl on the radio. (Plus I like some anonymity, sometimes.) The program was meant to address punk and politics, with myself being (as I put it) "the voice of doom." Because, as I've mentioned, I have an adverse relationship to punk rock that, in my most optimistic moments, I consider my love-hate object. So I spoke of riot grrrl and the disruption to punk rock whiteboy hegemony and of course a caller had to say, "Punk rock isn't sexist! It's maybe about 10% sexist and those aren't real punks anyway." Um, whatever, dude.

April 5, 2001, 9:48 p.m. || she'll be comin' 'round the mountain...

Well, the second paper, "Drag Racing in Digital Space," is finally finished, or finished enough. The best part about it is that I hate cyberpunk fiction with an undying passion. I hated it even before I began this paper. Moving on now to transnational capital and the circulation of the commodity.

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How many formulaic tales can one wade through in which a self-destructive but sensitive young protagonist with an (implant / prosthesis / telechtronic talent) that makes the evil (megacorporations / police states / criminal underworlds) pursue him through (wasted urban landscapes / elite luxury enclaves / eccentric space stations) full of grostesque (haircuts / clothes / self-mutilations / rock music /sexual hobbies / designer drugs / telechtronic gadgets / nasty new weapons / exteriorized hallucinations) representing the (mores / fashions) of modern civilization in terminal decline, ultimately hooks up with rebellious and tough-talking (youth / artificial intelligence / rock cults) who offer the alternative, not of (community / socialism / traditional values / transcendental vision), but of supreme, life-affirming, hipness, going with the flow which now flows in the machine, against the spectre of a world-subverting (artificial intelligence / multinational corporate web / evil genius)? 

--Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., managing to explain why I hate cyberpunk fiction

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I won the GSI (Graduate Student Instructor) Award for my department, though it may simply be for my staunch grin-and-bear-it stance. The class is not getting any easier to recuperate in the one-hour chunks I have for discussion sections. Two weeks' worth of readings on "violence against women" amounted to a total of thirty pages of terrible generalizations, i.e., "all men are empowered by rape over all women," and in that much time I can't for the life of me remember any part of the lectures because, whoops! There were no lectures. This last Wednesday she had the class reading Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz's "War Stories: 197_," and discussing in small groups whether or not rapists should be killed. What a disaster. I sat on my stool and edited my position paper while she divided the board under the headlines "SHOULD KILL" and "SHOULD NOT KILL" and collected the students' reasons and arguments, as if this constituted a lecture. (These kinds of lists are a standard feature of her classroom and require no preparation on her part.)

I'm at a total loss. I have no idea how to pull something useful from this mess. I was thinking about doing a mini-introduction to the concept of "bio-politics" and the making of "docile bodies" via Michel Foucault, but between the dearth of readings and lectures, there's nothing for them to grasp or sink teeth into. Especially since I've been the only one providing any theoretical framework, and in as little time as I've been able.

This sucks so much ass.

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Please check out Haley's comments on Manifesta. Her comments inspired me to re-visit a seminar paper I wrote for Tricia Rose on riot grrrl and the politics of the confessional.