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May 7, 2001, 4:42 p.m.

New orange striped sleeveless t-shirt. Old, gray and grungy Dollhouse capri pants (on sale). Thrift store zippered sweater depicting a lighthouse. Shaggy with wispy, shampooed hair and newly bleeding from another skirmish with the cat.

I feel like these are the few obvious things I know. When Mark asks me, "What are you thinking?" I'm at a loss for words, not because I'm not thinking but because I am thinking things like, "Oh my god, should I read Partha Chatterjee's Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World ? It's not on my book lists but what if they ask me about it anyway? How many 'scapes of global cultural flows are there in Appadurai's 'Difference and Disjuncture'? Oh my god, I can't remember!" ad nauseam.

Mike assigned me (on request) to review Verso's new "No Nonsense Guide to Globalization" and "No Nonsense Guide to Fair Trade," the latter of which is prefaced by none other than Anita Ruddick of The Body Shop. I've been so annoyed lately by the representational practices of anti-globalization activists that I'm cackling and rubbing my hands together at the mere thought of reviewing these books, like some villain in a silent film. I mean, I literally did these things when I showed Mark the books. Sigh.

I am having the hardest time, however, reviewing a fanzine called "Boy Girl / Girl Boy," a collaborative split between two persons ostensibly geared at gender deconstruction. It reads like weird college writing assignments caught a time warp (circa riot grrrl 1995), and are "conceptual" without being intellectually rigorous. Did I mention that the road to hell is paved with good intentions?

Shyla (the girl) dedicates most of her side of the split to the notion of "liberating women's sexuality," including a discussion of sex radicalism in which she selectively utilizes a poststructuralist analysis of language. Oddly enough she cites Foucault's History of Sexuality, Vol. One, even though Foucault expressly argued that the "freeing" potential of a "natural" sexuality (to be excavated from social constraints) is illusory. Yet throughout the fanzine she discusses the joys of "discovering" masturbation, of helping other women to "discover" this joy (she worked in a sex shop), of developing a "meta-sex consciousness," et cetera, as if there were some more real or "primal" sexuality or essence to be found down deep. 

And the privatization of "liberation" as some ephemeral condition that might be found in the bedroom, by individuals seeking enlightenment, is hardly revolutionary. (It should also be noted that the domestication of what were once considered "deviant" sexual practices is well under way. Since the late 1960s mainstream women's magazines have regularly featured sex toys and masturbation, and more recently John Gray, author of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, has penned a ...In the Bedroom version of his bestseller, offering "spicy" sex advice to couples.)

The now-hegemonic feminist "common sense" --that men seek to deny women sexual pleasure-- is made universal without interrogating the terms under which "freedom" is then produced. (I feel like I say this a lot.) What does it mean to continue to assign orgasm the quality of liberation when in the early 1990s Esquire magazine featured this "do me feminism" as the new (and more manageable) wave? When sex radicals also own sex shops, directing sexually frustrated women to the store shelves for a purchase that will (it's promised, like all good advertising does) changes lives? For which women is the imposition of a "repressed sexuality" a regulatory notion, and for which women is the attribution of a more "wild" or "rampant" sexuality also a coercive convention?

On the other end Rob (the boy) argues in one breathe for the destruction of binary gender roles, and in the next is reifying Iron John-style "male earth gods." (His side of the fanzine is also rife with New Age images of men and their penises, spilling, er, their seed into what looks like a galaxy or cosmic whatever. Seriously gross.) His essays about "male initiation" and masculinities are less confrontational and more confessional, which I can't stand. Can. Not. Stand. And I'm not a big fan of the "overarching, universal patriarchy" theme, nor of the rhetorical convention of framing politics in the language of injury. (And lately, heterosexuals, Catholics, Christians, white men, et cetera, have all utilized this political language of injury to stake certain claims in the social imaginary.) The weird New Age "primal" vibe combined with the terrible co-counseling "I'm okay, you're okay" writing just made me nuts.

Now how do I sum all that up in a short review blurb?

I also met one of the other Asian girl columnists at Punk Planet, but she seemed spectacularly unimpressed to meet another Asian girl punk rocker (although I am an expatriate, thanks). I remember when Iraya and I would approach Asian girls at Epicenter shows to say "hi," to be friendly and accessible among the teeming masses of white punk boys, and more often than not to no avail. Is it shyness or suspicion, weighted by a need to "fit in" with the crowd or (alternately) a desire to be an exception? Is it "no big deal"?

In other news, the sooner this semester is over the better. I keep thinking that maybe I could have done something to recuperate L's teaching. I worry that I was too obvious with my own discontent in front of the students (and I was pretty obvious, especially at 9 a.m.). Maybe I should have just turned off my brain and gone with the program, said, "Yes, women's work is under-valued, and husbands can and do rape their wives," and abandoned the attempt to offer them anything more. Sometimes even these basics are a revelation -- and is that enough?