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11.12.00, 1:45 a.m.

By the way,  Paperson asks good questions about pedagogy and Asian American studies, plus we're study buddies for our exams. This involves keeping each other silent company in the graduate student library and providing useful feedback on our work over lunch. Additionally I have threatened to de-pants all those in our working group if they do not show up with progress each week. Live in fear of my wrath!

12:31 a.m.

Don't expect this many updates this often, or coherent thinking at this late hour.

I'm procrastinating. Mark is asleep on the couch after a rousing viewing of Streets on Fire, a 1980-something skate video featuring all the anachronistic tricks (i.e., wall-riding) that look, so, well, innocent in comparison to today's 360 kick-flips. I should be working on my paper, or even the Race Riot project directory, but instead I'm looking up election updates and Requiem for a Dream reviews. We left the theater feeling a little violated --an elderly couple left during the gruesome end sequence-- but somehow feeling moved (to despair, if nothing else).

There is a Presidential Committee on queer Asian Pacific Islander American women tomorrow and Iraya is testifying. The both of us washing dishes with phones pressed between shoulder and ear, she tells me she is excited to get involved in local electoral politics and campaigns, inspired by the example set by Tom Ammiano. (Ammiano is a vocal member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, a gay stand-up comic, and the most progressive and honest politician in the City, and probably the whole West Coast. Maybe even the United States, at this terrible point.) We wondered breathlessly if Proposition L --a community-sponsored measure seeking to halt the dot-com inspired gentrification of the Mission-- would pass by its so-far narrow margin.

I have to admit, I haven't ever been inspired by electoral politics, though I've always believed that voting is especially crucial at the local and state level (and especially in California, prone to xenophobic and racist propositions, or in places like Kansas where the outcome of school board elections can make all the difference in sex education and separation of church and state). I've worked on campaigns against Proposition 187 (denial of social services and public education to illegal immigrants and their children) and 209 (ban on affirmative action) and watched both pass overwhelmingly (the majority of "no" votes coming from the Bay Area, of course). So it's kind of shocking to think that the bland, tired platitude "every vote counts" is proving true in this instance, but does the act of voting really constitute a "meaningful voice"? I don't know -- even as I understand the importance of universal suffrage and the critical difference it made during Reconstruction and the Civil Rights era, I'm struggling with the liberal individualist notion that in this country the right to vote is characterized as "empowerment," especially with continued uneven power relations and electoral politics ruled by the mob (winner takes all). It's not as if we are voting in a "level playing-field" of discrete individuals when whole populations are at stake, or stand to benefit. That is, just because you can (or do) vote, doesn't mean you're not excluded.

Or as Lani Guinier (former candidate to head up the Civil Rights division of the Justice Department whose nomination was pulled because of her suggestions for voter reform --thanks JB for the clarification!) wrote in her book The Tyranny of the Majority, "Representative democracy needs to take into account the interests of both 'winning' and 'losing' voters. There can be no fairness when majorities are fixed and permanent and when they consistently exclude and ignore minority interests." This is especially relevant this year, between the debacle in Florida, the fear of Bush striking terror in my core and his overwhelmingly white, heterosexual and male fan base, and the hostile dismissal of third-party politics. (I voted for Nader in Gore-friendly California, but I also had a soft spot for Hegelin, the Natural Law Party candidate and physicist who believed in eco-scientific solutions to replace fossil fuels and transcendental meditation for kids. Seriously, I can't resist theoretical physicists with their wave-particle charts and mathematical black holes.)

I'm also having to reevaluate those political theories about meta-systems that I haven't wrapped my head around in ages -- communism, socialism, republicanism, and the 57 varieties of democracy. "Democracy" isn't a monolithic discourse or system after all (certain forms of anarchism could be called "democratic"), though its wide-ranging manifestations (and motives) are unfortunately conflated despite their nuanced and differentiated structures of representation and government. The term has been so over-used that its significance has been exhausted; capitalism has been praised as "democratic" and is associated with "choice" and "individual freedom," despite the fact that capitalism intentionally reproduces intense class divisions and uneven power relations that are hardly democratic. So for bedside reading I've pulled Chantal Mouffe's The Return of the Political and David Trend's edited anthology called Radical Democracy so I can reacquaint myself with the differences between liberal democracy and radical democracy and enhance my own understanding of varying conceptualizations of citizenship and civic participation. And I'm thinking, too, of picking up my dog-eared copy of Lauren Berlant's The Queen of America Goes to Washington City to brush up on her theory of "infantile citizenship" -- I have a bad feeling it's eerily relevant this election year. (Berlant, by the way, is one a small number of feminist scholars I would ask to marry me, if I could avoid seeming like a stalker.)

I don't expect to have any answers in the morning.

I'm not moving to another country yet, mostly because we haven't been able to decide where we would ideally go. Erik sent us a run-down on most of the European nations and it wasn't encouraging despite better health care and public education. Helen and Nadine are rooting for Canada, but that may have something to do with the fact that we desperately want to meet one another. Nor am I getting a mohawk, though if I did, I'd break my "no photographs of myself on the site to stave off rude comments and stalkers" rule.

Oh no. Entertainment Tonight is doing a "Whatever Happened To...TV's Favorite Stars." Punky Brewster in a black bra and panties on a fake fur rug? Sally Struthers and her struggle to get a job in between "feed this child for 5 cents" commercials? I have to stay up now.