December 8, 2001, 11:19 p.m.
"It's always been fun to reject the gay childhood story, to tell
people I 'chose' lesbianism, or to over-articulate a straight childhood
narrative to suggest that lesbianism could happen to anyone. But not
engaging a trans childhood narrative is terrifying--what if it means I'm
not 'real'?" -- Dean Spade in "Mutilating Gender" in
makezine.org
I have long adored Dean and Craig at makezine.org, and this essay
cements
this love (along with Dean's hilarious rant against cell phones and the trap of
"free minutes"). Dean does a lot of work to interrogate the
fissures of (gender) identification as well as the various
disciplinary formations --and quite a number of them marked by "good
intentions" or queer activism and scholarship-- that
demand a particular narrative of "who I am."
I am so thematic right now.
9:28 p.m.
The last four weeks have been maddening --
I gave a talk and two guest lectures (on both coasts, but not all at
once), tore through a pile of research papers and gave out a
slew of failing grades, to which I and the other reader were greeted
with
tears, curses, and complaints about how "you didn't let
us know what you wanted." I feel content
with my work --and even generous-- because really, a one-page
sheet
of
instructions with very specific and detailed guidelines and a month of
office hours (available with a choice of readers and the
professor) wasn't enough? We are not mind readers -- I can't divine whether or
not a student comprehends the course material unless she
or he tells me, or until I'm forced to read a
research paper suggesting that no class reading has been done, ever.
In my absence from this space I have been thinking a lot about how we imagine how we do
politics, because of the presence of protesters at the MIT
symposium hoping to interrogate Tammy Rae Carland about Mr. Lady and the
Michigan Women's Music Festival, because of a fanzine I skimmed on the
plane which I had to put down because the vitriol and the righteousness
got to be too, too much.
And on this flight between Boston and
San Francisco I re-read (as I occasionally do) States of Injury
by feminist political theorist Wendy Brown, because
I have been thinking a lot about the languages used to make
political claims. She writes, "We need to learn how to have
public conversations with each other, arguing from a vision about the
common ('what I want for us') rather than from identity ('who I
am'), and from ... potential common values rather than from
false essentialism or unreconstructed private interests. Paradoxically,
such public and comparatively impersonal arguments carry potential for
greater accountability than arguments from identity or interests. While
the former may be interrogated to the ground by others, the latter are
insulated from such inquiry with the mantle of 'truth' worn by
identity-based speech."
And coming home I visit a messageboard (a rare event thankfully)
which now hosts a "people of color" forum and I am grateful in the
oddest, most distancing way that I'm not really involved in the
post-grrrl "scene," because so much of what still passes for "respect"
or politics feels like therapy or worse, because the divide between
theory and "real life" is being reproduced in dangerous, limiting ways.
(For instance, banning discussion of the social construction of race
because it "invalidates the real lives of people of color" is a move to
make my skin crawl -- how much critical dialogue about the flexibility
of race to discipline its subjects will be preempted by this?) And this
was the crux of my paper, the one I presented at MIT -- that the
emphasis on "the political is personal" and "safe spaces" has
effectively limited the language of political engagement to the
interpersonal and individual, and in framing political conflicts in this
language of "validation"/"betrayal" --and in valuing the "truth" of
identity-based speech as self-evident or a given-- critical dialogues
are avoided, or elided. And I think this is really what went wrong with
riot grrrl, and is what plagues much of what came after it, and
much of what exists now.
Am I being vague enough for you?
(Of course, the limits of such language for
political dialogue are firmly in place in our national culture. A recent
newsprogram featured angry e-mail messages from viewers suggesting that
politicians who are concerned about disappearing civil liberties would
"feel differently" if they had lost family and friends in the World
Trade Center, and that voicing such concerns is an "invalidation" and a
"betrayal" of those who died in the attacks. Ouf course, this ignores
the many relatives who did lose family in the attacks and yet
are vehemently opposed to the war, and whose own arguments are thus seen
as revealing all sorts of "unnatural" or "impure" political feelings.)
And boy, am I ever tired of being lumped together with other
individuals whose work is about "who I am" when I think there's such an
enormous distinction to be made between that kind of work and mine, when
what I'm doing isn't "who I am" but "these are the forces that constrain
or allow for my mobility through the world."
I am beginning to feel like a broken record.