Slaves of Academe

The Way We Live Now

2009-04-25T00:17:00.004-05:00

I have been away, but unfortunately not on holiday. Winter’s icy crust, an onerous teaching load, and the usual preoccupations with destiny have distracted me. In all honesty, I feel as if I have spent the last few months in a fugue state of work, striving for efficacy with five day weeks at the office and weekends spent grading or catching up on my admittedly anemic social life. The electronic world of blogs and Facebook has receded as the real life of classes and students and economic crises and health concerns has moved aggressively forward. I have been poor at responding to email, phone messages remain unreturned, and I am perpetually late to every meeting.

My appointment book resembles nothing less than the scribblings of a mad woman: class, meeting, consultation, forms due, forms returned, report due, report filed, assignment sheets due, assignments returned. Different appointments in different parts of the city mean I am in my car a lot. Sometimes I have to stare hard at an entry and work my mind significantly: What does that mean? Where do I have to be? What is demanded of me?

I feel lucky to still have a job. As the economic crisis rose in intensity after the new year, it was fairly clear that our campus would luckily only suffer minor reductions in staff, but our sister campuses were facing widespread faculty and staff retrenchment. This combined with a series of well-publicized mass layoffs in the corporate sector in Cold City made for a certain siege mentality. Receding into work made sense, both as a distraction and a goal. Even if we seem as if we’ve pulled out of the immediate economic death dive that made up January and February, the Fear remains palpable, both in the continuing gloomy economic news and the unknown beyond the next State budget session, not to mention the dreadful academic market of the past season rife with cancelled searches, even more limited opportunity professional opportunity, and the dreaded TIAA-CREF statements, with their negative figures. I’ve lost almost $9000, how about you?

The whole edifice of American life seems to have been violently shaken, although the extent of the true damage remains unclear. Even to those of us who realized early on the dimensions of the bubble, the broad-based hysteria of property porn, the opiate of flipping houses and putative permanent gains, the unfolding reality still comes an unpleasant shock. The tentativeness of the new administration and the usual political intrigues that seemed so interesting last fall now seem palliative, the last gestures before we hear “Switch her OFF!”

So one recedes into work, at the risk of being boring, or becoming wedded to the office in the way that some colleagues have always been, there on Saturdays, there every weekday, working in the hive, working into the night. And frankly, I don’t really have anything better to do with my evenings. I have no assignations, no boyfriend, no fuck buddy, no appointments for dinner, no jolly clique to join at the theatre or bar. I have become taciturn and curmudgeonly. There are many days when my cellular phone doesn’t ring once. The economic crisis has met the personal in a strange synchronicity, an odd concerto of bad performance art.

The retreat to the office is also a retreat from this place, Cold City, this godforsaken archipelago of exile. I have, on some integral level, given up on the here, like Napoleon’s dreary retreat across Russia, all mud and exhaustion. I retreat to work, but I suppose every silver lining has a cloud. Colleagues compliment me on my dedication to the university, to the demands of the institution. I am proving my commitment through the endless parade of students in my office, the door open for all to see, writing letters of recommendation and mentoring. I am proving my commitment by designing retention policies via assessment that add significantly to my workload. I am proving my commitment by constantly reinventing the wheel in my courses, the perfectionist tweaking and changing details and rearranging readings. I am proving my commitment by signing up for too much service, serving on myriad committees and panels, a very important and time-intensive administrative search with 8:00 am meetings (for which I am late), as well as the ubiquitous extra-institutional service, speaking to at-risk youth, developing scholarship programs, and making presentations to organizations. I’m doing fine, I’m doing well. Now, if only I could get rid of the doubt, of the feeling that everything I am doing is half-assed, disconnected, disparate. The Fear.

I look like shit. I have aged so much in the last two years it is sometimes a shock to myself. My photos on Facebook are artfully arranged simulations. My assistant remarks I look tired. Colleagues note I look tired. Thank God for the relatively boring dress code for academic men. It makes dressing in the morning less arduous. The body has its limits of course, which then become visibly palpable. But more importantly, I feel existentially unwell, so I retreat to the office. There has been a kind of mania to the effort, the unglamorous flapping of a drowning man. On some level, I suppose, it’s been an impressive performance: the spinster professor, with a box full of clippings and a French provincial office. Ideally, the next step is obtaining a cat, naming him Mr. Twinkles, and devoting my limited free time to making him seasonal costumes whilst I develop a healthy bourbon habit. Too bad I’m shit at working a needle and thread.

I have keys to my car, my apartment, my mailbox, my office, my building, and my different classrooms, but I don’t have the key. In this sense, my own personal circumstances mimic the general social and cultural malaise. Being an avatar of the moment, however, is seriously overrated.

Classroom Notes: Embarrassment of Riches

2009-02-08T22:54:00.004-06:00

These are the times that try the souls of men. I am not here speaking of what my colleagues have taken to calling, increasingly with less irony, the Little Depression. Rather, I am referring to my extremely busy semester. What with three full classes and a senior seminar, I no longer even have the time to feel sorry for myself, which I suppose is a good thing. But more remarkable than even my emergence from a certain lacunae of self-involvement is that after a disastrous fall semester, I am suddenly up to my ankles in ice cream.

All three of my classes are astonishingly, incredibly loquacious. Experienced teachers will know that this is a double-edged sword, for as much as student conversation can engage a classroom, it demands even more energy from the professor in terms of guiding and shaping discussion not only towards productive pedagogical ends, but to make sure that the Chatty Pattys, in their robust enthusiasm, do not push the quieter students to the margins. In my classes, this task is even more thrilling, in that we are talking about race and sexuality, which means that every student utterance has the potential of a pipe bomb to maim, injure, and deform.

Only one of my courses truly has this explosive potential, an intermediate course on race theories that is full of talkative Black students, a lot of white student anxiety, and Asian American student watchfulness. Because this is not my first time at the rodeo, and I tend not to be intimidated by even the most daunting classroom ecology, I approach this class with a certain insouciant sangfroid. Arriving at class, I am typically already mildly exhausted, for teaching at night is no excuse, I have discovered, to not have endless meetings during the course of the day before class begins. A final cigarette, a cup of vending machine coffee, and we are off.

The classroom is small, overheated, and the students are literally on top of one another. Such close proximity frays the boundaries students create around themselves. There is simply no room for coats, books, or anything to make safe space. There are exactly 33 seats, one for every student and one for myself. Such close quarters are still being negotiated, but they have tended to create an electric energy with both positive and negative benefits. For every remarkable observation made, there are two that are off topic, in the way that lived identities, such as race, can enable students to make observations without necessarily understanding the connections between their experience and the concepts we are exploring.

Yet, there are students who work with me, setting boundaries and returning us to relevant questions. We are all working together, in tandem, to create the space that we need to actually talk in depth about race. And it is working. I have done this before, but when it actually comes together, it can seem like a miracle.

At times, it can also feel like towing a boat with your teeth. Cajoling, smiling madly, writing on the board, asking questions, we rarely have any time for group work. Conversation can be inchoate, wild, wandering. Reining it back in takes energy, and when the last student has left and I walk to my car, I am blank. The flick of the lighter in the car, the heat running against the winter night, the crackle and spark of the tobacco, the first sharp inhalation of the dense smoke, is reward enough.

After last semester’s taciturn class, with its poisoned ecology, I feel like I have rediscovered some buried talent. How Oso Got his Groove Back. I know these things are variable, and that we all have bad semesters. Yet, for a teacher, nothing feels quite as good as when a class goes well. A quiet, deep satisfaction elevates one's mood and heightens the senses, opening up rather than closing off possibilities within and beyond the classroom.

Waiting to Exhale

2009-01-03T21:42:00.003-06:00

The holidays passed with their usual desultory combination of fast and slow, a morose conclusion to an arduous fall semester with occasional moments of delight. Like many who lack the accoutrements of the sentimental familial, whether in the figure of the biological family or a husband and his family, I again pass through the excruciating weeks of the holiday season in a sort of numbness, insulated as much as possible from a reflection on the potential personal meaning of having a void in those spaces.

Some schools offer long winter breaks, intersessions marked by weeks of cold, quiet time away from the demands of the classroom. I do not have that, and official faculty presence is required on Monday, with classes starting a week subsequent. It feels I have barely had time to get over my end-of-term head cold, much less recuperate enough to face once again the Roman Forum my classes seemed to be in the fall. I am exhausted by the very thought, although in the end I know I will put on my makeup, my costume, and return again to the proscenium arch. The show, after all, must go on, even if, especially at this point in the academic year, I feel as if I’m dancing as fast as I can.

One class in particular this fall was the proverbial thorn in my side. An introductory course with many students enrolled due to scheduling or General Education requirements is not, in and of itself, an omen for disaster. But in this case, the ecology never came together, and a mutual antipathy grew over the course of the semester like a marginal cancer rapidly metastasizing into every vital organ. You know, that kind of class. Since it is very hard for me to just walk away from my teaching, my response was to devote yet more time, more energy, more thinking, into the entire project, from assessments to classroom presentation to endless consultation hours re-explaining everything we had covered in class.

It was, in the end, all for naught. All the King’s horses, and all the King’s men could not put that shitcan back together again. Of course, I could spin it the way we are meant to nowadays: a learning experience, a teachable moment, an insight into greater attention to the needs of lackluster, unmotivated, and resentful students. All of which I will dutifully do, some snowy night by the fire. In the meantime, I remain hopeful that the next cohort of students shall be better equipped to respond both to me as a teacher and to the challenge of collegiate education. Since classroom ecology is situational, every semester we have another chance to succeed more effectively at what we do.

The high-wire antics of the crabby class were meet by other pyrotechnics of professionalism happening outside the classroom. A polite way to describe it would be personnel problems. I do not feel at liberty to elaborate greatly here, other than to say I have been particularly struck by how the politics of ‘respect’ are intensely and peculiarly felt amongst senior academics of color, to the general detriment of probationary faculty who are also themselves racialized. I have thought long and hard about this question, and can offer no straightforward solutions. I will say, however, that the drama of respect that plays out amongst racialized academics in a racist institution (the university) is incredibly destructive; it leads to mistrust, suspicion, paranoia, and stress, not to mention destroyed lives and careers. Mentoring is hard, and leadership is even harder. And in my experience, often those most obsessed with respect forget, conveniently, that ultimately it must be earned.

The paucity of these skills in the ranks of certain members of the senior professoriate of color I have encountered, or their selective and haphazard application, works against our greater interests. That said, our common humanity is never more apparent than in the twisted, ugly sneer of a senior colleague trying, pathetically, like a drowning swimmer, to destroy you: insecurity, damage, fear. I can empathize. It is a mark of the nobleness of the human social experiment that some of us try to rise above such self-involved survival strategies, that some of us know the value of living in human communities, and what that may mean. Such nobility tends not to protect you, however, in the star chamber of tenure. I’ve learned quite a lot in my traipse down the tenure track, not the least of which is the art of documentation. That does not relieve the stress, however.

My life has felt like an electric arc of stress, producing and draining energy in strange ways. In what should be the halftime of my adult life, I am still blocking, passing, sprinting to catch a soaring ball. I want to slow down the pace, but am not at liberty to do so now. I must continue to work as hard as I can, dance even faster, smile ever more broadly, jump even higher. The professional demands meet, awkwardly and uncomfortably, the playing field of the personal, the challenge of being fat, gay, single, 40, and an intellectual, a deadly combination I wouldn’t wish on my worst friend. I am highly conscious, perhaps overly so, of my rather precarious position, walking the edge of an active volcano of professional and personal desires, dreams, disappointments, and longings. I wish I could be more elegant in my handling of these challenges.

Yet, as someone I know recently put it, we constantly re-learn the most painful lessons in our life, over and over again like a masochistic version of Groundhog Day, specifically because they are important to who we are, who we want to be. And yet another has remarked that, on the commencement of the New Year she wanted to look toward the future, not the past, as the avatar of possible lives. This is of course what the New Year always promises: a new year, a new you; a promise also deeply grounded in the American psyche.

It is at moments like this, confronted with relentless American optimism, that I do not feel particularly American, but rather like the crazy aunt from the Old Country, wandering around the attic of memory while outside Ford motor cars and moving pictures and women with bobbed hair change the meaning of life, which in itself is a particularly ripe American image-text. So perhaps I am more deluded than even I perceive myself to be, at least as far as my place in a spectrum of American longing is concerned.

All I know is that it feels like I have been holding my breath for quite awhile. I am sure I am turning blue. I certainly did not expect to be here, where I am now. Fitzgerald’s famous dictum on no second acts in American life was matched, somewhere, by another who noted that American life is exclusively second acts. So, with that latter, more optimistic thought in mind, “I put on some makeup, turn on the tape deck, and put the wig back on my head…” This show must go on.

On the Morning After Turning Forty

2008-11-24T01:28:00.007-06:00

I’m just a girl with my head screwed on
I’m just a girl with a smoking gun

— Eurythmics

There was, oddly, no palpable change. The alarm clock went off as usual. The cold milky white light of early winter flooded through the windows, as it always does when the sun dips low on the horizon at this time of year. The morning coffee tasted the same, the first cigarette crackled and burned in a familiar way. Neither flooded with a newly acquired sage omniscience nor weighed down with the depression of wasted youth, one showered and shaved with the usual alacrity, and made one’s way into the city, with its demands and quibbles and annoyances, beeping appliances and red lights and merge lanes.

At what is most likely the prime of my life, I remain unfixed. Gazing in the mirror, the act of vanity, I closely examine the face reflected back, my face. People tell me I do not look my age. Yet, I notice the signs, the lack of elasticity, a persistent sagging under the eyes, the mild yet durable imprint of lines across the forehead. One’s skin does not bounce back from a late night or a stressful week in the way it once did. The face settles into a jowly countenance of, of what? Disappointment? Preoccupation? Distraction? Dissonance? Only by bringing my mouth into a wide, clown-like grin do I approximate conventional happiness, of a mildly insane sort. Tired with the effort, I let my face fall, resuming its somber sobriety, the battle scars of all the good times.

I wish I could say that attaining my current state of grace has given me, serendipitously, some sort of insight into the meaning of life, about what is most important, about separating the wheat from the chaff, of sons and daughters calling me Daddy and the warm, nightly embrace of another who loves me for the proverbial me, the compelling messages of advertising and popular culture and sentiment. A random day on the calendar, of course, does not endow us with such enlightenment. I turn away from the mirror with a shrug, return to the computer, sip a Fresca, light a cigarette, and load Facebook.

There, in that digital bonfire of the vanities, I scan the photos of my contemporaries, my Facebook ‘friends,’ some who are actual friends and others somewhat more imprecise, some from those vaunted bright college years and others from graduate school. Some look older and others, disturbingly, the same. And yet still others have an effect that is neither, yet both. They look evolved, comfortable in their skins. I too have evolved, but into what?

All I know for sure is that I have survived an arduous year, the life equivalent of swimming the English Channel, and now I return my shoulder to the wheel of the tenure-track, to an approximation of regular life, to work. Arbeit macht frei, or so they say. My social world, once broad and lively and pleasantly distracting, has severely contracted, a retrograde movement from macro to micro. I dislike talking on the telephone and am terrible about email. I promise to write but am distracted by work, by the lake, by listening to Tom Petty and Alphaville and Mary J. Blige, by smart little books on Bismarck's German Empire and catching up on my Michael Cunningham. Only a handful of stalwart holdouts have managed to develop a benevolent tolerance for such bad habits, spread out in an archipelago stretching from San Francisco to Toronto to Montreal to Providence (of all places).

More importantly, there is nothing like a life crisis to palpably demonstrate who one’s friends really are, and I would be lying if I said I was terribly surprised that over the course of the last year so many have disappeared into the ether. Somehow, such sudden, trap door exits now seem expected, normal, unremarkable. People change, tastes diverge, interests and enthusiasms become too elongated through time and space, taxing their elasticity beyond even the supple, insipid boundaries of sentimentality. As goes Facebook, so goes the world. I have been 'un-friended' by many I once thought intimates, and as on Facebook, one is generally not notified when one is unceremoniously removed from a life. My desire to know, to plumb the reasons and rationales remains, is matched by the knowledge that one will never really know why for sure, only that there is no longer any there there. Certainly there are worse things, but the effect of this process of loss has been a curious distance fueled more by boredom with the machinations of people than passionate feeling. I shrug my shoulders.

Rodriguez once wrote,

Though I am alive now, I do not believe an old man’s pessimism is necessarily truer than a young man’s optimism simply because it comes after. There are things a young man knows that are true and not yet in the old man’s power to recollect. Spring has its sappy wisdom. Lonely teenagers still arrive in San Francisco aboard Greyhound buses. The city can still seem, by comparison with where they came from, paradise. (27)

I returned to this quote in Rodriguez’s morbidly fascinating essay “Late Victorians.” What this young man knew that the older one cannot recollect is an abstraction, of course, since we are real time compendiums of our experiential knowledge, but perhaps a useful abstraction. This young man believed in friendship, in community, in ambition matched only by gleeful dissipation. Forty seems to mark a space where dissipation becomes slightly more literal than figurative, a lack of elasticity. As for friendship and community, well, in my current state I’m no longer sure where exactly to place those. Hypothetically, they exist, but like rare orchids or an elaborate facial ritual, they’re a bitch to maintain.

Rodriguez's queer first words of “Though I am alive now” always struck me as intriguing. The narrator must, on some level, be obviously alive, yet the connection of that state of living to knowledge seems purposefully unclear, for Rodriguez is too much of an anal retentive stylist for such a line to be an accident. It seems to place Rodriguez in a strange position of generational interlocution, but a confusing one that smacks of hypochondria and delusion, two sentiments not unfamiliar to Rodriguez, but still.

But perhaps that is the point. I am a coastal extraterrestrial (ethereal, homosexual, intellectual), crash landed in the mid-western zone of North America. Salvaged from the wreck: notepad, laptop, one-half pack of cigarettes, a lighter, a dogeared copy of Joan Didion's "The White Album," one compact disc by Yoko Ono, one travel-size tube of ClarinsMen Shampooing Ideal, and an orange Lamy fountain pen.

Though I am alive now.

Heroes of the American Republic

2008-11-02T12:53:00.013-06:00

Recently, Gore Vidal was quoted saying, on Barack Obama’s candidacy for President, “Slaves have a hard time making poetry, unless it's got a beat.” Vidal’s iconoclasm serves him well here, in his deep offensiveness but also in his astute revelation of the cultural politics of race in the United States. Such a remark, of course, illuminates a number of different national preoccupations. Suffice it to say, Vidal reveals a tin ear not only for poetry, but also for national poetics.

I suppose I could address this in a variety of different ways. Those of us who study the American Republic as well as live in its current manifestation are acutely aware of the rapturous as well as tortured transformation of the national concept. In this spirit, I offer a pantheon of American heroes, not the usual suspects but remarkably important nonetheless, who in thought and action counter Vidal’s witty racism on this, the penultimate eve of portentous national change. In spite of struggle, hardship, and violence, Americans have never given up at chipping away at the edifice of exclusion. That is the optimistic American tradition worth honoring and preserving.

Mildred and Richard Loving

Dolores Huerta

Shirley Chisholm

Our America (2): La esperanza

2008-10-30T00:58:00.003-05:00

On the day of the national election, I shall be serving as an Election Judge in a Latino-majority precinct in the city, speaking pidgin Spanglish and smiling like a lunatic. At our training a few weeks ago, in a stuffy conference room adjacent to the warehouse of the municipal Elections Board, the diverse faces of American democracy were on glorious display. There was no satin red, white, and blue banner, no complimentary flag pins, just uncomfortable plastic seats crammed into a small, fluorescent-lit space filled with a wide variety of people: Subaru matrons, blue collar workers, secretaries, hipsters, silk headscarves and North Face jackets, clogs and work boots and discreet pumps.

The training facilitator, an older white woman with a mild limp and a desperate need for a deep conditioning, covered an incredible amount of information in two short hours joyfully and efficiently, while soberly reminding us that as Guardians of Democracy we were not meant to deny citizens their franchise, but to facilitate their voting experience with efficiency and friendliness. We had to be as fresh and helpful at 7:00 pm as we were 12 hours earlier, when the polling station opened.

The phrase ‘Guardian of Democracy’ struck me as amusing, while at the same time also deeply apropos for arguably the most important federal election in my lifetime. The symbolic value of an Obama victory is overwhelming for a slave-holding white settler colony with a violent history of racial subjugation. Symbols, of course, are important, perhaps more important than we think. It has been fashionable on the Left to dismiss mainstream symbolism as empty gesture, to mock the pretension of participatory democracy, to cluck at party politics as ineffective and corrupt, regardless of political party. And indeed, those expecting a magical transformation after a potential election of Barack Obama will no doubt be sorely disappointed. I, for one, fully expect to be thrown under the truck almost immediately.

This self-assured skepticism has played a role in the politics of the avant-garde for quite sometime. But the time for such shadow boxing seems, at least at this moment, to have become less important, the position of cynics, sociopaths, and ideologues, a self-indulgence we can no longer afford. And the outpouring of energy and emotion in the current election cycle reveals not only the marginality of this avant-gardist cynicism, but also and more importantly the belief people still have in the American project, whether from the regrettable position of conservative reaction and fear to the hope for a better, more equitable American society.

I have surprised myself with my own investment in our peculiar American exceptionalism, and not only in agreeing to spend my election day in a tacky VFW. To wit, I regularly teach a course on American immigration and race, and this semester, the course has been wrapped up in references to the election and the possible futures of the American project. As the class focuses on the violent histories of American racism and exclusion as it connects to the mythos of immigration and assimilation, such contemporary political eruptions into the classroom space are to be expected, as students naturally connect the course material with the drama playing out in real time on television and the street, on the radio and in conversation.

While not quite Fishian in maintaining a strict kosher separation of personal politics from the teaching space, I am loath to proselytize in the classroom. Frankly, I find it unprofessional. Yet, I also don’t believe in maintaining the fantasy of apolitical transcendent omniscience that so distorts classic disciplinary education. What we teach and how we teach has political implication, even if at the same time, as Freud noted, a cigar is sometimes just a cigar.

The negotiation of this both/and position can be tenuous, like walking a tight rope every class. One theme that has been a constant in the Immigration class has been my use of the first person plural in discussion. My professorial insistence on ‘we’ and ‘our’ rises above, I believe, simple jingoism. Phrases such as ‘our society,’ ‘our history,’ and ‘our experience’ are meant to reassert ownership of the fragile, imperfect American experiment, to place the ‘I’ within the ‘we,’ to insist on the collective nature of our racialized histories, our violent traumas, and our timid and piece-meal emergences from those nightmares into the light of hope, of promise, and ultimately of hewing more closely to the Enlightenment principles contained in our founding documents that form the basis for some of humanity’s finest expressions. It is also meant to unite the fragments of the classroom, the disparate identity politics of different standpoints, racial and gendered identities and experiences, under the rubric of shared experience. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, we either hang together or we hang separately.

The first-person plural pushes white students to think of themselves within racial-ethnic experience, while also connecting students of color and New Americans to the troubled collectivity of dominant society, both of which they are a part of, naturally. Such a position, while progressive in its own instance, also strikes me as old fashioned, perhaps a bit démodé in its assimilative principle. But more largely, I really do feel the first-person plural in these instances; it’s not just an act to convince skeptical students I am not an Amerikkka-hating ideologue. I really do believe in the promise of America, the hope of the American experiment, the potential of American exceptionalism, not in its limited, expansionist and xenophobically nationalistic senses, but in what it means to create new societies forged in hope and violence, blood and joy.

Over one hundred years ago, Jose Martí, in exile in New York, formulated a new hemispheric ideal for hispanophone America, “Nuestra America.” Our America, or at least my thinking on what that phrase might mean now, for me, for us, borrows from Martí in its recognition of the potentials of our society, of our historical mestizaje here in anglophone North America, a recognition of the nexus of connection between races, standpoints, and experiences that forms the collectivity that is the United States.

And it is with that idea in mind that I approach the coming election, not from a position of fear, but hope. An evolution, perhaps, into something more perfect, something greater than what we have been, yet not as great as we have the potential to be.

Our America (1): American Psychos

2008-10-12T00:21:00.003-05:00

Tonight I got caught after dark in the woods. The sun here is setting ever earlier each night as we slide towards winter, and after an unexpectedly enjoyable warm autumnal day, I returned to a favorite but relatively remote nature reserve for an evening promenade. A storm moved in suddenly, and grey clouds obscured the sunset, and before I knew it, dusk had become dark. Although I know this reserve rather well, and am a large man generally unafraid of the dark, the walk back out of the forest was more nerve-wracking than I would have expected, the gravel path obscured, trees and glades dim but full of noise and shadow, illuminated ghostly by occasional flashes of distant lightening.

In an odd version of whistling past the graveyard, I imagined myself a Native American, or a Witch, at home in the gloom, familiar and well trodden. But I was relieved to be back in the car, merging into the river of interstate light that led me back to the electric city, alive with streetlamps and horns and crowds on the sidewalk enjoying the humid interlude.

The allegorical meanings of such a moment for the last two weeks is perhaps too obvious, too ham-fisted in its urgency. But we seem, as a national body, to have become caught in the forest after dark, unpleasantly surprised as the light has faded as suddenly as someone putting out a lamp. This week I felt, in addition to the usual annoyance and frustration with American politics and society, for the first time real, palpable fear. In a drumbeat fed, admittedly, by an unhealthy addiction to Internet political commentary, the twin engines of financial doom and rabid rightist mobs seemed to overwhelm the potentialities of the coming national election, the chance for renewal, however mild, the metaphoric turning of a racial page onto, at the very least, someplace different (not, of course, the vaunted end of race).

This is, understatedly, a dangerous moment for our Republic. Few realize how close we came, in the Great Depression of the 20th century, to fascism, how close to the surface such sentiments were, how many Americans actually admired Hitler and Mussolini (and to a lesser extent, Stalin) for making the trains run on time, for their strength, their masculine heroism, their ideological vigor. But if it is anything the past two weeks have demonstrated rather strongly, it is the truism of what is old is new again, both in the inept Hooverian economic bungling (and, more optimistically, the potential for Rooseveltian reemergence) as well as in the ugly political spectre of race-baiting, our old friend and compatriot, our American fellow traveler.

On one hand, such socio-political cycles are exhausting to the historically informed, like reinventing the wheel. On the other, the fact that they often aren’t recognized as cycles, or are interpreted as such but without nuance, is even more distressing. It is as if we are, as a society, doomed to recognize, every half-century or so, the necessity of the social contract, and in the interregnums between such periods of clarity, we are free to engage in Roman orgies of self-aggrandizing selfishness and self-destruction, for what is the last twenty-five years of Republican-led and Democratic-sponsored deregulation other than an incredible abdication of responsibility and self-awareness, a strange self-mutilation of the state, a resentful hangover from the end of formal legal white supremacy?

I recently began re-reading, before the current crisis, Brett Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, an instructive primer on how we came to be where we are. Like Alan Hollinghurst’s more introspective and dreamlike The Line of Beauty, Ellis’ controversial murderous epic, published in 1991, neatly delineates exactly what was wrong with the emergence of Wall Street culture and the rise of the political Right across the anglophone world in the eighties. But the big reveal is not in the murder scenes, which while horrendously graphic, almost ridiculously so, are a rather transparent metaphor.

Rather, they are to be found in the detailed, obsessive lists of consumer goods Patrick Bateman, the central protagonist, recites about himself and the characters he encounters. Often paragraphs long, these descriptions of what characters are wearing, or what their homes contain, designer and brand names, textures, the descriptive apparatus of magazine advertising:

Price seems nervous and edgy, and I have no desire to ask him what’s wrong. He’s wearing a linen suit by Canali Milano, a cotton shirt by Ike Behar, a silk tie by Bill Blass and cap-toed leather lace-ups from Brooks Brothers. I’m wearing a lightweight linen suit with pleated trousers, a cotton shirt, a dotted silk, all by Valentino Couture, and perforated cap-toe leather shoes by Allen-Edmonds. Once inside Harry’s we spot David Van Patten and Craig McDermott at a table up front. Van Patten is wearing a double-breasted wool and silk sport coat, button-fly wool and silk trousers with inverted pleats by Mario Valentino, a cotton shirt by Gitman Brothers, a polka-dot silk tie by Bill Blass and leather shoes from Brooks Brothers. McDermott is wearing a woven-linen suit with pleated trousers, a button-down cotton and linen shirt by Basile, a silk tie by Joseph Abboud and ostrich loafers from Susan Bennis Warren Edwards. (31)

These obsessive lists are vertiginous in their detail, but capture through that dislocation, through the attention paid to such things, the fundamental illness of late Capitalist consumerism and in particular the bonfire of vanities that seems now to be crashing down around us, to which Bateman’s murderous splurges are but the final coda on a society that prizes appearance and things over more socially ameliorative values, like our fellow citizens.

It comes as no surprise to those of us familiar with the echoes of American racial histories that the race baiting of the Republican candidates and their surrogates over the past two weeks dovetails nicely with the rising urgency of the global economic crisis, the ostensible end of the era of the Patrick Batemans and their existential lack of humanity. The only surprise, depressingly so, is how potentially effective such strategies remain, at least for a fringe of deeply unsettled people, angry at the world.

Instead of being afraid, as a McCain partisan claimed this past week in Minnesota, that he was afraid to raise his (unborn) child under an Obama presidency, the angry crowds gathering under the Republican ticket would perhaps be better served by pondering the effects of rising inequality and the inhumanity detailed in Ellis, how we all came to embody the psychopathological lack of Wall Street and Patrick Bateman. It is to Wall Street that the American Republic has been given exclusively for the last generation, and we see now where that all has led.

I, for one, am quite glad to be labeled a Commie Faggot.

Strange Days

2008-09-21T15:18:00.003-05:00

While it would not be true to say that we are experiencing an “Indian Summer” in its most classic manifestation, it has warmed up after a disturbing dip into fall here last week, with a spate of cold, wet grey days. The sun is warm again, and even though the foliage is moving increasingly towards changing, smatterings of yellow breaking up the chartreuse monochrome, one can for the briefest moment pretend that summer is actually not on its inevitable way out, that l’air douce of warm nights and sunny days shall continue unabated, in perpetuity, that we can stay this way forever.

As the unwelcome spooks of autumn creep forward, however incrementally, up the stairs, banging on the floorboards like an unhappy Poltergeist, blowing out candles and moving things mischievously, so our national mood has too an almost unbearable sense of foreboding, an unsubtle foreshadowing of disaster, if not disaster itself. The tension is palpable— in the almost-histrionic back and forth in the press over the national election, the cascading economic crises whose final coup de théâtre remains as yet unseen behind the curtain, in the taciturn classroom atmosphere this semester, students tense and crabby.

For my own part, I have found it increasingly difficult to contain my withering scorn over the state of the national body in the classroom, the outrageous fact that the criminal political party responsible for our national decline is even running a candidate, much less the two they have chosen to represent their idea of leadership. This is a dangerous position, considering one is already discussing hot button topics in courses focused on race and sexuality. And as much as I may strive to maintain an apolitical classroom atmosphere, students themselves reference political events beyond the classroom, which even if triggering only a silent grimace, betray personal sensibilities that inevitably offend others, the put-upon conservatives who describe undocumented workers in discussion as “illegals” and sit sullenly when conversations tend towards the critical, which is to say, pretty much every session.

Last week, the Dean sent out an advising email about student complaints, reminding all of us of the risks of political commentary, no matter how brief, to classroom atmosphere (and, as an aside, apparently to the Dean’s voicemail, which has been receiving anonymous messages describing the college as a site of indoctrination and “despicable”). To the Dean’s credit, there was not a subsequent finger waging about avoiding politics in the classroom, but practical solutions for reframing political discussions and debates in ways that empower student voice, theoretically enabling conservative students to argue, or at the very least state, their opinions.

And admittedly I attempt to do this in class as well, often ventriloquilizing those positions by anticipating and naming common sense perceptions of race and sexuality (and then, of course, demolishing them). But since so much of conservative rhetoric is ahistorically misinformed and reflective of socio-economic ressentiment, it can be hard to find a rational place of engagement with such positions and the students who hold them.

In a piece on teaching in the New York Times Magazine, the following observation is made:

Why are good teachers strange, uncool, offbeat? Because really good teaching is about not seeing the world the way that everyone else does. Teaching is about being what people are now prone to call “counterintuitive” but to the teacher means simply being honest. The historian sees the election not through the latest news blast but in the context of presidential politics from George Washington to the present.

What is left out, unsurprisingly for the New York Times, is that increasingly seeing the election in historical terms is itself a political position, which only means that it has become, over the last eight years of rapacious governmental criminality, even harder, more political dangerous, to teach critically, even to the text, much less voicing informed personal opinion. Those of us in the reality-based world now must confront those who do not wish to participate in such things: reality, that is. That this is a long-held truism in teaching, the disabusing of students of their preconceptions, their “common-sense,” seems to have been transformed, accelerated, and perhaps fundamentally challenged by the fantastical political polemic world of extracurricular culture and, more importantly, the apolitical culture of pleasure and consumption that, thus far, has largely insulated Americans of the last thirty years from making hard choices.

The grinding you hear all around you is that pleasure-consumption nexus achieving critical status. If indeed what we are looking at is a fundamental restructuring of American socio-economic expectation, then the stark political choices of the national election stand in marked contrast to such a crisis. The fact that one could even have a debate about the merits of the Palin nomination, outside of political theatre, is, frankly, absurd. And that is what, unfortunately, historical knowledge gives you, not the least of which is a rising Arendtian suspicion of mass enfranchisement, especially in a voraciously white supremacist capitalist culture that is trapped in a dream state, sleepwalking through history as the sun sets on a thousand dreams of widescreen televisions and cheap travel abroad.

Anne Lamott recently published a soft piece for nice Subaru-driving leftists on dealing with the political stresses of the moment, oddly echoing but not resolving the challenge of a conversation at a party last weekend with a completely drunk colleague, who wondered about the political apparatus for people like us, not moderates or conservatives, but dedicated leftist progressives, people who believe in and want to see things like comprehensive and universal national health care, paid maternity and paternity leaves, generous annual paid vacation time for all workers, subsidized affordable education, steep progressive taxation and an end to corporate welfare (or at least its most egregious forms); in short, a return to the commonweal, a commonweal that includes everyone, not just white Americans who bitch about socialism and the government and unfair affirmative action, even as their entire lives have been based on such benefits. Considering the current trillion dollar bailout being engineered to save American Capitalism from itself, such things are, ultimately, quite affordable in comparison.

Those of us in the reality-based world recognize, perhaps too critically, the array of possible futures before us. It is the American dreamers, those caught up in the night terror of consumption and resentment, falling towers and American flags, Rapture and Pretty Princess politics, which one must be concerned about. For the time of American Dreams seems over, and now the ugly drudgery of reality, or in Zizek's memorable phrase, the desert of the real, lies before us like a barren plain. It could all be such a nice teachable moment, if it weren’t all so vivid, so felt.

Travelogue

2008-08-24T15:40:00.003-05:00

And the moral of that is: Be what you would seem to be, or if you'd like it put more simply: Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.

— Alice in Wonderland

3000 miles and one windscreen crack later, courtesy of the city of Cleveland, I have returned to my flat in Cold City. The newly painted white walls, redone whilst I was away, brighten the space, however, all of my framed artwork still remains resting on the floor, leaning against the walls and off their hooks, a wholly appropriate metaphor. I had great hopes for my summer road trip, and while it had many enjoyable moments, I remain largely the same person I was when I left. I was hoping, perhaps irrationally and naively, for a greater change, a more impressive temblor, a wider break between the proverbial before and after.

Yet, as I reentered the urban precincts of Cold City on the final leg of my return drive, past the familiar landscapes, the skyscrapers and crowded exit lanes and Cold City U’s campus, I did not feel changed; at least not in the way I had wanted to be, bright and shiny, like a ferocious starlet, all legs and ambition and cannibal smile outlined by blood red lips. But I suppose that is OK. Such dramatic breaks in character might be appropriate for performances under the proscenium arch, but fall a little flat in the three dimensions of lived experience. There is no easy avoidance of the heavy lifting of self-transformation, yet the exercise of such atrophied muscles is beneficial, even if the short-term results are subtle, invisible, more sweat than substance.

The bustle of the new school year is upon us, with its mandatory meetings and obligatory social events, classes on the verge of commencing, new faces and familiar challenges. Summer here heaves its last, heavily humid breath. In September, the light will change. Such things distract positively, occupy the mind. Somewhat differently, 3000 miles of solitary road trip over two weeks does have a Zen effect, clearing the mind in the blankness of the road, the reach for the cigarette, the adjustment of the radio, motions that become automatic. Yet, the mind remains active, pondering and introspective, anxious for the life to come, revealing the limits of my own particular meditative practice I suppose, which is to say hardly any of worthy discipline.

Life, in spite of what we have come to believe from Hollywood and rapacious government bureaucracies, remains resistant to representation, which would include our very own clumsy efforts to ground it in narrative, and subsequently, attempt to know it completely, the fantastical dream of the 19th century, the glorified corpse. But that is OK too. The hooks may remain upon the walls, but the order of the pictures, through design or fancy, can be changed.

The Year of Magical Thinking

2008-07-29T22:07:00.006-05:00

Here summer hums busily, the trees and flowers and insects madly propagating and procreating whilst the sun is high in the sky. Vines crawl up the oak and ash trees, and the native undergrowth is as lush as a carpet. Where there was snow and ice, there is now verdant life, bubbling and vibrant. As we mere mortals swim, canoe, hike and carouse through the increasingly stultifying heat, the natural world is more aware, however, of what is to come, as the planet incrementally tilts back on its axis. Winter is never far from one’s consciousness here in the best of times, and even as sweat beads form on one’s forehead and upper lip, as the vine climbs upward, one casts a nervous glance behind, towards the glowering ice already passed through and that also calmly, silently, awaits its inevitable return.

Such cyclical rhythms have proved to be my dangerous siren song this past year. I have been fascinated by the riddle of the pattern, the details of the convergences and divergences. I have been living in a world of totems and miracles, of fever visions and symbolism. However, I remain unsure of the meaning of it all. For instance, the same November week my five and half year relationship ended with finality in a misbegotten telephone conversation in rush-hour traffic, a student filed a complaint against me with my Dean, and my car irrevocably broke down on the interstate in the middle of the night. Whilst waiting for the tow truck in the dark, smoking cigarette after cigarette and wiping the tears from my face, I did not then immediately think of the coincidental patterns later apparent to me. Such ironic talismans returned at the closing of the year, the last day of school, the cleaning out of the office, events matched by other vibrations, closings and voids. They seem relevant, in a morbid fashion, but are resistant to all but the most intimate analyses, outside of the colloquial observation that it has been a real shitty year.

Such patterns have haunted me, strange coincidences that brought together the narrative threads of a disastrous year: a long and difficult break-up, a fellowship year that was not what one would have hoped it would have been, a severe financial crisis that has dogged me from beginning to end (partially informed by the reduction in salary assumed by the fellowship year), an unusually trying and dark winter. The resonance of each element amplified the effect of the others, leading to crescendo points of painful introspection that at times seemed insurmountable. It would not be dramatic, I think, to describe the past year as the absolute worst of my life. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, goes the truism, but what gets missed in such haimische dichos is the scar tissue that remains: thickening, constraining, disfiguring.

I would like to think of myself over the past year as Alice in Wonderland, in a beautiful red silken dress, having to pass through an unavoidable hedgerow maze filled with razors and grabbing hands, beasts and unseen traps. Of course, my experience was not nearly so cinematic, although almost as surreal— crying on the interstate then appearing in class with swollen raccoon eyes, often an inability to focus on details, missed appointments and strange adventures, odd conversations with strangers and acquaintances, hours spent too much inside my head, occasionally raging neurasthenia, pins and needles and exhaustion and depression and morosity. The normal dynamic unsettled by disequilibrium, vertigo, nausea. My “process,” as I have been calling it, like a pet, has been a queer sort of evolution, a Darwinian experience of metaphysical proportions, with the exception being that I have felt every cell division, been highly conscious of the protrusion of flippers, the recession of wings, the closing of gills, the elongation of the spine in preparation for upright walking.

Darwin’s theory, of course, was predicated on a much longer window of time. My hyperawareness of personal mitosis over the course of the last academic year, the slicing of the cell, is not something one should live within for very long. It is unhealthy to be so aware of one’s own transformation into an as-yet unknown creature. Our immune systems have been designed to respond to known and unknown threats unequivocally, unthinkingly, as a tenet of survival. Most traumas are best forgotten, but the body remembers, and the apparatus of self-defense responds free of conscious will, sometimes threatening a deadly response to a mild irritant, to an echo of the past, a swollen closing of the throat, a sudden choking. All of which is to say that, in many ways, the past is prologue, both on the corporeal and existential level.

How that prologue becomes a different narrative, how we shape it to become a different narrative rather than simply a rush of anaphylaxis, has been my challenge of this year, the struggle of my process. The long half-life of trauma was apparent in my reactions to events at school, exacerbated by more intimate and fiduciary crises, the challenge to a particular vision I had of myself as a man, a professional, a "partnered" boyfriend protected by propriety and stability. Ultimately, the larger meaning of the moment, the lesson to be gleaned from the layers of hematoma and laceration, is lost in the effort to stay alive. Perhaps one day I shall be able to look back at this time, this painful year, and honor it with substantial significance, figure the algebra of the dreamwork more effectively. For now, for the moment, I am happy just to have survived.

As nature busily propagates, as the vine climbs upward, so do I too plan for the future under the regime of summer heat, making hay while the proverbial sun shines. At the end of this week, I begin a long road trip striking several points on my personal archipelago, with a combined 52 hours of driving over two weeks. The symbolic value of this journey is both literal and figurative, a closing of the book, a turning of the page, the curtain call on a particular and in some ways peculiar year of personal examination, lost in hours of interstate driving. It is a refusal of totemic signs, a turning away from the talisman, and an emergence into something else, something new, a creature similar but different, the relearning of upright walking— an end to my own personal year of magical thinking and a return to the material world.

The Night Gallery: The Riddle of Accomplishment

2008-07-02T01:49:00.006-05:00

When I received my cream-colored letter with the Latin crest announcing my acceptance to Prestigious Eastern University in the spring of my senior year of high school, my college counselor and several faculty members were ecstatic. My high school generally sent one student per year to the Ivy League, and that year I was that student. Other teachers, however, had very strange responses to my putative success. One remarked sourly that his daughter had wanted to go, but they couldn’t afford it. Another cautioned that students he knew who had gone east for college had ended up dropping out, drunk at the Student Union, failures.

At the time, a strange vibration told me not to pursue these odd utterances that were neither congratulations nor outright dismissals. Later, of course, I recognized the soon-to-be familiar cadence of ressentiment, for attaining something that was, for a number of reasons, thought to be beyond me. Berkeley was acceptable, an eastern university covered in ivy less so. Even though no one ever said so to my face, my admittance to a prestigious university was chalked up, on the part of some teachers and students, to an undeserved opportunity, due to affirmative action. And while I have no doubt that I was admitted to an Ivy League school in part because of affirmative action, the simple fact of the matter was that I was also a dedicated high school student with a GPA of 4.2 (factoring in AP courses and college language courses in French and German taken in the summers after my sophomore and junior years). Empirical evidence, however, doesn’t stand a chance against impression.

Now, of course, students of color cringe when affirmative action is mentioned. And many of the students of color at Prestigious Eastern University at the time didn’t need it, frankly. They had gone to Choate-Rosemary Hall and Exeter and Andover and Deerfield, they had mastered the techne of collegiate learning that would propel them first to the Ivy League and beyond to Wall Street or Yale Law or Harvard Med. Acting affirmatively has a bad reputation, is code for unqualified, which itself is code for “not one of us.” When a lesbian student this past fall went to the Dean to complain about my course (which I have written about esoterically here), she did not take issue with the readings, assignments, or classroom methodology. She claimed, simply and transparently, that I was “unqualified” to teach at Prestigious Lil’ College.

The racial, sexual, and gendered dynamics of that claim, of qualification, are hard to mine, for there is, to borrow TV Reed’s memorable phrase, a lot of traffic at that intersection. What I think my student sensed, on some intuitive level, was that I thought it was all bullshit, the meritocratic pablum that students at élite institutions are spoon fed, and that deeply threatened her sense of worth. The simple fact of the matter is, in the end, I went to a better college than she did. I know from “qualification,” and yes, I do think it is bullshit.

Am I saying here that all students are equally endowed with intellectual skill? Obviously, no. However, at the risk of sounding overly cynical, most of what passes for talent in the university is actually mimicry, mimesis, rote learning, repetition and training and being told what to do and learning to meet expectations. Do you remember when you figured out how to phrase arguments in ways that pleased your teacher? Do you recall the moment when writing essays became about ideas and not sentence structure? Or the first time you used a sophisticated word casually and informatively? These are signs of education, of knowledge, of intellect. But they are taught, learned, and repeated skills. If you have no one to teach you these signs however, then whatever innate intelligence one has goes largely unrecognized and untrained. Although I had read the name for years, the first time I said Goethe aloud, in a graduate seminar no less, I mispronounced it. No one in my household was a dedicated reader of Goethe, you see, nor for that matter, a speaker of German.

This does not mean that nothing is going on in those gilded heads lining classrooms in prestigious colleges and universities. But the institution’s expectations and measurements of performance are grounded in a number of presuppositions that precede the university on the primary and secondary levels: quiet space for studying; supportive, motivated parents; food, shelter, and health care; safe streets and classrooms; money for materials, training, and tutoring; and perhaps most importantly, a recognition that education is a laudable goal, and flowing from this, an agreement with or at the very least an acquiescence to the structure of power represented by schooling.

Middle- and upper class students, those with material privilege and a knowledge of the shape of structured education (study habits, mastery of written and spoken language, advanced literacy in testing and assessment methodologies), come to school prepared to excel on the institution’s terms. Conversely, for many working class people, schooling and the schoolhouse are antagonistic spaces. The degree to which this is true for all working class people (or, for that matter, middle- and upper class students) is debatable, and over the past few weeks I have struggled with my colleagues in my teaching seminar to define the antagonistic relationship working class students bring to the classroom, an animosity grounded in unequal power relationships rather than meritocratic talent per se.

One of the seminar coordinators graphed the differing value orientations between working class and middle-class populations thusly:

Middle-Class/Working Class
Becoming/Being
Achieving/Belonging
Individual/Group

Thought/Action
Abstract/Concrete
Decorum/Practicality

Past—Future/Present
Entitlement/Undeserving

This graphing I found intriguing, both for what it said about how the expectations of the university are grounded in class, and class privilege, as well as where I myself might fit into the above structure. Working class people do not value the same things that middle- and upper class society does, or at least not in the same ways, which then leads to a disconnect with schooling, the primary engine for acculturation into dominant standpoints that are arguably necessary for successful social integration (success here measured by attainment of credentials and financial security).

One of the things that was fascinating to me was the extent to which seminar participants did not want to engage with class, but rather were distracted or drifted off into discussions of race or gender. This was symptomatic of many things, not the least of which is a paucity of class analyses in American history, politics, and social formation. We are sexualized, gendered, racialized beings, but like to think of ourselves as relatively classless, which is why someone who lives in a fourth-story walk-up in East Harlem and another in an apartment on the Upper East Side can both describe themselves, without irony, as "basically" middle-class.

But where does the working class academic fit into the schema above? Do we bridge the gulf between analytical standpoints, or do we leave one for the other? Many academics either play at classlessness, or offer apologetic mea culpas to their classed condition, both of which are rather annoying. I, for one, am not classless. I am a middle-class person from a working class background, who mastered the art of mimesis in pursuit of what I thought was important, driven out of the natal home by gayness. And for as much as I could appreciate the elegance of the graphing, the humanistic and communal values associated with working class people, I know, at least from my patch, that there was also a lot of human misery, which of course is why working class people pursue university degrees in the first place, chasing an escape, drinking the Kool-aid their middle- and upper class peers imbibed long ago, like mother’s milk.

Where we get stuck is in thinking that class, like other social conditions, is inescapable, that accomplishment means nothing, that we are always raced, gendered, sexualized, or classed in ways that are biological or natal rather than social, and therefore malleable. Or alternatively, that our accomplishment taints us, and we seek to recover the original house of love and familial warmth. For working class academics, the struggle is in keeping it real, and by that I don’t mean being street, I mean recognizing that we are compromised agents of hegemony, we have drunk the Kool-aid, but still might have something to offer our working class students besides punition and antagonism. The question becomes: is the very task of teaching someone to think, not the beautiful gilded lilies of places like PLC but the working mothers and foremen and the eager new Americans in classrooms at places like Cold City U., therefore an act of class betrayal in and of itself, if the thinking is grounded in class inequality? What are we teaching and how?

The Night Gallery: Academic Class

2008-07-01T12:32:00.003-05:00

Some weeks ago, while perusing a Chronicle comment page on graduate school, I ran across a thread by someone considering an application to a graduate program in the humanities who remarked that everything they read via academic blogs was dissuading them from a career as a professor. A commentator on the thread responded by dismissing academic blogs as the territory of the dissatisfied and angry, those with the proverbial ax to grind, and that his or her experience had been, to put it colloquially, just peachy, thanks. The subsequent advice was to ignore the hysterical electronic Cassandras of the interwebs and follow one’s dreams. In the United States, Horatio Alger trumps Machiavelli every time.

Obviously, I have often thought of this Cassandra function of many academic blogs, and the occasionally relentless negativity academic blogging can present about our work lives and sense of self, sometimes to the occlusion of the joys and benefits, be they what they may, of what we do in the professoriate. The tension here, especially in a society as underwritten by sunny narrative as the United States, is the pragmatic darkness of the critical academic blog narrative that seems untoward, improper, and disrespectful. Some of this impropriety has been present in online discussions of tenure and promotion, as well as the dedicated use of the pseudonym in academic blogging and the constant vandalizing of the academic job wiki this past year. I could wax theoretical about the potential transgressive functionality of academic blogging against the hegemony of Mammon and the institution, the voice of the powerless in the face of power, et al. But you already know that, having heard it before for other micro-phenomena in stuffy hotel meeting rooms, wondering where you can get a cup of coffee and a bagel.

Suffice it to say that academic blogging, and this blog in particular, has partaken in the attempt to offer a correction to self-conceptions in the professoriate about who we are and what it is we actually do, and how that circulates and operates in an institutional framework that is both varied and universal. As opposed to the Horatio Alger-driven narrative stream of parts of the professoriate, the “just peachy” school of narcissistic interpretation (i.e., my experience was fine, therefore, the Business is just fine) that rewards and punishes individuals but refuses to indict structures, the Night Gallery of alternate experience that drives much academic blogging, sometimes quotidian but at other times rather extraordinary, offers us the macabre, the strange, and the surreal. This dark side of the professoriate, however, is no less legitimate or relevant than the sunny story line, just perhaps more unpleasant to assimilate, more Catholic than Protestant in its worldview.

This critical edge, the unseemly observation of the edges of hegemony, is both political as well as experiential. That is to say, learned as much as intuited, although it seems here that intuition is the stronger emotional lead. Recently, I completed a teaching seminar on working class students in the academy that focused both on theoretical applications of socio-economic class in the academy as well as practical retention tools directed towards working class students. At Cold City U., where our primary demographic is non-traditional working students re-entering university, often in pursuit of credential degrees, such tools are quite important, not only for retaining students who may be at greater risk of dropping out, but to help us fulfill our institutional directive, which is precisely the successful education of these non-student students.

I was struck, and surprised really, by two things about the seminar: firstly my own passionate investment in what all these questions mean, and secondly the institutional contrasts between Lil’ Prestigious College and Cold City U. that are sustained by class difference. The latter seems almost like a no-brainer, although coming back from the Gilded Lily to a largely underfunded utilitarian working class university made me more sharply aware of the distinctions between institutions and student opportunities that are fundamentally, transparently unfair. For many academics, even those teaching at a place like Cold City U., the unrelenting perception is that our students will never be technically competent in the fantastical manner in which we imagine teaching, Mr. Chips and the Dead Poets Society and The Paper Chase. But after a year with the remarkable! special! amazing! students of PLC, I remain convinced that techne is not the basis of distinction here. Rather, it is the larger institutional perception of quality. Dullards exist everywhere, although they are decidedly more unpleasant when they think they are the shit.

For the working class academic, or those academicians that emerge from the purported lower orders, our achievements are always under scrutiny, always questioned, constantly re-thought. The sharp edge of this questioning for me emerged in discussions over what constituted working class culture, and how to accommodate that cultural stream in an institution fundamentally geared towards middle- and upper class training. I found myself engaged ferociously in attempting to honor working class ways of learning while simultaneously trying not to undermine my own (and others) success in the system through assimilation of those middle- and upper class mores.

Some seminar participants had rather strong ideas about what constituted working class student learning models, and in those idea(l)s, I sensed a whiff of noblesse oblige, however unintentional. Since most of the participating seminar academics themselves came from the working class, I also was aware of a certain abjection, a self-negation towards our own successful negotiation of the structures of the university that we were now attempting to ameliorate for our current students. I was surprised at my own ferocity in debating these things with my colleagues, my tenacity in accommodating different learning models but refusing to disown the system completely, for in that abandonment is the erasure of my own accomplishment.

How we learn to become who we are in the university is, of course, driven by class-based assumptions (among others) that are largely invisible, and during the seminar, I returned often to memories of childhood, of differential expectations and chance encounters that, had one or two things been shifted, a opportunity not opened, a connection not pursued, would have resulted in a very different life. Those alternative selves are not bad in and of themselves, just remarkably different. Many American writers, from Fitzgerald to Rodriguez, have delineated class leaps and verisimilitude, in many ways the quintessential American story.

Negation, deauthorization, and neurosis are primary ideological elements in those stories, but in the post-sixties era, we want to be more holistic about our students’ success. Sometimes that drive towards holistic educational models, however, belies our own class-based assumptions about success and working class potential, as well as leaves largely unexamined and uninterrogated the presumptions of class and intellectual promise that speak more to our own self-conceptions of worth and experience than anything our students may actually be capable of.

Material Things

2008-06-30T18:58:00.015-05:00

Graduation Day

2008-06-11T12:10:00.005-05:00

What is it about graduation and the end of the school year that strikes me as so sad? It is a feeling that seems, at times, like the return of the swallows to San Juan Capistrano: annual, dependable, predictable. Perhaps it is the simple fact that most of us, when our respective commencement ceremonies come rolling around from May to June, are frankly exhausted, delirious, usually sick with early summer colds, buried under a mound of grading. But I think there is also something else there, a wistful nostalgia, a brief moment when our students mirror ourselves in strange, unexpected ways. Except, unlike our students, we know how the subsequent acts may play out.

This vibration of bittersweet memory and identification is highly variable. Some years, I have turned on my heel and walked into summer with nary a glance backward. Good riddance to bad rubbish! But for others, the moment is laden with meaning and memory. Graduations of course are institutional moments of high-flying, bloated, and hyperbolic rhetoric about potential laid out before a group of mostly hung-over, soon-to-be ex-undergraduates, as their assorted families witness the blood libel, crabby and sartorially diverse, kibitzing in scopophilic awe, cameras flashing over Ann Taylor and Dress Barn, Brooks Brothers and JC Penney.

The ceremonial aspects of the graduation ceremony are familiar to most faculty members, for this is not our first time at the rodeo, and we’ve donned these robes, hot and itchy and uncomfortable, before. But graduation is one of the few moments when the institution must reveal itself to the outside world, and for what it’s worth, most schools try to make the most of it, parading about in medieval squalor. Pageantry and polyester and ridiculous maces and inspirational speakers with their self-evident messages, as well as the seemingly endless drone of names and degrees, can make most graduation ceremonies seem like waterboarding.

The range of ceremonies can also be rather telling. From the intimate leafy venues of the baccalaureate college, with well-dressed parents and buffet tables heavy with shrimp and tropical fruit laid out under tents, to mass ceremonies held in civic auditoriums devoid of natural light, not to mention coffee, they all have in common a certain pomposity that I suppose is necessary, a symbolic reference to the value of the degree, of the work, of the intellectual journey. But these material differences also speak to the ways in which different degrees from different institutions circulate in the world beyond the university.

For many of us, not from the landed gentry but allowed, begrudgingly, to participate on the margins, graduation was more like an expulsion than a celebration, the end of a particular dream state. As the last of the balloons fell and non-unionized employees were sweeping up the assorted debris, some of us woke with a start, as if from a bad dream. What before had been student collegiality, a collective of meritocracy, becomes in an instant rather material, when we realize we aren’t going to Europe for our gap year before Yale Law, or we shan’t be taking that job at McKinsey, or doing a nifty unsalaried internship at MOMA. My own graduation had this tenor rather strongly, in the chilling realization that I had no plan, had been given no plan, and needed to find a job, fast. I may not have had a plan, but I had acquired a rather high-toned accent, and soon found myself answering phones three thousand miles away from the dreaming spires.

Of course, now, years later, some of the bitter in the sweet is the memory of this recognition that college did not foreclose the real, economic world we are grounded in, but rather, at least in my case, just offered a respite from it, the sweet illusion of privilege. Those of us with stronger training and direction, better mentorship, voraciously educated or careerist parents, knew this fact, of course, and planned, like the proverbial summer squirrel, for winter: kissing ass, working hard with an eye towards graduate or professional school, lining up references, investing in a Brooks Brothers suit. The crickets, who played all summer, who sang their beautiful song, who took the intellectual curiosity bit about undergraduate liberal-arts curricula seriously, came to the chilling recognition that assailing that peak only led into a deeper, darker forest, usually about the same time one’s polyester gown was returned and the school chums drove off to board a flight to Paris at JFK. We, who had sung our beautiful songs, were left with the unenviable task of bushwhacking without a compass.

This year, at the conclusion of my capstone course, I wrote a somewhat sentimental email to my senior students, which said, in part:

For most of you too, this is also the end of your senior year and thus your collegiate career, which is a powerful moment in your lives, although at this point you most likely feel more overwhelmed and tired. I know I did as my senior year crashed to an end. But as you enjoy the last of your time in college, and embark on, well, really, the rest of your lives, you are not now in a position to appreciate what [Prestigious Lil’ College] has given you, and will continue to give you, in your formation as individuals, citizens, and intellectuals. You will come to appreciate in different ways, more finely and perhaps also more fiercely, the depth of your collegiate career at [PLC], depths which in my own experience become sharper not duller, more meaningful, as the years go by.

The metaphor gets wobbly at the end, as I dashed this off before heading home to grade essays, but the message speaks to my own experience of graduation as a marker of experience, a moment of ambivalent change that can only be understood later, with more distance. A sharp depth, however, seems more profound, speaks more to what I really wanted to tell my students, than a deeper depth, although of course that is also implicit. Because for me, graduation is sharp, the cutting edge of a blade, one of several distinct instants in my life of before and after, a dropping off into dark water.

And perhaps this is why the end of the year is somewhat sad for me, not only because on occasion we are saying goodbye to talented students we have come to appreciate, but also because we know that the future often does not play out like a commencement speech. In our students’ faces we see the hope and exhaustion we also felt, long ago, on an early summer morning, we see ourselves written quite strongly there. But some of us also see and remember the forest, the instant we realized we were profoundly lost, and worry and wonder about the journey through it, for our students, and indeed still for ourselves.

Bloodsport

2008-05-20T02:31:00.006-05:00

I was becoming more and more isolated in the splendor of my office. It was a tiring little game once the glamor of being student council president wore off. I longed to return to the potato patch and raise hell with kids who didn’t know the difference between Weejuns and Old Maine trotters. But those kids grew up and wore tons of eye-makeup, iridescent pink fingernail polish and scratched each other’s eyes out over the boy with the metalflake, candy apple red ’55 Chevy with four on the floor. There was no place to go back to. No place to go to. College was going to be like high school, only worse. But I gotta go. I don’t get that degree and I’m another secretary. No thanks. I got to get it and head for the big city. Got to hang on. That’s what Carl told me once, you got to hang on. It would be nice to talk to Carl. God, it would be nice to talk to someone who wasn’t fucked up.

— Rita Mae Brown

This blog has not been following the Democratic presidential contest too carefully, partially because its author seeks to be resistant to easy polemic, which unfortunately has tended to characterize the contest so far, but also because the balls have remained largely in the air, although there is a strong feeling now for most about where they will fall. But more importantly has been my own sense of ambivalence over choosing: a veritable embarrassment of riches, as much as one can say that for presidential candidates in the United States at this moment, which is to say, imperfectly and perhaps ironically. This putative richness of course is representational, but also exists in relation to the lifting the socio-political pall that has fallen over the United States since the turn of the century under its current political leadership, which is a polite way of saying, well, lots of things.

So, my aim here is not partisan politics, of which I remain, at least in the current contest and at the current moment, somewhat disinterested in, although natürlich I have made my own choice in the matter. Rather, it does seek to engage some interesting observations made regarding the leading candidate over the past few weeks. The most immediate is the subject of a recent ill-considered editorial that is making the rounds across the interwebs. But another is a piece a few weeks ago by Maureen Dowd that sought to consider why it would be that Barack Obama seemingly cannot connect with the working-class people and their communities that his own youth is firmly rooted in.

The question of full-blooded American identity as deployed by Kathleen Parker is easy enough to dismiss almost out of hand: incoherent as it is, it is rather simple work to cherry-pick the piece not only for its historical inconsistencies but its reliance on the murky concept of blood, the one thing that, remarkably enough, has generally not been an organizing principle in American juridical tradition. Of course, blood here really means race, and some commentators have drawn the obvious connections between American identity, blood, race, and whiteness.

Dowd, admittedly not one of my favorite journalistic commentators, and her foray into the cultural politics of Obama’s perceptual class anxiety, strikes at notes familiar to most professionals, racialized or otherwise, who have had to significantly transform themselves on the pathway to success. She writes, not without a strange dose of smugness,

“It must be hard for Obama, having applied all his energy over the years to rising above the rough spots in his background, making whites comfortable with him, striving to become the sophisticated, silky political star who looks supremely comfortable in a tux. Now he must go into reverse and stoop to conquer with cornball photo ops.
[…] It’s hard not to be who you are, but it’s doubly hard to be who you’ve strived not to be. Obama not only has to figure out how to unwind with a Bud. He has to rewind his life.”

But is this not the putative American Dream? To leave behind our old selves like so many used clothes and emerge from our chrysalis state into something more beautiful, more capable, more free? Isn’t this American success writ large? To move on up, to make one’s self better through class advancement? The fact is that this transformative social politic remains, at best, available only to certain Americans. The rest of us, to a large extent, must continue to labor under our old selves, even when those old selves have long outlived their usefulness, not to mention their relevance. Self-transformation can be an awfully tricky thing in a white supremacist and anti-intellectual society.

Obama’s story of self-improvement and class transformation through education and opportunity lies at the heart of the very processes of the formation of the professoriate of color, and ostensibly what we seek to bring to our students, again racialized or otherwise, similarly situated. While Parker’s narrative of race forever delimits citizens of color to the margins of authenticity, reinscribing the racialist, anti-republican politics of the 18th and 19th centuries, Dowd’s critique punishes Obama, and by extension all accomplished people of color, for being Zip Coons, striving for something that is just beyond their purported natural reach. It is a curious racialist pastoral, one embraced across the political and social spectrum, not the least of which would be the university. But it does little to address the dynamism of our society, much less those of us who actually live within it.

There is no required rewind, for the simple fact of the matter is that education and experience do, in fact, change the student, irrevocably. That is the point, arguably, of education. That does not erase what existed before, but rather, as in Freud’s invocation of Rome as an allegory for the mind, layers different experiences and selves on top of one another. Self-reflection tends not to be a strength in American media or political culture, but if one were to reflect on the strange career of race, class, and gender in our society, one would be forced to recognize, a bit more forcefully than either Dowd or Parker, that the interstices of the three largely determines who we were, who we are, who we hope to become, and a host of other life factors that are material as well as representational, empirical as well as ephemeral.

Just as the spectre of the full-blooded American elides our complex and violent history of national formation, the house of which we continue to live in rather vividly, so the pantomime of ersatz populism masks a decidedly more brutal regime of class warfare. And both boil down to the question of essence, of true selves constantly elusive to the American experience, yet irrationally and violently insisted upon. Do I, in my most private moments, seek a return to the prelapsarian state, to the real me, under all the other real mes, the really really real me? Not on your life. Like Gertrude Stein once famously said of Oakland, “There is no there there.” And in this refusal there is elegance, which perhaps is what Obama might be touching: a truer, deeper vein of the American character, which also explains why it must be so violently disavowed.

Madonna: A Comment

2008-05-18T15:04:00.005-05:00

The new fascination with the diva as kitsch, a laughingstock, a reptile in a dress who cussed like a trooper and threw drunken tantrums in public places, was the result, not only of a contradiction intrinsic to the gay sensibility, but of a contradiction intrinsic to two extremely important things, to the very nature of glamour and the medium of film itself […] They provided the impetus for a form of gay mockery that originated in our disillusionment with our once “empowering” role models who, as they became older and lost their position of preeminence in American society, could not sustain their prestige in the eyes of their gay fans […] What happened to the real diva also happened to the imaginary one, so that the fate of these two mythical beings was closely linked. They had become part of us; we had incorporated their style onto our own. When they declined, we declined; when they were discredited, we were discredited.

— Daniel Harris

Madonna recently released her latest album, Hard Candy, to decidedly mixed reviews, the strangely overriding note seemingly being “Isn’t it great she can still walk and talk?” I am hardly an avid Madonna fan now, imbued as I am in the feeling that most popular culture, in its ephemera, cannot answer the questions I face now as a middle-aged man. I have returned to literature, to the somber embrace of private words and images, personally interpreted in the quiet of my garret.

Yet, Madonna, her image and sound, do form a soundtrack to my life, even if such a soundtrack is now but an echo rather than vibrantly pounding, an occasion for sentimental nostalgia. What once proved endlessly fascinating for a more innocent American public (not to mention a generation of overly enthused feminist scholars) is now inundated in a sea of flesh: part-time Lolitas and full-time Gold Diggers now shake their posteriors lasciviously before cameras, and the spectacle of unleashed female sexuality, so beguilingly apparent in Madonna’s earlier work, now all seems rather old hat. And while Rolling Stone may proclaim, incoherently, “name another near-fifty-year-old who can still rock a hot crotch shot on her album cover,” to paraphrase Andrew Holleran, the thousandth crotch shot is not what the first one was.

Gay men and the iconography of the star has been the subject of much debate and speculation: how gay men came to identify with the star and her glamour, the social and political implications of such identificatory displacement, the use value of such adoration from the position of Capital. On the release of this latest album, and through some heated discussions with other gay men on Madonna, I began to think through the decomposition of the star, but in particular the personal eroding of Madonna’s star image.

Again, part of this is hardly Madonna’s fault. Our popular culture is now a 24-hour media-saturated abattoir that is fleeting, scopophilic, and full of schadenfraude and glee. What once made Madonna so spectacularly special is gone, and therefore, so is much of her iconographic power. As a long-term survivor of popular culture, there is little left she could do anyway, other than perhaps a more radical mutilation of the body itself, akin to Michael Jackson. But such changes do not demonstrate relevance, only spectacle. Changing one’s hair color or wearing outrageous clothing will clearly no longer cut it.

And one of the most distressing aspects of the new album for me was not the music, which is appropriately banal, but the still photography associated with it, which does indeed show Madonna ‘rocking’ a crotch shot in boxer’s gear and a unitard. But, present there too is the tell-tale marking of entropic decomposition: the hair is wrong, matron-like and dull; her skin coloring is off, waxy and ashen; the ridiculous open-legged poses in ostensibly sexual clothing, the obligatory salacious tongue displayed, only sets off just how unsexy the whole performance is. Isn’t there a better way to reflect middle-aged sexuality and sensuality beyond the patently obvious? If there is (and of course, there is), Madonna has not discovered it, or perhaps she feels she cannot afford it. Apparently, she’s dancing as fast as she can.

I suppose for many younger gay men, Madonna still strikes at some heart of their identity. She did for me, as well, when I too was younger. But this dissonance is not necessarily only a paean to middle age curmudgeonry, although there is some of that here too. Rather, it is, in some larger part, reflective of an evolution beyond the mere symbolic, beyond the star as displaced apotheosis of voice, of identification and desire. Quite frankly, I don’t need Madonna anymore, because I have myself, in its fractured, curious, confused, questioning glory.

In thinking through this point, I returned again to Daniel Harris’s rather smart disquisition on the star and gay men, “The Death of Camp,” where he locates the decomposition of classic camp star culture for gay men in post-Stonewall socio-economic politics, when gay men no longer needed the cipher of the star to articulate their inner selves. This argument is compelling, for it locates the increasingly abuse of the star (“the change from reverence to ridicule, from Joan Crawford as the bewitching siren to Joan Crawford as the ax-wielding, child-beating, lesbian drunk…”) in a hyperconsciousness of her degradation, through aging and the contrast of image and reality, which strips gay men of their cult of adoration and forces them, on some level, into the light of day through a recognition of materiality and an evisceration of the glamour of the image. In Harris’s perhaps cynical calculations, gay men do not evolve to higher level of consciousness however, but rather replace the cult of the Star with shopping and other mainstream consumerist practices.

This is most likely truer than not, and to be fair, aside from the most fiercely engaged partisans, Madonna is an ironic icon for most gay men, a decidedly guilty pleasure, or as one gay man put it to me recently, “That bitch can put on a good show.” However, one of the most compelling aspects of Harris’s essay is his discussion of the literary end of the cult of the Star for gay men confronted by the HIV crisis, by mortality, by the body itself, that for many men, unhooks representation from reality. Harris quotes John Weir’s The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket, one of the most powerful eighties fictions of AIDS, as the protagonist recognizes the ineffectiveness of star worship upon confronting his impending death—

"Who’s the main character in my life? … Who is starring in my life? It can’t be me… I’m just a walk-on… Not even a supporting player. Not even a cameo appearance by a long-forgotten star. I’m just an extra. No one else is starring in my life. That’s why they’re halting production. It’s a bad investment for the studio."

So, invariably, part of the fall of Madonna for me, and the greater decomposition of Star iconography, is a recognition that, in the end, we ourselves are the stars of our lives, we must be the stars of our own lives. As comforting as the image of the Star might be, it strikes me as far more important to turn towards one’s own self, and invest in that particular limelight, even or perhaps especially if one is not quite ready for one’s close-up.

Five Favourite Revolutionaries: Richard Rodriguez

2008-05-10T02:25:00.005-05:00

St. Augustine writes from his cope of dust that we are restless hearts, for earth is not our true home. Human unhappiness is evidence of our immortality. Intuition tells us we are meant for some other city. Elizabeth Taylor, quoted in a magazine article of twenty years ago, spoke of cerulean Richard Burton days on her yacht, days that were nevertheless undermined by the elemental private reflection: This must end. […] I have never looked for utopia on a map. Of course I believe in human advancement. I believe in medicine, in astrophysics, in washing machines. But my compass takes its cardinal point from tragedy. If I respond to the metaphor of spring, I nevertheless learned, from my Mexican father, from my Irish nuns, to count on winter. The point of Eden for me, for us, is not approach but expulsion.

— Richard Rodriguez

Richard Rodriguez is a liberal, not a revolutionary of the barricade sort, and as to whether he remains a true favourite is debatable. I feel I have lived within his work so long that I can’t remember a time before. A certain listless ennui has set in: Her again? Which triggers another thought: is there actually anything left to be said about Rodriguez that hasn’t already been played in stereo? But in terms of revolutions of thought, of important shifts in pathway and standpoint, yes, Rodriguez still counts. Rodriguez, of course, is the bête noire of Chicana/o Studies, the greatest sell-out of all, the face that launched a thousand articles, that still even today attempt to undermine his work, as if picking over the bones of a very old carcass that has been striped clean.

Why Chicana/o intellectuals would still engage so vociferously with Rodriguez speaks to his power as a particular type of avatar. His three autobiomythographies, Hunger of Memory, Days of Obligation, and Brown, have unevenly traced out the Mexican American condition, but most critics in the academy still focus on his first work, Hunger of Memory, for its advocacy of assimilation and its stances against bilingual education and affirmative action. Because Rodriguez is primarily a journalist (and at the time, a polemicist), his critiques were weakly supported and rather easily dismissed, but the critical reaction to them revealed more about the fears of the Chicana/o professoriate than the work itself, which of course was fascinating to me. What becomes a thought criminal most? Apparently devising a million ways to label him wrong, over and over again.

Hunger of Memory was a standard on course syllabi in the eighties, assigned by liberal white teachers to spark lively discussion on American society, race, and immigration (a cheap trick), or by professors of colour to display inappropriate political thoughts (another cheap trick). But what little of the discussions I remember from my seminars was relatively myopic, both in using any text as evidence of experience and the thoughtless, knee-jerk dismissal of its perceptions. There was little detailed investigation into Rodriguez’s arguments and stylistic presentation, giving way rather to an expulsion through identity politics.

This intellectual deadlock started to ease a bit by the early nineties, when it was clear that Rodriguez was a) not a flash in the pan (with his second, stylish anthology Days of Obligation) and b) with the shift towards cultural studies, which sought to reevaluate his work. The complexities of his political illness, his reasons for alienation from the Mexican American socio-political Left, and especially his sexuality (he was famously closeted upon the publication of Hunger of Memory), began to figure more prominently in the analyses of his work. This was also the time I started to re-read his essays, and uncover some sort of strange lineage for gay Chicanismo, along with some others, many of whom were also gay Chicanos.

The effects of this reappraisal were mixed. On one hand, suddenly it seemed every Chicano Homo was talking at every conference about Rodriguez as our bastard father, as the shame we must live down if we were ever to join the ranks of bright, shiny warriors for Chicanismo. On the other, there was space to begin mining his work for greater meaning, even if that meant a certain professional risk: a peer warned me at the time I would never get a job doing Rodriguez. And indeed, as my study progressed, other graduate students began to use the fact of my work on Rodriguez to dismiss me, transferring Rodriguez’s political stain onto me. All of which taught me much more of the unconscious fears and mobbing effects of the profession than anything else, but was depressing nonetheless.

What I resented most about such criticisms was that they were easy, too lazy, simple. If you want to position someone or some work in opposition, at least know it coherently. Many Chicana/o scholars and graduate students did not, but rather had taken a cursory reading, or worse, a reading of the secondary criticism, and reached conclusions that were as firm as Gibraltar. This is not necessarily surprising, since academics are as vulnerable, ironically enough, to received knowledge as anyone else. But, in this twist of intellectual fate, what drew me to Rodriguez in the nineties was exactly his position as iconoclast, as thought criminal, as sick aunt.

And he is sick, interestingly enough. While I appreciate the beauty of his language, the astuteness of his insights, the cleverness of his writing, he is an ambivalent father figure. If his alienation does determine a particular gay and Mexican American relationship to assimilation, culture, and values, than that is a decidedly mixed legacy. Of course, this is also a problem of reading. While texts are forever, the author is not, and his perspectives have shifted and changed (his most rigorous work remains Days of Obligation; Brown is stylistically lazy and Hunger of Memory too minimalist). But for many of us, we remain stuck in his Ur-text of pain, Hunger of Memory. And one of the reasons, arguably, is that this is the work that speaks to our own experiences of assimilation, of shame, of the electric trauma of becoming an educated person in a white supremacist society.

And this is an aspect of the critical foray that I have found distressing in Rodriguez and the reception of his work. His delineations of those traumas, or as one early critic put it, “difficult to write, difficult to read,” have not triggered sympathetic understanding (or even sympathetic dismissal), but rather a rejection that is Freudian in its vociferousness, the repression of something too close, too personal, too close to the bone. There is little generosity in reading schemes of Rodriguez, and this lack of generosity demonstrates, on the surface, the ideological rigors scholars of colour face in maintaining appropriate socio-political positions in their work and their personal lives. But more deeply, it also uncovers, arguably, our loathing of the faggot, of the vulnerable sissy, as Randy A. Rodriguez so revealing analysed in what is probably the best interpretive piece on Rodriguez’s work.

If it is true that Rodriguez is, in Randy’s analysis, El Malinche, the gay version of the race traitor so integral to Chicana feminist theorising, then how does one embrace this crown of thorns? Here the differences between men and women are instructive, for gay men have no overarching critique of gender, so our male paradigms stand alone, in glorious masculine individuality, instead as avatars of greater consciousness. This is why, among myriad other reasons, Rodriguez is an ambivalent figure for me. There is, to paraphrase Lee Edelman, no future there.

If this strange isolation is indicative of gay Chicanismo I cannot tell for sure, but suffice it to say that Rodriguez has been one of the most important intellectual interlocutors for me, both in his criminality as well as for exposing his neurotic trauma in an almost primal sense, for probing the wound relentlessly. His stylistics speaks to how far we have truly mastered the English language and made it our own, and his work is worth reading for the writing alone, although at times it can become baroque, too precious, too enamoured with itself, especially Brown. (A fond memory: Seeing Teresa de Lauretis doing a close reading of Rodriguez's essay "Late Victorians"— the soaring metaphors, the literary allusions, the deep meanings of Rodriguez's turns of phrase: delicious!)

Desire and identification drive much readerly relationships, and the autobiomythographies of Rodriguez are the most compelling of all, for they trigger both revulsion and desire/identification simultaneously. This combination has taught me quite a lot about not only Chicano gayness but also intellectual iconoclasm, its power and its limitations, as well as figuring ambivalence into reading and interpretation.

Five Favourite Revolutionaries: Andrew Holleran

2008-05-07T16:02:00.004-05:00

I have been a full-time fag for the past five years, I realized the other day. Everyone I know is gay, everything I do is gay, all my fantasies are gay. I am what Gus called those people we used to see in the discos, bars, baths, all the time—remember? Those people we used to see EVERYWHERE, every time we went out, so that you wanted to call the police and have them arrested?—I am a doomed queen. […] But let me assure you, my novel is not about fags. It is about a few characters who just happen to be gay (I know that’s a cliché, but it’s true). After all, most fags are as boring as straight people—they start businesses with lovers and end up in Hollywood, Florida, with dogs and double-knit slacks and I have no desire to write about them. What can one say about success? Nothing! But the failures—that tiny subspecies of homosexual, the doomed queen, who puts the car in gear and drives right off the cliff? That fascinates me. […] It was those whom Christ befriended, not the assholes in the ad agencies uptown who go to St. Kitts in February! Those people bore me to DEATH! […] THAT is what I want to write about— why life is SAD. And what people do for Love (everything)—whether they’re gay or not.

— Andrew Holleran

Because by and large LGBT people are born within the heterosexual family, we must consequently re-learn what it means to be ourselves within the social and cultural norms of gayness, once we achieve an acceptable escape velocity from heteronormativity. This is a rather old-fashioned perspective, for nowadays many in the LGBT community are wrapped up in homonormativity, a resurgent parallel structure of propriety that, contrary to popular opinion, is not really new as much as newly fashionable. Bourgeois gay teens proclaim their sexualities and take their cute boyfriends to prom, baby dykes are senior class presidents, and everyone is supposedly OK with gay.

While the class and geographical dimensions of this normalization of lesbian and gay identity are relatively limited, the perception is that this acceptance is the new norm. After all, we had Will and Grace, didn’t we? IKEA produces commercials for us, don’t they? Political candidates are willing to mention us without a sneer, aren’t they (even if they still do nothing tangible for us)? Nowadays, in short, many LGBT people seem to want to be the asshole who goes to St. Kitts in February.

In any event, for many of us still, our experience actually hews to the older model, of learning gayness from peers and lovers, from crafting personae from the raw material of our foundational standpoints of alterity and anomie with like-minded fellow travelers away from the family, in the cauldron of the gay ghetto. For the two generations of gay men and lesbians after Stonewall, moving beyond the social and cultural practices of the bars and closed societies into the light meant also producing different kinds of cultural production, literature, and arts that reflected new meanings of gayness, new codes of behavior and experience that assimilated the political principles of Gay Liberation but also spoke to a deeper, quotidian senses of what gayness meant.

Andrew Holleran was one of a group of gay writers who began in the seventies to delineate a literary universe for the post-Stonewall gay man. While gay literature predates the riots that form the Procrustean bed of the contemporary LGBT moment, typically that literature was not written for lesbians or gay men specifically, but oriented towards the heterosexual reader as audience, for convincing potential straight allies that we deserved pity, not punishment (the lesbian pulp fiction of Ann Bannon is a notable exception in this regard). Holleran and other lesbian and gay writers of the seventies began to break with this receptive strategy, and to write from a position inside the gay world, to offer lesbian and gay readers literature written from the perspective of gayness not as illness or alterity, but as epistemological centre.

I first read Holleran’s Dancer From the Dance, his classic of gay ghetto love and life, in college, when I began devouring gay writing in an effort to learn not only what it may mean to be gay, but also to consider the artistic reflection of experiences I was now integrally a part of that were grounded in gay difference, not a mimesis of heterosexual norms. I knew many doomed queens then, and in some ways I too was one as well. The melodramatic antics of our young undergraduates were taken, in part, from the literary construction of a gay subject that focused on questions of satellite cultural norms and values (tragic love, sex, cruising, drama, camp), as well as the learning of gay descriptive vernacular that was reflected in the real, live gay people around me. While Kramer’s politics were sharper, Mordden was funnier, and White more seriously literary, Holleran seduced with the beauty of his language, his hypnotic and dreamy passages describing what heretofore had either been mundane or horrifying. Holleran’s writing gave beauty to the sites of our lives: the gay bar, the cruising strip, the one-night stand, the lonely hours alone in apartments in the city.

As Holleran aged beyond the Manhattan/Fire Island scene, his work continued to resonate. Ground Zero is perhaps the most beautiful literary memorial to the lives of the men lost to HIV disease, and The Beauty of Men and In September, the Light Changes both wryly capture the bittersweet yet empowering nature of aging in a gay culture that still largely considers 40 to be social and sexual death. Characteristic of his oeuvre is the focus on language, on description, on the dreamwork of gayness; on creating, through words, the materiality of a gay sensibility that may not exactly match individual experience, but works towards giving the gay world a schematic infrastructure of meaning and emotive power that is portable, malleable, and relevant.

I may not be a regular traveler to Fire Island (in fact, I have never been), but the detailing of the norms of a particular gay urban world in Holleran’s writing has given me an aesthetic sensibility that is useful beyond simple transparency of experience. A modus of description that figures my own life and experiences within a communal aesthetic standpoint: a collective that while fractious and contested, is also mine. This aesthetic and literary project was, in the seventies, revolutionary. No one thought it would sell, for one. As one of Holleran’s characters observes, “Those things may be amusing to us, but who, after all, wants to read about sissies?” In the end, it turned out that the gay literary universe begun by Holleran and others was able to rise above such marginal utilitarianism, and not only by the simple fact that, of course, it is sissies that want to read about sissies, but also by giving the gay world the cultural clothing it needed to begin to see itself as whole, specific, original, and not simply derivative— a distinct standpoint in conversation with heteronormativity yet unique.

Five Favourite Revolutionaries: Joan Didion

2008-05-04T11:58:00.006-05:00

We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of the narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience. Or at least we do for a while. I am talking here of a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling. I suppose this period began around 1966 and continued until 1971. During those five years I appeared, on the face of it, a competent enough member of some community or another […] This was an adequate enough performance, as improvisations go. The only problem was that my entire education, everything I had ever been told or had told myself, insisted that the production was never meant to be improvised: I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did […] In what would probably be the middle of my life I wanted still to believe in the narrative and in the narrative’s intelligibility, but to know that one could change the sense with every cut was to begin to perceive the experience as rather more electrical than ethical.

— Joan Didion

Some people, perhaps many people, would hardly consider Joan Didion revolutionary. She is not exactly everyone’s cup of tea. Her writings, especially those about American society in the sixties, struck many readers at the time and afterward as overly self-involved, politically reactionary, and strangely disconnected from the flows of the zeitgeist. Yet, it is precisely this disconnection, this anomie from the passions of people, politics, and society, that distinguish her writing for me, as if in her dissonance she attains a sharper understanding of what is happening, a critical eye that cuts through hyperbole like a laser.

I cannot remember when I first read her work, perhaps it was her famous essay on Haight Ashbury hippies or the stylistic paradigm copied by younger, popular authors of the late eighties and early nineties, like Bret Easton Ellis and Donna Tartt, that brought me back to the source. But the essay I remember most, the essay I re-read often and quote from, is “The White Album,” reproduced in the anthology of the same name. For me, this is pure Didion, the pinnacle of her descriptive methodology that flows through her most recent, affecting work, The Year of Magical Thinking.

In fact, reading and re-reading this latter work, I was struck by how the text resonated even more strongly with a familiarity of her other, older works, and how The Year of Magical Thinking was the logical place her work would lead: scrupulous, disinfected, painfully introspective. Didion spares no one, including herself, in her quest for understanding, for comprehension, for critical perspective. This bracing rigour has always drawn me to her work.

Of course, the particular resonances of her life that match mine are compelling. A native Californian, her interpretive standpoints are grounded in loss and the cataloguing of change, not necessarily via sentimentality, but through a desire to make sense, and in this manner, connect. Critical reception of her work has often focused on her disconnection, her idiosyncratic self-appraisal, her bikinis and Hawaii and neuroses, but often such criticism misses this larger point of disconnected connection. Just because one is outside does not mean one cannot see in, and use that position to offer a useful descriptive.

Didion’s perspective is shaped by the foundational influences of her generation, the “Silent” one, and refracted through leaving home in pursuit of a metropolitan career in New York, and thus seeing California and herself from a different standpoint. Her return to the state in the sixties, becoming a leading mainstream journalistic chronicler for its tempestuous transformations of the era, gave her writing a perhaps unnaturally powerful resonance, one naturally resented by those who read the events of the time in another light.

Yet, Didion’s moonscape-style of description is apropos to a certain western, Californian interpretive stance: living on the edge of what is possible, physically and emotionally and spiritually and materially. She is one of several leading authorial voices that have attempted to delineate a Californian perspective on the world, and her sparse prose and wry emotional observations, as sharp as a scalpel, are in some ways akin to what André Breton once said of the work of Frida Kahlo: a ribbon around a bomb.

What my identification with her dissonance, her dislocation, her clinical introspection of the wound, potentially says about my own standpoint is revealing. We search for narrative, and upon finding none, attempt to make sense of the resulting chaos, partially out of an implicit, trained desire for narrative, but more importantly stemming from an unhealthy attraction to the distinctions between expectation and reality, between empiricism and dreamwork, between utopia and dystopia, the lines of which are closer to the surface in a place like California, but are present everywhere in the American unconscious.

Didion taught me a new way of making sense of being Californian, where I am from, and flowing from that standpoint a rigorous stylistic technique for viewing the world— that the ribbon is as important as the bomb.

Five Favourite Revolutionaries: E.M. Forster & Howards End

2008-05-02T11:41:00.007-05:00

So the Wilcox episode fell into the background, leaving behind it memories of sweetness and horror that mingled, and the sisters pursued the life that Helen had commended. They talked to each other and other people, they filled the tall thin house at Wickham Place with those whom they liked or could befriend. They even attended public meetings. In their own fashion they cared deeply about politics, though not as politicians would have us care; they desired that public life should mirror whatever is good in the life within […] Not out of them are the shows of history erected: the world would be a gray, bloodless place where it entirely composed of Miss Schlegels. But, the world being what it is, perhaps they shine out in it like stars.

— E.M. Forster

Most academics can point to a certain text, a singular work that shifted their perception of the world into before and after. Above and beyond a simple ‘favourite book,’ as academicians and intellectuals we develop perhaps overly strong and anachronistic identifications with texts, narrative, and characters in a society that no longer truly reads. For me, that one book, that moment when the scales fell away, is Howards End, E.M. Forster’s evocative and thoughtful 1910 novel.

I studied Passage to India, A Room With a View, and Maurice in college, of course, but only read Howards End in the second year of graduate school, for pleasure, and immediately fell swooning into its narrative of intellect and Capital, beauty and techne, and the struggle to synthesise the two via the mechanism of the Schlegel Sisters, Margaret and Helen, and their complex interactions with the Wilcox family, avatars of imperial capitalism.

Forster’s language, its languid beauty in unfolding the story of Meg and Helen and their relationships to the Wilcox clan, opened a window onto the pleasures of writing and description that was seductive. The Schlegel sisters serve as a foil for the dynamic contrast between reason and passion, counterpoised against the decidedly anti-intellectual accumulation standpoint of the Wilcox family. The Wilcoxes, in their patriarchal patriotism and firm belief in Empire and Mammon, live still in the capitals of the world, perhaps now more than ever.

In the end, Forster allows the Schlegels to win this contest, to triumph over the Wilcoxes through joining their values together, giving us a literary conclusion that is rarely, if ever, found in real life. While perhaps overly utopian in its sensibilities, Forster grounds a humanistic future in the Schlegels, and their principles of connection. The epigraph of the novel, “Only Connect,” speaks both to the immediate desire to park the intellectualism of beauty and soul within the precincts of predatory Capitalism, and the larger need for connection in a world torn asunder by distraction, greed, and material desire and envy.

Meg, in her pragmatism, sees the need to join the two legacies together. Helen rejects Meg’s compromise as a betrayal of idealism, although in the end comes to live under the auspices of the Wilcoxes, not to mention her own annual allowance of £600. The tension between Meg and Helen is driven by the problematic figure of Leonard Bast, striving member of the Edwardian underclass who is a cipher for the fear of “the Abyss” of poverty and destitution, but also for determining a certain political commitment. These aspects of the novel, while striking the sensitive mind as somewhat ugly in their dimensions, are still vivid today, as abstraction as well as literal cognates for the struggles of the principled intellectual, especially those of us who do not come from money and privilege. Meg and Helen are allegories for the professoriate, and the anxiety we find within ourselves and our profession.

The narrative engine of the life of the mind and how, if at all, it could survive in the new, brutalist industrialism still challenges us one hundred years after Howards End was written. The questions Howards End poses remain central to our understandings of ourselves, as thinkers and intellectuals, standing in relation to Capitalism and the meat grinder of development and the blind, uncritical amassing of wealth and things. While I do not think the solution proffered by Forster is the best of all possible worlds, it does offer, in its literary imagination, one way of preserving what is arguably the best of human spirit through a commitment to survival over principle, and but moreover really a synthesis of the two.

Many of us are ostensibly more devotees of the latter than the former, but in truth we need to figure out a mechanism for both survival and principle if we are to thrive. This is what the Schlegels graft onto the capital engine of the Wilcoxes, and what many of us continue to struggle with today, in an anti-intellectual society that regards academicians as irrelevant freaks of nature.

My last summer at Sadistic College, my compadres, Mr. Gordo, and I spent many a leisurely afternoon by the lake or evenings around dinner plates, reading aloud the entirety of Howards End. Not only was this quaint 19th century entertainment charming in its social bonding, but allowed us all to envelop ourselves in the narrative as a communal act of engagement, of connection, reflecting Forster’s own desire to bring together people and ideas in productive and nurturing relationship. Howards End, for me, was the beginning of the conversation, not the end, continuing to resonate within my own life.

Five Favourite Revolutionaries: Stuart Hall

2008-05-01T02:32:00.007-05:00

Revolution: what is it? We live in a society where the word typically describes either innovation in consumerism or is used in ways that are decidedly beyond its immediate capacities. ‘Revolutionary’ describes everything from the latest formulation of Tide to musical hucksters shilling for Mammon. Everyone from the poststructuralist pundit to the endowed heiress wants a piece of revolution nowadays.

On the political Left, revolution is imbued in a certain romance, stemming originally from the French Revolution of the 18th century but more closely tied to the development of Marxist thought in the 20th century (which itself borrowed quite a lot from the violence of the French model), flowing from Soviet nomenklatura and the socio-political discourses of the sixties. Revolution speaks to wiping the slate clean, a profound and common desire of the American mind, and as such, hardly revolutionary in and of itself.

For the student and intellectual, tracing out revolutionary intellectual moments may be somewhat more tactile. The pallid accusation that university academics work to indoctrinate their students does not, of course, speak to the idiosyncratic formation of the mind that is so integral to intellectual thought, which here primarily means the ability to think above and beyond what one already knows— to learn something new, and see something differently. Revolutions in thought, like political revolutions, rarely have predetermined endings, but arguably do have distinct and discrete beginnings.

So, in honour of May Day, I have decided to share some of my own revolutionary thinkers over the next five days: five intellectuals and cultural producers who, through their work, have informed my own particular formation as an intellectual and citizen. Five days, five revolutions in my own thought. And the first, and perhaps most influential in theoretical approach, has been the work and career of Stuart Hall.

Once you enter the politics of the end of the essential black subject you are plunging headlong into the maelstrom of a continuously contingent, unguaranteed, political argument and debate: a critical politics, a politics of criticism. You can no longer conduct black politics through the strategy of a simple set of reversals, putting in the place of the bad old essential white subject, the new essentially good black subject. Now, that formulation may seem to threaten the collapse of an entire political world. Alternatively, it may be greeted with extraordinary relief at the passing away of what at one time seemed to be a necessary fiction. Namely, either that all black people are good or indeed that all black people are the same.

— Stuart Hall

At an MLA interview a couple of years back for a position in Latina/o literature, I was asked who my primary intellectual interlocutor was, and I responded without hesitation, “Stuart Hall.” This drew an interesting reaction from one of the interviewers, who demurred that this was an unexpected answer. I didn’t have the chance to follow up on the implications of that utterance (in particular the implicit expectation of a different name), but I found the response telling, in some ways. What does Stuart Hall have to do with Latinidad?

While Hall has a distinguished and elaborate career in many areas, the most important influence on my own thinking has been his formulation away from essential identities into the cacophony of contestation and contingency, which is a very fancy way of saying there are many ways of being Latina/o, or Black, or gay, or whatever. He wasn’t the first to articulate this particular critical stance, but he was the first I had read, and subsequently, his work became central to my own approach to questions of race and sexuality, in particular the challenges of working through the complicated legacies of white supremacy, colonialism, and resurgent sixties social movements.

I first read Hall in a seminar called “The Decline of Britain” my junior year. A small class, we met weekly over dinner in a paneled room off a dining hall, and while silverware clinked on plates and the voices of students drifted under the door, we discussed the end of Empire, and changes in society and the state in the postwar United Kingdom. Hall, emigrating from Jamaica as a young man to Britain, represented in many ways the promise of the metropole to the colonial subject, as well as a new articulation, of Black Britishness that spoke to transformations in British identity. Coming out of a particular moment in student identity politics, where race and sexuality were regarded simplistically as foundational and unquestioned monoliths, where experience was the unquestioned and unexamined baseline measurement of authenticity, Hall’s formulation opened the door out of a stifling cul-de-sac.

Of course his work has been remarkably influential on thinkers across the anglophone world. There seemed a time, in the nineties, when you couldn’t swing a cat without hitting a citation of Hall. My graduate program was no exception, and I was surprised that as my fellow doctoral candidates struggled over their theses, they often used Hall in ways that raised questions about identity that were then foreclosed by their very own projects, by their insistence on rather rigid ideas about identity that exemplified themselves in rather ugly struggles over who counted as what, the hows and whys.

This critical misuse of Hall only reinforced for me the importance of the revolution his work sparked in my mind, the challenges of existing in the world of the Post, and the crumbling of the theoretical unitary subject. Hall’s own personal commitment to the possibilities of knowledge and transformation, not the least of which was taking a position at the Open University as opposed to crossing the pond to a bloated position in the Ivy League, became a positive model of intellectual engagement that lived up to its political implications, a rare bird indeed in the Business.

This realisation did not make my work theoretically impossible, but did mean I learned how to read and tread with care, how to measure and analyse in ways that spoke to the opening of possibilities through Hall’s work, rather than raising purely performative questions only to immediately shut them down. Hall pushed me to confront, seriously, what it meant to think through race and sexuality outside of the comfort zone of expectation and preconception, to own the intellectual choices I made, and make connections that expanded and enriched Latinidad beyond simply Aztec warriors and gang sociology, offering choices and pathways that were unexpected and new. And with this, he changed my way of thinking, as well as my expectations of the abilities of scholarship.

Married to the Mob

2008-04-25T20:20:00.011-05:00

And thus, very gradually just at first, Mary’s finer perceptions began to coarsen.

— Radclyffe Hall

A few weeks ago, I traveled to a conference whose focus intersected with my own research and teaching interests. There was the faint air of reunion about the event, with Prancilla and some compatriots from various past lives in attendance, in a large city much livelier and urbane than Cold City. The first impression being back in such a city was how much I missed it, this urbanity: the self-conscious scopophilic pleasure of the street, the flâneur-like quality of the men and women passing by in their smart clothes and big sunglasses and nifty shoulder bags, the surging crowds, the monumental 19th century architecture sitting under the glowering monumentalism of modernism, an odd architectural conversation, but enervating nonetheless. Here was a city that stretched to the horizon, like Cold City and its environs, yet also vertical and dense, a ‘thick’ space, to borrow the nomenclature of cultural studies.

Coming at the end of very long and challenging winter, such a vision, so close yet far, was enticing in its possibilities, and suddenly I was afraid my finer sensibilities are being worn down to the nubbin under the unrelenting banality of Cold City and its solid Babbitt-like sense of self. Perhaps what I need, if not now than in the future, is more sensibility than sense, more Marianne than Elinor, more Helen than Meg, more magical realism than the “architectonics of the suppository,” in Scott Long’s memorable if unrelated phrase. But then again, this is neither here nor there.

The writing of my presentation, which sought to put flesh on the skeleton of a colorful neologism, was like eating glass. An idea tossed off casually in an abstract posted in August was now in need of a corpse, and I struggled through three drafts to arrive at a barely acceptable version of what I wanted to say, which in reality remained beyond the bounds of my available talent at the moment, not to mention the 15-minute time limit. A senior professor prominent in my interdiscipline but trained and placed in a more conservative traditional discipline, whom I have known in the past, was in attendance at the panel. Afterwards, at the post-conference cocktail, he approached me to deliver his pronouncement, Zarathustra-like, on my presentation (“well-written; circular; said nothing”) but more importantly, to inquire as to the status of my manuscript.

I haven’t seen this professor in many years, and had no idea how much he knew exactly about my rather baroque journey on the tenure-track: the glorious rise, the vertiginous fall, the stylistics of the walking wounded. I didn’t necessarily dodge the question, but my somewhat stock, vague answers he waved away with a manicured hand holding a plastic glass of Merlot. The real issue, in a sudden turn of character from amiable to critical, was that I had always been the special boy, the good student, the wonderful writer, and I was afraid of exposing my work to criticism, was indeed afraid of criticism. Prancilla, who sat beside me, remained quiet but observant. I did not, in the instant, deny this somewhat easy psycho-social pater familias gesture. The question, for a famous tenured professor, as to why probationary faculty at R2s with no research support and no pre-tenure sabbatical would not, in fact, produce on the level of an R1 faculty member was deemed mostly immaterial. My tenured colleague's critical stance, unfortunately, removed all production problems outside of the system and the structure of the Business and grounds them firmly and irrevocably in the lack of the junior professor, which of course is exactly where the Business prefers them.

Yet, for as facile of a reading as this may have been on his part, the accusation (for that is what it was) has stuck with me. I have pondered whether or not this is true of me— am I afraid of criticism? For what it is worth, I am willing to own up to my own role in the paucity of my publication record. I have no good excuse, other than I have been teaching and performing service since I received my doctorate with no appreciable break. We know, of course, that this is not nearly good enough (as excuses go), yet I also must mine the distinctions here, not as apologia, although invariably this task functions as that, but primarily because the material bases for “work” are often elided in these conversations.

Recently, someone asked me if I was happier 5 years ago than I am now, and I honestly could not answer without deep ambivalence, even if at heart the true response to such an unfathomable empirical question is no— I am in fact not happier now than I was 5 years ago. But I am also not the person I was 5 years ago. That person, in photographs and memory, seems very far away. But then again, this is neither here nor there.

For myself, I do not see the lack of a manuscript as attributable, exclusively at least, to a fuzzy notion of psychological block, a primal scene of professional phobia, although no doubt there is some of that there, someplace, knocking around, along with all the other psychodramas of trauma and discovery, experience and disappointment, fear and loathing, that have characterised my time swimming in the tenure stream. What I do see as perhaps a more crucial element here is the role of mentorship, of which I have written before, material support, professional expectation, and generational gap. And ambivalence, of course. Always that.

In this instance, a reliance on pop psychology offered something less than useful. I wish to save such conversations for my shrink, who is trained to interpret them and paid handsomely to hear them. Rather, something more material than noblesse oblige passing as advice is called for, although what exactly constitutes this materiality remains unclear to me. It does seem to me that lately in particular, any demonstration or expression of vulnerability on my part to others, in both personal and professional contexts, does not trigger humanistic empathy, but rather a disturbing sadistic instinct stronger than reason, one that passes sinisterly under the guise of “good advice.”

But then again, this is neither here nor there.

I’m with Stupid

2008-04-22T11:32:00.005-05:00

I was faced with a choice at a difficult age: should I write a book, or take to the stage?

— Pet Shop Boys

The dreaming spires are shivering under the kind of publicity that would make any Ivy League administrator break out into a cold sweat. The eruption of national controversy over Yale student Aliza Shvarts and her senior art project seems, on one hand, to have more substance than Obama’s “bitter” tempest in a teapot, but also distressingly falls into the larger cultural file of “épater le bourgeois,” always conveniently handy on the desktop of the American mind. As Margaret Soltan, who has been following the controversy closely, so eloquently observes, “America’s stupidest avant-gardists desperately want to shock us. But when they actually do shock us, they tend to run and hide.”

We occasionally forget, of course, that épater-ing the stuffy bourgeois actually has an important history as a critical practice. Manet’s Olympia remains for me the preeminent example of pushing conventional boundaries of what is visible, although there were others before and after who have attempted to accomplish this difficult task, stretching back to Velázquez and Las Meninas. And the questions of what is visible and what is vision seem central to transformative art, important art, valuable art. For as much controversy as her work has engendered, this is the value of the work of Kara Walker: changing the way we see things, similar to the performance art of Adrian Piper and Yoko Ono and Fluxus.

For me, it is hard to decide whether this project and its widespread publicity are worthy of a yawn or a smirk. For you see, I too was an undergraduate art major in a place very much like today's Yale. The quality of our education was uneven, the purpose somewhat obscure, and in retrospect, afterwards and from another place, I could begin to ask questions such as “What is the value of teaching art within the liberal arts curriculum?” and “What, aside from techne, should a student take away from such an enterprise?”

But even to begin to ask these questions demands a subject position outside of the enterprise of art itself, which to the undergraduate mind was wrapped up in mystery and geist. If we had all been better readers of Hegel, we might have learned to be somewhat more critical of ourselves and the art we were producing like bees in a hive, deep into the night amongst the burned out, drugged up graduate student painters and sculptors, their fragrant studios rife with the smell of turpentine and cheap liquor and cigarette smoke. Many of my fellow majors rejected intellectualism, explanation, disquisition, chalking their work up to spirit, unfathomable and elusive. This technique tended to work rather well in critiques, being, like feeling, beyond reach.

The deep romance of the whole thing belied the very real materialist dimensions of what some of us were doing. Certain students were already, at the undergraduate level, positioning themselves in relation to the New York art world, making contacts, honing their skills at abstraction, building a mystery. For the rest of us, well, we weren’t sure what we were doing, which is why we later became professors or lawyers or consultants or magazine writers. We didn’t have what it took to sustain the infrastructure of personae that would be required of us, not to mention the obligatory chutzpah of presenting rather tiresome ideas and concepts in abstraction without a knowing smirk.

Some of my fellow art majors have gone on to great fame and requisite remuneration, on the basis of trend, good looks, sex appeal, and PVC tubing or a barbell sculpted out of Vaseline. But I don’t think it a random error that I would have ended up a professor instead of a contemporary artist, for my work, as well as intellectual thought processes, was always more materialist than abstract, always more grounded in the immediate rather than dans le nuage, and most always based in the need for an income rather than networking and trust fund payments.

I was also blessed with a cynical, young professor mentor whose own work was grounded in rigorous technique, and who was also willing to guffaw gently at the pretension and worthlessness of much of what was produced in the student studios as well as New York. His critique was not based in an opposition to abstraction, of course, but from a pragmatic, materialist standpoint that recognized that art circulates in a capitalist society not as a romantic stream of consciousness but primarily as an object of market value subject often to irrational exuberance. (This is why, just as an aside, some artists have blockbuster shows at the Guggenheim and others sling hash)

The one danger I see in this debate, especially in the mainstream press, is an axiomatic dismissal of abstraction in responding to Shvarts’s project. Transparency, especially as it relates to realism, is not necessarily the only, or even the best use-value of art. It doesn’t help that the artist herself has produced obscurantist texts defending her project, seemingly locating it within some sort of post-structuralist critique of knowledge and knowing and truth, the same thing we were doing 20 years ago, when much bad art was produced but we didn’t have the benefit of the Internet to spread our disseminations widely. (I shared my senior evaluatory critique with another student artist who produced lithographs of lesbian stick figures tossing toasters; we both received a B+)

Abstraction and post-structuralism are not the enemy here. Rather the controversy hinges on evaluation and art, on our associations of art and beauty, and on art itself: what is it? These are all questions that are really somewhat beyond me right now, however, suffice it to say that for the American Scooby, art is mysterious persona and requires very little in the way of execution, other than a compelling press release and viscera. Aside from any potential merits of her project, Aliza Shvarts is a type that I know well, perhaps even reflective of how I used to be, in some respects. If she plays her cards right, she has a bright future in the galleries of New York. Whether or not that is a good thing remains open to question, I suppose.

Autorretrato

2008-03-31T18:49:00.008-05:00

As if to add insult upon injury, an early April Fools joke, it is snowing today in Cold City, big chunky wet flakes that whirl outside the window heavily, as if Winter is clawing at the edge of the cliff, perched hanging above the abyss, straining for its last life. To wit, there is no accumulation, just deep icy slush that gives way easily to the plows that have come through desultorily, wearily, as if the season has continued just a few days too long. In cold places, of which I have known many, is there anything truly as reassuring as the deep, throbbing scrape of the plow? The monstrous machines belching diesel and promising civilisation and salted roads, their fluorescent vest-wearing crews pushing Nature aside for the banalities of automobile travel and shopping errands.

Our Spring term, ironically, begins shortly, and a young professor’s fancy turns to the sartorial. A new term always promises a new chance to craft anew one’s peacock splendour whilst strutting about on the stage. I have gone through many an incarnation of different and occasionally antipodal presentations of self. I have done the cool jeans and sports coat look, the suit look, the Mr. Rogers sweater vest look, the casual Friday look, the über-femme queen look, even at one point the skater boy look. Is there indeed a look I haven’t tried? I guess I haven't shown up in a Mumu (yet!). While some academics may think the sartorial to be beneath their ethereal souls (and dress accordingly), visual self-presentation is important insofar as it does communicate professorial value to our critical audiences.

This musing on the professorial look is not completely random, of course. A recent piece in the Times discussed professors’ use of the Internet, in the usual mildly mocking tones the paper likes to marshal against hapless eggheads toiling in their towers whilst good money is being made elsewhere. Professors using Facebook and MySpace! How curious! Professors revealing their hobbies and interests in the same torrid, exhibitionist manner as their students! How silly!

Aside from whatever stylistic problems I may have with the apparatus of description in the pixilated pages of the New York Times, the question of professorial personae, and the tension between private lives and public performances I thought was interesting. This is a recurrent thread, of course, as professorial duties always involve the actual performance of the body, as well as, apparently, the online performative principles of social networking sites.

The Times piece notes that professors using Facebook or MySpace are often trying to communicate their humanity to students, their interests outside the classroom, the “real” person behind the façade of professorial authority. Imbued as I am in mystery and ritual, I am not sure I am one with the madding crowd here. Broaching the proscenium arch of the professorial performative is not terribly interesting to me, actually. Do I really want my students to know the really real me, to feel the edges of who Professor Raro is outside of the classroom?

Not particularly. Of course, I am not a complete scrim in the classroom. Little bits of the real me, whomever that might be, slip out, on occasion. Usually these moments are regretted, pondered, worried over. For in my conception of my role, there is little room for that real me in all its blowsy dimensions: iconoclastic, profane, wildly disorganized, inchoate, ambivalent, and occasionally foul-mouthed. Some of these qualities come through in my pedagogical method, of course, but are honed, perfected to techne, directed not towards me on the stage but to the audience listening, participating, and ideally engaging on some level beyond the mere level of the attentive.

And this is in some ways the definition of professional, the distinction between our work selves and our private selves, the line that separates the real person from the teacher, the guide, the intellectual cicerone. It is also about power, quite obviously— my need to retain professorial power in the classroom, partly as a way of controlling potentially explosive course foci, but also as a defensive gesture towards those students (and colleagues) who consider my presence in the classroom an aberration barely tolerated, much less received with approbation.

We live, of course, in a social moment that thrives on revelation, confession, and anticipated absolution. When Britney lands on the cover of The Atlantic, you know we’re in trouble. Some of the trends in the profession related to openness and transparency of personae stem from the social changes of the sixties, which sought on one level to humanise education and bring students into universities in non-hierarchical ways. Even the most taciturn professor trained after 1970 reflects some of these changes. The classical mode of professorial intimidation has gone a little démodé, although some still hold onto it, mostly as a performative abstraction. Far more common is the soft-fuzzy, Apple pie-like professorial method, with open office hours and jeans and North Face jackets and free writes and hugs all around, sprinkled with cinnamon sugar.

This, as Historiann notes, is still rather grounded in the corporeal, in the bodies we actually inhabit outside of mediated images. The sensibility of the panopticon, of being observed always and critically, is one that racialised, gendered, and sexualised professors, especially probationary faculty, tend to feel more strongly, and respond to clearly, in particular and sometimes peculiar ways, in conflict and collaboration, as one could say. The underlying theme is a hyperawareness of image, and image projection, in our professional and personal lives.

Since a series of emotional shocks this past fall threw my life into disarray, I have become increasingly focused on my image, in particular with the representational image of the still photograph. On my real-life Facebook page (yes, I have one, although it is not accessible to my students) are dozens of photographs of myself in various guises, usually with the same grimace or Mona Lisa smile, and usually taken by myself with the aid of a mirror, a stand, or with the camera held at arm’s length. I have found such self-involvement curious. It’s not like I was not already highly attenuated to myself in space, but the closing of a critical period of my personal life has brought me back to the image in a strange way. What are these photographs meant to communicate, through the guise of the solitary image of a relatively boring man approaching 40?

I don’t consider this gesture towards the self-portrait narcissistic as much as it seems to be an attempt to place myself in a moment, in space and time, to use technology to understand, incompletely and incoherently, who and what I am, and how this being, however polymorphous, communicates itself to others, in the classroom and beyond, as well as the forementioned hyperawareness of the self as image, as ocular sophistry. However, unlike other colleagues who increasingly believe in the transparency of the image, the beneficial effects of the open MySpace page, the ameliorative balm of purportedly humanising minutiae, I find no curative in such navel gazing. I remain, curiously, opaque to myself, much less anyone else. After all, "Un autorretrato no necesariamente implica un género realista."

No Cross, No Crown

2008-03-13T11:45:00.006-05:00

The latest viral protest thread making the rounds is the campaign to register disapproval at the recent decision to deny tenure to Andrea Smith at the University of Michigan. As the gears of the online posts, remarks, petitions, and even a group on Facebook (!) slowly move forward and gather speed, there is for me one part familiarity and one part curiosity. The familiarity of course consists in the overheated speech one now associates with such actions, the endless outrage, the high-flying yet strangely naïve rhetoric, the easy slippage into épater le bourgeois whilst simultaneously declaring ownership over one of its primary symbols.

This we are used to, and for some of us, form a scrim of white noise so intense that sometimes it is hard to listen to the important beats beneath the screeching. Connected to this mild revulsion at polemic excess, ironically, is the concomitant curiosity, natürlich, which lives, for me at least, in the question of just how and why the Women’s Studies department faculty could have voted against Smith’s candidacy.

For those unfamiliar, relevant journalistic details can be found here and here. Smith is lucky enough to be sufficiently well placed and networked to actually engender a campaign in the first place (not to mention a story in the CHE). As I have observed before, most of us denied the brass ring of tenure or mid-career renewal slink into the shadows: mortified, depressed, and alone. And which lucky institution will snap Smith up still remains to be seen. For all the digital sturm-und-drang, the simple fact of the matter is that, regardless of whatever troubling dimensions of the case, Smith has enough capital to easily move into another position. However devastating or disappointing the outcome of this decision may be for her, and not to undermine the power of these processes on the academic self, I doubt there will be many nights of nail-biting anxiety over future prospects in the profession, unlike the faceless, nameless others whose limbs litter the dreaming spires.

That said, there are elements of the case that seem strange. For someone so accomplished, at least on paper, to not receive tenure begs the question of where the bar is for the rest of us. I suspect, however, that this might be a case of being too brilliant, too fabulous, too accomplished, remembering the egghead axiom— "The only hit that comes out of a Helen Lawson show is Helen Lawson, and that's ME, baby, remember!" Getting to the bottom of any tenure case, even when you’re inside of it, is folly, of course. Suffice it to say, tenure and decisions surrounding tenure are the academic equivalent of the Immaculate Conception: just one of those mysteries in which one does not question so much as believe. But, if it is true, as La Vicks and Love Buckets recently remarked in a delicious blasphemy, that the cult of Christianity is grounded in a 15-year old Jewess “in trouble” from an illicit liaison with a Roman soldier, than there is always more to the story than meets the eye, in spite of belief, hope, and yes, inspiration.

All of which is to say that in spite of all the efforts to empiricise, measure, and delineate tenure, to “understand” the process, a large part of it will always be mysterious, the final hazing, the culminating movement of neophyte to acolyte. I feel ambivalent about such an interpretation, obviously, only insofar as such belief systems can blind us to the real inequities in tenuring processes. Similar to other rigorous, mystical institutions, like the military, Roman Catholicism, Hollywood, Broadway, and the dark arts of Wall Street and the City, the university also has its blood sacraments, which include ritualistic purging. Part of the problem with tenure being wrapped in mystery, ceremony, and hocus-pocus worthy of a Skull and Bones initiation, is that in the dark all cats are gray, and it becomes hard to discern legitimate concern (and yes, indeed, outrage) from hucksterism and carpet bagger self-aggrandisement. This has led a sizable portion of the profession to shrug their shoulders when tenure scandals emerge, or worse, reach for the easy answer of dismissal (“activist-scholar”).

Of course, there are good reasons why someone, even with Smith’s impressive record, could be denied tenure. This is the snake in the Garden: meritocracy is the usually the least of it. Someone like me, on the margins of the university metropole, knows relatively little of the inside details, other than what I’ve heard on the telephone and read online. But there is enough out there to begin to question the dynamics of the decision at Michigan in important and crucial ways. And I don’t mean via the mechanism of performed outrage, but rather how and why a tenure committee would turn down a Nobel Prize nominee?

Tenure is a bar, but is also very much about a bar, if that makes sense. It is about who really counts in the Business. Aside from the talk of abolishing it, tenure remains important for all of the usual reasons (primarily academic freedom), but for others perhaps more important, especially faculty governance. Without the job security of tenure, the professoriate is reduced to the role of a paid workforce serving at the whim of various bottom lines. More importantly, ending tenure would mean throwing the whole sadistic and ritualistic system into disarray: it means, oddly enough, removing the mystery, and replacing Christ on a Cross with a test tube, or worse, a torn glossy photo of the latest talentless starlet from Vanity Fair. That guild model upon which tenure is based is dead as a doornail, yet we dwell in its ashes, rubbing them on our faces like barbarians, in the mistaken belief that they still connote magic. We still believe in tenure because it is linked to the mysteries of the profession, and like all dead systems, that faith is much more dangerous in decline, like a drowning swimmer.

The most salient aspect of this case, from what I can see, is not whether Smith was a good colleague, whatever that means, or even a pleasant person, but rather the simple fact, as my colleague La Gamine recently observed, that Smith would not be in the unenviable position of denied tenure if not for the very fact that she was a Native American feminist “activist-scholar.” In other words, her socio-corporeal identity and the direction of her work that that identity has influenced are the problem. To paraphrase Geraldine Ferraro, if Smith were a white woman, much less a white man, she would most likely have not been denied tenure.

Her public record, from what we can see, is exemplary, by most casual standards at par or indeed above her tenure cohort. Rather, it is apparent that other issues are exerting influence here: personality clashes, professional intimidation and jealousy, slippery and inchoate racism and sexism potentially masquerading under “fit,” questions over politics, intellectual work, and which work "counts." In any event, I certainly hope the legal team at Michigan has instructed their overseers to start saving their pennies.

We will never know the real story, or even an approximation of the "real," although we will get shrill versions. Interestingly, the forces arrayed against Smith are seemingly also not the usual suspects: it was, after all, the Women’s Studies faculty that voted against her candidacy. There are also apparently factions of Native American Studies that find her work anathema. Yet, as much of a critique as might be mustered against Smith or her supporters more broadly, I am troubled by the implications of a decision seemingly grounded, in whole or part, on who one is, what one is, and the denial, not only of tenure, but of picturing that “one,” in whatever valence, within the precincts of the university. Again, this concern is not necessarily for Smith herself, at the centre of the metropole, but for the rest of us in the academic outré-mer, without support committees and networked friends and Facebook group pages, who struggle everyday within the occasionally oxymoronic of the intellectual of color.

Yet, to veer off the distressingly scripted pathway we have been following here, perhaps this oxymoron, like tenure, is itself another one of the mysteries of the profession, and that the martyr is as much an aspect of our rituals as anything else. Therefore, there exists the possibility that the drama unfolding at Michigan is itself part and parcel of the Business, central to its power, a coup de théâtre in which we are all playing our roles, perhaps a little too perfectly.

Cold City Notebook: Winter's Twilight

2008-03-07T17:55:00.005-06:00

Last week, as part of my commitment to a civic commission, I attended a speech by Cold City’s mayor. The occasion was held in a new, burnished steel and honey-blond wood performing arts centre downtown on a snowy, slushy day, and I put on my brown pinstriped monkey suit and meandered down. The lecture hall was an impressive modern space lined with sumptuous fabrics and woods, filled to overflowing with wonks and power brokers, protesters, and various clueless citoyens like myself, with a large, dramatic picture window that, Cold City style, looked out not onto a beautiful view but rather a brutalist, brown concrete high-rise apartment block from the seventies. It seemed an interesting counterpoint to the luxuriousness of the hall, and represented in its physical manifestation some of the aesthetic and social conundrums of this place.

Being present among the city’s elect (literally and figuratively) drew my mind to settling down here for this stultifying interregnum. As the Mayor, with the perfectly lacquered hair and reptilian mannerisms particular to politicians, droned on over his nifty little PowerPoint presentation, and through the many moments of obligatory applause, as scripted as Kabuki (Down with Crime! Up with Youth! Down with Inefficiency! Up with Development!), my thoughts drifted to the dimensions of identity formation and the Bedouin-like travels we academics live through, taking a little from each place we land and packing it away, in small, portable valises we can grab quickly, without thought, in a hurry, a battered airplane waiting on a humid, cracked tarmac to spirit us away to the next destination.

Now of course, this is not necessarily the experience of all academics, perhaps even most academics. Many of us land in one place or another, and wake up thirty years later Emeritus and unbearably crabby. To which I say Mazel tov! This has not been my experience, however. Having fled across the continent back and forth five times, my sixth dropped me here, deep in the Profonde of some sort of formerly unknown Amerique.

I would like to think that I am not condescending to this particular, idiosyncratic corner of Middle America. I have tried, somewhat successfully, to recognise and appreciate the specific social and cultural qualities that Cold Place offers, if nothing more than the sheer alterity of severe Lutheran effacement. I know my way around town, where to turn left and where to turn right, where to get most any commercial item I might have gotten in New York, and where to get a decent cheeseburger. However, recently, I have begun to worry a bit about my own placement here, have started to realise that one’s cultural baggage, no matter how tightly packed, how lightly it weighs on one’s fingertips as one breaks off their stiletto heels to run faster, remains, however unintelligibly, important.

I wonder if my personal formation is not too coastal, too determined by living in particular communities with specific relationships to identity and social politics, to ever be truly comfortable here. Recent decisions to stay for the duration have only increased the intensity of the concern, the mildly obsessive focus on possible assimilations. Part of this is being torn by memory, and competing cultural comforts that live in other places. But a larger part is a growing recognition of the unique dimensions of Cold Place with its incredibly strong local culture that demarcates quite clearly insider and outsider status. I am reminded of a story I heard when I arrived, of a long-term gay resident of Cold City who, after 20 years of professional accomplishment here, took a job back in his hometown of New York because, as he put it, he “didn’t want to die alone.” When I heard this story originally, in the bloom of enthusiasm, I thought it ridiculous. Now, chillingly, I understand it completely.

As Love Buckets put it with his usual delicacy the other night as we sat, desultory, in a quiet, morose gay café surrounded by men with their faces fixed hypnotically on laptop screens, “All of your sophistication, and you still can’t get in [to the local culture].” As Love Buckets painfully explained, slowly and deliberately as if to underscore an important moral principle to a child, whereas New England Protestantism regarded modesty and self-effacement as hierarchical (I’m modest, ergo better than you), Cold Place Protestantism was designed more to reinforce the collective (I’m modest, so to not draw attention to myself). He traced out, quickly, several examples of how this attitude works: the refusal of compliment, the downplaying of accomplishment, the display and cherishing of unassuming tastes, functional architecture, and humble dreams.

The effect of this cultural sensibility on everything from social relations to professional engagements has been curiously frustrating. Those very attributes (florid articulation, educational achievement, cosmopolitanism, aesthetic discernment) that draw others to you like a moth to flame in the Babylonia of the coasts are actually anathema here, on some strange level: the indelible stain of the ausländer. Where this attitude meets the particular deployment of gay identity is even more problematic. If the act of coming out involves an elevation of individual ego against the communal super-ego (or alternatively I suppose, the sexual base against the cultural superstructure), then it means that by their very being LGBT people here transgress the dominant cultural code. Which goes a long way to understanding why regional LGBT folks are so assimilative in their principles, distinctly “just folks” in their hyper-consumerism of bourgeois proprieties, SUVs, Labradors, and CostCo cards.

For the moment, however, I am stuck, an egghead clogged sink. I am long in the tooth on the tenure track, my own research project(s) of doom still in process, but also with quite a lot of teaching and service under my belt. In other words, I am pretty much the university's version of Box Office Poison. I shan’t be going anywhere soon.

All of which feels rather daunting. But perhaps I am following the wrong thread here, which is the assumption that I shall spend the rest of my days here, a tremor reflected in the mantra-like echo of Helen Fielding’s apt description ringing in my head: “… fears of dying alone and being found three weeks later half-eaten by an Alsatian.” The simple fact of the matter is that the wide-angle cosmopolitanism that is reflected in my experience and makes me such a piss poor Cold City citizen is exactly what will most likely restlessly propel me, belongings tucked into a matchbox, once again into the ether.

Perhaps, however and with any luck, before that inevitable flight of the Valkyries, I shall be able to play Babette to the feast.

Where the Kissing Never Stops

2008-02-23T03:29:00.004-06:00

Our winter term is coming to a slow curtain. We are close enough to feel the edges of the giddy break, a pause in the endless commuting, the drone of National Public Radio, the incredible amount of money currently spent on gasoline, not to mention the actual techne of teaching: the grading, the preparation, the performance, the ethos of “the show must go on” even or perhaps especially when one feels more like crawling back into bed chilled by neurasthenic anxiety, or never leaving the bed at all, duvet securely tucked over one’s head.

In moments like this, I feel Didionesque, reaching for the cigarette and the tranquiliser, trapped in a ruined manse on Franklin Avenue watching for anonymous panel trucks and imagining the worst. I have taken to closing the oaken door of my borrowed office upon arriving on campus and napping with my feet up on a chair, a book nestling my chest, the muffled sounds of students and secretaries floating through the walls as the radiator clanks and hisses and the computer emits a soft ping whenever a new email arrives.

Last fall, my introductory class was like swimming the English Channel, three times a week. Between fractious groups of students who regularly brought their extracurricular tensions into the classroom and the more personal dramas unfolding behind other oaken doors and on the interstate between hither and thither, I was exhausted. It took all my energy to play my game face, to arrive and be animated, constantly haunted by feeling like a lion tamer whose luck has run out. Again and again and again.

My class this semester, however, has demonstrated once again for me the infinitely local and immediate politics of classroom ecology. Whereas fall was in many ways sheer torture, the teaching equivalent of waterboarding, the current class is surprisingly friendly. Smaller, more cozy, and without the native informants who can, on occasion, wreak havoc on one’s lesson plans, not to mention one’s last good nerve.

It is a known risk in the art of teaching race, sexuality, and gender studies that students often bring their lived and vivid subject positions into the classroom. Many instructors of these interdisciplines make quite a lot of hay over how such subjectivity adds to the classroom, contributes to peer learning, and bridges the gulf between intellectual study and real life. All claims, I might add, that also look quite good on a teaching statement.

However, and to be frank, sometimes such subjectivities can be annoying, insofar as there will be students (and there always are, for the most part) who have what I like to think of as an inappropriate investment in the transparency of experience. These are students who arrive with a firm belief in their known subject position, and thereafter stick to it. Since the point of most classrooms is transformation, in a minor or major key but transformation nonetheless, such stasis can prove damaging, especially when it becomes imbued within real life politicised identity categories.

Now, not every student can become a butterfly, emerging from the chrysalis of preexisting knowledges all shiny and new and renovated, like Lindsay Lohan after her latest stint at rehab. This we understand, following the Chinese proverb “Teachers open the door, but you must enter by yourself.” But sometimes students want another door, or refuse to see the door, or don’t believe in the principle of doors, or rather, and more depressingly, think they don’t need a door at all: they’re fine just where they are, on a BarcaLounger with a litre of Pepsi, a tube of Pringles, a flat screen television, and multiple remotes.

They are, of course, sadly mistaken, if only because identity, like all intellectual knowledges, is always fluid, always changing, and always (already) mutable. This doesn’t mean identity is not felt or indeed lived, obviously. What it is to say is that we all can afford to learn something new. And, moreover, it is to say that the occasional student who digs in his or her heels and refuses to learn something new is not valourising their identity (as they may understand it), but rather selfishly refusing to think, which may be a forgivable crime in the world beyond my classroom, but is decidedly a mortal sin chez moi, because it speaks to a remarkable lack of curiosity.

This term, such pitched battles of will have been deliciously absent, because the exact matching identity category to the subject we are studying is also absent in the student population. In this case, one runs the opposite risk of an anthropological study, especially when at the commencement of the class one of my students inquired as to whether we would have guest speakers. I have not designed the course to include guest speakers, for two principle reasons: firstly, the course readings were comprehensive and inclusive (sometimes overly so), and because the classroom is primarily an intellectual space for me, a reliance on written course materials is sufficient to communicate important components of the study.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, I did not want to turn the classroom into the Hottentot Venus Show. People speak from their experience, and sometimes that act of speaking is informative and interesting and compelling, but the idea of bringing in The Other to inform the non-Others strikes me as, to put it somewhat colloquially, icky, in an old-fashioned Yamomani kind of way. And, already serving as a kind of living, breathing Other for most of my students, as a racialised gay man who is resistant to facile ocular readings, I know the pratfalls of being a real life avatar of consciousness. One is always disappointed in not getting “the real thing.” But what, I would ask, is that real thing, and why do we seem to want it so badly?

Where the rubber meets the road in this little disquisition is often over the question of role modeling. Concerned parties declare, “Our students need role models!” whilst ringing their hands and mopping their brows. And I am a role model, just not usually for students who are exactly like me. My old department chair at Sadistic College criticised my performance as assistant professor because I was not mentoring the “appropriate” students. Sure, the Latino students were not flocking to my door, but there was usually always a line of students outside my office, typically women: lesbians and black women and white women.

Seemingly, these students were my constituency. Something in my teaching persona appealed to them, and inspired them. And why not? The idea that we need, like simple narcissists, an exact replication of ourselves in mentoring and teaching and intellectual development is a crude understanding of identification, to put it mildly. This is not to say that institutions no longer need to work harder at recruiting and retaining faculty of color and LGBT faculty, because they do. But it is to point out that most of the time identity and identification are not neatly seamless, which is a standpoint some students lack when they come into my classroom expecting to learn nothing (new).

Au milieu de l’hiver

2008-02-14T22:33:00.006-06:00

I knew a girl
Who tried to walk across the lake
Course it was winter
And all this was ice
That’s a hell of a thing to do, you know
They say the lake is as big as the ocean
I wonder if she knew about it?

—Yoko Ono

It’s the bottom of the winter, that time of year when the dark and relentless cold and the sun hung low in the southern sky and the blinding white of endless fields of snow and ice all begin to look and feel like something quite less than picturesque. OK, we get it already. Would someone please turn off the bubble machine? It is a time when, as Prancilla noted on the phone the other night, everyone here is sullen and turned inward and mildly depressed from endless hours spent in stuffy apartments or underheated cars lurching and grinding from a cold start, ABS stuttering on snowy streets whilst blowing stop signs, frizzed hat hair, and salt stains on one’s shoes and cuffs.

Prancilla invoked an aphorism of our friend Djola, a former resident of this ice palace, who, remarking on his experience of several winters here, noted that after a Cold Place winter, one knows oneself quite well. And I suppose on some level that is true, although does nothing whatsoever to relieve the immediate claustrophobia, akin to wintering over at the Overlook Hotel.

One wonders why anyone ever bothered. Why didn’t the peoples of the First Nations and the grizzled francophone voyageurs and the mild-mannered lieutenants and the hardscrabble women and later the farmers and merchants and labourers who followed them just keep moving? Eventually they would have all fallen into the azure swimming pools of Southern California, and with any luck, have found a pitcher of Strawberry Daiquiris on a side table.

This is the logical response of people from warm places, people such as myself, people from places where it hardly ever rained, much less snowed. From places where lemon trees grow year round, where it is 95º on Christmas Day, where fecundity breeds fanciful visions, wilted ennui, magical realism, sun-baked dissipation, and the heat-induced dementia of louvered windows and toasted coconut mochas and Quetzalcoatyl and Angelyne and ten-lane freeways and pyramids and Lake Mead and Proposition 13.

The brittle cold on this edge of the world does not allow for such fantastical escapism, for better or for worse.

The Fifth Estate

2008-02-09T01:14:00.000-06:00

I have recently befriended a rising member of the academy’s Fifth Estate: a Student Life professional employed at the bloated and domineering local R1. Prim and proper, he reminds me a lot of myself at his age, a bit of the young foggie about him. I don’t think I have ever seen him outside of a pair of slacks and a meticulous sweater paired with a button-down shirt, his early pattern baldness only adding to his curmudgeonly demeanour, although in point of fact he is, under the preppie-professional dreck, a twenty-something gay man making his way, Mary Tyler Moore-style, in the big city.

I had never really thought too much about the rise of a Student Life professional class in the university before some of our extended conversations. They seemed a vague presence on the edge of more important things: the machinations of evil administrators, the follies of faculty, the striving of clerical staff. But increasingly, the Student Life professional represents a new cadre in the academy, one imbued with considerable power and influence over the structuring of students’ social lives and, consequently, some of their relationship to the dynamics of the classroom.

When I was in college, of course, we were at were in the twilight of the laissez faire period that had been engendered by the social upheavals of the sixties. Colleges and universities, after many years previous to the late sixties of dominating and structuring the lives of their students, especially at co-educational or single-sex institutions (parietals), shifted their methodologies and started to treat students as the legal adults they had always been. Laissez les bon temps roulez! Experimentation and sometimes overindulgence in sex, drugs, and drinking became the distinguishing stereotype of the college undergraduate in North America, one not terribly dissuaded by the rise in legal drinking age in the early and mid-eighties.

When I was a freshman, an unlucky WASP heir in the dormitory across the street died of asphyxiation after vomiting in his sleep after an all-night drinking binge. I remember a notice about it in the student paper, a sort of “drinking that much is bad, um-kay” sort of banality, and the establishment of a scholarship in his name by his parents. Then, nothing. No lawsuit, no mandatory training sessions, no hand-slapping or temporary suspensions or feeling circles or interventions from “trained staff.” It was expected, perhaps somewhat morbidly, that teenagers sometimes do stupid things, and that sometimes they die because of their stupidity. The Latin fatalism of the post-sixties era of student affairs was remarkably suited to the feeling we had about ourselves, as independent young adults (who wanted to drink, drug, and sex to abandon, although not all of us were lucky enough to have all three simultaneously).

What a difference twenty years makes. Nowadays, of course, the Student Life professional and his or her ubiquitous staff are cheerfully on hand to make an appropriate intervention into such crudely self-destructive habits. Obligatory counseling, group sessions, Resident Assistants with the power to “write up” straying undergraduates in the panopticon of the contemporary dorm, and staffs of people (and the money) to plan a slew of compulsory welcoming and continuing programming and heartfelt retreats that seem to serve at once as both jocular socialisation and rigid regulation are what seems to distinguish the residential and social lives of today’s undergraduates.

My buddy says my dissonance with this new Fifth Estate is because I am a member of Generation X, typified by anomie, independence, and misanthropic skepticism. The current generation in college now, in the nomenclature of the Student Life professional “The Millennials,” is characterised by a greater desire for structure, companionship, and socialisation. I’m not sure if this is quite true, although it would go far in explaining some of the interesting differences between some contemporary undergraduates and my own generation, even if all I could think about when this distinction was made was the difference between Morlocks and the Eloi.

The larger drama of why we would have the emergence of a new estate on an already top-heavy and listing institutional ship indeed speaks to millennial concerns, although not perhaps in the way that my buddy imagines. The most obvious one that stands out, in my Skepticon, no doubt overly Gen X imagination, is the need to prevent or circumvent litigation. In loco parentis has rushed back into vogue on the back of legal action on the part of parents and families that increasingly hold universities to parental obligations of care, concern, and safe guarding. Whether or not this is a socially beneficial understanding of the role of universities is a conversation that for all intents and purposes was never held, as universities, like all cowardly and conservative institutions, ran for cover in the face of wrongful death lawsuits and zealous juries.

This, of course, is part of the greater crisis in torts that exists in the United States, and as such is symptomatic of many different things that may or may not concern us as academic professionals. Rather, in talking with my new colleague and thinking about some experiences in the profession, I have increasing wondered about the role of Student Life services on what we do in the classroom and how we function as professors and teachers in the university. I offer two relevant examples:

Diversity Training— Most student life services offer mandatory diversity training for incoming students. “Diversity” here typically means the usual suspects: race, gender, sexuality (sometimes), faith communities (sometimes). In my experience, most diversity training is poorly focused intellectually and often tends to center on a simplistic descriptive of feelings. This is not true all the time and in all cases, however, suffice it to say there is a lot of money to be made in diversity training (it is quite lucrative), and usually contracted to outside consultants. Heaven forbid I would be against Diversity Training (although I loathe the word diversity). But I have found, as faculty who teaches these things in the intellectual context of the classroom, that half my time is spent unraveling the messages, axioms, and truisms of the diversity trainer when students must confront, again intellectually, difference, power, and oppression. Some conundrums cannot be ended with a group hug, unfortunately.

Parallel Programming— At a former institution there was quite a strong student centre for LGBT students, run by an efficient and well-organised Student Life professional who was also gay. However, any connection or co-programming between faculty who taught in these areas and the student centre were practically non-existent. In fact, there seemed to be a mild antipathy between faculty and Student Life around any co-programming. Once, I met with the Student Life professional who ran the student centre to offer my help in whatever events my presence could be relevant. The Student Life professional was courteous but guarded, declaring at one point that attempts to connect faculty to programming had been met in the past with disinterest, and hence dropped. So, this incredible social resource for students was effectively divorced from whatever might be going on in their classrooms. This same Student Life professional later directed a disgruntled student in my class to the Dean, bypassing both either a conversation with me or with my chair (and therefore university policy as well), underlining an open antagonism towards faculty that I found bothersome at the time, but had I been more vulnerable would have been much more dangerous.

These anecdotes illustrate a troubling aspect of the rise of Student Life Services in the university, and that is their disdain and effacement of faculty, whether intentional or not, in their programming efforts. For instance, why aren’t relevant faculty being asked to teach (and remunerated for) “diversity” seminars, thereby amalgamating the social needs for tolerance into an intellectual framework? Why aren’t faculty and curricular offerings being better integrated into the structure of student life programming? There’s a lot going on here, not the least of which is the noblesse oblige of faculty, who tend to be overworked already as it is and rather touchy about the specifics of their presentations. There is also, in some quarters of the professoriate, a decidedly dismissive attitude to Student Life services as being somehow beneath learned scholarship.

This is a dangerously missed opportunity, for two reasons: firstly, Student Life services are here to stay. They are a competing power centre in the institution, and they tend to be allied directly or indirectly with the concerns of administration, which are mostly about maintaining control, period. Secondly, in their disinterest, faculty have unintentionally abandoned aspects of their traditional precincts of teaching to an administrative arm of the institution that arguably is not as concerned with intellectual enlightenment as it is in enforcing the rules. Did you know there are now degree programs in Student Life services and academic administration? Student Life is a growth industry, even as tenure-line faculty positions go the way of the loon.

This is not necessarily to deny the newest component of the Pax Administrana its piece of the pie, for it is much too late for that gesture, nor is it to deny the competency of many, if not most Student Life professionals. But as Sun-Tzu once said, “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” As faculty, we ignore this new estate in our midst at our peril.

Best in Show

2008-01-30T19:25:00.000-06:00

Cold City U. is currently hiring in my home department. Being on leave at Prestigious Lil’ College, of course, I am also far, far away from the actual drudgery of the hiring committee, with all of its petty, seething passions and endless meetings and email memos and candidate schlepping and humourless dinners. But I have made it a point to dress properly and get into the car to travel across town for the job talks, as the candidates slowly wend their way through their presentations. These visits are a professional obligation, of course, but also a chance to showcase my presence, on the margins, of the department. I always make sure to look appropriately put together (which nowadays consists mostly of shined shoes and hair gel) and be attentive, solicitous and interested, even if my presence is largely formal.

Being a silent witness, my critical interpretation has been based in the immediate performance of the vaunted “job talk.” I am not privy to the dossiers, have not participated in the phone interviews or preliminary vetting, and only have the vaguest notion of where these people are, what they “do,” or other potentially fetching qualities. Their very names escape me, as I focus completely on their talks and how well they may or may not meet the expectations of the department, the university, and the specific and perhaps peculiar qualities of the search. At the last talk, I had to discreetly inquire from a member of the committee the name of the candidate, as it went in one ear and directly out the other. Talk about blind review!

Now, of course, I’m no slack when it comes to the old job talk. I’ve given plenty, and I’ve flubbed probably more than a couple too. For the candidate, the campus visit in general is a sprint that is exhausting, daunting, and suitably depressing in its post-visit regrets. In my experience, there’s barely time to go to the bathroom in peace, much less have the time to adequately compose oneself for the hyper critical (and yes, bitchy) audiences one is expected to entertain, like a glossy-haired specimen. There’s nothing quite as ugly as an academic crowd that smells blood, and there is quite a lot of blood spilled at job talks, with the smirks, sighs, aggressive questions, early departures and late arrivals. At the end of the day, in the quietude of one’s beige, anonymous hotel room, self-doubt can creep under the door and through the window like a bad odour.

But that, as they say, is another story. Currently I am a part of that bitchy, egghead Skepticon audience. I try to be kind, realising what it is like on the other side of this strange looking glass. And Cold City U., relentlessly unpretentious, does not consider itself quite as special as some of our sister institutions. Modestly hardworking, humble yet fierce in our task, we tend not to be too terribly interested in the latest intellectual debate between schools of thought, or how well one can elucidate the currently hot theories of disciplinary specialty. We are not the barracudas of the R1, with their shiny eyes and suffocating sense of intellectual rightness.

This does not mean we hire anyone off the street, however. And one of the surprising things I have noticed, in my scopophilic evaluation of the current Dog-and-Pony Show, is how poorly candidates listen to the instructions given to them for their specific job talk at Cold City U. In this instance, each candidate was given a single, broad but focused interdisciplinary question to respond to in his or her talk, primarily in the name of fairness but also to judge his or her relative intellectual merits against one another. I know this question well, because it is the same one that was given to me when I came to present at Cold City U. With one exception, the candidates have basically ignored the assigned question in favor of talking about something else: their research. While interesting on some sort of esoteric level, such presentations do not speak well to an innate ability to respond to instructions, think flexibly, or take our institution seriously, in terms of its demands and needs.

Another way of putting this would be that there is an overwhelming formal idea of the job talk focused on one’s research that dominates the profession, and I have been jarred by the fact that this hegemony of idealisation has been largely unshakable for certain candidates. However, we are not all Research One Institutions, we cannot all support research as the primary function of faculty work, and the consistent inability of candidates to modify their presentations to local circumstances not only undermines their candidacy for employment at Cold City U., but speaks volumes about what is considered important in the profession, and how that importance communicates itself through mentorship, or lack thereof, to vulnerable doctoral students.

One of the most important things I ever learned, before I left graduate school, was about modulation, audience, and the job talk, from a late-day panel at an MLA many years ago. That panel, which had one faculty each from an R1, an R2, a baccalaureate college, and a community college, was deeply influential in my approach to the job market. The panel’s message: all politics are local, craft your application to our specific institutional needs, and respect our potentials and limitations. Common sense, but evidently not that common.

Obviously, other important silent factors here would be the glamour of the R1 and the pecking order of institutions and “good jobs.” The R1 is where we receive our training, and subsequently, most of our ideas, however wrong-headed, about the profession. Yet, there is life, in some sense a more beautiful life, beyond the precincts of the R1. Teaching and service are important and do count at some universities, much more than whether one’s manuscript has been accepted at HUP. Additionally, I do feel that some of our candidates are toying with us, little non-ranking Cold City U., as a practice job run, or the academic version of the safety school, which is connected to the arrogance of some candidates emerging from high-profile graduate programs. But I know those people, and I know those programs, and suffice it to say, Hubris has its price. One shame in the popular decline of Classics is that increasingly people forget (or never learned) the lessons of Greek mythology and tragedy, and therefore reenact them in depressing, less interesting, imminently predicable ways (not to be too Cassandra about it).

In the end, some of the algebra of the job market will always be hidden from us, but other aspects of the equation are right in front of our eyes. So open your eyes already.

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner!

2008-01-14T01:45:00.000-06:00

What a strange trip this year promises to be. I’m not sure which is more hallucinogenic, the fact that as of this writing there is an actual race going on between the candidates for the Democratic nomination, or that the acceleration of the noise and smoke around the primaries signals, finally, a possible end to our long national nightmare induced by our velvet coup d’état of 2000 and oddly affirmed by the disastrous vote of 2004. It has been a long, strange trip, and the concept of the trip seems key to making it through this year with any semblance of sanity. Just let go and surrender to the surreal, slipping downwards into distortion, wild colors, and bad object-subject choices.

After the Iowa caucuses and the surprise upset in New Hampshire, even a political mole like me has awoken to the kerkuffle, the loud debates over lukewarm apple pie, the passion of a gazillion hotheads. Don’t get me wrong: I vote, I’m a decent citizen, I wear the dorky sticker afterwards, but ever since night has fallen on our society, I have been, frankly, numb. Up until very recently, I knew that whomever won the primaries and gave whatever ridiculous speech at the podium in Denver in August would get my vote, but I really didn’t care very much as to who it was, in particular. An “Anyone but…” sort of position, I suppose. And I am still not terribly engaged on a partisan level. What has drawn my attention lately is the increasingly antagonistic tone between the two leading Democratic candidates, arranged tellingly around race and gender.

Of course, as a professor that specialises in these fields in my teaching and research, I have my opinions, although I have yet to be asked them by anyone, surprisingly, much less invited to pontificate on television. But it does not surprise me that as we slide towards Super Tuesday, and for all intents and purposes the deciding factor in the nomination, the tone has gotten a lot less civil. Although I’m sure dedicated political watchers would be able to trace out a more complex genealogy of campaign slights, missteps, and gaffes, for me the first sign of trouble, the darkening of the sky, the warbling of the siren, was Gloria Steinem’s ham fisted attempt at subtlety of argument in the New York Times last week sometime.

Now, firstly, this is where we are in the United States in 2008: politically exhausted, economically in crisis, and hopelessly divided on any number of issues, with two peculiar, viable, and historically significant candidates vying for the office of the President of the Republic. So, the greater point for me is that this is, ultimately, a win-win situation, even if the Democratic candidate loses the election. The United States has finally moved to a place where a white woman and a black man can be considered, however tendentiously, for the putative highest office of the land. But race and gender cling to their auras like a bad suit. Steinem’s intervention attempted to negotiate this tricky pathway between Scylla and Charybdis, with piss poor results.

Coming from the “I’m not trying to rank oppressions” school of second wave good intentions (and we know where that all ended), Steinem then proceeds to rank, including the myopic use of that old red herring that black men were awarded the vote 40 years before women (not to mention strange unqualified assertions of black male power). Gender beats race in her equation. We don’t live that way, however, unless we have a rather uncritical view of ourselves in time and space. We are all raced and gendered, as well as sexualised, in ways that work together and simultaneously, not to mention the economic dimensions of money power in an unequal and brutalist society devoted to the unmitigated worship of Mammon.

Look, these things are hard to talk about, much less parse. I understand that. But frankly, I was surprised that Steinem didn’t so much, and her attempt to examine the delicacies of race and gender in a patriarchal white supremacist society were about as subtle as Joan Crawford trimming her rose garden ("Tina! Bring me the AX!"). As I argued over at Bitch PhD, in a brief comment, it might have been more prudent, not to mention strategic, to examine how the two leading Democratic candidates are being interpellated into race/racist and gender/sexist paradigms by a mediagenic socio-cultural political system that is both bankrupt yet surprisingly resilient in its devotion to the Other machine.

And no matter which way you cut it, Hillary and Barack are coming out of the Other machine, albeit with different degrees of insider statuses, but still. The cynic in me would want to say that, aside from Hillary this and Barack that, the choices are still circumscribed within models of Otherness and devotional assimilation that are insipid, in the race to appeal to demographic lowest common denominators and focus groups. But maybe that speaks to my own exhaustion.

Of course, ridiculous paradigmatic expressions are equal opportunity gaffes. The latest, about Hillary’s reported commentary on Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King Junior, and the struggle for Black Civil Rights in the 1950s and 1960s, reveals its own strange elements of lock-step historical misapprehension. Since the last redoubt of mild-mannered white supremacy is now located seemingly in the figure of Saint Martin, it should come as no surprise that an opine on the complicated record of the end of formal white supremacy in our society in a difficult time should engender such a cheap opportunity for political potshots, not to mention soft answers to difficult questions. It's hard for us to look in the mirror.

There is a real opportunity here for the explosive discursive forces of race and gender to erupt within the candidacies of the two contenders who most evidently represent these difficult and painful historical and social conditions, throwing the election to the latest white guy in a suit and bad tie, meek shellacked-haired wife at this side. What a bore! If Hillary and Barack can keep it together with no media-generated pseudo scandals and appropriate payment and/or obligatory “holiday” to a telephone-free island someplace for ex-lovers and hungry, meth-addicted call boys and girls, then we might be in for an interesting ride along the rim of the active volcano of the deepest, most secret places in our national psyche. Most likely, it won't be pretty.

Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios

2008-01-04T00:27:00.000-06:00

I’ve never been big on the New Year’s resolutions. They always struck me as typically Protestant, strangely concerned with perfection and rigour, divorced from the sloth of life, the muck and dank of the body. My syncretic Catholicism, with spells and prayers and devotionals, insulated me from such simplistic faith in working towards shiny holiness, even as the Enlightenment rationality of my formal education shifted those beliefs towards a benign agnosticism with less time spent at the altar or astride a body of water, flower petals in my hand. But this year, I’ve been feeling the need for some sort of plan, some determined path through the strange times I have been living. Instead, however, of developing a plan, a guidebook for 2008, a goat path strewn with breadcrumbs, I went to Montréal, and all was lost in dissipation.

I have seemingly spent many desultory holiday seasons in Montréal. One, a dark and cold two weeks years ago, was spent with La Voice and her now ex-husband relentlessly playing Carmageddon and chain smoking. I don’t really remember leaving the house, although we did, at least once, to go to Ottawa for Christmas, a baroque familial adventure that only added to the surreal nature of that time. Another memorable Christmas was with La Donna in her rather broken-down apartment, both of us dead broke and celebrating Christmas dinner at a depressing caisse-croûte, eating hot dogs. I can’t remember what didn’t work in that hellish apartment, either the refrigerator or the stove, but needless to say, it was not a happy time.

The tension of long-distance friendships is that life continues in your absence, although in my experience and with synchronicity being what it is, one is never too far from their friends at particular moments of reunion, and this trip was no different. La Voice, La Donna, and I are all at an interstices, a crossroads, albeit of different sorts. Perhaps the general theme of dark Christmastimes in French Canada is more one of weather than anything else: the snow, the ice, and the darkness. Perhaps (and more instructively) it is an ambivalence towards the holiday season and all it implies, the family hearth, shiny presents, a fragrant bough. I have had these things, of course, but not recently, so they seem somewhat out of reach, and therefore, are resented. Christmastime is to be survived, and even in the face of the coming cold, January’s slowly lightening days are a joy, aside from the fact they happen to occur at 0 degrees Fahrenheit.

My life, and the lives of many of those I know, are beginning to resemble more and more Almodóvar’s classic 1988 film Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown. We’re all on the edge of a breakdown, but have too much of our wits still about us to actually dive into that deep, dark pool. So we spin, we toil, we go to Le Stud to dance and drink Canadian beer and cruise, followed by 4:00 am cheeseburgers tout garni and an early morning ride home on the Métro (“Prochaine Station: Berry Ukam”) with workers and office drones, smelling of grease and cigarettes.

Unlike Almodóvar’s luminous celluloid creatures, all dressed in primary colours and crazed by feminist lawyers, Shiite terrorists, and drugged gazpacho, we are somber in our dark woolen gear, bundled against the North American winter, striking poses in hoodies and jeans and a beer bottle pitched just so, last minute rushes to Jean Coutu for Vichy and Eau Thermale Avène, woozy on liquor and polyglot chatting in French, English, and Spanish, no less. Our tuques hide our hairdos, and our kissable, luscious lips are chapped from the wind.

It has become popular among certain critical circles to hate Almodóvar’s project of representing women, with easy dismissals of his filmic characters as drag queens, gay men as women, akin to some (relatively accurate) critiques of Sex in the City. But what has always fascinated me about Almodóvar’s work, especially Women on the Verge, La flor de mi secreto, and Todo sobre mi madre, is the work of representation, communicating something about the emotional inner lives of women, and how that representation relates to masculinity and gayness, the cinematic and imaginary relationships between gay men and the women they know and love.

And it is the inner life that is always turmoil, resistant to analysis, crazy and uneven. What does it mean to be on the verge of something, but not committed to the plunge? Christmastime in Montréal always seems to strike at some dark heart of this question, some element of the query, to go to the edge and stay there, between pasts and futures. In any event, I can’t say for certain which character I am playing at the moment. Is it Pepa, the heartbroken actress hooked on tranquilisers and chasing her lover around town? Or Candela, in her outrageous outfits and fits of suicidal hysteria? Or am I Marissa, the snooty virgin? Or maybe Lucia, the craziest of them all, trapped in the past and a mean shot? And which is La Donna, The Voice, and Prancilla (who dropped in for a couple of days)? Wandering the city, searching for something, the quality of which remains intangible yet powerful, driving us forward into the night.

Now that I am back in Cold City, the more I think about it, the more the last two weeks resembles this manic Almodóvar production, which on a strange level is reassuring. It means that, like in cinema, there will be an appropriate revelation of narrative meaning in an hour or two. The only challenge, for the moment, is looking good for the camera.

L’étranger

2007-12-11T11:57:00.000-06:00

I never read Camus in high school. Perhaps it was too highbrow, or maybe our teachers didn’t realise the importance of existentialism to the teenage mind. We read American classics, which were almost as obscure, things like The Red Badge of Courage, Sister Carrie, The Scarlet Letter, Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, stalwart examples of 19th century American literature that were meant to communicate something about ourselves to ourselves. We did not read JD Salinger, interestingly enough. Maybe our teachers did not want to loosen that particular nut on the developing American mind. In any event, this was before the ubiquitous school shooting experience and the mediagenic telegraphing of personal pain, when most teenagers, including myself, mercilessly applied their angst and fear secretly and relentlessly to themselves, in the privacy of the bedroom and bathroom and mind. While The Red Badge of Courage gathered dust on the dining room table, we read Judy Blume or Marion Zimmer Bradley, or watched the utopic possibilities unfolding on The Brady Bunch in afternoon reruns.

But Camus has been on my mind lately, specifically his creepy The Stranger. When I did finally read Camus in college, I was struck not only by the great David Bowie and the Spiders from Mars cover art of that particular edition, but by the misunderstanding the text attempts to trace out in understanding what exactly is The Stranger (or the Outsider or the Foreigner, in some translations). Society wants to understand Camus’s protagonist as a stranger to its values and norms, but in that attempt, violently circumscribes him within misapprehension and confusion, which the text implies is indicative of a society that refuses to see itself clearly, and uses the ill-formed concept of the Stranger to define itself in hysteria and denial.

The concept of the Stranger has been important to most human societies, of course. It is the basis for the concept of xenophobia, and reveals quite a lot about human collectives. Some of my experience this past semester speak to the power of the concept of the Stranger in our own professional worlds. For all the talk we make in the profession on universal commonality of goals, purposes, and interests in research and teaching, through our national organizations and journals and newspapers of record and shared discussions of teaching and peer review, most often our professional worlds and expectations are shaped most immediately by the local, by the institutions and human collectives we work for on a daily basis.

There is the truism, of course, of all politics is local. We are trained and inculcated into the profession on almost exclusively local levels even if we might imagine, in a Benedict Anderson sort of way, there is, out there, a larger profession: first our doctoral institution, with all its peculiarities in modes of thought and approach, and then our subsequent experiences at our probationary positions, then through to tenure and beyond, for those of us left with any energy and wanderlust after tenure.

I have been thinking a lot lately of the local, the local culture, the local milieu, as I am circulating this year as The Stranger: an official visitor whose powers and talents are vaguely known, imagined, but not fleshed out, and therefore, remain suspect. My role is a little different from that of a visiting professor, as I am circumlocuted within a specific role and title, within a specific window of time. I am open to the possibilities of learning and growth within this context, of course, but am not terribly interested in assimilation, for institutional assimilation makes no sense in my particular placement. A year from now, I will be back at Cold City U., far away from the honey-dipped precincts of Presitgious Lil' College (PLC). What is curious is that many institutions, however, cannot understand their processes outside of assimilation, not only as a statement of their own value, but as a system of comprehension. In other words, there remains insider and outsider, and no medium in between, for comprehending both individuals and ideas within our institutions.

Since the university is a human concept, this is not terribly surprising, natürlich. And we can think of global corollaries that reflect this dynamic as well. The problem, with the global and local, is the way assimilative strategies, or at the very least they way we typically understand these strategies, inscribe and reinforce notions of identity (institutional, intellectual, social, cultural, or otherwise) that are deeply reactionary. As much as we might like to believe that we as academicians and intellectuals are more enlightened, more open to the possibility of difference, we in fact often also operate as brutal enforcers of the known order, through things like “fit,” or concepts of appropriate or inappropriate methodology. This was certainly the story of my experience at Sadistic College.

I have also been feeling this tension at PLC, especially from students (well, one student in particular, actually) who have strong opinions on what constitutes the purported PLC method, and certain faculty and administrative interlocutors who have urged me to accommodate these conceptual threads into my teaching. On some level, of course, I recognise the necessity of assimilation, of change and flexibility in method. I have, after all, held positions both as tenure-line faculty and adjunct at several universities with rather strong self-conceptions. However, this year, I have felt empowered, through the curiosity of my own placement professionally and emotionally, to also stand up for the talents and seductions of The Stranger, to be confident and safe enough to insist on difference, and all the chaos it implies for academicians.

For ultimately, The Stranger brings, not only in Camus’s pathological example of fear and loathing but also ideally in a rather more humane context, different knowledges and experiences that are valuable. Again, intellectually, most of us understand and honour this in theory, but in reality can practice assimilative coercion in its most vicious forms. The challenge is maintaining calm in the face of the vertigo such confrontations with difference trigger. As I mentioned in a meeting a few weeks ago with an administrator, adaptation to the PLC model is not a useful idea for me.

The shock of the administrator was palpable, and as we talked more, I outlined the professional and institutional parameters for such an utterance, namely time for my own research agenda in a position that was not tenure-line and terminal (and therefore relatively value-free on both sides of the contractual form), but most importantly in the skill set I bring as a stranger to PLC: transitory, temporal, and ultimately fleeting, but useful nonetheless. The shock that would greet my rejection of simplistic adaptation speaks to rudimentary ways of understanding assimilation, in its many guises, as a straightforward adoption of a host society’s norms and values. But this does not occur in such a clear-cut manner, of course. Assimilation is a complicated nexus of values and decisions that as a process is uneven, unique, and specific.

And where the rubber met the road, so to speak, in this particular conversation was in the fact that I have a job already, another placement that is secure and different and awaits me elsewhere, and therefore I was empowered to think and speak freely, as The Stranger from and with another place. As I indicated in this conversation, the point was not that I was unconcerned with the effectiveness of my teaching methodology, but rather that I wanted a recognition of the value of different systems in transitory contexts, as well as some sort of acknowledgment that adaptation and assimilation are also maneuvers of power, but that that power must, ideally, flow both ways. In other words, institutions need to invest and nurture their faculty in consensual ways, but there also must be space in that nurturing for multiple positions vis-à-vis the institution, from temporary to permanent and everything in between, from The Stranger to The Distressingly Familiar. This strikes me as fundamentally pragmatic, but as we know, pragmatism as a methodology gets rather short shrift in our place and time.

I recently read that the Puritan voyagers, one of the socio-cultural roots of American society, called non-Puritans “strangers.” There was something rather instructive in that factoid, something that spoke to the strong bonds we form within collectives, as well as something about the American character that was reflected in the 19th century literature I was forced to read in high school. What seems harder to me, and the potential point for conflict, in the profession and otherwise is where we insist intellectually on those differences but then act in a different manner when we meet them in flesh and blood.

Teaching HIV

2007-12-01T18:51:00.000-06:00

Today is World AIDS Day, the annual commemoration of the global fact of AIDS and HIV, the virus that causes it. But aside from a series of interviews on NPR, the day has passed relatively unnoticed. The Cold City U. LGBT student organization decided against doing anything for it this year, Prestigious Lil’ College is out for the winter break, and right now the bars and clubs of Cold City are filling up with men and women either blithely unaware of the day or unconcerned. After all, as my friend La Connaire put it over the summer in a kind of throw away comment, AIDS is no longer a gay disease, but an African one. Let the music play again.

When I was in college, of course, it was the nadir of the crisis, or as Andrew Holleran once described it, The Fear. Gay men were seemingly dropping like flies: suddenly, viciously, and brutally, drowning in protozoa or suffering from strange zoological bacterial infections. The pallor that had settled on gay life left little room for doubt that AIDS was, in some crucial way, a gay disease, or at the very least a focus of gay concern and action. This was certainly the reaction of heterosexual society in the 1980s, which used AIDS to conveniently reinforce its pathological ideas about gay sexuality, in particular anal sex.

But those dark times were also a period of hope, of optimism, offering a renaissance of LGBT activism around the HIV crisis that oddly both reaffirmed the importance of an LGBT communal identity as well as ameliorated heterosexual America’s homophobia, or to paraphrase Andrew Sullivan, AIDS demonstrated to straight America the fact of LGBT humanity. When straight America decided gay lives were expendable, lesbians and gay men and trans folks organized to serve and care for our own, from safe sex information (indeed, the very creation of the idea of safer sex is thanks to gay men) to social services for people with AIDS. But these were also the times when one still saw, on Greenwich Avenue in New York City and Castro Street in San Francisco, gay men with AIDS: slim, pallid, sickly. The tactile example of the epidemic was obvious to any gay man and lesbian. It was not aesthetic, it was not pretty, this was real, and it could happen to you.

We don’t really see that anymore, of course. Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapies (HAART), otherwise known as the AIDS cocktail, have changed the equation of HIV infection. Now we think of HIV positive people as relatively normal, albeit with a chronic, serious, but manageable condition. We think of them as climbing mountains, kayaking in wild rivers, going to brunch, at least if we take our messages from some of the controversial advertisements for anti-retroviral drugs in LGBT publications. AIDS is now a problem, for LGBT people, of the other, the dusky unwashed masses in hot places. Or as Love Buckets put it tonight, AIDS no longer seems like a problem for gay men.

Yet, I would argue that HIV continues to be central to our conscious and unconscious notions of gay identity, for better or worse. The global gay community is now arguably a natural reservoir for the virus, gay men still seroconvert (become HIV positive) everyday, and the difference between HIV statuses for many gay men still remains one single test. These are scientific and public health notions, but more largely, culturally, the narrative of AIDS in the developed world is also largely a gay one. Some of the most beautiful and eloquent stories of AIDS, and its human dimensions, were written by gay men facing the crisis head on: Paul Monette, Joseph Beam, Mark Doty, Richard Rodriguez, Gil Cuadros, Marlon Riggs, Randy Shilts, David B. Feinberg, Larry Kramer, Essex Hemphill, Andrew Holleran, David Wojnarowicz, and John Weir, to name but a few. These cultural producers captured the crisis in all its dimensions, adding flesh to the accumulating statistical bodies of gay men in the 1980s and 1990s, documenting the crisis and bearing powerful witness to the lives of the gay men silenced within its precincts.

Today, it is politically incorrect to describe AIDS as a gay disease, and of course in the most literal sense, it is an absurdity to conceive of it as such, for HIV, like other viruses and bacteria, doesn’t discriminate based on human social and cultural identities. But disease as a metaphor for the human condition is a crucial aspect to how we come to see the world, as Sontag has noted, and I would argue that HIV is a gay disease, not only for its emergence and continual presence within the literal gay body in the developed world, but also for the figurative dimensions of its descriptive and cultural history.

This is the perspective I attempt to communicate when I teach courses in LGBT Studies. For me, HIV is so central to the LGBT experience that it deserves its own special topical section on the syllabus. But trying to communicate the importance of this moment, this extended meditation on morality and culture that HIV represents for LGBT people, is difficult in many respects. Primarily, I increasingly find that teaching this material is emotionally exhausting, in the reading and re-reading and explication of searing narratives of loss. I am from the generation of gay men that followed in the wake of the initial crisis, but was deeply imbued by its messages. HIV is not an abstraction for men of my generation, but rather a tiresome acquaintance one cannot shake for life or money. I have known HIV positive men, I have dated HIV positive men, and yes, I have had sex with HIV positive men. And I myself have faced The Fear directly, in sterile doctor’s offices, every time one must confirm or deny their current HIV status.

But my students do not share this perspective. They, like the contemporary LGBT community largely, deal with AIDS as an affliction of the other, of the past, and in that maneuver ironically recreate the conditions for moral judgment that made HIV a crisis in the first place: dirty gay men and dirty gay sex. Since HIV becomes a public health crisis through the sexual ecology of gay sexual hedonism of the 1970s and the difficulty of heterosexual society to talk openly about gayness, battling presentism is hard. In fact, intellectually, it is an impossible task. But as I ask students to consider not HIV, but the lack of it, in the progression of sexual adventurism among gay men of the seventies, I also ask them to step outside of themselves and their moral judgment, to see the world from a different perspective. They resist, they stall, they shuffle, and yet, I push them. And this work is agonizing and grueling in its own respect. Humanizing AIDS for my students feels like reinventing the wheel, proving again the basic humanity of gay men, and more largely all LGBT people, to those who doubt it (dirty gay men, dirty gay sex). Yet, what choice do we have but to engage in this work?

San Francisco as a city has a spooky element in general, with its fogs and gusts and gothic architectural notes, but when I lived there, for many years in the 1990s, I always felt I was surrounded by the ghosts of the thousands of gay men gone away, and I could see, intellectually and emotionally, their world overlapped onto mine, my face where theirs had been. Such visions are not healthy, but are increasingly necessary, for resisting the abstraction that AIDS has become for many people, including many gay men. Honouring World AIDS Day means not only wearing a red ribbon, if people even still do that, but also remembering the thousands of gay men lost, and the thousands still living with HIV, not as the other but as ourselves, in other rooms and other voices.

The Sound of Silence

2007-11-18T23:07:00.000-06:00

A few weeks ago, I turned 39 years old, a mediocre age ultimately yet also one pregnant with possibility, as 40 looms beyond. I’m not sure whether it is accurate to label recent events in my professional and personal life a “mid-life crisis,” since 40 is apparently the new 30, from what I’ve read. But suffice it to say this autumn seems to have nurtured several turning points, forks in the road that deserve serious thought and consideration. Happening against the backdrop of the typical white noise of teaching, crescendos have been reached and receded from, decisions considered, made, dropped, or changed.

Unlike 33, the vaunted l’age du Christ, or even the late twenties, with its New Age Return of Saturn, 39 seems like a somewhat outdated marker, the punchline of an old joke, the final threshold of true adulthood. After 39, it is hard to deny that one is finally all grown up, for better or worse, even when one’s personal and professional lives remain interstitial, intermediate, traced out but not set.

I have no wife, no children, no mortgage, no Labrador. Yet I do have the ubiquitous student loans, a brand new car plus loan, several projects that simmer, monthly bills and daily obligations and distractions, but the outlines of the grand récit remain fuzzy. I have been imbued lately within my iTunes program, permanently set to shuffle, so one has no idea whether one will be hearing recent popular music of little value or be blindsided by a song that takes one back to key moments, other places and other times both joyful and sad. All I know is that memory remains vivid, charged with meaning, but also seemingly does not lead anywhere productive, at least in the short term.

The leaves have mostly fallen off the trees, darkness grows more elongated with each glowering dusk, yet we still have not had, in Cold City, our first real snow. Today it threatened, flaked a bit, large and chunky, for about 30 minutes, falling outside the window as I shuffled through papers and overdue bills and TIAA-CREF statements and extra syllabi and cards and reminders from the dentist that have slowly but surely been collecting in a large red IKEA plastic bin, where I have recently taken to throwing anything that comes my way via post or campus mail without a glance.

I sorted the catalogues and envelopes and announcements for student shows in September into recycling, filed bank and retirement account statements into their appropriate folders, shredded credit card offers and disposable personal correspondence, and put aside the truly urgent, the threatening cable bill and rollover notice and the call for papers and the letter of recommendation forms into a neat, red folder, and went to the supermarket. When I do choose to eat something recently, it is invariably comfort food: cheese quesadillas, corn dogs, bologna sandwiches with American cheese, homemade macaroni and cheese, or scrounging a meal at La Vicks, enchiladas or chile colorado.

As I walked down my quiet street from the supermarket, deep dark even though it was only 6:30, I sensed the world beyond my garret: the smell of wood smoke, one last resistant tree on the street with yellow ochre leaves, the wetness of the precipitation and the rising smell of soil. Fall used to be one of my favourite times, full of warm light and friends, the crispness of the days feeling vivacious, alive. Now, autumn seems the darkest time of the year, a black hole with the summer retreating into a distant glow, months of relentless cold and ice and chapped hands and lips ahead.

I thought such a change in seasonal perception funny, although like all things it is a function of embodiment, a certain time and place lending its peculiar flavour to the overlay of other memories: early dusk at Prestigious Eastern University, walking to meet friends for dinner, passing the various dining and residential halls, the streetlights and headlights bright on a wet street. Tonight, in contrast, and aside from my funny realisation, the only feeling I had was that my hands, gloveless, were remarkably cold.

I am attempting here to trace out an emotional mood without detail, a moment pregnant with possibility: I am a 39 year old light-skinned overeducated Latino gay academic man living alone in a familiar city yet also one not my own, at the cusp of change, at the fork in several paths, with a brand new car plus loan. And I am unsure and scared. That is all.

The Grain of the Voice

2007-10-28T20:04:00.000-05:00

My 9th grade English teacher, a tall lanky Italian American man I would spend hours mooning over (the large hairy forearms, the little tuft of chest hair that would emerge just north of his shirt collar as he leaned over my desk, his high tight ass under his drab chinos as he wandered in front of the chalk board), wrote on my mid-term progress report, regarding my performance: “A smart student who is also pedantic and condescending.” Only fourteen and already big with the attitude. Unfamiliar with the art of the backhanded compliment, I needed to look up the word “pedantic” in the dictionary, and was suitably impressed with myself. Why, yes, I thought, that describes it pretty well. And the rest, as they say, is when her real troubles began.

This pedantry continues, obviously, into my adult life, although modulated by a Forsterian desire to connect rather than impress exclusively, to bring people into the circle of intellectual recognition, the warmth of that particular fire, as opposed to excluding them. Even if this is a laudable goal, it is a hard one to achieve, and one that is not universally applicable in all situations, as the lamentable example of Leonard Bast proves. Quite clearly, many academics use their erudition to establish a boundary between the unwashed rabble and ourselves as the intellectual elect. When this happens in the classroom, it can be inspiring or destructive or both at the same time, and may in fact be one reason why academics are so hated in our society. Historically, Americans seem to have little patience for book learnin’. It chafes against our narratives of parthenogenesis.

My stylistic and linguistic pedantry of long-standing might also be the origin of the latest hot rumour at Cold City U. that I am not planning on returning to campus following my fellowship year, that they should just reassign my office because I am “outtie.” I am considered “too smart” for Cold City U. Is this true, I wonder? Ultimately, no, because most academics are smart and indeed most academics also work with students who lack élite training, but it seems more a question of style than actual smartness. I am “too smart” in relation to the way the institution sees itself, which of course is more about the institution than me. Ironically, the old Greeks at Sadistic College thought I wasn’t smart enough for that bordelle, which I suppose is a way of saying in the end there is no winning. Smartness, like beauty, is largely in the eye of the beholder.

I would like to think I have struck a balance between the two sides of egghead élite and rabble, through reports from course spies that describe unedited student commentary as “he’s really smart and uses big words, but isn’t an asshole about it.” But for every student brought into the warmth of the intellectual fire, there is no doubt another who feels that such performances are showboating in the worst sense. If only students knew that many of us actually talk and think this way in private as well as in public, they might be a little less anxious. At least in my circle, the intellectualism of verbal language continues to the most minor things, shopping lists and emotional problems and the weather. On the tongue of the lively academic, language lives a life that is rarely does outside of literature.

The other day, in a community meeting, I used the word “Zeitgeist” and afterwards, was approached by people who expressed admiration of my use of words they had only ever read. Stunned and not a little embarrassed, I thought of the lists of vocabulary words in 12th grade AP English, of the crafting of unfamiliar sounds and meanings, of the thrill of discovering the myriad ways in which we can express ourselves. I had not, at the time, thought this special, but do now.

I have been thinking of these intellectual and linguistic personae more lately, the performance of erudition, because this semester, like some others, I have been utilizing blogging as a course assessment in my class. My students had the option of maintaining a blog for the course, and I too as the instructor maintain a “course blog,” that offers extracurricular commentary on class readings, discussions, and ideas. This double blogging (course blogging and this blog) has been both interesting and exhausting, and curiously, I have come to feel ambivalent about class blogging in a way I didn’t when I carefully designed the assignment.

For one, it is clear that the development of a written voice is essential to blogging. Those of us who blog regularly know this aspect of the medium, and are drawn to it, I would suppose, because of the expositional and narrative possibilities. Some of my students have taken to the genre like fish to water, and are, as they say, natural bloggers. In fact, when I designed the assignment, I thought this would be true of most of my students, imbued in social networking and online chat and Instant Messaging. This, however, was a misapprehension. Aside from those natural bloggers, who typically are also either gabby or strongly opinionated students in real life (IRL), some of my student bloggers have had trouble crafting themselves in the genre. On Friday, I had an early morning appointment with a student, a smart dedicated young woman, who admitted she was having trouble figuring out how to blog and what to blog about.

We had a long conversation on models, ideas, generating thinking. But the simple fact of the matter is that it is hard, if one is not naturally drawn to electronic media, to sustain something like a blog. When I was writing the guidelines for the assignment, in late summer, I knew there would be an adjustment period for some students, but in fact this adjustment period is, for some, not temporary. The simple fact of the matter is that some of these students are not bloggers, and would have been better served by the traditional writing option (you know, papers and stuff).

The rules for course blogging are in the end very similar to something I have begun to think about the blogosphere: One must start with voice to become fluent in developing voice. In other words, and for the most part, voice cannot develop in electronic media unless it already exists on some level elsewhere, verbally or politically or socially or on the written page. It is no accident that my most successful course bloggers are those who already come equipped with fire and music. These personae communicate themselves strongly on the web page, whereas the more mild students suffer under their light (all the course blogs are linked, and so students are reading each others’ blogs as well as my course blog).

The relationship of the course blog to the student blogs was originally one of modeling, but as I now review several weeks of entries, I return to the concept of pedantic alterity, the difference between myself and my students, not only grounded in the fact that I am a regular blogger here (which my students, obviously, do not know about), but also through the differences of articulation and voice grounded in electronic media but flowing from other sources as well. I have been very happy with my course blog, but realise that on some level it is also ridiculous: incredibly erudite entries that, while short, no doubt must remain, for some students, opaque. In other words, in many ways my course blog is like this blog.

The voice carries over, curiously, from Oso Raro to the man, the professor I am IRL. The illusion, the performance of persona on this blog becomes more concrete on the other blog, the course blog, with a real life picture and a public identity, but what is the connection between Oso Raro of Slaves of Academe and Professor Oso IRL, between Oso here and Oso there? Not surprisingly, even though there is a greater public identity on the course blog (which is written under my real name), it is a voice modulated and yes, restricted, by a rigourous professionalism. I am, natürlich, the professor, and must maintain that performative mask in ways that change and shift the voice of the course blog away from Slaves of Academe. They are both real, both the real me, but the course blog feels less so, or rather perhaps and ironically, more performative than here.

The course blog was meant to facilitate further discussion, and I think in some senses it does, but in another way it serves the more traditional exercise of establishing differences between professor and student that by their very nature are intimidating. And in the end, I’m not sure how I feel about that effect: is it helpful? Is it useful? Or does it result in confirmation of long-held conceptions of egghead difference, inscrutable ideas meant to obfuscate, not clarify? Pedantry has a bad reputation, but I do think there are better and worse variations of it.

All of which is to say, I suppose, that I am ambivalent on the uses of course blogs as assessment tools. I’m not sure that it doesn’t put certain students at a disadvantage, and I’m not sure that it has been as effective as I would have hoped in terms of bringing web-based media and information into the classroom. But the concept of voice remains at the heart of my ambivalence, both my students and my own, as we venture tentatively into the electronic frontier together.

Cleaning My Closet

2007-10-11T00:50:00.000-05:00

In honour of National Coming Out Day, I was recently invited to present some remarks, with others, at a community forum on “coming out.” My fellow panelists dutifully stepped up to the plate and presented the precious and at times incoherent details of their individual coming out stories. Personally, I demurred on my own details, giving an overly intellectual reading of coming out as a sign (as in semiotic sign), partially because on some level the whole experience seemed too private to share with strangers, as odd as that may sound. My reticence was informed as well by a caution that was reinforced by the difficulty the other presenters had in speaking about coming out. Generally, in my experience, coming out does not easily lend itself to linear narrative strategies.

Obviously, this isn’t about being in the closet, in the literal sense. I have been out since I was 17, in various guises from mad queen to bear cub, and as most LGBT people can attest, one is constantly coming out, over and over again, on a daily basis. The decision to drop a revealing pronoun in multiple administrative and institutional contexts is coming out, being with another gay or lesbian person in a public setting is coming out, laughing out loud with a butch dyke in a restaurant is coming out, as is perusing the cosmetics counter with a knowledgeable eye at Macy’s and not flinching at the harridans in Kabuki make-up, all mouths and eyes.

To be frank, one of the things that has always annoyed me about Coming Out Week/Day/Month is the relentlessly cheerful teleology behind it: “Come out, and you’ll be up to your ankles in ice cream! Honest!” The truth, as always, is a shade more complicated. Coming out is a nuanced and complicated series of interlocking decisions that shift and slide in unique ways depending on the individual. There is the revelation to the self, the tenuous contacts with others of similar precision, and the various levels of openness with family, co-workers, peers, strangers, as well as the institutional and administrative apparati that determine our lives, from insurance forms to campus directories. In the end, the “coming out” that seems to be central to National Coming Out Day is not the end, but the beginning.

Twenty-one years on, coming out feels both over- and underrated. To be gay or lesbian is to constantly bump up against a society that in subtle and not-so-subtle ways devalues your humanity. It is a daily struggle for affirmation, although this makes it sound melodramatic. What I mean is that the conscious lesbian or gay man must always strive to maintain fluency in parent culture norms as well as the specific and unique characteristics of LGBT life. We are socio-cultural polyglots. What, for instance, is the meaning and value of men loving men and women loving women in our society, on sexual, social, political, and economic levels? LGBT folks can’t agree on a singular answer, although there are numerous and productive threads in that discussion, and heterosexuals, when they care to listen, tend to be bewildered.

And who can blame them? For the discussions and arguments and debates that occur between lesbians, gay men, and transgender people are often contentious, revealing different moral and ethical systems that are not complimentary, and often are in direct conflict. There are precious few models for what lesbian and gay identity really looks like, outside of stereotype. We are lifting as we climb, building as we destroy, in tension with what society tells us we should be, how we see ourselves in relation to those images, and the flickering projections of gay pride and shame that surround us in our pixelated media and ghettoes of the mind. We ourselves are bewildered, as we salvage what we can from the piles of discursive rubble, building a home in the abyss, as The Fierceness used to say.

Before Stonewall, the sense of coming out was related to the debutante. Coming out meant acknowledging yourself as a fellow traveller before the secret demimonde of lesbians, gay men, butches, bull daggers, and queens of the City, to other LGBT people and the nascent LGBT community. This sense of coming out is markedly different from our contemporary usage, which generally means proclaiming yourself to unknowing or unfriendly straights. I prefer, in some ways, the previous usage, not only because it honours the LGBT community, but also because it speaks more to the gay men and lesbians we become than the drama of tear-stained eyes of shocked parents, or the flinch of the functionary. Today, we commonly tend to understand coming out (again, to straight society) as “I love you in spite of…” rather than, as in the case of the previous usage, “I love you because…” But isn't the latter so much more beautiful?

My girlfriend La Connaire and I used to joke that LGBT identity was like the famous film Freaks, where the “normal” woman is joined to the tribe of circus performers and carnies by the chant “One of Us, One of Us, One of Us!” But there is a ring of truth to that sly appropriation. Becoming LGBT is a process that begins with coming out, but one that reaches fruition only much later, and in the company of fellow travellers, the brothers and sisters who form community norms, boundaries, and expectations. I came out shortly after arriving at Prestigious Eastern University, but I didn’t start becoming the gay man I would eventually become until I met my clique of gay men of color, queens and butches who would mould me, train me in the dark arts of faggotry, the sophistry of inversion— the language, the pose, the stance, the look, the critical relation to the world. Ironically, in becoming gay, I also became a man, for this fierce tribe of men inculcated me into masculinity, the sexual hunt, the inchoate desire.

Twenty-one years on, however, it is also easy for me and others like me, fluent in faggotry and Dykotomies, relatively comfortable professionally, living in a big cosmopolitan city, to forgot the horror of the closet, the torture of the closet, the soul-killing suffocation. For being in the closet doesn’t mean you don’t know who and what you are (or might be). It actually means being highly conscious of that different state, and choosing to suppress it, to smother it in its crib, to deny the possibility. Whether this is through a straight marriage of convenience or worse, not allowing oneself the possibility of love, it is an ersatz version of life. Even with all the problems and challenges of LGBT life, being conscious of one's self and working within that consciousness to get, in the words of Mica Paris, “a little more perfect,” is preferable to the peculiar form of self-mutilation that is the closet. There certainly is no single path to enlightenment, but one must start someplace. And for many of us, that starting place is beginning the journey of becoming LGBT that is marked by "coming out."

Mean Grrlz

2007-10-02T23:29:00.000-05:00

Returning to the drama of the gifted child classroom setting has been, well, refreshing, to say the least. My experience at Doctoral U. over the summer teaching this same course to more traditional students prepped me a bit for the Nestea plunge of the return of the repressed: Pater, Mentor, Symbol, Structure. It is a role that I once relished, back at Sadistic College, but then grew out of at Cold City U. Having mature, self-assured adult students revealed the true dimensions of the problematic of traditional teaching. But, with a gift for gab and an easygoing nature, I thought little of the actual dynamics of returning to the traditional classroom.

It’s not that I have been thrown for a loop. Franchement, I have been teaching too long for that sort of dramatic gesture. Rather, I am rediscovering the internal dynamics of the traditional student and their worlds, especially how they bring the instructive differences from their social spaces into the classroom. Again, I had a preview of this when, over the summer, I had a smart, sexy, articulate student activist in class. I failed to realise, enamoured as I was myself with hir prowess, how this person dominated and effectively silenced the other students in class. My epiphany came at our final social class dinner, when we discussed a recent campus controversy. The student activist pronounced a certain reading of the situation, which caused some cautionary noises from myself, and then, surprisingly, other students.

These were little cautions, not big ones, but nonetheless the student activist seemed upset and left early. After hir departure, the group exploded in alternative readings, contradictions, and political accusations. It was at that moment that I surveyed, in my mind, the strange silent dynamic in class, so powerful I had written off the class mid-way through as being disinterested. I finally saw not disinterest but fear, fear of this student and the implications of discussion. It was an instructive reintroduction to the hypersensitive overlapping of the classroom with the dining hall, the dorm room, and the meeting space.

There is more than just a little of that at Prestigious Lil’ College. Unlike Doctoral U., PLC is small, élite, and self-conscious in a panopticonic way. These students bring intimate histories into the classroom setting. As I have been negotiating the different streams of thought occurring in the classroom, racial and sexual and gendered and intellectual, I began to think of the student catalogue, the system of identification that many of us maintain, even if it is not coherent, to understand the social world of the student within the classroom, a sort of primer in high school cafeteria politics, glossed within the college classroom— the paradigmatic tribes we inhabit. It allows us to teach more easily, and perhaps more problematically, also tends to determine our initial impressions of students, although I don’t know of any professor (or at least those who I respect) who isn’t willing to be surprised out of their system.

My "system" was developed as a younger teacher-apprentice and perfected at Sadistic College, with all its mind trips. I allowed it to get dusty at Cold City U., but now find that a review may prove helpful. Obviously, most of these archetypes are specific to my own training and experience, but modification is the art of classification, so adjust to your own expectational categories. Expand the boundaries of knowledge!

Borrowing a page from Linnaeus, let’s begin the work of classification—

The Spy

Description: The internal plant, a pair of student eyes and ears that record and report what occurs when you are not around.
Habitat: Your office hours
Beneficial Effects: Anticipating crises, averting disaster
Cautions: Not revealing your hand; deploying their own agenda

The Smart White Girl

Description: Dedicated, interested, involved
Habitat: The front row, with reading marked
Beneficial Effects: Smart, smart, smart! Relieves the burden of deadly course conversation slowdowns with compelling questions
Cautions: Easily disappointed; secretively critical on course evaluations

The Student Activist

Description: Relentlessly hypercritical of society and culture; if skilled, typically smart; if unskilled, relies too much on polemic
Habitat: First or second row
Beneficial Effects: Can point out the obvious political connotations without implicating you
Cautions: Can easily turn on you as an "Enemy of the People"; can be excessive in requests for extensions due to arrests at demonstrations as well as invocations of bell hooks

The Politicised Woman of Color

Description: Beautiful, brainy, opinionated
Habitat: Second or third row, off-centre
Beneficial Effects: The voice of articulate racial-gendered dissent
Cautions: Can become frustrated with level of understanding of peers; can overplay role of representational voice of dissent; occasionally exasperated by Smart White Girls (see above), Showstoppers (see below), and Cautious Women of Color (see below)

The Cautious Woman of Color

Description: Ambitious, critical, calm, collected.
Habitat: The corner
Beneficial Effects: When she decides to intervene, it is always remarkable
Cautions: Easily bored; preoccupied with the LSAT/MCAT/GRE

The Showstopper

Description: Gab-ilicious! Liza Minnelli gestures, eyes popping like Diana Ross, they want to be the Star, hands splayed out under the faces like Judy Garland
Habitat: Under the key light
Beneficial Effects: Will intervene in any silence, even if s/he hasn’t done the reading
Cautions: Boredom of the other students, yourself, as they drone on; hard to shut up

The Shy Girl

Description: Quiet, observant
Habitat: Fourth row, off-centre, head down, eyes averted
Beneficial Effects: Generally good work, their writing is typically highly skilled; their presence boosts your enrollments, pleasing the Dean
Cautions: Opaque, hard to read, potentially critical on course evaluations

The Skepticon

Description: Regards the class and you as bollocks; doesn’t like the reading, nor the discussion, nor you; Exaggerated self-esteem issues
Habitat: Second row, ostentatiously doodling
Beneficial Effects: A souvenir of the folly of youth
Cautions: Can foment dissension in class and outside of class (see The Spy, above)

The Dude

Description: Taking the course for Gen Ed requirement; disinterested
Habitat: back row, texting under the desk
Beneficial Effects: Can sometimes surprise you; comic relief
Cautions: Can challenge your authority if irritated; can distract others

The Grade Grubber

Description: Always interested in the grading percentages, sometimes excessive questions on assignments.
Habitat: Any seat, your office hours, the Dean’s Office
Beneficial Effects: Clarity in grading
Cautions: Typically have to grade up to alleviate the threat of a long process of grade challenge

The Dullard

Description: Didn’t get it, doesn’t get it, will never get it
Habitat: Front row, looking bewildered; your office hours, before and after class, the writing center
Beneficial Effects: If you like a challenge…; points at the pearly gates
Cautions: Tends to pull at the heartstrings and be awarded a barely passing grade for effort

This is just scratching the surface of a rich vein of professional knowledge. What are your archetypes? Let a thousand flowers bloom!

Driving

2007-09-21T18:24:00.001-05:00

Die Katzen springen
Die Vögel fliegen
Die Hunde bellen
Die Ziegen fliehen
Wenn du mit
Deinem Automobil
Angefahren kommst

— Stereo Total

Last week Cold City had a spate of severe weather, including a tornado warning, heavy flooding rain, and 1” hail that hit one afternoon right as the rush hour was at its apex. I was home, editing an essay for Mr. Gordo and nursing a cold, when the sky turned dark and flashes of lightening illuminated the sky. I unplugged the computer and switched on the news, and as the orange, reds, and purples of the weather map floated over the television screen, the storm sirens started sounding outside all over the city, the long warbling I used to associate almost exclusively with dance remixes. Within moments, the weatherman, in shirt sleeves to indicate the serious nature of the weather event, ticked off communities where sirens were going off, and the ones where people should watch the sky for the telltale greenish hue of a tornado and the other places where people should be headed towards the basement.

I have heard them before, the sirens, but this strange crooning notice of impending danger, either from air-to-ground lightening or tornados, always hits me in the pit of the stomach. It is an unpleasant and disorienting experience. Where I’m from, there are no sirens to warn of earthquakes, just the sickening rumble and first roll, with a split second thought that hopefully it is just a minor temblor, and not “the big one.” In any event, the tornadic activity hit south of my particular voisinage, but after the excitement of looming disaster, I was spent for the day, exhausted by the threat of imminent peril and suddenly feverish. I spoke on the phone with The Voice, and then La Vicks, and subsequently went to bed.

I have been feeling the first weeks of school, not the least of which is the curiously ambivalent pleasure of having really smart students. On one hand, it is gratifying to face eager, knowledgeable faces each session, their reading neatly marked, chirping and conversating like there’s no tomorrow. On the other, it means one can never, ever relax. The students are constantly pushing you, and in response, you must be simple, chic, and elegant. Sometimes it feels like one is putting out intellectual fires all the time, and it is only the first weeks of class. These performative pressures slowly release, three times a week, as I head out into the cornfields and into the setting sun, en route back to Cold City.

For, you see, Prestigious Lil’ College (PLC) is located deep in the hinterlands of Amerique profonde, and, perhaps stupidly, I decided to commute three times a week rather than relocate to haimische Shtetl land. I didn’t want to sublet, I didn’t want to give up my urban life, or what passes for an urban life, I didn’t want to move. So, one of the reasons I am knackered, in addition to the glorious challenge of active teaching, is that three times a week I am in the car for two hours, negotiating the drive to and fro from PLC.

It is not what I would describe as relaxing driving. While not necessarily akin to the BQE at rush hour, it is nonetheless demanding driving with particular rhythms and beats: urban, suburban, and rural. Keeping track and adjusting sometimes makes me feel as if I’m doing a Dance Dance Revolution marathon. If I am heading from home into the country, it starts off in the heart of the city, stopping for a coffee, joining the interstate and slowly passing the numerous construction projects that define warm weather here, as our extreme winters preclude major building projects for six months of the year. It doesn’t help that in general Cold Place drivers are horrible, for a variety of sundry reasons that mean defensive driving is the order of the day. But in the city itself, there is not much one can do other than go with the flow and hope no one decides to merge into your lane at the last minute sans flicker or a glance in their blind spot, unfortunately a rather common occurrence.

As the city gives out onto the suburban apron, the speed limit increases and one faces a changing traffic pattern, with more trucks and SUVs and busses. A generation ago, the suburbs around Cold City were fairly close in proximity. Now they stretch almost 25 miles outside of the urban core, endless pitched roofs and soulless big box shopping centers, apartment complexes with obsequious names like Deer Park and Oak Park and Elm Grove, gargantuan interstate-side fuel complexes, with huge canopies sheltering 25 pumps, and ubiquitous Vanagons careening down the highway coming up your ass at 20 miles over the speed limit. A hot play date, apparently.

Finally, the suburbs give up the ghost and one is in the country, passing cows and appaloosas and fields marked by signs indicating the type of seed grown, dodging slow pokes and huge eighteen wheelers on a two-lane highway. The speed limit here is high, and one tends to go even more than that, so pulling off the highway, one feels windblown, dissonant. And you still have seven miles on a country lane to PLC. Arriving at the sylvan precincts of the college, parking, one almost cannot believe that one has made the journey only to do something else. The journey itself feels like quite the accomplishment.

I am not the only faculty member living in Cold City and schlepping down. And I have broached a discussion with some other faculty to commute together, which would save on both gas and driving anxiety, but I have not gotten it together yet to organize such a venture. Where this constant movement to and fro will get sticky is during our impending winter, when travel times are elongated and conditions can dramatically deteriorate. And like Margo Channing, one must make every show. On the particular stretch of interstate I travel to PLC, it is not unknown during winter weather to be down to 25 mph with hazard lights on, if not already spun out in a ditch. (Memory: Prancilla coming back from PLC on the cellphone, during a snow storm: Prance— "What are these crazy people doing in a ditch?" Me— "Girl, get off the phone now please!")

I will need to secure a warm transitory bed chez PLC before that time comes. Until then, I am in motion, most of the time when I wish I could have a nap instead of a drive. However, pulling up chez moi always feels right, the energy and comfort of the city, the ziggurats of Mammon heralding my arrival back into corn-fed Sodom and Gomorrah, the deliciously anonymous city. I’ve played the country châtelaine before, and that time is over, for now.

Memento Mori

2007-09-11T00:11:00.000-05:00

Nowadays, I am not one easily given to displays of overwrought emotion. In fact, I am usually characterised by sang-froid in the realm of the emotional: a practical girl, good head on her shoulders, get on with it, that sort of thing. Or at least I like to think of myself as so.

I have spoken before on this moment, this odd combination of numbers, the unlucky reminder of both better and worse times, the sickening memory that now, invariably, comes around annually, stretching into infinity. Every year there will be a moment of recognition, however increasingly dim, of an event as germinal to one's experience and as shocking in its abruptness as the guns of August or the explosion of Vesuvius, signaling the profound loss of an entire world, in the toxic plume that covered lower Manhattan.

Unfortunately, the human heart is not equipped to deal with this sort of sudden catastrophe, this vaporisation of quotidian realities that were thought of, however erroneously, as timeless. And as time has passed, the true ramifications of that awful moment settle in the bones, uncomfortably, a painful reminder.

Suffice it to say, emotionally drained in a curiously dislocated way, I feel bereft of adding anything more than what I have already said, other than to sadly note that September 11th, 2001 has become the national sepulchre for both our common taste and promise, a greater loss than any of us could possibly have imagined, at the time.

Gardening at Night

2007-09-09T00:25:00.000-05:00

Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

— William Butler Yeats

So tonight, slightly bored as most folks I know in Cold City are out of town or otherwise indisposed, feeling mildly bloated from a modest supper consisting of a grilled cheese sandwich and a bowl of minestrone, I began Googling. On one hand, the electronic infrastructure of web, email, and other assorted circuit-based paraphernalia means that we, as an egghead class, are as far removed from our dusty sinecures as we have ever been. We are everywhere, yakking and writing and commenting and engaging, far from the remove of our isolated Ivory Towers (or cement-brick basements, as the case maybe). Yet, that networking also means that the fates of friends and enemies long forgotten are also at our fingertips. Such information, if not judiciously weighed, can provide a one-way ticket to the Funny Farm.

Schadenfraude and Envy seem to be two cardinal emotional states in the academy, and the Internet provides us with the ambivalent deliciousness of both in equal measure. But a little of this goes a long way, and after entering some key names and idly reviewing university profile pages, course descriptions, and conference programs, and perusing listings on Rate My Professors and Amazon, I did not feel the usual self-loathing I usually experience at such tortuous, masochistic moments. You know the drill: Mr. X has Fabby Job #2439, Ms. Y has Post-Doc #746338, Ms. Z is still at the Roy Cohn Center for Self-Aggrandising Studies, et cetera. Woe is me. Slow curtain, the End.

No, instead, this time, as I monitored, through casual Internet stalking, my former colleagues and doctoral student peers, I realised with a mild start that we move at different paces and speeds. In fact, the stars of my cohort and the ones immediately before and after seem to have hit a wall. They burned bright, burned hot, then flamed out. Some have received early tenure, and retreated into bourgeois respectability, producing no doubt hideous monster children and buying homes. Others have just dropped off the map, stopping at book #1, or article #1 as the case may be. The Next Big Thing turned out to be rather the latest Flash in the Pan. Some are still passing through the Merry-Go-‘Round of mentions in equally moribund authors’ acknowledgment pages (“So-and-So continues this important work,” and other such nonsense), or they have nice positions in which they’re producing little, a name on a webpage, all pixel. Like most of the profession, once we have achieved a certain level, many of us die a figurative death. We continue to breathe, theoretically, but professionally we have become the embodiment of a certain sort of social parasite.

In my fields in particular, this final resting place is one that is deeply political. If I were to look at the range of people in my areas of research and teaching expertise, the ones who landed the plum jobs or had early articles or clawed their way to the top, were also the ones who, to a certain extent, worked for it. And not in some snarky CHE sort of way, but rather in terms of the desire to succeed at any cost. I have commented on this particular sub-strata of homo academicus before, the Fine Young Cannibal. And I have always felt bereft in front of their dazzling skills (not to mention gleaming fangs), the dedicated talent at leaving no ass unkissed in their rush for their positions and name recognition. But tonight, I remembered that the profession is not only the terror-induced adrenaline rush of the probationary period, the desperate grasping at the keys to tenure. Rather, it is (also) a longer race, a deeper challenge.

The probationary period and its unpleasant rigours has distracted many academics of my generation from the real struggle, which is ultimately the task of maintaining a vital and dynamic intellectual and teaching life beyond the tenure finish line. This tends to be true across disciplinary and interdisciplinary boundaries, and is also a relatively familiar trial. It is not by accident that we have, for our use, the term Dead Wood. Also, the dangerous depression that many academics face immediately after receiving tenure is indicative of this struggle. And that is why, tonight, instead of self-loathing, I felt curiously relieved.

Yes, my book(s) remains undone. Yes, I have devoted too much time to teaching and service and not enough to professional rimming. Yes, I never had the interest to fuck my way to the middle, and yes, perhaps I had better things to do than the relentless slogging that our professional coaches recommend in print and conversation. The truism of Arbeit Macht Frei in our profession has some chilling dimensions that are stifling, if not down right dangerous. My summers and free time were spent travelling, or reading, or staring into the air, thinking and reading what I wanted rather than what I should, or hours wasted spent talking and socialising with people I wanted to, rather than those I should have. (Flashback: a dinner with Paul Gilroy just as his star was rising, years ago. I was a first-year graduate student, unfamiliar with his work, and said nothing. Later, chastised by a colleague for my silence, I shrugged. I had, frankly, nothing to say.)

Yet, all this wasted time was not for naught. It has contributed to the longer term, to the intellectual and academic I am. Intellectual life is like tending a garden. True gardeners plant with an eye towards the future: this sage here will complement the bougainvillea, and fill in the space in front of the Cana. Any of us can plop ferns in the sun or marigolds in the shade, straight out of the pot. They look nice for a few weeks, but then die. Poorly placed, a disregard for their natures, instant gratification instead of building (a mystery). Similarly, the professional pace I have been keeping has not necessarily landed me in academic nirvana, but it has provided me with experience and expertise, space for reflection, bad times and good times, and the slow percolation of ideas and projects that are ripening and maturing. This is also generally true of other academics of my generation who I respect. They too are tending their gardens, learning the structures of the institution, and writing, just slowly, deeply, with care instead of flash. Learning their craft the old fashioned way, as instructive as the difference between Nina Simone and Brittany Spears, between mastery and pastiche.

As I closed my browser on the past, I felt hopeful, optimistic, not necessarily at the misfortune, the wonderful and horrible lives of formerly famous (or soon to be formerly famous) colleagues, although that is always a nice touch, but rather at the realisation that there is more than one way to skin a rabbit. Remembering that, in the face of the relentless and vicious propaganda that indicates otherwise, might save some of us from ending up exactly where we don’t want to be: moribund, self-satisfied, uncurious, stultifyingly cynical, self-involved and distant. I would rather have had the indeterminacy and constant questioning, and yes, controversy and resultant displacement into academic Siberia, that has characterised some of my time in the profession than a set of slogans and a polite audience that applauded at all the right moments, an airless sinecure, left to rot. That’s not an intellectual life, that’s a museum-quality death.

How we come to believe that this state of dusty irrelevancy is what we have been working towards, what we should want, tells us quite a lot about the current moment in academia.

The Dope Show

2007-09-08T02:23:00.000-05:00

Delicate Boy recently had a post musing, as the academic year commences, on annual theme songs. I'm not sure I can go for the whole year under the aegis of just one chanson, given my mercurial tastes and moods. Captain and Tenille one moment, the Carpenters the next. (Another reason why iTunes shuffle is so me) In any event, talk about an embarrassment of riches! Should I go for cynical, bitchy, Super Faggy, or inspirational? After some pondering, and perusing of my music collection and YouTube, I finally figured on The Dope Show, by Marilyn Manson, as my theme song of the semester. Not only is it a lyrically fantastic song (my favourite line has always been "The drugs, they say, are made in California"), but the video is stunning, a little bit David Bowie, and a lot of Todd Haynes' creepy Safe thrown in for good measure.

As a parable for teaching and la vie academique, I guess I went for the cynical angle— with a title like The Dope Show, full of deliciously malicious double entendres, how could it be anything but? Nevertheless, what academic, I ask you, could resist this line:

They love you when you're on all the covers
When you're not, then they love another

Certainly a cautionary tale for academics and starlets alike.

What's your current theme song?

Casa de los babys

2007-09-06T09:47:00.000-05:00

The start of a new school year, and the reports are pouring in. The cyclical nature of academic life is one of its most reassuring qualities, the endless flowing in and out of semesters, courses, students, in and out of our lives. Is this why we become academicians, sophisticated technocrats, wizards and witches of knowledge? For the calming hum of the seasons, the repetitive rituals reminding our reptilian brains of a perfect embryonic state, close to our mother’s heart, the pulsing rhythms relaxing our muscles, lulling us to some sort of delightful somnambulant state? Or maybe we just like our summers off.

In any event, my return to Cold City has had a remarkably different quality this year. I’m not sure why, although perhaps it has to do with La Vick’s impending move to Cold City to shack up full-time with Love Buckets (I have one thing to say— U-Haul), or perchance it is a feeling of expansion in my social life, or maybe it is the beginning of my fellowship year at Prestigious Little College (PLC), with all the fresh possibilities it holds. I feel better this year, curiously. After so long feeling dismayed at the blank stares of eyes that have seen one too many winters, this time I feel strangely comfortable. Not one of them exactly, my fellow Cold City denizens, but like an exilic being that has finally figured out how to float above it all. This euphoric state may come collapsing down at the first serious dip in temperature, but for now, it has persisted beyond any possible oxygen deprivation from commercial air travel.

The past week or so I have been being inculcated, initiated, into the rituals of PLC. New Faculty Orientations are always a trip, and for the newbie, the freshly minted PhD or lucky girls and boys who finally make it off the adjunct tilt-a-whirl, it is one of the passages of the profession. Who knew that slightly endless seminars on everything from Sexual Misconduct codes to FERPA to library reserves could be so meaningful? (Note: it’s not, but still) PLC’s ritual is somewhat more extensive than usual, lasting basically three days, the results of which has one’s smile at the end of a taught wire.

Of course, as the old hag I am, I can pace myself. This is, after all, my third inculcation into institutional mystery. And like losing your virginity, you only really experience it once. Everything else, whether better or worse, reminds one however faintly of that first, awkward groping moment. Institutions attempt, through these orientations, not only to guide new faculty to appropriate resources, but also to bring these faculty members into an institutional fold, a single standpoint that can last an hour or a lifetime.

For me, partly it’s a case of having been through it before, in different guises and fashions. Sadistic College’s orientation was labourious, but brief, at just one day. No bells or whistles, a rubber chicken lunch, and a brief disquisition by the insane president that only offered the briefest of glimpses of the Apocalypse Now-type horror that would unfold, later, in the dark. Cold City U., as befits its institutional profile, was no-bones: simple, chic, and elegant (minus the chic and elegant): a two-day long marathon in windowless, humourless classrooms. Just the facts, ma’am. No porn or gambling on computers, please. Here’s the benefits package and your password to Cold Place’s system-wide website. Stale sandwiches and an endless march of staff across one’s glazed eyes. As seductive as a testicular exam.

In contrast, PLC has put on the dog. Sociability and printed nametags. Lunches fabricated out of locally grown organic vegetables and offering the most incredibly creamy tenderloin smothered in blue cheese held in neo-Gothic halls with elaborately painted ceilings, tablecloths and real napkins, and founder’s portraits in oil on the walls. Erudite talks from the Dean and President that focus on texts and ideas, not regulations. Personable introductions to the general faculty, along with little cocktail gatherings featuring hot buffets and wine. No free t-shirt though.

And although there have been a number of eye-glazing moments, as today when half the library staff came in to discuss their various services arranged as an awkward tableau vivant in front of us, for the most part one feels, well, to be frank, one feels the money. PLC is prestigious, well endowed, and not afraid to demonstrate it in those tasteful ways that matter: good food, for one, not to mention a benefits package that is incredibly generous. And staff and faculty folks are competent and seemingly happy. Who knows if and when the mask will fall off: all institutions have their dark sides of course, but for the most part, PLC’s orientation seems to lack either the Gothic atmosphere of Sadistic College or the astringent Socialist realism of Cold City U.

Also, to be completely honest, as a visitor in this leather-padded magical Hall of Versailles, I am relatively free: to speak my mind, to be light, to be wind, to be water. While my fellow neophytes keep their mouths shut, on the tenure-track, I am chatty, provocative, engaging, flirtatious. Why not? I am here a year then, like Cinderella’s coach, will disappear into a puff of smoke, back to Cold City U., hopefully with a book under my belt. I got my education! To be the visitor is both to be marginalised and liberated. Marginalised by an institutional politics that looks at my specialty and department as unbecoming of true academic study (oh well) or that sees me as passing cannon fodder, the glances at the name tag and affiliation leading to unfocused smiles; liberated in not being beholden to those forces for my professional future through the mechanism of tenure, of the small-town politics that define baccalaureate collegiate faculty culture. Over the summer, having a coffee with a Cuban lesbian professor, an old hand herself, she remarked that the institution of the academy has “no memory and no heart.” Keeping that in mind means that my time at PLC has more to offer me than the institution, in terms of my own agenda free of the perturbations of unfriendly colleagues. Like Charlotte Vale, I am no longer afraid.

As I continue to move across the institutional spectrum, these differences are as instructive as the similarities. All of this only reinforces the old saw of “all politics are local.” For whatever limitations PLC may have, it is a relatively safe space to launch a career, or rather build on an already extensive foray into the halls of academe. Already an accomplished teacher and dedicated worker bee, it will be important to keep one’s eyes on the prize, which is to say, one’s research agenda, even as I luxuriate in and nervously anticipate the opportunity to teach talented, traditional students once again.

The adult learners I have taught for the last two years have been remarkable, and the shift in professional perception one gets teaching at a place like Cold City U. is bracing and wonderful. Traditional students have their pitfalls, especially at baccalaureate colleges where the expectations for faculty-student interaction are rather high, at times almost strangely infantile. (Moment: a panel featuring undergrads where one plaintively states she expects us to be “family”) But the change suits me, in exactly that dimension: as a change and challenge of mind. As many of us increasingly move around the profession and across different dimensions of student constituency, the ability to teach in the different registers that movement requires is what distinguishes the teacher from the technocrat.

So it’s not an argument of either/or: either talented students or the dregs, trad or non-trad, grammatical skills or illiterate dullards, bright-eyed eager beavers or exhausted lumpen. It is rather a realisation that one needs to speak to all of those groups simultaneously, which reveres and honours the act of teaching in ways that most admin speak give short-shrift, even at “teaching institutions,” with their nifty slogans and empty pockets. Bad teaching remains the dirty little secret of the profession: many of us can’t really do it terribly well, I would argue, and those of us who do slide down the professional ladder unrespected. Tim Burke has had a fascinating conversation over at Easily Distracted on popular anger at the academy, and I think that robotic or disinterested teaching is one of the reasons as to why we, as a social and professional class, are both respected and loathed with equal measure.

My temporary return to the Casa de los babys of traditional studentry signals also a return to a type of teaching that thrills and chills at the same time— the thrill of engaged, bright student interlocutors, and the chill of projection and home telephone numbers on syllabi. I think I’ll feast at the table of the former and forget to include the latter.

For Mr. Gordo

2007-09-05T18:21:00.000-05:00

The untold want
By life and land ne'er granted
Now, Voyager
Sail thou forth to seek and find

— Walt Whitman

The Senator and the Bathroom Stall

2007-08-28T19:40:00.000-05:00

Washington loves a scandal, even or perhaps especially a manufactured one. And although lucky enough to initially break on the day of even bigger news, Senator Larry Craig’s foibles and fumbles under a stall wall in a men's room at the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport in June, and his rather rapid descent and evacuation into Republican Siberia, is one juicy scandal. Glenn Greenwald over at Salon has a pretty good roundup of the right wing blogosphere’s back flips on Craig, who was outed last fall by a leftist gay blogger, primarily for supporting a conservative “family values” platform while engaging in anonymous sex with men in public places.

On some level, of course, this pantomime is what we have come to expect from our politicians and politicos. The doughy faces intoning a saccharine and implausible familial and sexual utopia, while in the realm of the personal they hone their practice of the seven deadly sins. Money, greed, image, distortion, and farce seemingly remain the guiding principles of the American political apparatus. And there is something awfully rewarding, schadenfraudic and almost with a sense of jouissance (pardon the pun) about seeing Senator Craig numbly deny the conditions of his arrest, which are contained in the dry, laconic description of the police report. Just this afternoon the New York Times reported the denial of his gayness at a robotic press conference without questions (“Senator Craig, are you a Sodomite?”). This is most likely true, as Senator Craig in fact does not have a gay social-cultural identity, certainly not with his luckless wife next to him. However, the sex he likes to participate in is gay, whatever that may mean at any given time it means male cock and male ass and a male mouth, however you slice it.

A perusal of the details of the police report will convince any gay man that, indeed, Senator Craig was looking for more than a dropped piece of paper in the men’s room of the Minneapolis-Saint Paul airport. Yet, ultimately, I feel ambivalent about the conditions of his arrest, which amounted to being in a suspicious place, and performing suspicious acts, but in the end doing nothing untoward. There was no slow reveal of the senatorial member, no embarrassing close-up of the congressional money shot under an enameled stall wall. Senator Craig is guilty of several things— a) tapping his foot and bumping it against the foot of the undercover police officer under the stall wall, b) lingering outside of the stalls suspiciously, and c) reaching under the stall wall with his hand, waving it back and forth but establishing no physical contact with the police officer. So, this is where we are in 2007: you can be arrested for tapping your foot.

As I said before, only an imbecile would mistake Senator Craig’s actions for anything other than what he was arrested for, the inchoate desire to have sexual relations in a men’s loo with another man. This is a crime. Senator Craig was charged with Invasion of Privacy and Disorderly Conduct. In court, the first charge was dropped but the second sustained by his guilty plea, for which he paid a fine and was put on probation. However, what exactly was Senator Craig guilty of? My thinking on this matter has been guided by recent events in Cold City, where all summer local police forces have been conducting stings against men who “cruise” for sex in public places.

Lacking the star power of a United States Senator, however, many of these men have seen their lives destroyed by the process of entrapment and vengeful publicity that has characterised these sting operations. Many of these men have been forced to register permanently as sex offenders. Many have lost their jobs, through being charged with "sexual assault" for touching a fully clothed police officer on the thigh or buttock. And yes, many have had their pictures, addresses, and places of employment plastered on the front page of Cold City newspapers and on television. All of this reminds me a little too much, as someone who studies and analyses gay history, of the pre-Stonewall period, where to be gay or lesbian was to be constantly and consistently vulnerable to the rages of heterodominant society, including falling within active and brutal containment stategies of incarceration, arrest, institutionalisation in mental health facilities, and the public shaming and pariah status that drove many lesbians and gay men to suicide.

It is hard for many post-Stonewall LGBT people to defend public cruising, especially in front of straight people. In fact, many gay men actively disavow public sex, with responses along the lines of “Haven’t we moved beyond all that?” and “Men who do such things are either closeted or have real self-esteem problems.” Indeed, the local Cold City gay press and Cold State LGBT civil rights organisations have been largely silent on the parading of the new sex offenders on the front pages of our newspapers. Unlike the 1950s, when police entrapment and criminalisation of cruising was recognised by gay men and homophile organisations for what it was, the heartless enforcement of heterodomination, today LGBT people demur. We shuffle. We blush. We focus on the positive images that are designed to reassure and recruit straight allies: we are not deviant, we are just like you, and we have nothing in common with those icky butches/cruisers/drag queens/queers.

This is an immense and dangerous failure of LGBT political community. I am not here defending the “crime” of public cruising, although obviously I have my doubts as to who is really damaged here, for cruising as a gay art has a long history, and if practiced with some sense of discretion and care, offends no one and delights many. My beef with the latest series of entrapments in Cold City, as well as the Craig case in the airport stall, is the degree of punishment, not punishment itself. If public cruising is a behaviour we seek as a society to dissuade, is the best methodology to march in the footsteps of a legal and policing tradition that pathologises and publicly shames men who have sex with men, that blatantly and shamelessly loathes gay men (and by extension all LGBT people) as freaks, as “sick,” as sex criminals?

For instance, wouldn’t CCTV cameras, public signage, and police patrols with mild misdemeanor citation (violation of park hours, for instance) be a better, more progressive solution? Some cities have experimented successfully with less punitive measures to discourage public sex, or at the very least make it more subterranean. Sexuality is a complicated business, and there will always be men (and many women) who enjoy the thrill of public sex, the erotics of space that it represents, the desires it unleashes. Nothing, no punition, will ever eliminate it. And indeed, I suppose I can imagine how coming upon someone in the wood engaging in sex would disturb, although when it has happened to me (with aggressive straight couples, by the way, who have glared at me as if I had walked into their bedroom), I have discreetly averted my eyes and continued on. Chacun à son goût.

But does the punishment here match the crime? A destroyed life, a wrecked career, a permanent tag as sex offender? No, these are not just consequences. This is heterodomination at its worst: a self-justifying tautology that consigns LGBT sexuality to the pathological and then reinforces that conclusion through its own mechanisms. Public sex is only the most extreme instance in this regard. If one thinks critically about how heteronormativity warps our daily lives, the extension of socio-pathology from "illegal" public sex to kissing, holding hands, or even walking together is only the shortest logical step. Any LGBT person can relate their experiences of containment and self-control, of not feeling safe in public space doing something that straight people unconsciously take for granted everyday: the demonstration of their affection, sexual and otherwise.

Mr. Gordo and I have experienced two significant instances of public gay bashing together: one was on the New York subway, where a deranged homeless man singled us out and unleashed a barrage of homophobic taunts and physical threats, for the simple fact of sitting together. The other was just last month, where walking home from a restaurant in Yarmouthport one night, Mr. Gordo put his arm around my shoulders on a dark country road and, illuminated by headlights, a passing truck yelled out the familiar epithets. If such mild mannered demonstrations of affection can trigger heterosexual panic and the ever-present potential for violent enforcement (The Fear: Would the assholes in the truck come back with leaded pipes?), then it is no surprise that public sex, the overt and raucous visible demonstration of gay sexuality, is such an incredible threat, even as we live in a society increasingly dominated by pornographic and proto-pornographic images of heterosexuality.

To not see and attempt to understand how the policing and pathologizing of public sex is connected to larger discourses of heterodomination is an anti-historical failure of imagination in LGBT America, which tends to be so busy attempting to establish the very basis of our shared humanity through charitable acts worthy of Mother Teresa that it has little time to engage in the more complicated debates and conversations occurring within our communities over things like gay marriage, public sex, child rearing, as well as a host of other topics. A point of controversy in my summer course was our final discussion on transgender sexuality, where at the end of class one of my lesbian activist students approached me and mildly upbraided me for discussing some aspects of trans culture “in front of straight people” (the straight students in the class).

Such sentiments, reflective of discourses present in LGBT civil rights organisations and invested in rather simplistic concepts of positive representation, strike me as strategic yet shortsighted. Being nice rarely guarantees you anything, ultimately. And shopping and exquisite taste will not prevent you from being charged with disorderly conduct, even if you aren’t actively cruising, but rather just in the wrong place at the wrong time. The cases of men arrested for “looking gay” in a cruising location (and therefore presumptive of guilt: to be gay is to criminal) are numerous. It's called entrapment for a reason. Ultimately, there is no singular answer to the phenomenon of public sex and its place in gay sex culture. But marginalising the issue as not pertinent to LGBT socio-sexual identity and legal discourse is far too easy of an out.

As for the lecherous Senator Craig, no legislative friend of LGBT people, well, that pious hypocrite is on his own.

Quelquechose Oso

2007-08-24T01:00:00.000-05:00

Eve— Eve, Eve the golden girl; the cover girl; the girl next door; the girl on the moon. Time has been good to Eve. Life goes where she goes. She's been profiled, covered, revealed, reported: what she eats, and what she wears, and whom she knows, and who she was, and when and where she's going. Eve. You all know all about Eve. What can there be to know that you don't know?

— Addison DeWitt

Tenured Radical tagged me a zillion years ago for the 8 things meme that was circulating in the early summer. Since I feel I am such an open book, both in my personal life and online, I was left pondering what 8 things could possibly be left that you don’t already know (and have heard ad nauseam via the mechanism of the kvetch)? Some things, of course, remain too personal to write about publicly, as surprising as that may sound to regular readers of this blog. Yet, I have mined my memory to present 8 things unknown or relatively unknown about me, as per the rules of the meme. I shan’t tag anyone, however, mostly because I think at this point the meme is dead. But that is the story of Oso: a day late and a dollar short.

1: Most of the time, I think I am ugly

Rather I guess one could say sometimes I have poor self-esteem, if we wanted to get all Oprah about it. It's not like I'm cutting myself or anything like that. But I avoid looking into mirrors I “don’t know.” I use clothes and language to perform the social power I feel I lack in the corporeal. I cultivate a specific photo pose and appropriate angle to affect the wonderful lie of photography. I have an image in my head of what I look like, and to see that representation disrupted by an inadvertent candid photo or a passing glance in a plate glass window brings on a shudder and not a little nausea. Therefore, I avoid these confrontations with one particular reality, and work on the mimetic perfection of representational strategies, which is a fancy way of saying I prefer to see myself in photos than in real life, like any true star, I suppose.

2: I almost gave away my application to Prestigious Eastern University

It had come in the post, unsolicited, and sat for a while in the pile of the detritus of college apps and four-colour brochures I was inundated with my senior year in high school (“How Does Puget Sound?” is a remembered tag-line from one of those brochures). By the time the deadline approached, I had already gotten an early acceptance into Berkeley and a famous art school, and wasn’t terribly interested in writing another “deeply felt” essay. A school chum expressed interest in the application, but I never remembered to bring it to school, and at the last minute on a lark I decided to send it off. My life would have been completely different had I in fact remembered to hand the application off to my friend. Just one of those little things that happen to determine the course of the rest of your life.

3: Motherly intervention saved my academic career

After my bucolic primary school, I transferred to a local junior high that was notorious for its violence. I was a wreck every day I had to go to that school, where violence and failure were institutionalised, a one-way ticket to reform school. After I was beat up in the second month of 7th grade, my mother, the secretary, marched down to the school to seek my transfer to a calmer local junior/senior high school that was, however, outside of my residential zone. On her way into the school, she ran across some cholos who were selling raffle tickets to sponsor the burial of one of their friends, a student at the school, killed in a gang shooting and whose family was, like most of us, on the verge of financial disaster and couldn't afford the burial. She bought a few, and went in for her meeting. When the vice-principal demurred on the rate of violence at the school and refused to authorise a transfer, she tossed the raffle tickets at him and, suddenly experiencing a change of heart, he signed the form. I spent the next five and a half years in relative peace (free from most overt violence but not the contempt of my peers), being a closeted nerd and moving onto the fabulosity of Prestigious Eastern U. But for the Grace of God...or in this case, my tough-ass mother, willing to confront banal, disinterested authority.

4: Mr. Gordo and I were almost a Missed Connection

For several months, Mr. Gordo and I saw each other around the campus of Sadistic College, he a grad student in a radically different discipline and me a new faculty member teaching in the undergrad college (ergo, no conflict of interest, all you Jane Gallop watchers). I saw him in the student canteen before the start of school, wearing a sports coat, yakking away with some girl in Spanish, with his cute little Benjamin Franklin hair don’t of the time, and was mildly smitten. We would see each other en passant through the fall, once when I was with the local man I was dating for awhile in the parking lot of CVS, me thinking (perhaps ungenerously): “That’s the dude I want to be with, not this chump!” We saw each other at the bus stop, and even went so far as to wave at each other from across the street, but we never spoke. He knew the grad student couple that lived upstairs from my flat, and I queried them about him, but they didn’t pass along the interest. Finally, after Christmas holidays but before school started, I saw him bound out of the dining hall alone in a ridiculously huge Michelin Man down jacket on one of the warmer days of a generally warm winter (I was wearing a jean jacket), his shoulder-length fringe gone. I said, “So, you got a haircut…” He turned around, stunned. He had just returned from Venezuela and was depressed with North American winter. The rest, as they say, is history…

5: I slept with a woman once (Gasp!)

Tequila, lime, and salt. A pachanga. A flirtation. A drunken encounter in a small, airless room. She went to Wellesley. She gave me hickies that raised some hackles the next morning: I looked like I’d been in a car accident and resuscitated by vampires! Ironically enough, she ended up later that night, or rather early morning (after we stumbled away from each other) at my house eating a huge hoagie with her robust Chicana girlfriends, also all eating huge hoagies, invited by my roommate (who did not know of our earlier encounter), while I sat on the couch with my head in a tequila spin. The whole experience was uniquely surreal, at the time. Practice makes perfect, however (head spins and fumbling away from each other, I mean).

6: I flashed the Class of 1974

The summer after my junior year at PU, when I had developed quite an alcohol habit, I crashed the reunion party for the Class of ’74 with a bunch of friends, including a boy from Columbia I had a mad crush on. We knew the student bar workers and they served us free screwdrivers all night. Shit faced. A song. A dirty dance with Columbia boy. A grind (OK, a few). A loose belt. The music ended and suddenly I was standing in the middle of a manicured lawn surrounded by people with my pants around my ankles and very visible wood tenting my briefs. These are the times when being drunk really pays off, cause you can pick your face up off the floor with little compunction. Ah, to be 20 and drunk again in the summer night (surrounded by the Class of ’74)! Not my finest moment, but memorable nonetheless. Nothing came of Columbia boy, by the way. Maybe we lacked a certain mystery (hellõ!)…

7: I slept with Big Time Power Playa Scholar

But it didn’t do a thing for my career, alas.

8: I was fired for being an incompetent secretary

My first bursary job at PU was as an assistant to the two education coordinators at the university art gallery, who at the time were both named Janet. I was 17, struggling through my first semester in college, and a mess, needless to say. PU was changing its phone system that semester, and every office had two phones, an older black model with a red push-button hold function, and a newer tan one with a series of complicated key entries for multiple functions, including hold (something like *8#3). Both lines were live, placed side by side, and both would ring at any given time (each had a unique prefix). A phone call came in for either Janet from a museum benefactor on the new phone, and I pressed the tactile hold button on the old phone as I called out to the Janets that they had a call (meaning, dear reader, that the benefactor was in fact not on hold but on a live, open line, listening in real time). Both Janets came to my desk and started bickering about who would take the call, with one Janet saying “No way, he was such a boor at the last event,” and the other Janet responding, “Well, I don’t want to talk to him either.” On and on they went, about how boring he was, as on and on the benefactor listened. Finally, they instructed me to take a message and walked away. As I turned back to the phone, I noticed my error with a small gasp and glumly told the benefactor they were not available. Oops! He was gruff but managed to remain polite. Stupidly, I immediately informed the Janets of my error and they commiserated over who would have to call him back and eat crow. I was fired shortly thereafter, on a snowy afternoon late in the semester. Initially, I took the news well, but retreated to my Selectric and cried like a baby, which was awkward only in so far as the office was an open plan set up, and my sniffling and sobbing could be heard by everyone, including both Janets, a couple of docents, and the other bursary student. I met a friend on the way home and cried all the way to the WaWa, when she turned and said to me: “Go out tonight, get drunk, and raise a toast— ‘Here’s to the Bitches!’” I didn’t do that, but I always thought it was a fine response to a freshly-fired teary-eyed 17-year old on a slushy street corner in the fall of a grey freshman year.

Ode to Cape Cod (The End of Summer)

2007-08-20T22:28:00.000-05:00

Scallop rolls
Clam Fritters
Sandy legs and feet
Hyannis traffic
Rotaries no one knows how to use properly
Captain Frosty's
Kate's
JT's
Herring Cove
Commercial Street
Route 6A
Tim's Books
Mayflower Beach
Chapin Memorial Beach
Swimming in the bay
$15 beach parking passes
Inaho
Butch lesbians! Beach lesbians! Golfing lesbians!
(and oddly enough, yet more lesbians)
The Beautiful Lisa's beautiful house
Crappy beach chairs from Christmas Tree Shop
Diet Guaraná
Clem and Ursi's
Plymouth and Brockton busses
(which I always thought of as PB and J busses)
Beach reading: Invisible Eden, Running with Scissors, and Becoming a Man
Avène 20 SPF spray
Going to sleep and waking up with Mr. Gordo

Returning to regular land-locked programming presently— Arrive Cold City tomorrow.

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Traveller

2007-08-06T10:00:00.000-05:00

I arrived back in Big Eastern City this morning on a red-eye from the West Coast, a sullen, dark, sleepy, and meal-free flight that was notable only for its lack of notable occurrences, a blessing in this day and age. Mr. Gordo delayed his departure for work to sit and have a coffee with me, both of us sleepy in the grey light of morning, talking quietly, exchanging kisses and holding hands, comments on my tan after six weeks in California and the presentation of my little gifts: a Papier-mâché doll from Mexico obtained at a flea market, a double pack of Nutella from CostCo, unpacking my toiletry kit with Japanese shampoo and Clarins, bringing a chuckle from Mr. Gordo. What is Oso if not a product queen?

As I rode the bus into the city, the weary dawn not breaking through the rain clouds, I reflected on the sensory elements of arrival: the dank humidity rising up from the sidewalk through my sandals, the subdued nature of the sleepy crowds around the luggage carousel, the dry heat of the first cigarette on the sidewalk outside the terminal, negotiating the transport into the city to arrive at Mr. Gordo’s EasyBake apartment in time to see him before work. The cognitive dissonance of air travel is what strikes me at moments of arrival. Six hours before you were here, and now you’re there, here, there, here, there. In a sleepy dawn, it’s best not to think too much about this: the rib dinner with La Gamine, her boyfriend and La Zeez, the delicious post-prandial iced Mocha with toasted coconut, so strangely Californian in its fusion of flavours, the hasty goodbyes at curbside.

I realised, on the bus, that I am almost never met at the airport. Sometimes it happens, often when I go to California and always when I go to Geneva, The Fierceness waiting outside the frosted sliding doors of customs. I can count on one hand, after dozens of arrivals, the times I have been met at the airport in Big Eastern City, and never in Cold City. Usually it is me alone, waiting for the luggage, buying a transport ticket into the city, then riding alone, surrounded by tourists, into the labyrinthine depths.

While air travel has been democratised, it is still something most people do not do frequently. Whether by nature or profession, I feel I am on planes and trains and buses often, sometimes for pleasure and other times for duty. But what remains characteristic of my travelling is the essential loneliness of it, shifting from one world to another, and doing so alone.

I tend not to talk to seatmates. I am quiet, unobtrusive. I bring a book or a pile of magazines with no pictures. I read. I nap. I use the toilet. I eat what is given to me, and occasionally will drink as well. I do remember a period in the eighties when I thought it a bad idea to eat or drink on a plane. I’m not sure when that ended, probably right around the time one started to not get fed on long-distance domestic flights.

I remember smoking on planes, when I was a non-smoker. I remember when flying wasn’t so stressful, yet so dull. I remember flights where the toilets stopped functioning someplace over the North Pole, and others where one had a whole row of seats luxuriously to one’s self. I remember my first flight to France: girls dressed to the nines in the departure lounge, little paper menus (still beef or chicken, just in French), literal baskets of bread, and the little kit one got, laid on the seat in a keepsake plastic bag marked with the logo of Air France: eye shades, slippers, toothbrush and paste, a mint. Not anymore. Now, flying to Europe feels like going to Cleveland. Flying into Caracas for the first time, over the ranchos with strung incandescent lights that shimmered like candles, a large, winged orange tropical roach crawled up the wall of the jet way to herald my arrival.

Travel, travelling, is something, with a few notable exceptions, that I have always done alone, a pattern that started with my first real journey, from Los Angeles to Prestigious Eastern University, oh so long ago. I remember the arrival then too: sharing the plane with a high school basketball team all arms and legs, the dyed hair of the woman in front of me, her reclined seat and hairdo impinging on my space, LaGuardia, the dark luggage retrieval area, the shuttle bus, the fear of mugging, the humidity, the detritus of the East, the rust, the sumacs glowering over the ruins, the Jews and Italians and Black folks with their accents of ethnicity holding up paper signs with names on them, not my own.

There will always be something of that original and primal shock for me in travel, banal omens and boredom and excitement and sleepiness and a greasy face.

Men (3): The Beauty of Men

2007-08-06T09:12:00.001-05:00

For my father, sitting uncomfortably in that petit-point chair without arms, manliness was not discussable, but had it been, it would have included a good business suit, ambition, paying one’s bills on time, enough knowledge of baseball to hand out like tips at the barbershop, a residual but never foolhardy degree of courage, and an unbreachable reserve; to the headmaster manliness was discussed constantly, every day, and entailed tweeds, trust funds, graciousness to servants, a polite but chilly relationship to God, a pretended interest in knowledge and an obsessive interest in sports, especially muddy, dangerous ones like lacrosse or hockey or rugby that ended with great sullen lads hobbling off field to lean on sticks on the sidelines, the orange and blue vertical stripes of their jerseys clinging to panting diaphragms, bare knees scarred, blond hair brown with sweat, an apache streak of mud daubed across a wan, bellicose cheek.

— Edmund White

My assumption of masculinity was relatively straightforward. You take the stereotype and you embody it. In some ways, you actually take it further than straight men, firstly because you can (you are aware of the representation) and secondly because you are performing more explicitly for a gay sexual economy that has, in many ways, uncritically exalted masculinity without critically engaging the limitations of such a paradigm. For what I learned from the Beautiful Amazons was that sexuality and gender were primarily performative, if also be grounded in the materiality of the body. However, to hold this view in relation to masculinity is, in some essential way, what makes one queer in the first place.

As Cherríe Moraga was led back to Chicanism@ through her lesbianism, I was led back into masculinity by my gayness. The men who taught me to be a man were other gay men, wrapped up in their own fetishistic desire for real men, straight men, masculine men, their fathers and brothers and school chums and roommates, and the gay porn stars and sex gods who most closely hewed to this representational ideal. A gay roommate taught me, using the mechanism of a cucumber, the proper way of briefly agitating the penis after urinating (my mother had instructed, curiously enough, the use of toilet paper to dry the tip). Gay men instructed me on the appropriate mannerisms of (gay) men: the stance, the walk, the look, the glare, the hunt. Gay men, natural born killers, introduced me to the sexual arts of homosexuality, the joy of gay sex, so to speak: the art of fellatio, the pleasure of anal sex, the recovery of the fecundity of the male body from loathing and disgust. And the larger shift was palpable.

Suddenly, I had cracked the code of sex, and combined with sexual sophistication, realised that the hard part wasn’t getting laid, it was figuring out everything that came with that. While gay men honored my femininity, my queenliness, my campy nature, they also instructed through their sexual opprobrium the proper assumption of butchness. Out with the cream-coloured sweaters and slacks, the hennaed hair, the precious affectations, and in with the buzzcuts, hoodies, jeans, goatees and beards, keeping one’s hands at one’s side, loving privately but liking publicly, at least when on the prowl.

One of the curious effects of Stonewall for gay men was a reification of an ersatz masculinity that was toe-to-toe with its heterosexual counterpart, if grounded in an open acknowledge of the homoeroticism of male culture. What is a urinal other than an institutionalised voyeurism? What is the communal shower room but an opportunity to gaze, however surreptitiously, at other men and their bodies in the heat and steam? Or contact sports, a manner of legitimised male touching, fondling, and physical intimacy? It is no accident that post-Stonewall gay culture exalted these spaces exactly, either through the domain of public sex or reconstructed in gay-specific sexual spaces. For not only do these spaces form the formative primal scenes of sexual desire for most gay men, they are also highly eroticised and charged as male-only vulnerability (a man is never as vulnerable as when he is naked among other men).

Of course, one of the primary critiques of feminists and lesbian-feminists of the 1970s (and those since) has been the paucity of a radical critique of gender among gay men. Authors like Andrew Holleran and Larry Kramer posed the question, in various guises, as to why gay men turned liberation into an orgy. To the first, I would guardedly agree, to the second I have no succinct answer, but suffice it to say insofar as gay men openly acknowledge the performative nature of their masculine games, their bears and wolves and cubs and “straight-acting” and “masculine” as teatro, there is a critique of gender occurring: a playful and subversive excavation of the ahistorical masculine ideal. If you want butch, we’ll bring it (and then some).

Where we lose the thread is when gay men begin to believe their performances, begin to mistake playacting for the real, the natural, and then exalt such simulacra as transparent and self-evident. In this fundamental confusion, they have not been alone. But the lash is particularly sharp for the boys who grew up as girls, desiring the feminine, outside of masculine normativity. The quest to attain masculinity on our own terms is a journey often met with refusal from both men and women of all sexualities. And ironically, the gender games of gay men have now reached mainstream heterodominant society, through the guise of metrosexuality and an increased attention to grooming, self-presentation, and through feminism, concepts of emotional capacity and demonstration. Gay men now return to mainstream (“straight”) masculinity their own sharp sense of performance, of desire, of longing, taming on some level the beast that made most of our lives hellish in another place and time. Whether or not this return of the repressed is a good thing remains open to debate.

The risk, of course, if that these diffused notions of gender lose their critical edges in translation, transmitting the worst of gender (self-doubt, obsession, illness, the fetish of performance) without the liberation, without the release, without the understanding of the drama. I can embody masculinity more easily now because I realise I have options. There is a reassurance in the mimesis, a comforting ability to pass unmolested on a daily basis, to meet gender expectations. But this is not necessarily forever. In my experience, most men, whether straight or gay or someplace in between, are fundamentally confused about masculinity, and what it means "to be" a man. There are recognisable archetypes, ideals, tropes of desire, but for any individual man, the answer to the question “What is a man?” is most often either fuzzily stereotypical or a retreat into the self as a modicum of example.

On some level, this series of entries was actually prompted by my scopophilic pleasure, at appreciating the beauty of men. We have a popular culture notion of what that means: the athlete, the model, the star, the buffed and beautiful. Rather, as a sexual omnivore, what I mean by the beauty of men is the celebration of men in all their quirky strangeness— fat and skinny and tall and short and those that are handsome and others not so much. The ability to appreciate a wide variety of men and their bodies and their personalities as exciting, as desirous, as fleeting moments of potential, exciting in their own right as ideas and ideals.

An oft-discussed montage scene in the film Lianna concerns the central character’s movement into lesbian identity, her realisation of her lesbian desire, as she walks down the street and she notices many different types of women in space as objects of her desire. This random, inchoate sexual and social joy is what I am reaching for here, the open acknowledgement of homoerotic desire. For to enter into the tribe of gay men was to fundamentally recognise the beauty of men, the opportunities and stories and drama that every man potentially represents. Both Holleran and Kramer reach for this wondrous joy, this hunger after deprivation, as a potential reason for gay promiscuity, and that no doubt is part of it.

But the simpler reflective space that such longing provides is more important than the actual bodies of men. For if part of mainstream masculinity now is gayness, than gayness also contributes that open, frank acknowledgment of men and masculinity both as object and aesthetic site, terms we don’t necessarily associate with progressive politics but that are central to the drama of gay identity formation, for better or worse. The better side of this coin is that it frees men, gay and potentially straight, to recognise each other not only as objects of desire but as subjects of desire as well, as honouring a type of intimate and affectionate and appreciative masculinity that is new and old simultaneously, buried under the modern heteronormative loathing of same-sex desire that arguably constrains and tortures most men into a very small, very dark corner.

Becoming a man for me meant acknowledging this desire, this greater beauty of men. It was only then that I could occupy that space that for so long I thought excluded me.

Men (2): The Queenly Interregnum

2007-08-02T16:53:00.000-05:00

Oh Mary, it takes a fairy to make something pretty.

— Emory

I grew into a young collegian steadfastly resisting my mother’s directive to butch it up, In high school, on the outside, I was relatively “normal” if I stayed still and didn’t speak, perhaps a tad bit fashionable in the language of the hip youth culture of the moment of the mid-eighties. This normality was one enforced by my mother, who refused to buy me the outrageous clothes I wanted, as well my own keen desire to survive high school intact. In those little hot houses of doctrinaire coercion passing for individuality, to stand out was to invite contempt at best, physical violence at worst.

There was one openly gay boy in my high school, Danny Lopez, a handsome Blatino who split his time between his father’s house on the East Side and his mother’s in the Anglo Westside. When he was with his father, he would be at my high school. He had a fashionable haircut, fashionable clothes, a red Honda Scooter, and seemed unashamed of his gayness, although he suffered the disdain of many of his colleagues, the usual suspects, and the sniggers behind his back even from his friends, even from me. His freedom to be himself was, in retrospect, predicated on his knowledge of an alternate world (the more liberal Westside of Los Angeles, with its nefarious gender-bending teen clubs like Odyssey) as well as a certain amount of money and an untraditional family (Did his family not care as much?). He ended up going to Vassar (natch), but dropped out after a year and returned to Los Angeles, to what ends I never found out.

Arriving at Prestigious Eastern U. accelerated and nurtured my own gay idiosyncrasy, and enabled me to come out as fabulously as could be imagined in the strange political and social moment of the mid-eighties, when Andrew Holleran observed that, due to AIDS, New York socialites were pronouncing gay as “not an option.” However, hope springs eternal, and never so much as in youth unleashed from institutional and familial constraint. Gay America was in health crisis of desperate proportions, but that fact didn’t really penetrate the stone walls or linger over the slate walkways of PU. The holocaust happening to several generations of gay men wasting away in distant, grey cities seemed, mistakenly as it turned out, to be as relevant to our lives as The Epic of Gilgamesh.

Quickly, I experimented with different styles of self-presentation: asymmetrical haircuts, big curly bowl cuts, hair gel, combed Caesars, jackets with fur collars, sleeveless purple shirts, pants the colour of goldenrod, platform shoes, jewelry (Oy, the bracelets!), all to a soundtrack of similar genderbenders: Culture Club, Duran Duran, Bronski Beat, Depeche Mode, The Cure, and the other mascara bands of the time, not to mention Jody Watley, a mascara band of one. I never used make-up though— I didn’t have the discipline to never touch my face or brush my hair over my forehead with my hand. At the end of my junior year I started to grow out my hair into what would eventually become quite the mane, tight luxurious Louis IXV pin curls when conditioned and set, a bird’s nest of frizzy bush when not. There was no unifying aesthetic theme (in fact it all seems from a distance rather half-assed), other than perhaps unleashing the Queen, breaking all the constraints my mother and masculinity had attempted to set for me.

Of course, the greatest asset of this Queen was not sartorial, but verbal. The minute I spoke, she came forth, imperious or ingénue, little girl type or Glamazon in ermine and deadly tacones. All that reading of literature in my teen years, Saturday nights spent with books, listening to the gallineros of my Beautiful Amazons (who never, of course, lacked for opinion), Sunday afternoons watching Hollywood melodrama with my mother, finally paid off. I could read like an expert, and quickly became known more for my cutting tongue than my disorganised look. As I read once online in a description of what one gay man did not want, when I opened my mouth a purse fell out, except in my case it was a purse coated in razors. Like the fierce pachucas who went out with razors in their big hair, my voice was ready for battle, all the wounds and hurts and silences of the past rushing forth like a tsunami. My actual voice, the instrument itself, only truly deepened at the end of my twenties, and in my late teens, I could still be mistaken on the phone for a sultry Brenda Vaccaro, ma’am-ed as much as anything else. Taken together, my college chums and I (for of course, as a teenager, I was lemming-like in my need for a clique) were not committed officially to the a code of gender bending, but we functioned that way, too sexually naïve to openly assert roles of top or bottom, still unjaded to the extent we could imagine a gay identity of indeterminate gender.

This unleashing brought me great joy, for it was like the millstone of masculinity was removed from my neck, and for once I could breath the sweet air of a certain type of freedom outside the rigors of masculinity. This was an illusion, of course, but for a brief time I could sally forth into the world determined to project the multiple image-texts of my own fractured relationship to the paragons of masculinity and femininity. From the former I felt excluded because I was not the fair-haired athletic boy on the sidelines of the green, verdant pitch, the one who walked correctly, who spoke correctly, who “liked” but did not “love” in Edmund White’s memorable literary characterization of masculine and feminine. I stood uncomfortably outside of femininity through the most obvious factor: that I was not, in fact, physically a girl, although emotionally and socially I had been raised as a kind of ur-girl, at the very least imbibing the cautionary values of Mexican and Chicana cultural femininity even as the body was not located in the transparent space where most of us assume gender, sexuality, and identity coalesce (i.e., I was missing a vagina, among other things).

Bookish, terribly ashamed of my body, not particularly athletic, and closeted, arriving at college was like embracing a version of myself I had been taught to hate. All of a sudden, the forbidden was accessible, the denounced a new value. The bubble of PU did not adequately prepare me for the rigors of the real gay world, with its strictures as demanding and doctrinaire as any present in heterodomination. But for a time, I lived outside these structures, originally in joy, and later in resentment. I entered graduate school living a peculiar fantasy as a middle-aged woman with a penchant for hair bobbles and cream-coloured clothing. I appeared regularly in my first class as a teaching assistant with my hair balled up on the top of my head in a messy bun, held by a paisley scrunchy. What my students thought of such a performance remains unknown, although at the time, it did not seem extraordinarily outside of the realm of the possible at that school, at that place.

During this period, I was regularly ma’am-ed in public, in spite of being 6’1” and having a small goatee. The public confirmation of reactionary gender identifications is not in recognising men and women as distinct and separate, but looking for the non-man, and therefore woman. In an Italian restaurant in San Francisco's very straight Marina district once, the waiter gallantly asked me what “la signorina” would like. I did not hasten to correct him, just ordered my plate of fettuccine as I brushed my silky hair off my face. He scrambled away mortified and I, I’m not sure what I felt. At one time, around the age of 24, every piece of clothing I owned was part of a particular colour palette: cream, ivory, eggshell, vanilla, light tan, sand, butternut, toffee, dulce de leche, crème caramel. One of the memories of my graduate cohort was me appearing before Big Time Semiotic Translator in our first-year pro-seminar wearing a braided ivory sweater, fanning myself vigorously and declaring the need for air conditioning, at the hottest time of the year, surrounded by people dressed appropriately for those in their twenties, and not their fifties. All I was missing was the Eileen Fisher twin set and discreet silver jewelry.

This look represented my strange attempt at WASP class. Whether or not I read publicly as man was less important than being The Queen, a task for which I was remarkably successful. At the time, I felt like a heroine from a bodice buster, wanting love on her own terms, desirous but wounded, sassy but smart: Stevie Nicks minus the coke. And I suppose on some level I did feel like a “girl,” Chelsea Clinton awaiting her transformation from ugly duckling to polished young lady: prudish, virginal, deeply romantic. However, as I moved out of the PU’s queer aura into the rigors of, on one hand, revanchist lesbian cultural politics that for the most part saw in me not an ally but a bitchy queen, and the hypercritical tribes of gay men, the course correction so desired by my mother began to appear, slowly, slowly. The irony here of course being that gender and its norms was increasingly policed and enforced by lesbians and gay men.

This enforcement of gender came, primarily, through the mechanism of sex. Gay men of my generation and those that came before may have emerged from the cauldron of adolescence with their bodies intact, but we brought along a host of remarkably simplistic and fetishistic masculine fantasies, most of which revolved around the recapturing of lost youth and its attendant masculinity, not unleashing the queen but snagging the quarterback. And these gender games remain deadly serious. Recently, at a BBQ, I noted that the self-described “Alpha-Wolf” host had Vanilla Brown Sugar hand wash in his bathroom, which he loved. Bringing my hand to my nose and smelling the deeply feminine smell, I remarked wryly, “So much for the Alpha-Wolf,” to which he did not laugh, or campily agree, but instead got pissed off. I was stunned by the depth of his self-delusion, although I shouldn’t have been.

My own transformation into a man was predicated on gay desire and gay coercion. Simply put, to get a date or get laid, with a body like mine, meant no mincing. My mother’s expectation of masculinity met, ironically and perhaps with more than a bit of tragedy, the very same sexual ideal held by most gay men.

...

Men (1): The Beautiful Amazons

2007-07-30T03:17:00.000-05:00

I’ve been thinking a lot about men recently, straight men and gay men and DL men and transmen, boyfriends and “girl” friends and regular ol’ friends and tricks and acquaintances and passing strangers. A series of inchoate thoughts disorganised by theme and genre. The other day I was wandering listlessly with La Gamine through Macy’s, she detoured to look at the silver jewelry while I went in search of the Biotherm counter, when I was confronted with a huge image of the latest Lancôme woman, wet and pink and mauve and huge, perfect eye shadow and luscious, full lips spread over with a creamy, glittery lip gloss. As I stood in this veritable centre of femininity, focused on this seductive image, senses heightened by the smells and reassuring chatter of the cosmetics counters, the glass and chrome, the pure white light, the last redoubt of women and girls and fags, it struck me that my threads of thought leading towards “men” were pulled through and mediated by women— the women I have known, the “woman” I am, and “Woman” as paradigm.

As readers of this blog will have noted, I was raised by a fierce pride of women, with my grandfather the only permanent man in residence. The absence of the father was never remarked upon either in a positive or negative sense. It just was. I was not one of those children who pine longingly for the absent father. I never knew him, and my relation to him was almost wholly abstract, a racial stain perhaps, an equation with no solution necessary. The various Lotharios that passed through my mother’s putative sexual-romantic life were hardly better than the absent father. Some were nicer than others, some lasted longer than others, but they all came and went without leaving much of a mark, aside from their various peccadilloes, their strange habits, their general description.

Recently I remembered that one of them had a house in Redondo Beach with a large backyard that featured blackberry bushes and a tree with a bent limb that was perfect for climbing and sitting. My mother had a photo of me sitting in the tree, preternaturally blond and in a perfectly hideous jean jacket ensemble, very circa ’76. The mechanism for the memory was of course the fact of the photo. That one was named Michael, and I suppose in the spirit of the times, he had a bit of the dreamboat about him. He was blond, fashionably shaggy and moustached, drove an MG 5-speed convertible, but the exact year or two of his presence are lost to me. I do remember disliking his obvious self-involvement, in spite of or perhaps because of his sexy car.

In any event, my maternal grandfather, the one constant in the constellation of masculinity pendant ma jeunesse was hardly what one would call an affirmation. I never felt emotionally connected to him, fascinated as I was by my grandmother and her sisters, with their matronly woolen dresses, their big dyed hair (Chicana "Blondes," aka Orange), their penchant for brooches and turquoise rings, their mysterious dressing rooms with small tables loaded with cremes and lotions and toners and perfumes, their appointments at the Beauty School on Hollywood Boulevard, followed by suppers at Love’s BBQ, where the rib platters were served with small bowls of rose water for rinsing one’s fingers. The fascination was similar but different from many gay men’s narratives about identity formation through the magic and performance of femininity.

While it is true that I was known to wear my mother’s high heels on occasion, in the privacy of empty bedrooms on hot Southern California afternoons, my role in relation to the mechanics of femininity was definitely under the hood. Very early I understood and demystified the superstructure of the feminine for the women in my family, and adopted their critical eye, their manera of self-presentation, which was a very obvious but at the same time subtle application of make-up, clothes, and hair. Just tonight, Philosopher Mom, in response to my disdain for her sock collection, accused me of being an Aggressive Femme. And on some level I had to agree with her assessment. I had, after all, the most excellent teachers, task mistresses all.

Femininity, a particularly virulent strain, I knew from. It held no mystery or sexual compulsion. Often, one reads in straight men’s memoir, about the power of the objects of women’s sartorial and hygienic cultures on young male protagonists, the touch or thought of a bra triggering an orgasm (or several). I washed the bras and panties from an early age, applying Spray n' Wash to the occasional stains caused by a sudden, unexpected menstrual flow on my mother's undergarments. I dusted the jars of potions and lotions, and used them myself, as we did not support separate toiletries for women and boy in my house. I grew up with the original green smell of Clairol's Herbal Essence and Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific in my nose. I used Dove soap. I untangled the cords of the curling irons and makeup mirrors in an attempt to plug something in, and dusted foundation powder off the phone when I went to use it. I watched and assisted as my mother and the other women in my family made themselves into the feminine, surrounded by impenetrable clouds of hairspray and Chloé. The unknown territory for me was men, men and their worlds.

Understanding the aerodynamics of the feminine superstructure was easy enough, but getting to the base was a harder task. Like many proud, fierce tribes of women, those of my family were hard as nails, critical, not coquettish: a sort of take-no-prisoners and suffer-no-fools kind of school, for which I was always glad I was born a boy. To be raised as an actual girl by these women would have been difficult. Their surface was soft, pretty in pink, but underneath the layers of chiffon and Maybelline and ashtrays overflowing with crushed lipstick-stained butts, their depths were harder to plumb. Capricious Amazons, they seemed to simultaneously disdain and need men. Some were better at this game then others, with my mother being more on the losing end than her other woman relations, with their gentle hen-pecked husbands in tow as their high-heels clacked on the walk into the house. They were unburdened by the feminist principles of equality in relationships that so drove my mother nuts with men unreceptive to such ideas. They were, in short, the boss, a position that struck me as about right.

They encouraged my effeminate antics, the dressing up, the lip-synching to diva hits with a towel on my head, they helped me perfect my Wonder Woman spin, they bought me Bionic Woman dolls and saintly icons. It was only later, after I had begun to break into adolescence, that the opprobrium of my mother and grandfather in particular began to attempt a course correction, a shift in perception, but by that time it was rather too late. My maternal grandfather was a man’s man. He had been a submariner in the Pacific theatre during the war, he had tattoos on his arms, a rather large penis that I saw once in passing. He worked for the government in something mysteriously nuclear, with a Q clearance. He sported an astronaut’s buzzcut his entire life. His abundant masculinity, in contrast to my grandmother's strength, led to a strong sexual frisson between them. While he may have turned his eye during my early youth, indulgently, the arrival of the age of masculinity triggered, among a host of other things, a sharp reaction to my engrained effeminacy.

In the tortured interregnum between my grandmother’s early death and his own, his displeasure came through violent tongue-lashings on appropriate masculine behaviour, the usual things, nothing too special to recount here, although once, while with my mother, she channeled his critiques by pointing out a teenaged boy my age and asked why I couldn’t walk and act like him. At that moment, I was wearing a loose white cotton shift over a golden oversized vintage business shirt with Sally Ann plaid pegged slacks and white Vans slip-ons, with heavily gelled hair and soft, manicured hands of which I was particularly proud of the buffed, glossy nails. I was in no position, at 16, my 16, to transform myself into an appropriate boy. For I was a boy raised as a girl, in a culture and a society that viciously hates women and the men and boys who identify with them.

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