Reading Notes- Activism & Rhetoric: Theories and Contexts for Political Engagement, edited by Seth Kahn and JongHwa Lee

From the Forward, by Philip C. Wander, page xviii: “In short, politics and protest are not a diversion from or an obstacle to teaching and scholarship. They offer an opportunity for integration. […] For me, I was simply doing what ought to be and had to be done. Ignoring the issues, pretending that they did not exist, or that professors should not become involved in them was simply unthinkable. It would have required me to kill a part of myself.”

From the Introduction, by the editors, page 1: “First, while theory and practice in rhetoric have historically attended carefully to rhetoric’s democratic possibilities, most of that attention has focused on deliberation and consensus-building. Second, it has become quite clear to us that, at least over the last decade and perhaps longer, neither deliberative democracy nor consensus-building responds fully to the needs of activists.”

From “The Only Conceivable Thing To Do: Reflections on Academics and Activism” by Dana L. Cloud, pp. 11-24

“Activists were and are intellectuals as much as any professor, but at a level with political events, not one step removed. This activism was a manifestation of intellect in the service not of the production of abstract knowledge but rather of action based on knowledge” (p.13).

“As Gramsci explained, intellectuals should put ideas into the service of historical education, political analysis, and collective action. Criticism of prevailing ideologies and consciousness is part of intellectual work, but critique must happen in conjunction with practical political activity if it is to be relevant at all to the democratic project” (p.15).

“Critique is not enough. It is the system of exploitation that needs addressing at the point of production, the only place ordinary people have been able to win significant material gains. In those struggles, sexism, racism, and other oppressive ideas can evaporate quickly” (p.17) (Cloud then tells a story from her ISO visit to the 1997 UPS picket, and how just briefly bringing up the homophobia of strikers calling scabs fags to the strike captain was enough to make it stop throughout the line)

p.20 -story about how UNITE HERE did a joint campaign with San Diego queer activists around Prop 8 (the anti-marriage equality amendment) after Hyatt donated to the Prop 8 campaign, around boycotting Hyatt, and it was called “Sleep With The Right People” - NCA conference-goers pulled together an Unconference at a different hotel during the NCA weekend so that they could participate in the boycott and recruit other folks at the Hyatt NCA conference into the boycott while raising political awareness about it and still talk to one another

From “Speaking Truth to Power: Observations from Experience” by Lee Artz, pp. 47-55

“Understanding democracy as a political goal and a social process, rather than a pre-existing political condition, repositions social movement rhetoric from an oft-conceived role in appealing to established power to a more radical position as a means for mobilizing public action against power” (p.47)

“We note that persuasion must be evaluated by attentive audiences, but what conditions allow for audience receptivity? Motivations for persuasive appeals and for individual or group responses arise from rhetorical exigencies that demand human action (Bitzer). But what makes a problem more or less urgent for recipients of calls for action? Not the rhetorical appeal itself, because to be effective it must conform to the needs and interests of the audience. Publics and groups come to each rhetorical situation with pre-existing interests and needs. What are these needs and interests? Perhaps some prior rhetorical appeal has led to actions that have created current social relations with attending conflict and contradiction? Likely perhaps, but nonetheless, whatever their origin, needs and interests arise from the sociopolitical conditions being lived at the historic moment of crisis” (p.47-48)

“In a more contemporary case, the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq creates different issues for different social classes — without regard to their identification or agreement with any particular political argument. For or against the war, Halliburton shareholders and Hill & Knowlton PR account managers confront a different set of decisions than a National Guard private or a college professor. The rhetorical situation may appear the same — for or against the U.S. war — but the possible consequential actions entail some dramatically unequal behavioral choices” (p.48).

“Rhetoric will not stop a meteor hurtling through space, nor will the meteor disappear if we do not perceive it or believe in it. I suggest that some social relations create social conditions that have the same physical properties. Talk will not, by itself, stop war, inequality, oppression. Nor will the failure to perceive the inequality or injustice make it less real. Rhetoric may enable the privileged to turn away, but for those that suffer the condition remains. This understanding by no means derides rhetoric, that classic art of discovering all the available means of persuasion. But “all the means” means “all” of the mea.s We must not privilege argument without regard to social class; we must not omit the social relations of power in which and through which all rhetoric must pass. Capitalist hegemony needs us to accept the rhetoric of the marketeers” (p.49).

“Attitudes toward the war are influenced by persuasive appeals — to the extent that appeals resonate. But citizens (who have already internalized dominant cultural values) evaluate the arguments (which they hear from their preferred media) from disparate social positions that afford diverse experiences, consciousness, and constraints” (p.39).

“Rhetoric provided the spark only when the material culture was mature. After the working class grew to have economic power, the agriculture working class matured, the capitalist classes were betrayed by Somoza, the professional middle classes found no satisfaction in other alternatives, and the Christian life of the working classes found liberation theology, which spoke to their everyday material conditions; then — and only then — the FSLN led the Nicaraguan revolution” (p.51).

“Our field has a similar sociological blind spot: located close to the site of power, U.S. academics have a perceptual handicap that often cannot see capitalism and social class contradictions. Read any mass-communication, advertising, public relations, journalism, or media studies mass-market textbook. Most promote pluralist ideology and the myth of the ‘marketplace of ideas” (e.g. Folkerts, Lacy, and Larabee). There are few that do not at least accept the validity of the marketplace. Public interest is presented as one of the many market side effects. Even in rhetoric texts, the presumption of democratic pluralism remains; class inequality does not appear in the glossary of terms. Expectedly, activists hailing from these parts […] insist they will ‘speak truth to power'!’ Why? Who cares? Power is the source of the problem; power concedes nothing without demand, as Frederick Douglas so cogently noted; and power already knows its own truth. Speaking truth to power only reinforces power. We need to speak power to the truth of social inequality” (p.53)

“Rhetoric and activism? Three things. First, recognize the material conditions of our lives, especially the social relations of capitalism and its class contradictions expressed in neoliberalism, consumerism, individualism, two-party elections, and the quality and inequality of life. Second, identify those human agents capable of making fundamental social change— those social classes and their allies who have a vested interest, some predisposition, and the actual power to improve the human condition. Finally, present a rhetoric for a new consensual social power that underscores the truth of capitalist inequality, favors the building of participatory communities, and expresses the potential for new democratic social relations — in Gramscian terms, advance a hegemony by demonstrating the benefits of a new socialist culture. The task of rhetoric for social change is to speak power to truth” (p.54).

From “You Can’t Get There From Here: Higher Education, Labor Activism, and Challenges of Neoliberal Globalization” by Kevin Mahoney, pp. 147-158

“The failure to recognize the linkages between union work and academic work in a public university at the onset of the twenty-first century ignores the fact that both areas are under assault by the same neoliberal logic” (p.151).

“It is one thing to prepare an individual to enter a public sphere and argue for [their] position; it is quite another to prepare individuals to enter into relationships of solidarity and interdependence, and reconstruct their identities and practices” (p.152).

“The coincidence of postmodernism with the re-emergence of rhetoric has tended to bend rhetorical inquiry and practice toward studies of discourse and media consistent with English and Communication departments. While the work in these areas has been extraordinary and has deepened and expanded the scope of rhetoric, the notable lack of a similar engagement with political theory has denied current rhetorical inquiry a crucial link to questions of democracy and political struggle” (p.153).

On Finishing My Dissertation During RTD's Return to Doctor Who

Assuming everything goes according to the plan over the next month, I will receive my PhD in English effective February 1. My subdiscipline is rhetoric & composition, and my dissertation is about queer digital literacy practices, specifically bisexual literacies on TikTok circa 2020-2021.

I didn’t write it like a traditional dissertation. I often make light of the style, calling it “weird,” saying I “got away with” it. But I do this because I’m insecure that my friends and colleagues won’t take it seriously as real intellectual work, because it diverges significantly from the dissertations they are writing or have written. I figure that if I suggest to them that I don’t take it too seriously, I’ll shield myself from the chance that they don’t take it seriously either. And more than anything, I want to be taken seriously.

My dissertation uses a lot of multi-genre writing, drawing on Julie Jung’s idea of delayed convergence as a revision strategy —that is, switching between genres to intentionally create and leave open certain questions for the reader, in hopes that what happens in between will be generative. The style is also informed by M. Remi Yergeau’s book Authoring Autism, about how discourse around autistic people renders us lacking in ethos from the beginning — again, my deep fear of not being taken seriously. It’s partially a political polemic, calling for a return to Marxist politics within the U.S. queer movement, especially in the current legislative environment, for trans people in particular. It’s partially autoethnography, grappling with my own queer digital literacy journey as an early 2010s Tumblr kid, and thinking about how the cultural environment of bisexual TikTok is so different from what I remember twelve years ago — in a good way. It’s about the pandemic — because TikTok use in the U.S. exploded during the early months of Covid-19’s circulation in the United States, when so many people were learning and working from home. It’s the capstone of my degree, sure, but it’s also the capstone of questions I’ve been asking myself since high school, about my identity and my place within the world.

And so, at times, I take some time away from my main arguments and analyses to write about Doctor Who. It comes up in my discussion of fandom cultures and shipping, and it comes up in my discussion of my own experiences on Tumblr — before I was reblogging queer content, before I’d even come out to myself, I was posting about Doctor Who. But it also comes up in my own queer literacy narrative. Here’s a passage from the diss:

My partner and I recently started re-watching Doctor Who, from the beginning of the series reboot in 2005. When these episodes originally aired, we were ten, and closeted even to ourselves. We pause the episode often to discuss, as we watch with new eyes, queer eyes, eyes that have also seen Russell T. Davies’ more recent show It’s A Sin, a semi-autobiographical story about living as a young adult in Margaret Thatcher’s London. We realize, yes, the Doctor is queer, perhaps pansexual, emotionally unavailable, mostly celibate. We realize two episodes so far in season one explicitly mention trans people, in the future, in outer space. We’re watching this after Russel T. Davies has announced his return to the show, and we know that the new Doctor, with episodes airing nearly 20 years after the season we’re watching, will be played by a gay actor, and the next companion will be trans. My partner wonders if maybe Davies is saying, “you guys just didn’t get it the first time, did you?” We don’t dismiss the Master’s flirtations with the Doctor as a throwaway joke — he is flirting. They have history, the kind of deeply complex history that only two hundreds-of-years-old, friends-to-enemies, time traveling space aliens can have. I say I have a headcanon that the Master was the Doctor’s first sexual partner, but that the reverse isn’t true. We observe that while Rose and the Doctor aren’t sleeping together, they are nonetheless polyamorous partners. We reflect on Captain Jack Harkness, an unapologetically sexually fluid character, who is happy to explore intimacy with people of any gender or species. In a children’s show! He might be the first explicitly queer character I ever saw on TV or in a movie, and episodes of his spinoff show for adults, Torchwood, might be the first time I saw gay sex on TV. Doctor Who is wonderfully queer, no headcanons required, but we weren’t able to see it the first time. Because we had learned to disregard the explicit queerness as jokes, and assume that just as with everything else, we were just reading into it. Something inside me feels warm and happy, to revisit this show that I love, with a person I love, and watch it not as a weird nerd thing (okay, it’s still a weird nerd thing), but as a queer thing. Wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey, and GAY.

As I was completing the final revisions before sending the "complete” draft off to my committee, something happened that was a big deal for Doctor Who fans: David Tennant returned to the show for three special episodes in honor of the show’s 60th anniversary alongside Catherine Tate, also marking the return of Russell T. Davies as showrunner. Tennant, known as the “tenth doctor,” would now also be the “fourteenth” — briefly, just for these episodes, until Ncuti Gatwa took over, the first Black and first openly queer actor to play the character.

Davies, it turns out, had been thinking about how to write for work as a queer person in the face of an overwhelming rise in transphobia in his country, too.

Catherine Tate’s character, Donna Noble, now has a teenage daughter, Rose, who is trans (played by Yasmin Finney). While Donna’s mother expresses uncertainty about how to talk about Rose, she saves these questions for Donna in private, so that Rose is spared from hearing them, and Donna firmly but warmly reminds her of what is appropriate. It’s a beautiful scene infused with love. Later, in a scene that was slightly more heavy-handed (but in a way I was happy to excuse, since Doctor Who is very often cheesy and/or heavy-handed), the Doctor refers to “the Meep” (an alien that looks like a Furby) as “he,” before Rose chastises him for “assuming the Meep’s pronouns.” Rather than getting defensive, the Doctor takes this in stride, quickly correcting himself and asking if the Meep is he, she, or they. (The Meep prefers to be referred to as “the Meep” instead of with a pronoun). Later in the episode, for reasons too complicated to get into here, nonbinariness as a concept — but Rose’s identity as a nonbinary trans girl in particular — saves the day.

It’s almost as if Davies is saying, “fuck all of you bigots, Doctor Who does in fact belong to the queers,” much as I feel like The Matrix: Resurrections is Lana Wachowski giving a big middle finger to the “red pill” contingent and saying “the Matrix belongs to trans lesbians first, all other queers second, and then everyone else.”

But this is not a one-and-done occasion for queer representation in the 60th anniversary celebration. In the second special episode, the Doctor and Donna briefly visit Isaac Newton. Afterwards, Donna asks, “Is it just me, or is Isaac Newton…hot?” and the Doctor replies, “Yeah. …really hot, actually. Oh, is that who I am now?” and Donna says, “It was always lurking under the surface, mate.”

On some level, it felt like RTD gave teenage me canonically bisexual David Tennant’s Doctor as a PhD present. As much as I enjoyed some aspects of fandom as a teenager, I was never into shipping or even fanfiction — it felt sacrilegious to the canon established by the creators. So this was not a moment of validation for my youthful imagination. But it nonetheless spoke deeply to my little teenage heart — that’s mine, that’s who I am, too. Growing up, as I think it is for many people, the fantasy was always what if someday the Doctor wants me to travel with him? But re-watching parts of the show this year brought me to a new, unexpected relationship with the character: in several episodes, he takes a job as a teacher. And I’m a teacher. And his teaching persona is perhaps a little closer to my teaching persona goals than I care to admit — I can’t pull off hypergenius time traveling space alien, and I think I don’t have quite the right gender expression for it either, but in my best moments, I maybe can pull off “a little too quirky, a little too enthusiastic, but charming and smart enough to pull it off” (it’s that autistic rizz, baby). And so the day after this second special aired, for the first time in a long time (but not the first time), I specifically tried (and failed) to do my hair like his before going into work. Not on that day, but on a different day, when I made a joke in my queer rhetoric class about the Doctor being teacher goals, a student told me that “queer studies professor and Doctor Who aren’t that far off in vibes,” which is perhaps my favorite compliment I’ve gotten from a student. (Bisexual literacy problems: when a particular incarnation of the Doctor is so formative to your taste in men, but also to your professional fashion sense goals, and your professional fashion sense says Lesbian, which is rhetorically the opposite of being perceived as liking any kind of men.)

But then came the third special episode. Neil Patrick Harris, playing a trickster god from another dimension, does a lipsync number to a Spice Girls song, and that isn’t even what I want to talk about here.

This episode introduces a new thing: bigeneration, where instead of a Time Lord regenerating from one form into another, he splits in two. (There’s also a hilarious bit of dialogue about whether bigeneration is a myth — not sure if the pun is intentional.) So for the last part of the episode, David Tennant and Ncuti Gatwa are acting alongside one another. Gatwa’s Doctor tells Tennant’s Doctor that it’s time for him to stop traveling, rest, and process his trauma. He pulls him into his arms for a deep hug that’s so emotionally intimate I gasped as it happened. Tennant’s Doctor goes “home” to live with Donna and her family while he works on himself, while Gatwa’s Doctor hops into the TARDIS and, based on the preview of the Christmas special, which I haven’t watched yet, immediately hits the club.

I read this as a probably unintended scene about millennials (represented by Tennant) and Gen Z (represented by Gatwa). Gen Z says “ok millennials, you’ve had a good run, but you’re having a hard time, go home and go to therapy, it’s ok, we love you, but we’re having the adventures now.” And the final scene is a peaceful family dinner out on the patio — the weather is beautiful, all of the loved ones are there, Tennant’s Doctor is telling stories about his life.

And this is what I’m left with, having just completed a dissertation about queer literacies — a foundational piece of media from my own queer literacy history, newly imbued with bisexual millennial symbolism, embracing me, saying “it’s ok, you can rest.”

And of course, I can’t rest, I have a job, I have all of the political commitments I’m arguing for in the dissertation, and so on, but I can leave these issues — bisexual identity rhetorics, the role of this identity category in the LGBTQ+ community and in the queer liberation movement — to rest. I answered the questions that teenage me needed answers to. I’m ready to defend the dissertation, deposit it with the library, and be done.

It feels good. These anniversary specials brought me some unexpected, poetically appropriate catharsis, right as I’m transitioning away from being in school for my entire life and into the next, hopefully more stable, if I’m approved for my certificate of continuous employment three years from now, step.

I Watched All Of The Star Wars Content

After I finished Season 3 of The Mandalorian, I wasn’t ready to leave the Star Wars universe yet. So I watched Obi-Wan Kenobi. And then I watched Andor. And then I thought, “well, why not watch all of the Star Wars shows? I’ve only seen the movies plus Mando.” And so my summer project began, which was actually a end of spring + summer + start of fall project. But now I’m done. And I have thoughts.

But let’s do my Star Wars background first: like probably most fans under 40, I grew up watching the original trilogy. I don’t have any memories from Before I Had Already Watched Star Wars. When the prequels came out, my dad saw them in theaters with his friends, and I watched them once we had them on home video. I watched Attack of the Clones the most, because it was my neighbor’s favorite. And I never managed to remember Revenge of the Sith that well, because I often watched it when I was home sick, and the fever kind of prevented it from sticking. When The Force Awakens came out, I was a young adult who was so excited to watch a Star Wars movie in theaters with my dad instead of being Too Young To Stay Up That Late and then Well Let’s Wait Till It Comes Out On DVD (my memory is that the first DVD we ever owned was Who Framed Roger Rabbit, but now I’m wondering if it was actually Attack of the Clones, because we definitely had Phantom Menace on VHS. I think.) I loved the originals. I loved the prequels. I didn’t understand why people hated them.

So that’s what I was coming into this watching experience with. I haven’t read any of the books or comics, and I haven’t played any of the video games other than Lego Star Wars. After deciding to watch everything, I also decided to watch it in timeline order, since watching Obi-wan and Andor right after Mandalorian was making it hard for me to keep the timelines straight. I think Young Jedi Adventures hadn’t aired yet when I started this project, so I began with Phantom Menace. But I’ll write about them in actual timeline order.

Young Jedi Adventures

Probably the one I enjoyed the least, just because it’s for very young children. But it’s very cute (and I love that Nash has two moms) and has good messages and I look forward to watching it with my children once I have any.

The Phantom Menace

I know that Machete Order suggests skipping this one, but I so disagree. We get to see Anakin being a Sweet Kid, establishing his goodness before we meet him again as Angsty Teenager in Clones, understand that he comes from slavery, see his relationship with his mom, and see that he actually is brilliant. In the later movies, Anakin’s really good with a lightsaber and strong with the Force, but he doesn’t seem crazy Chosen One good — Obi-wan and Yoda in particular are also extremely skilled. But Phantom Menace establishes some of what sets him apart — he’s the only human who can podrace, and his skills as a pilot are directly linked to his Force abilities. He’s also brilliant apart from the Force — he builds C-3PO from scratch. We also see that Anakin does choose to leave Shmi and become a Jedi (instead of being forced by Qui-gon), and he does promise to come back for her. These are key actions to set up his internal conflict for Attack of the Clones.

While I do think it’s a stretch that the people of Naboo would elect a teenager to be their queen, this movie also lets us see how awesome Padme is (especially since Revenge of the Sith mostly focuses on her as Anakin’s wife/mother of his children, rather than as a politician). And we get to see Obi-wan (who is also quite young, probably only a few years older than she is) being impressed with her.

And of course the Duel of the Fates scene is incredible. Can’t miss that.

Oh and we meet R2D2 too. He’s the best.

Attack of the Clones

While I didn’t understand why people hated this movie when I was a child, I did come to agree that Anakin is so annoying in this movie. But re-watching it this time, I realized he isn’t so annoying because Hayden Christensen is doing a bad job — he’s so annoying because he’s 19, has more skill and power than he knows what to do with and doesn’t really understand that his training is also about self-discipline and ethics, is haunted by the guilt of leaving his mom in slavery and never returning to free her, and is super horny for Padme the whole time, who he’s suddenly in close proximity with basically constantly after not seeing each other for a decade. And he has no support in handling his feelings, because as a Jedi, he’s not supposed to have them, and Obi-wan tells him to suppress and ignore.

I often think about the scene immediately after he kills all of the Tuskens, when he’s telling Padme about it. I think it’s so interesting and important because as he tells her, it’s clear that he knows he did something wrong but that he simultaneously doesn’t feel bad about it even though he knows he ought to. I love Anakin in Clone Wars, so massacring the Tuskens before that is a constant reminder that he is very much a Problematic Fave. This is such a specific moment in his journey — his relationship with guilt and rage is leading him to do really bad things, but he still has a lot of (I think sincere) loyalty to the principles he’s been trained in. He also specifically tells Padme, when she tells him anger is normal, that it’s not normal for Jedi. He still sees himself as a Jedi, but he also sees himself as different from most Jedi. He loves Obi-wan, says he’s like a father to him, but is also filled with anger at Obi-wan too. This also makes Clone Wars more interesting, because they typically get along during Clone Wars, but this anger is still percolating under the surface and really emerges during Revenge of the Sith.

I think it’s also interesting and important that Owen and Veru do meet Anakin and presumably suspect that he did murder a bunch of people, even if he doesn’t share what happened with them. This adds to my enjoyment of Obi-wan Kenobi and A New Hope.

Clone Wars

I suspect it’s not controversial that I think Clone Wars is absolutely incredible, adds so much to the universe and characters and story, and is probably the best of the television shows.

If you just watch the movies, the time skip between episodes 2 and 3 is quick and not really remarked upon. You really just process it by recognizing that Anakin’s hair is long now. Clone Wars shows that actually quite a lot of stuff happened in between, and it was definitely traumatic for everyone, including Anakin.

I think the thing I like most about Clone Wars is all of the storylines and character development of the clones themselves, as individuals and as a group. Because the movies don’t address that of course the human clones that make up a clone army would have some feelings and opinions about being clones in a clone army. I love how the show shows how they individuate themselves in small ways, like tattoos and how they decorate their armor. I love that they name themselves and each other, and that a surefire way to know who is the Bad Guy in an episode is who refuses to call the clones by their names. I love they they brag about girls even though “you’ve never even met a girl.” I love how seriously they take brotherhood. The storyline of Fives discovering the brain chips and what happened next broke my heart. I love Cut, the clone who deserted and fell in love and started a family. And the storyline where our guys are temporarily under the command of a different and super harsh Jedi shows us that while Anakin is a bit too murdery with his enemies, he treats the clones under his command with a high level of respect and humanity, probably above and beyond even the average Jedi. And of course spending so many seasons with some Jedi and their clone regiment makes the pain of Order 66 that much more evident. Because it’s Ahsoka’s friends who are now trying to kill her, not just Some Guys That Look Like Storm Troopers Who Were Supposed to Be On Our Team, as it is in Revenge of the Sith.

Some Other Stuff I Like:

• We get a lot of fun Anakin/Ahsoka or Anakin/Obi-wan adventures, but the show also isn’t afraid to take some episodes away to spend time with other characters and storylines. I particularly enjoyed the one where R2D2 leads a droid squadron.

• I never really understood what Dooku’s deal was in the movies, but this show really gets into the politics and shows that while the war as a whole was orchestrated by Palpatine for power, a lot of the individual worlds that seceded were probably doing it for pretty reasonable reasons (the Republic was super corrupt). And that the Separatists are also their own whole political body with their own Senate. We also get to see that Palpatine’s machinations were very slow and methodical and he took power bit by bit over time, way more carefully than it’s presented if you just watch the movies.

• Even though kinda the point of having a droid army as the enemies is that we don’t feel that bad when they die and can cheer on the heroes doing hero shit, the battle droids are humanized just enough that we do feel kinda bad and are reminded in a small way that war is still war.

• More Padme!!! More Padme doing politics!!! And being friends with Senator Organa! In watching Revenge of the Sith, I was always kinda like “ok he’s just some guy they introduced to be Leia’s dad,” but with the context provided by Clone Wars, he becomes “Leia’s birth mom’s close colleague and friend and political ally, who of course will volunteer to help keep her child safe in the aftermath of a coup helped along by her biological father who is now a Sith Lord”

• I’ll group Episode 5 of Tales of the Jedi here too — it’s the one where Anakin trains Ahsoka to defend herself against clone attacks instead of just battle droid attacks. It ends with a duplicate of one of the last episodes of Clone Wars, where Ahsoka and Rex are about to enter a hangar full of Order 66ed clones who want to kill her, and Rex whispers something like “Let’s hope you remember all of your training." While the training was very harsh, Anakin ended up saving her through it, because she was prepared for scenarios the Jedi didn’t think it mattered to prepare her for.

• I love how much overlap (like duplicate dialogue) the last season of Clone Wars has with scenes in Revenge of the Sith, to really cement that they’re happening simultaneously.

• I also find it delightful how many iconic Star Wars lines (like “I have a bad feeling about this”) end up being said by other characters throughout the show. It’s silly but I like it.

• The events leading up to Ahsoka leaving the Jedi Order also flesh out some more of how the Jedi were actually becoming corrupt and why Anakin might have been so angry with them in Revenge of the Sith.

• Some of the episodes touch on some U.S. imperialism topics, like the discussion of whether it’s good to train local groups of militants (who might be terrorists) if it helps win battles against the droids

• We also get to see some scenes of him/Padme connecting and being in love, but also some scenes that show their marital tension (which is frequently but not always also political disagreement) has been building long before Revenge of the Sith.

• Obi-wan and Satine!!! I loved that storyline, loved their sexual tension amid deep political disagreement, loved how they’re both so principled and that’s part of what they love about each other even though they disagree. And the fact that Obi-wan had also fallen in love with someone he met via his Jedi work means he could have provided so much more support to Anakin if he had known the extent of Anakin and Padme’s relationship.

• The episode where they go to the slave trader planet and Anakin has to confront his past and trauma about that. Good episode.

Revenge of the Sith

Of course, this movie doesn’t mention Ahsoka at all because her character didn’t exist when the movie was made, but I think that’s emotionally moving —that Anakin’s just split up with his apprentice who is quite young and doesn’t discuss her at all with anyone. It really highlights some of Anakin’s immaturity and self-centeredness during this moment of his life, especially in contrast with him in Clone Wars as this impulsive and rebellious leader but also caring person and teacher. He’s still also the guy in Attack of the Clones, a few years on.

Until rewatching this movie this time, I’d always thought Obi-wan did know about Anakin and Padme being together and it was mostly a DADT situation. But it turns out that while he of course knew Anakin was in love with her, he didn’t actually know they were a couple, even though he isn’t surprised to learn that Anakin is the father of Padme’s baby.

Even by mid-movie, Anakin is still loyal to the Jedi — he turns in Palpatine to Mace Windu even though Palpatine is tempting him with a Sith apprenticeship that could save Padme. I think a central tension is that Anakin comes to believe that the Jedi serve the Republic, which means serving the Senate and Palpatine, while Mace and the other Jedi believe the Jedi ought to serve the ideal of the Republic, and once Palpatine is clearly threatening that, they have to operate independently. Anakin is also shaped by how much of his life has been at war, vs. the other Jedi who lived most of their lives during a time when being a Jedi didn’t mean being a general.

I like the fan theory that suggests Palpatine sapped Padme’s life force away to save Anakin. I also think Anakin becomes convinced that neither Padme nor Obi-wan could ever forgive him for the things he’s already done (like killing younglings —which, yeah, that’s a big one) and so there’s no point in trying to be good and walking it back and so he ends up stuck with Palpatine even if maybe he regretted his actions. Maybe he regretted his actions immediately after getting put in his Vader suit. Maybe he spent the rest of his life feeling awful but needing to continue on his path because he felt like there was no other option.

I also like the fan theory that suggests Tatooine with his relatives was a safe place to send Luke because Anakin hates Tatooine so much that he would never ever go back there ever.

Bad Batch

This might be my favorite show after Clone Wars, because it’s basically an extra season of Clone Wars but with some different characters. The premise of “the clones are already second-class citizens prized only for their use in war, so what if there were some ‘defective’ clones who are outcasts among their own brothers prized for their extra special use in war” is interesting. I also think it’s hilarious that the Bad Batch powers are like:

1. This guy can sense electromagnetic frequencies

2. This guy can shoot superhumanly well

3. This guy is super big and strong

4. This guy is a cyborg

5. This guy is simply autistic with a special interest in technology/engineering

Bad Batch really explores the theme of brotherhood more, especially in how the guys cope with Crosshair choosing to side with the Empire and what it means to be big brothers to a little sister when all of your other thousands of siblings are adults.

(Also, Omega is trans)

I also like that it’s yet another peek at how Order 66 was experienced by another group of people, and it gives us a chance to see how various rebel clones coped with breaking from their brainwashing + having to build a new life when the only thing they’ve ever done is no longer an option + the Empire is now getting rid of them all, maybe by prison and maybe by murder.

Plus it’s some backstory to begin setting up Palpatine trying to clone himself, so that Rise of Skywalker is a little bit less out of nowhere.

I was really sad to finish season 2 and not be able to hang out with these characters anymore, and I’m so glad another season is planned. (But I will very much wait until the WGA and SAG-AFTRA win their demands)

Solo

I liked this movie when it came out, and my main critique is that L3’s interest in droid rights is portrayed as laughable, like “look at this crazy feminist droid” basically. She’s right!!! Droids should be free!!! But it’s fun. Han Solo is cool —that’s his whole thing. And he is cool. And also hot. And it’s fun to see the backstory of how him and Chewbacca become friends and how they get the Millennium Falcon. Would watch again. It’s fun.

Obi-Wan Kenobi

I loved this. Of course it doesn’t make sense for this Obi-Wan to look so young when it’s only 10 years or so before A New Hope and of course he looks much older in that, but who cares, whatever. I love getting to see Obi-wan still trying to process the trauma and heartbreak of what happened to Anakin. And Young Leia is so cool and fierce, she’s simply the best.

I also love all of the Obi-wan/Owen interactions. Because they both do care for Luke, but Owen very, very understandably doesn’t want Luke anywhere near Jedi shit. Because Owen knows what happened to Anakin — surely, Obi-wan told him when he first brought Luke to him — and understandably blames Obi-wan for it. But Obi-wan isn’t just trying to keep an eye out for Force sensitivity— he also just wants to bring Luke a toy because he’s a kid and kids like toys and that would be nice.

This show also gave me way more empathy for Owen in A New Hope. When you watch A New Hope on its own, and Luke is begging to be allowed to enroll at the academy and Owen keeps saying “one more season,” Owen just seems like a kinda selfish square uncle who it makes sense for an isolated young adult to be pissed at. But Obi-wan Kenobi raises the possibility that actually Owen might be trying to keep Luke at home on purpose, not because he doesn’t want Luke to pursue his dreams, but because actually, a Skywalker enrolling at an Imperial flight academy might not be very safe for said Skywalker whose name is Skywalker and has Skywalker on his paperwork with the Empire. It’s very possible Luke is, if not entirely undocumented, then only partially documented. Tatooine is very isolated —even if he has local paperwork, like for enrolling in school, he may not have ever registered with anything that syncs with the Empire’s databases.

Someone else online pointed out that in their Force telepathy, Obi-wan always calls Anakin Anakin until the very end, even though he says Vader when discussing him with other people. I also think it’s so powerful that just as Obi-wan is haunted by his lost relationship with Anakin, Anakin is also haunted by Obi-wan.

Rebels

It took me awhile to get into Rebels, I think mostly because I didn’t think it would live up to Bad Batch for me. And it didn’t. But I did like it. I love the lothcats and lothwolves. I love Sabine and Zeb. I love that we get to see Retired Veteran Rex. I love that Hera and Kanan are definitely in love even though most of the time they’re focused on their missions and so aren’t super expressive about it. Although I think the show was a little confused on this point — sometimes they read like a very established couple who are just private about affection, but then saying I Love You is a big deal for them, and I spent most of the show hoping for them to kiss, not realizing that actually they had been sleeping together the whole time and their physical relationship on the show was just very small because it’s a show for kids (they could have kissed sometimes, though!!!).

I love that we get to see Leia being a rebel Senator before she’s outed as a rebel.

I love that Chopper sometimes goes undercover disguised as an imperial droid.

I love that Ezra’s parents were rebel communicators who were later able to orchestrate a prison uprising due to people feeling inspired after hearing their son’s own rebel communications.

I love Kanan’s journey of trying to figure out what it means to be a Jedi when his training was cut so short and now his people are in exile but also he has this kid to train.

Ahsoka fighting Vader and realizing who he is!!

Oh and AP5, the droid whose voice is an homage to Alan Rickman. So fun.

I like how the focus on just one rebel cell really emphasizes that stuff like this was happening all over the place, and there could theoretically be lots more shows of stuff other rebels were doing at the same time.

Andor

One Way Out is one of my favorite episodes of television ever. I think Andy Serkis should have won a lot of awards for it. And I’m obsessed with the backstory he decided on for his character: that he was a union leader imprisoned for standing up for his fellow workers (a key part of fascism is trying to crush workers’ organizations, so this makes sense for the Empire) but then put in a position of authority within the prison because he’s good at leading. This also makes sense for the Empire because if he’s the boss (and he has to act like a boss, because he will probably be murdered if he doesn’t), then he probably won’t lead a prison uprising, because the other workers will hate him because he’s not one of them, while still being in a role that uses some of his skills. It takes a budding revolutionary on his floor to make him risk returning to his roots.

I think the pacing of the show is pretty slow at first, but I came not to mind that, as part of the point is how Cassian’s politics shift slowly over time. I like that we also get to see some of the innerworkings of the Empire (both in the bureaucracy and in the very basic question of “how does the Empire do all of its stuff?” and the answer is “well, a lot of prison labor.”) Learning more about Mon Mothma is also cool, as well as some of the innerworkings of how the Rebels functioned as a group too.

More on Andor here.

Rogue One

I was not a particular fan of Rogue One when I first watched it, and the reason was that not long after watching it, I could barely remember anything that happened, so it must not be very memorable. In watching it again, I liked it better. I love the reveal that the way to destroy the Death Star isn’t a coincidence that merely requires a Skywalker (that is, a very skilled pilot who is also strong in the Force) to exploit, but that it was designed that way on purpose by a Rebel on the inside. It’s details like these that build up the theme that the Rebellion was successful not because of a couple great heroes like Luke/Leia/Han/Chewbacca, but because many people were all working together over years to take the Empire down. This is kinda the opposite of the message in Rise of Skywalker.

I like that they all die at the end. I thought that was powerful, too — that sometimes people do die while doing heroic, dangerous shit. But in this case, it was worth it— they got the Death Star plans out. They didn’t do it fast enough to save Alderaan, but they saved many, many other people.

I especially like the very, very end, where we see Leia’s ship immediately before A New Hope. I wasn’t bothered by the CGI Leia (the first time I watched the movie, it was the day Carrie Fisher died, so seeing her unexpectedly did throw me and make me cry), so I liked seeing her as the next handoff in the Death Star plans relay, but I especially liked seeing all of the crew on her ship running around, trying to escape, and doing their own best to pass the plans through the door to the next guy to keep them safe. I never paid them much attention when watching A New Hope (because they’re mostly cannon fodder to be shot down by Stormtroopers), but I really paid attention to them as fellow Rebels in Rogue One.

I also like that Red Five dies, just as a little backstory for why Red Five is available as a call sign for Luke.

A New Hope

My main takeaway from this re-watch was “Leia is fucking awesome.” The way she stands up to Vader, pretends to not even be a Rebel, pretends to give up the base but then it was an abandoned one all along, the way she doesn’t put up with any of Han’s shit. She was raised to be not just a politician, but a Rebel politician like her dad, and she’s seen some shit, so of course when she gets rescued by Guy On His First Mission Ever and Some Rapscallion Who Just Wants Money, she’s gonna be salty with them. And Obi-wan, the guy she was actually trying to contact, gets murdered, and so she’s stuck with them.

Obi-wan telling Luke about how Anakin was a great pilot and a good friend hits different after you’ve seen the prequels (and Clone Wars). Giving him his lightsaber hits different. Them fighting and Obi-wan closing his lightsaber hits different. One final lesson to his apprentice — he will become more powerful than Vader can possibly imagine. And Obi-wan refusing to hurt Anakin more, having cut off most of his limbs previously, also hits different.

Chewbacca of course deserves more recognition than he gets, but also, R2D2 is a war hero (having played a pivotal role in all three wars that make up the Star Wars) who also doesn’t get the credit he deserves. And he flies with Luke while Vader is shooting at them, and while maybe none of them realized who each other was at that point, that’s emotional. R2D2 and Anakin were best friends.

Empire Strikes Back

I don’t really have anything to say about this movie that feels even vaguely original. It’s a great movie.

Return of the Jedi

Leia Continues To Be Awesome.

Luke and Vader having matching mechanical hands. Luke saying, “I am a Jedi, like my father before me.” Honestly that’s so great. Because Luke’s whole mission is to turn Vader good, just like Vader’s mission is to turn Luke bad, because they both want to be on the same side. And by saying that, Luke is saying “we can be on the same side, but only if it’s the Jedi side, which you’re welcome to come back to.” At the end of Revenge of the Sith, Anakin feels he can’t possibly undo what he’s already done. Padme is dead, and Obi-wan just cut off his limbs, and he murdered a bunch of Jedi. But now here is his son, who he has no relationship with, who he hasn’t “betrayed” because he was Vader for all of Luke’s life, saying “you’ve been an oppressive murderous warlord for my entire life, but I want to give you another chance to be good if you want it, and we can connect.” And Vader takes the opportunity. Anakin turned to the Dark Side in hopes of saving Padme and their baby(ies), but he has to come back to the light side to save their actual child and save the possibility of having a relationship with him. Because if there’s one thing that’s consistent about Anakin throughout all of the films, it’s that he prioritizes his loved ones above everything else (including his morals): his mom, Padme, R2D2, Obi-wan, Ahsoka, and now Luke.

I know some people don’t like that they edited Hayden Christensen into the new release of this movie to be Anakin’s Force Ghost. I do feel bad for the original ghost actor who is no longer there, but Hayden Christensen is what Anakin looks like for me, so I don’t mind. But regardless of who plays him, I love having Anakin’s Force Ghost at the end. Because while he lived as Vader, he died as Anakin motherfucking Skywalker. (If he’d lived, he would have had to contend with the decades of horrible things he’d done, so he kinda has to die for the emotional/narrative beats to work.)

The Madalorian

Before this project, this was the only Star Wars show I’d watched. And I watched it for Baby Yoda. But I like it. I like learning about the history of Mandalore (which is even better having now gotten more of the backstory through Clone Wars), I like the tension between Mando and his fundamentalist group and Bo Katan and the other Mandalorians who do take their helmets off. I like Mando and Grogu growing to love one another. I like their adventures. It’s fun. (I also like that this also has some “The Emperor has been trying to do cloning shit” stuff too to make Rise of Skywalker less random)

Book of Boba Fett

I enjoyed it. I like seeing him become friends with the Tusken tribe. I love Sophie Thatcher as one of the troublemaking youths. I liked learning more about how Jabba’s role as a crime boss actually works. I liked that rancors are actually sweet. But mostly I liked the episodes that were really just bonus Mandalorian episodes. I also think the theme music is incredible.

Ahsoka

I wasn’t that into this show until this week’s episode (Episode 5). But I LOVED this episode, specifically all of the Anakin stuff. Seeing Ahsoka trying to process her feelings about “this guy who I was close with and fundamentally shaped who I am as a person turned out to be a Sith Lord, so what does that make me? And were all of the good times a lie?”. Seeing Anakin flicker between himself and Vader.

Some people on Reddit are calling Ahsoka’s return “Ahsoka the White,” which I think is funny and appropriate, but the Lord of the Rings reference that occurred to me while watching the episode the first time was at the very end of her time in the World Between Worlds, where she decides not to kill Anakin with his own lightsaber. He backs away, his Sith Eyes turn back to Regular, his expression softens, and he says “there’s hope for you yet.”

This read to me very much like Galadriel —but instead of “I passed the test, I will go into the West and remain Galadriel,” it’s “YOU passed the test, which means my legacy can remain the legacy of Anakin.” Because he got forgiven by Luke, but that doesn’t mean much for the harm he caused. But since Luke was raised by Owen and Veru and trained by Obi-wan and Yoda, not Anakin, how Ahsoka chooses to be in the world is much more relevant for Anakin’s legacy, because she is someone who has been deeply impacted by his choices.

I also love live-action Hera, and David Tennant as Huyang is great.

Resistance

This is my second-least-favorite of the shows, maybe. Or maybe third-least (if Boba Fett is second). It’s certainly fun (I especially like Neeku, because he’s autistic and such a sweet person and caring friend while also being skilled and helpful for Hero Stuff), but I just never got as into it as the other shows.

The Force Awakens

Finn gets a name from a friend just like many of the clones got their names from each other. Poe is of course extremely cool (and hot). I love that Rey knows of and loves Han due to his reputation as a smuggler, not as a Rebel hero. BB8 is super cute and I love that he has a clearly distinct personality from R2D2. Seeing Han and Leia as middle-aged estranged lovers who very much still love each other but are mourning their son’s turn to the Dark Side (and fascism) is great. R2D2 in low power mode I take as basically mourning Luke.

I actually kinda do agree with the haters who say Rey is overpowered, though. She learns a lot of Jedi skills very fast — it’s not just that she can use the Force, but she’s already doing mindtricks and lifting huge things very early and so on. Maybe that’s because she and Ben are a dyad so some of his skills and training spill over into her?

I also think that while Finn and Poe have great chemistry together in this movie, that really falls away in the subsequent ones (even just platonic chemistry), which makes it hard for me to ship them together.

Chewbacca deserves more sympathy and support than he gets at the end of this movie. Like Leia should have hugged Chewy immediately, not Rey — Leia and Chewy are Han’s life-partners. And Chewy surely was also close with Ben for most of his life, so Chewbacca is also mourning not only his best friend, but “this kid who is basically my nephew is doing really evil shit, including murdering my best friend who is also his dad and also leading a fascist regime”

The Last Jedi

I like this one. I like the themes of “maybe the Jedi were actually bad or problematic at best.” I like seeing Luke grappling with his decisions and regret over mistrusting Ben and considering killing him instead of loving a kid who needed him. I like Rose and Finn’s friendship. I like Holdo and I like that she has purple hair. I think the final Luke vs. Kylo Ren duel is awesome.

The Rise of Skywalker

I do not like this one. I do like Rey and Kylo’s relationship and how it develops. I like that they kiss. I like Poe hitting on his ex even though I don’t like that they probably introduced her to avoid Poe/Finn shippers, and I like this because I want Poe to hit on me.

I do not like that they bring Palpatine back. I do not like the Sith wayfinder stuff, that feels random and made up. I do not like that they ignore the themes from the previous one. I do not like that Rey’s heritage ends up being important. I think the themes are much better if she really is just Some Random Person. She doesn’t have to be a Palpatine to be strong in the Force, and she doesn’t have to claim herself as a Skywalker to be a good person. She can just be Rey, who has had meaningful relationships with many people.

I do like C-3PO introducing himself anew to everyone, and I do like R2 being hurt when he doesn’t remember him. I also like “R2’s memory circuits seem damaged because he’s saying there’s a message coming from…Master Luke???”

But mostly I think this movie is bad.

Introduction to LiCS Special Issue on Queer Literacies

While my exams are long over, summer means I have time to read more scholarship, and I think it’s important to continue writing here about what I’m reading. I know how useful many of these posts have been for me to go back to while writing my diss and other projects.

So, this weekend I’m reading the special issue of Literacy in Composition Studies on queer literacies, edited by Collin Craig, Wilfredo Flores, and Zarah C. Moeggenberg. Their introduction to the issue talks a lot about the importance of deep citational engagement, especially with scholars of color, rather than skimming sources and citing them to say you cited them. This made me reflect on how precarity and work speed-up/productivity inflation create structural barriers to doing so.

This special issue came out in March 2022. I’m reading it in June. Not a terribly long delay. But even just in the introduction and the first article (which I’m currently only halfway through), there are so many things that would have been useful for me to have thought about, read, discussed, cited, etc. in the very proposals I just submitted earlier this week. Proposals that were due, so they took priority over catching up on reading. These proposals would be stronger, and my scholarship would be better, if I had read these pages a few weeks sooner.

I teach 3-3 (as an adjunct), work an adjunct staff job, have two important committee positions in my department, have a summer class to prep for, am trying to write my dissertation, am active in two unions, and active in a political organization. All of this makes it hard to engage deeply with scholarship period, separately from concerns about who or what we’re engaging with.

Sources I Marked in This Introduction

“Definition of Literacy in a Digital Age,” NCTE 2019

“Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” Cathy Cohen

Also Cathy Cohen’s reflection piece in 2019 GLQ

Royster, Calling Cards

Collins, “The Social Construction of Black Feminist Thought”

Craig, “Courting the Abject: A Taxonomy of Black Queer Rhetoric”

Pritchard, Fashioning Lives, of course.

Lance T. McCready, Making Space for Diverse Masculinities

Carmen Kynard, “Literacy/Literacy Studies and the Still-Dominant White Center” - it is ridiculous A) that I didn’t put anything by Carmen on my exam lists, and B) that anyone on my committee let me do that. What an oversight.

Quotes I Marked In This Introduction

“use the idea of queer as a provocation to imagine how we might organize across varied communities defined as ‘the other’ by the state and/or racial capitalism” (from the 2019 GLQ piece, Cathy Cohen, 142)

They cite Ferguson (Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique), Halberstam (Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability) and Alexander (Literacy, Sexuality, Pedagogy) in relation to “queer literacy practices are inherently political” (p VII)

“Queer literacies are inherently social, either in response to normativity or the learned ways we understand and uptake our queer elders’ practices for survival” (p. VII)

At the top of page VIII there’s a discussion of “coalitional possibility” and I marked the paragraph as a whole because a lot of this language, probably unintentionally, reads to me like NGOspeak . Which I’m hesitant to say because more radical groups definitely also talk about coalition-building, but it feels like a liberal word to me that often comes up instead of “solidarity.” Kind of like allies vs. accomplices, although accomplices is also in the process of being hollowed out I think

Marked another paragraph discussing Wilfredo’s experience of being told the anti-racism Queer Caucus panel at CCCC 2021 “wasn’t queer” - this and the earlier quote I marked about queer literacy being inherently political is making me think about a tweet I saw this morning in which someone was arguing that there is nothing inherently anti-capitalist about queerness, and we can see this in the cooptation of Pride. Which I think is interesting, because they’re right in the sense of “queer” as “LGBTQ,” but for me queer is a term that carries political weight, not inherently of course, but because it was popularized/reclaimed for a particular political purpose. And since I think you can’t have full queer liberation under capitalism, to be queer means (ought to mean) to be anti-capitalist. But lots of people don’t feel that way, and lots of people think queerness is about anti-normativity and not about a particular political analysis, so it’s both true and not true. But point being, an anti-racism panel is totally queer, queerness as a political category comes with the obligation to be anti-racist.

The idea of “non-normative citational practices” - I’m not totally sure what the authors are envisioning when they say this phrase, but what it makes me think about is citing tweets, TikToks, just regular people talking about stuff. Because if me doing archival work looking at bisexual magazines from the 90s counts as scholarly work, and that’s where people who were intellectually engaged in bi issues were talking about it in print (meaning not just out loud, meaning it’s something we can access now in their future), social media seems like the 2010s/2020s equivalent.

p. XI- marked a paragraph summarizing Eric Pritchard’s “expanded definitions of literacy” specifically embodied literacy

p. XI- right after that paragraph, “In Black queer culture and some other communities of color, getting read, reading others, reading and writing ourselves is instrumental to performing and fortifying our identities, both individually and collectively”

p. XI right after that — reference to Julia Serano who notes that “passing” discourse (as it relates to queer people) is inherited from discourse around racial “passing”

I marked basically all of page XII for different examples of queer literacy practices and identity expressions

Review: Don't Look Up

Context: In my “Writing in the Disciplines” class this semester, I asked my students to write reviews of either Don’t Look Up (which we watched together) or another piece of media. I wrote along with them, and this is the result.

I first watched Don’t Look Up on Christmas Eve, with my partner and two close friends. Due to the skyrocketing wave of the Omiron variant, it was the first Christmas I had ever spent away from my family. The movie has everything I want: astronomy, comedy, political commentary, and an all-star cast. But above all, I immediately identified with Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence), the PhD candidate and audience surrogate who first discovers the comet that will collide with the Earth in six months.

As a PhD candidate researching queer people’s use of TikTok, it’s unlikely (to put it mildly) that I will ever discover an impending apocalypse. But nevertheless, I see myself in Kate throughout the movie. When showing the film to my students during our media criticism unit, I was horrified to realize that Kate and I were even wearing (essentially) the same sweater. 

After Kate and her advisor (Leonardo Di Caprio) meet with the President (Meryl Streep), who decides to do nothing about the comet for fear of spoiling her party’s chances in the midterms, the Chief of Staff orders them to keep the existence of the comet strictly confidential. And this is where the differences between Kate and I become most relevant.

If it were me, that comet would have been all over Twitter before I even got into the Oval Office. Probably even before they made me wait in the hallway for seven hours and charged me for free snacks. 

When choosing a movie to watch with my students, I ended up picking this one because it’s about such an important topic and is the subject of so many different takes. A rich text with which to practice writing reviews! I also picked this one because it’s deeply concerned with issues of science communication, the topic of the course’s second unit. This movie was such a good fit for the kinds of conversations I wanted to have with my students that I redesigned the entire syllabus over winter break to give us space for the film.

The movie asks, what should you do in Kate’s position? Dr. Mindy (her advisor) asks her the same question, and he sarcastically offers the following options: start an online petition, organize a “mob” with picket signs, or overthrow the government. This scene takes place right after Kate has loudly informed the patrons of a shrimp restaurant that the government called off the mission to deflect the comet in the hopes of turning a profit. 

For me, the turning point of the film comes when the FBI threatens to prosecute Kate for treason unless she signs a plea bargain promising not to make any more public comments about the comet or the government’s response to the crisis. Kate signs it.

This is another point where Kate and I diverge. I would not have signed it. And I would not have signed it because I am part of a political organization that would have supported me — publicized my trial and used it to fuel protests against the government’s inaction. And if the FBI tried to disappear me instead, they’d publicize the hell out of that too.

Kate picked the option that offered a much more pleasant last few months of life, but in agreeing to remain silent, she sacrificed her chance of saving the world. Could she have succeeded, if she had made a different choice? Maybe, maybe not. But that’s a hell of a lot better than certain death.

I believe it’s not yet too late to avert the worst effects of climate change, but we are running out of time very, very fast. In 2007, I watched An Inconvenient Truth in my sixth grade social studies class. That same year, researchers estimated that carbon emissions from industrialized countries would need to be 25%-40% below 1990 levels by 2020 in order to meet target warming goals. That year has now come and gone, and at that benchmark, annual emissions were up more than 50% relative to 1990. Now, the IPCC thinks meeting that original target (less than 2 degrees Celsius of global warming by 2100) is impossible, and 1.5 degrees might be impossible too. While it won’t happen with a bang, like the comet, the window for action is narrowing.

The evening before the comet hits the Earth, Dr. Mindy drives Kate and her boyfriend to get groceries for a family dinner. During the car ride, they listen to one of his favorite songs, and he talks the whole time, earnestly trying to make sure Kate appreciates all of the lyrics to the extent they deserve. And I realize that while I am most like Kate, I am also like Dr. Mindy, showing my own students a movie I love, and talking through the whole movie to make sure they notice all the things I think are clever.

Bi+ Rhetorics on TikTok

A big motivating force behind my dissertation is the desire to help bi+ people learn about our history (which is often erased or overlooked) and give people true information that helps them feel validated, affirmed, and more secure in their identities. While I could go about this by just writing my dissertation and then hopefully turning it into a book that the public can read (and I do hope to do that), it made more sense to me to make public-facing content the entire way.

TikTok is the booming new social media platform among Gen Z and millennials, and #BiTok is a fairly robust network of people talking about their experiences. There have been several articles written by women who realized they were bisexual through watching bi+ TikTok content. I’m also writing about bi+ TikTok for my dissertation. So, it made sense to create an account and start making educational videos about my research.

There are several TikTokers who focus on LGBTQ+ history/education, including @gia.sed, @rainbowhistoryclass, and @sy.the.gender.rebel. Rainbow History Class, in particular, gets tens of thousands and sometimes even hundreds of thousands of views on each video. So, the audience for this kind of content is definitely there on the platform.

I’ve been making videos for one week now (@bi_rhetorics), and currently have 77 followers with an average of 175 views per video. From my limited knowledge, this seems like a pretty good start. I’m also keeping a running sources Google Doc of where I got the information for each video, and I share the link in the comments to my videos.

My Goals For This Project

• Share interesting information I learn during my research (including from my orals reading), primarily focused around bi+ people but also concerning other aspects of LGBTQ+ history and community

• Document my research process (such as visits to archives, when allowed) to make the everyday experiences and steps of research/getting a PhD visible

• Provide sources for all information in my videos so that viewers can pursue more info if they wish and have sources to refer to when discussing with other people

• When people present false information or bigoted points of view in the comments, respond and/or argue back only to the extent that I judge this will be beneficial for my real audience. For example, so bi+ people reading the comments can see my replies and see counter-arguments to comments that might make them feel bad.

You can view my TikToks here.

Accessibility Powerpoint for Bronx EdTech 2021

Please click here to download a copy of my Powerpoint presentation for BronxEdTech 2021.

Choose Your Own Grading Schema: An Online Learning Experiment

Abstract:

Last semester, after teaching mostly asynchronously with no penalties or cutoffs for late work, the responses I received in students’ end-of-semester reflections were mixed. About half said they were incredibly grateful for the flexibility my class structure offered. The other half said they wished I’d required attendance at the optional Zoom sessions and held them to their deadlines under pain of grade penalty. They recognized that while ideally they would be self-motivated to participate as much as possible, external pressure would have been helpful. In this presentation, I will share how I revised my syllabus for Spring 2021 to account for both strands of feedback, and how students have responded. At the beginning of the semester, students chose via Google Form which grading plan they wanted: Structure and Accountability, or Maximum Flexibility. Students on the Structure and Accountability plan are required to attend the weekly Zoom sessions and complete all assignments on the syllabus. Students on the Maximum Flexibility plan are not required to attend Zooms and are only required to complete select assignments marked in bold on the syllabus-- unit projects, unit reflections, and a few other smaller tasks-- but are still welcome and encouraged to attend class and complete other activities. After each unit, students are given the opportunity to switch grading plans if they wish, after reading an overview of the exact assignment and points breakdown for each plan on the coming unit. Students have responded very positively to this method, and about one third have chosen the Structure and Accountability plan each unit so far, and additional students on the flexibility plan are also choosing to attend the synchronous classes and participate in ungraded activities.

Re/Orienting Writing Studies: Queer Methods, Queer Projects, Edited by William P. Banks, Matthew B. Cox, and Caroline Dadas

I first started reading this book early on in the pandemic. Then I didn’t read any of it for several more months. Reading theoretical writing felt impossible at the time. But now, when I’m sitting down to write this, it’s also been a long time since I finished reading the book (I think I finished last summer? Or fall), so I don’t remember much of it now. Thankfully, the practice of going through to type out quotes I marked has been a very helpful review process.

This book is similar to Imagining Queer Methods, but with a more specific focus on writing studies. Several of the authors wrote other things that I’ve read for my orals, or have since encountered/cited for other projects.

(p.3) Discussion of how entering a space as a researcher always changes that space, but beginning to do research in a space you’re already in (such as your own classroom) changes how you act, and so changes that space too.

(p.5) quote from Harriet Malinowitz- “Which of our theories of writing don’t explode when we consider their ramifications for lesbian and gay writers?”

(p.5) Quote from Kirsch saying we should always choose to write our research in genres that match the methods we chose (or choose methods that match our genres, maybe)

(p.8) “For many LGBTQ people, there is a felt sense, as much as a theoretical one, that one resistant method for maintaining our existence involves not being bludgeoned by languages intended to hurt us but pushing back, even in small ways, in order to maintain our own sense of self and community.” - Foucault’s reverse discourse

(p.9) “The realization that language and identity are interwoven and interanimated means that any discipline focused on the study of language must engage theories and rhetorics grounded in such a realization.”

(p.11) quote from Krista Ratcliffe- rhetoric is “the study of how we use language and how language uses us.”

(p.11) “But rather than assume a primarily ontological nature for language and reality, queer rhetorics begin with the assumption that critique— the calling out of language as language— represents an initial and important destabilization of meaning, not to prevent meaning or to pretend that meaning cannot be made but to ask why this meaning at this time and under these circumstances; these are fundamentally rhetorical questions”

(p.12) Rhetorics of Intentionality (as one type of queer rhetoric— the intention matters more than whether you succeed, like it doesn’t matter if you can pass as a gender, the fact that you are trying to communicate that gender means people ought to recognize that as valid). Questions how rhetorics of intentionality would change how we view rubrics and writing assessment (if intention comes above outcomes)

(p.14) Rhetorics of Failure— “a chance to eschew ‘being taken seriously’ in order to be ‘frivolous, promiscuous, and irrelevant’” and make a ‘detour around the usual markers of accomplishment and satisfaction.”

(p.15) Rhetorics of Forgetting- strategic forgetting, look for lost/forgotten people and stories, ask WHY “certain elements of our disciplinary past have been forgotten.” Why do some things have rhetorical velocity and some things stay still/left behind?

(p.16) Heather Love, reminds us to pay attention to ‘texts or figures that refuse to be redeemed’ and disrupt the progress narrative of queer history. Resist pressure to redeem the past.

(p.16) Quote from Jean Bessete’s chapter later on in the collection- “When we look for queerness in the archive, what exactly are we seeking?”

(p.16) Right after that quote, from the editors: “When we look for X, what are we strategically forgetting in order to keep X in focus? How could we acknowledge that tension in our work? Why might we need to forget X in order to discover Y?” This is like the questions of measuring sexuality and gender nonconformity— any measure you choose brings into focus some things and excludes other things

(p.25) Gary Olsen refers to traditional rhetoric as “the rhetoric of assertion”

(p.28) This chapter is by Hillery Glasby, she suggests “ambivalence as a methodology because it reduces, or altogether negates, the desire for coherence and polished texts” -seems similar to revisionary rhetoric

(p.29) “write yourself so that Others might know the Self. This can be critical self-care work since difference becomes internalized over time.”

(p.30) quote from Alexander & Rhodes- queer rhetorical practices are those “that recognize the necessity sometimes of saying ‘No,’ of saying ‘Fuck, no,” of offering an impassioned, embodied, and visceral reaction to the practices of normalization that limit not just freedom but the imagination of possibility, of potential”

(p.42) Another quote from them- “We understand queer composing as a queer rhetorical practice aimed at disrupting how we understand ourselves to ourselves.”

(p.43) paraphrase of Rhodes, “because of the heteronormative institutional locations in which teaching occurs, there may be no true ‘queer pedagogy’; there is only the possibility of teaching queer.

(Skipping over everything else I marked in Stacy Waite’s chapter since I wrote about this chapter separately in my Stacy Waite post)

(p.55) “If there were a single conceptual umbrella for thinking about queer/trans methodology, it wouldn’t necessarily translate to a focus on LGBTQA topics so much as on a commitment to rigorously (if not deviantly) questioning our deeply held disciplinary narratives.”

(p.99) In Jean Bessette’s chapter. “Cofounder [of the Lesbian Herstory Archives] Joan Nestle (2015) describes her early commitment to the word lesbian as a ‘noun that stood for all possibilities of queerness, for all possibilities of deviations…Not a role-model lesbian history, not an archive of safe stories, always my own undertaking of keeping in the archives the tensions of lesbian difference’ (239-240).” Also that LHA is “open to a diversity of visitors, unconstrained by ‘academic, political, or sexual credentials,’ race or class”

Sources To Look Up

(Rhodes & Alexander) Techne: Queer Meditations on Writing the Self

(Rhodes) “The Failure of Queer Pedagogy”

Imagining Queer Methods, Edited by Amin Ghaziani and Matt Brim

Quotes I Marked

(p.4) “Many humanists embrace a ‘suspicion of method’ (Brim and Ghaziani 2016, 16) and assume that queer frameworks are incompatible with social science epistemologies.”

(p.7) “We thus envision a dual mandate for queer methods: to outline the conditions of queer worldmaking and to clarify, but not overdetermine, the conditions that ‘make live livable”

(p.14) Bit about Halberstam and scavenger methods

(p.15) Quotes from Munoz about evidence and how the nature of queer history means there often isn’t the traditional kinds of evidence bc leaving evidence is dangerous

(p.17) Note about “zombie categories”— categories that are invented by researchers for particular purposes but don’t catch on because they don’t resonate with people, OR categories that used to resonate with people but are now archaic holdovers

(p.29) - mentions that when Heather Love taught a queer method graduate seminar and invited several established scholars, they said they have no method. Method in queer studies undermines “queer theory’s institutional claims to inter/anti-disciplinarity”

(p.30) “To see one’s practices as beyond method and utterly undisciplined is a failure to reckon with queer scholars’ position in the university; it fails to recognize the violence of all scholarly research— even its most insurgent and intimate forms.”

(p.33) “For those trained in traditional empirical methods, adding the volatile queer to method introduces the scandal of theory, aesthetics, and cultural studies: jargon; small sample sizes, and in some cases of a single (fictional) text; unclear standards of evidence; lack of attention to representativeness; and disconnection from real people, places, and things. For those trained in the humanities, the scandal is just the opposite: the anchoring of queer to method threatens to drain its political potential by submitting to regimes of statistical reduction, the reification of identity, the overvaluing of visible behavior, and the foreclosure of the speculative, the counterfactual and the ‘not yet here’ Jose Esteban Munoz designated as queer utopia (2009, 1).”

(p.33) “Queer research in a humanities framework is not guilty of reduction, but is characterized by attentiveness to what Lauren Berlant, in an analysis of the case study as genre, refers to as ‘tender singularities’ (2007, 669). Yet the fear is that such scholarship brings its considerable methodological resources to bear on merely fictional, idiosyncratic, or hypothetical instances, far removed from the exigencies of anyone’s life.”

(p.55) Discussion on the ethical issues (and practical difficulties) of doing ethnography on a group that you’re not a part of, but argues that refusing to do the research just because of your identity is the ‘skeptic’s cop-out’ and might be the worst position, since you’re avoiding dialogue altogether. At least if you do something shitty, people can talk about it.

(p.90) Story about developing a survey instrument, via casual conversations with queer people, which helped shape how the survey instrument ended up looking. Says most item development studies are done using majoritarian beliefs about minorities, so using queer people as the starting point is unusual.

(p.105) Discussion of the shortcomings of available data on LGBT households, including that the census only looks at coupled households, which excludes single people, people who don’t live with their partners, people not willing to identify their sexualities, bi people, and trans people.

(p.106) Important discussion about how WHAT you ask about (behavior? identity? feelings experienced?) deeply determines the results you get. Also that gay people are a group that is IMPOSSIBLE to randomly sample.

(p.107) description of RDS data collection (respondent-driven sampling) - helps you get in touch with more of a community than you could on your own

(p.110) description of how the researcher used news stories about different neighborhoods as structuring tools for their interviews and how this method is useful

(p.134) Discussion of some of the difficulties in measuring GNC populations

Literacy, Sexuality, Pedagogy: Theory and Practice for Composition Studies, by Jonathan Alexander

One of the underlying premises of this book is that sexuality shapes and is shaped by large parts of culture, so being “sexually literate” (being able to write, read, and talk about sexuality in an informed and nuanced way) is important. So why not practice writing skills that are useful across main domains while also practicing talking about sexuality?

I first read one of the chapters, “Transgender Rhetorics,” in my feminist pedagogy class during my master’s. It was the first piece of trans-related scholarship I ever read, and I also wasn’t sure how I felt about it. Because students are asked to imagine a scene from another gender’s point of view, but write in pairs, it seems like it’s going to lend itself to stereotyping, and less about imagining the trans experience and more just imagining the experience of another gender. Someone (I think I saw it on social media, I think) once put it like this: rather than asking people to imagine if they had their body but felt like another gender, people should try to imagine that they are their real/current gender, but no one around them notices and keeps mistaking them for another gender. Like for me to imagine I’m trying to live my normal day as a woman but everyone around me suddenly reacts as if I’m a man. When I follow that line of thought, I think about all the experiences I get included in as a woman— conversations I have with other women that we wouldn’t have in the same way if men were also there, for example, conversations in the bathroom together, just conversations about shared experiences that relate to gender— and imagining being excluded from those things, on purpose, is very sad.

Just a couple days ago, I was talking with someone who explained it to me like this: when cis people write about trans people (in this case we were talking about movies about trans characters), they focus on the body, and when trans people write about trans people, it’s about the emotions.

Quotes I Marked

(p.2) “sexuality is a cultural production; it represents the appropriation of the human body and of its erogenous zones by an ideological discourse.” (this is a quote from Halperin not from Alexander)

(p.6) quote from Cultural Studies in the English Classroom- “Cultural studies…deals with the production, distribution, and reception of signifying practices within the myriad historical formations that are shaping subjectivities. These range from the family, the school, the work place, and the peer group to the more familiar activities associated with the cultural sphere, such as the arts and the media and their modes of production and consumption. In other words, wherever signifying practices are shaping consciousness in daily life, cultural studies has work to do.”

(p.7) quote from same book- “all texts are involved in politics and power: all tacitly endorse certain platforms of action. Language…is always a program for performance.”

(p.27) quote from David Bartholomae- “writers, in order to write, must imagine for themselves the privilege of being ‘insiders’ — that is, of being both inside and established discourse, and of being granted a special right to speak.”

(p.45) 3 kinds of sexual scripts, theorized by Gagnon and Simon (1973): intrapsychic (stories you tell yourself about sex and sexuality), interpersonal (how you talk about sex with others), cultural scripts (existing within groups about normative understandings)

(p.51) - note about how birth control and alternative ways of having children have separated reproduction and sex, so sexual identity really is more of a “lifestyle issue” than anything else.

(p.102) Describing the purpose of queer theory: “Are students questioning the naturalized structures of heteronormativity and heterosexism? Are they interrogating naturalized narrations of sexuality, identity, and normalcy?”

(p.105) “As such, the call to ‘work’ or think queerness in the classroom should not focus solely on introducing our many straight students to queer lives and stories; rather, working queerness in the writing classroom should be an invitation to all students—gay and straight— to think of the ‘constructedness’ of their lives in a heteronormative society.”

(p.106) “From a rhetorical standpoint, we could say that straights have the ‘narrative luxury’ of not having to consider their self-narration— at least not as closely and critically as many queers have had to.” (For example, you don’t have to come out as straight)

(p.107) “Since declarations of one’s straightness seem most common when that straightness is called into question or doubt, I have theorized that we could ‘tease out’ for examination a narration of straightness by playing with this ‘soft spot’ in the straight subjectivity— by poking the point where straightness must maintain itself as an identity over and against queerness.” He also talks about how he made a fake webpage called Straightboyz4Nsync and asked his students what they thought about it. The students mostly agreed it’s fine for a straight boy to like NSYNC, but any straight boy who likes NSYNC and feels the need to make a website defending it is probably not straight.

(p.193) Long block quote about a teaching technique called “Freeze frame” where you pause class discussion to do metadiscussion on what is happening in the room emotionally.

Sources I Marked

American Sexuality magazine, started by an anthropologist

James Berlin, “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class”

Susan Romano, “On Becoming a Woman: Pedagogies of the Self”

Zan Meyer Gonclaves, Sexuality and the Politics of Ethos in the Writing Classroom

Susan Bordo, The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private

Kenji Yoshino, Covering: The Hidden Assault on Our Civil Rights (***look up for Queer Rhetorics chapter***)

Richard E. Miller, “Fault Lines in the Contact Zone: Assessing Homophobic Student Writing”

Writing from students in a youth and AIDS project- http://homepages.uc.edu/~alexanj/voices_of_youth.htm

Bill Wolff, “Reading the Rhetoric of Webpages: Rethinking the Goals of Student Research in the Computer Classroom”

Revisionary Rhetoric, Feminist Pedagogy, and Multigenre Texts, by Julie Jung

Quotes I Marked

(p.3) [Jung had given her students a multi-genre assemblage of her own writing] “Their confusion made it quite clear that juxtaposing genres within a single text disrupts readings and delays meaning making, and that such disruptions can result in reader responses that force writers to revise more deeply.”

(p.4) “Researchers theorized revisions as a process through which writers see their texts again and thereby create rather than correct their written products….Donald Murray was a major contributor to this changing view of revision…In his landmark essay, ‘Internal Revision: A Process of Discovery,’ published in 1978, Murray defines writing as rewriting and distinguishes the polishing work of external revision— ‘what writers do to communicate what they have found written to another audience’ (91) — from the knowledge-making process of internal revision— ‘everything writers do to discover and develop what they have to say, beginning with the reading of a completed first draft (91). Whereas external revision involves making changes based on the needs and expectations of one’s intended reader, Murray explains that during internal revision, the audience is the writer herself rereading her evolving text to discover meanings not yet made clear; positioned as her own best reader, the revising writer creates a space for her text to respond.”

(p.8-9) Chart explaining 4 theories of revision: stage model (revision is editing), problem solving model (solve communication problems that result from your failure to communicate with the audience), social-interactive model (revision is about negotiating the situation and expectations between writer and reader), rhetorical-cultural model (delay consensus, identify and explore sites of conflict, don’t delete controversial parts but add to and analyze them)

(p.12) “In short, I ask that rhetors seek to make themselves heard by demonstrating their commitment to listening to others; I ask that you join me in finding ways to write writing that listens.” (Also argues that multigenre texts are good for creating meaningful reader response discussions)

(p.26) Passage on Mairs feeling like her whiteness prevented her from accurately reading Alice Walker so she let ‘Alice Walker teach me how to read Alice Walker.’ “With this move, Mairs illustrates how revisionary rhetors can learn to respond to texts they fear they cannot understand: They relinquish claims to mastery; by doing so they fall into despair; by falling into despair they become ready to listen.” What she did is she identified different strategies Walker was using and then used those same strategies in her own essay, to embody/feel those strategies herself.

(p.29) - talks about two authors, which she will analyze in this chapter, combining genres that are considered within and without Rhet/Comp, and how that weirdness makes readers uncomfortable, which allows them to think about things in new ways.

(p.33) Multigenre texts vs. “blurred genres” (Geertz)- multigenre texts have stark breaks (white space) when genres shift

(p.43) Discussion of how academic authority is built by tearing other people down, and how that’s mean and unnecessary, and Welch uses multigenre writing to talk about it

(p.45) “We have theorized how the personal has made its way into the academy, but we have yet to examine carefully how the academy has made its way into the personal.”

(p.49) “Because Miller opens with a moving scene about his father’s attempted suicide, I expected him to come out in favor of personal narratives in academic contexts; I continued to read his essay as if he were opposed to disembodied academic arguments. However, when Miller breaks form and reflects on his decision to do so, he demonstrates how genre— in this case, the genre of the personal narrative— creates readerly expectations about how writers position themselves in relation to disciplinary arguments. By stepping back and telling me that he knows I’m doing this, Miller illustrates how my reductive reading has forced him into a corner that he refuses to occupy. His metadiscursive commentary thus demands that I examine how genre expectations shape the way I hear a writer’s argument.”

(p.53) “rather than engage in the disciplines ‘conventions of attack/counter-strike’ (182), however, Lu chooses instead to revise her initial response to Miller’s essay by critically affirming the ways in which she, too, has deployed the same rhetorical moves that disturb her….Lu’s essay is a dramatic example of one reader’s efforts to own responsibly her reactions to a text that disturbs her. My purpose in discussing it here, however, is to suggest the degree to which Miller’s multigenre form encourages such a response.

(p.77) Describes an assignment in which she asks students to write the introductions to two different essays: a literary analysis and a rhetorical analysis of the same short story. The students enjoy this, but she realizes they suck at close reading nonfiction. “I believe rhetoric teachers bear the particular burden of teaching students how to closely read nonfiction.”

(p.82) Shows some different introductions to an early draft of a response to an essay that pissed her off. The first is very “warlike,” which goes against her beliefs against how people should engage in discourse. So she explains her ongoing thought process and shares more attempts at introductioning. One version says she “has trouble hearing” his arguments, which is very different from her initial approach. But her “final” version, which she frames as a “revision” of his essay, goes through step by step in the framing and explores her own emotional and intellectual reactions and agreements/disagreements with his essay. Then, after the framing, she writes about further research she did: she asked several male colleagues to read the essay she is criticizing, then interviews them about how they responded to it and why. My one struggle with this chapter is figuring out where her “revisionary essay” begins/ends as opposed to the rest of the chapter that DISCUSSES her revisionary essay. The sections blend together.

(p.152) Quote from Foucault about progress, in which he explains that he’s not saying humanity doesn’t progress, but that it’s wrong to ASSUME humanity has progressed. The question is not “How have we progressed?” but “How do things happen? And how do things happening now relate to things that happened in the past?"“

Sources I Marked

“The Writing/Reading Relationship: Becoming One’s Own Best Reader” by Richard Beach and JoAnne Liebman Kleine

“Fighting Words: Unlearning to Write Critical Essays” by Jane Tompkins

“The Nervous System” by Richard E. Miller

Publics and Counterpublics, by Michael Warner

I’ve heard enough people cite this book that I thought I had a general sense of what publics and counterpublics are and are about. I was kind of right, but in reading this book, I realized I was also kind of wrong. “Publics” can be anything that someone means when they refer to “the public.” Because every time we say we’re writing for “the public” or “for general audiences,” we don’t actually mean literally anyone. There’s always some additional shape to the audience we imagine, and the audience we imagine is always going to be at least a little bit different than the actual audience. As Warner says, I — as one of his readers — might join, leave, or re-join the public he is speaking to at any time, and he won’t even know it.

Quotes I Marked

(p.9) “A public is inevitably one thing in London, quite another in Hong Kong. This is more than the truism it might appear, since the form must be embedded in the background and self-understanding of its participants in order to work. Only by approaching it historically can one understand these preconditions of its intelligibility.”

(p.10) “To address a public or to think of oneself as belonging to a public is to be a certain kind of person, to inhabit a certain kind of social world, to have at one’s disposal certain media and genres, to be motivated by a certain normative horizon, and to speak within a certain language ideology.”

(p.11) Discussion of the tension between how a public isn’t an objective, quantifiable thing, but it also isn’t just something totally subjective and infinitely mutable.

(p.12) “One of the central claims of this book is that when people address publics, they engage in struggles—at varying levels of salience to consciousness, from calculated tactic to mute cognitive noise— over the conditions that bring them together as a public. The making of publics is the metapragmatic work newly taken up by every text in every reading.”

(p.18) note about how two of the essays in this book were “written against what at the time felt like huge blockages in the sayable”

(p.18) “As I began speculating on the close relation between sexual cultures and their publics in the modern context, I came to the conclusion that one of the underlying flaws of the gay and lesbian movement was the way it obscured and normalized the most compelling challenges of queer counterpublics.”

(p.50) “[The unequal distribution of power in mass culture and the increasing involvement of the state in civil society] produce a public that is appealed to not for criticism but for benign acclamation. Public opinion comes less to generate ideas and hold power accountable and more simply to register approval or disapproval in the form of opinion polls and occasional elections.”

(p.52) Stuff about Sedgwick and “the closet” and how “the closet” is a stand-in phrase for a whole lot of rules about what can be said when and where and by whom (and who must say what when, etc.)

(p.67) “A public is a space of discourse organized by nothing other than discourse itself. It is autotelic; it exists only as the end for which books are published, shows broadcast, Web sites posted, speeches delivered, opinions produced. It exists by virtue of being addressed….Could anyone speak publicly without addressing a public? But how can this public exist before being addressed? What would a public be if no one was addressing it? Can a public really exist apart from the rhetoric through which it is imagined? If you were to put down this essay and turn on the television, would my public be different? How can the existence of a public depend, from one point of view, on the rhetorical address and, from another point of view, on the real context of reception?”

(p.70) “The result [of not feeling like you’re able to address a meaningful public with a capacity for listening, understanding, and acting] can be a kind of political depressiveness, a blockage in activity and optimism, a disintegration of politics toward isolation, frustration, anomie, forgetfulness….This is why any distortion or blockage in access to a public can be so grave, leading people to feel powerless and frustrated. Externally organized frameworks of activity, such as voting, are and are perceived to be poor substitutes.”

(p.71) “What determines whether one belongs to a public or not? Space and physical presence do not make much difference; a public is understood to be different from a crowd, an audience, or any other group that requires co-presence. Personal identity does not in itself make one part of a public…Belonging to a public seems to require at least minimal participation, even if it is patient or notional, rather than a permanent state of being. Merely paying attention can be enough to make you a member. How, then, could a public be quantified?”

(p.77) “Public speech must be taken in two ways: as addressed to us and as addressed to strangers. The benefit in this practice is that it gives a general social relevance to private thought and life. Our subjectivity is understood as having resonance with others, and immediately so. But this is only true to the extent that the trace of our strangerhood remains present in our understanding of ourselves as the addressee.”

(p.113) “It might even be claimed that, like dominant publics, [counterpublics] are ideological in that they provide a sense of active belonging that masks or compensates for the real powerlessness of human agents in capitalist society”

(p.114) “There is no speech or performance addressed to a public that does not try to specify in advance, in countless highly condensed ways, the lifeworld of its circulation: not just through its discursive claims…but through the pragmatics of its speech genres, idioms, stylistic markers, address, temporality, mise-en-scene, citational field, interlocutory protocols, lexicon, and so on….Public discourse says not only ‘Let a public exist’ but ‘Let it have this character, speak this way, see the world in this way.”

(p.145) “As conversations get closer to public topics, where opinions would have a general relevance and others’ views would have to be taken into account, people tend to shut up, deflecting currents of conversation. Even active volunteers in civic groups construct their volunteering so as to avoid risky discussion. They choose topics that allow them to avoid dissent. They frame their motives as prepolitical. Journalists and officials actively conspire to limit public discussion, diverting it into testimony that can be viewed as private passion rather than opinion or argument.”

(p.148) Discussion of different norms in academic discourse vs. journalistic discourse (propensity toward infinite complication/nuance) and how there’s very little infrastructure for discussions between the academy and the masses/between professions/disciplines and journalism

(p.150) More on academic discourse, public intellectuals, seeing academics as politics, etc.

(p.157) Some criticism of Marxism that I think is Marxists and poststructuralists strawmanning each other again. Or at least both sides being wrong about their compatibilities. You can believe in discursive/cultural hegemonies and also believe in bourgeois rule via the state.

(p.167) About tolerance and publicness and ethos and minoritization

(p.189) Immigrantphobia as “supplying a concrete phobia to organize its public so that a more substantial discussion of exploitation in the United States can be avoided and then remaindered to the part of collective memory sanctified not by nostalgia but by mass aversion. Let’s call this the amnesia archive. The motto above the door is: ‘Memory is the amnesia you like.’”

(p.194) Observation that in the ancient world, sex is just a personal activity— it’s a verb that doesn’t need a direct object, like laughing, pooping, crying, dying, etc.” You just fuck, and sometimes another person is involved, basically. Who they are doesn’t have big stakes for your identity or the social meaning of the activity.

(p.195) list of activities that don’t seem like they’re related to sex/sexual culture, but they are: paying taxes, celebrating a holiday, investing in the future, teaching, carrying wallet photos, buying in bulk, etc.

Sources To Look Up

The Trouble With Normal, Michael Warner

Disciplining Gender: Rhetorics of Sex Identity in Contemporary U.S. Culture, by John M. Sloop

It still feels strange to me that an academic book really can just be an introduction, several chapters of illustrative case studies, and then a conclusion. I don’t have a particular reason to think this is wrong except for an internal and definitely misguided sense that every book must make big arguments about the nature of the universe.

My partner and I are also having an ongoing discussion about materialism and its relationship with discourse, so I’m excited to read the materialist rhetoric articles cited here!

Quotes I Marked

(p.2) “That is, while cases of gender ambiguity were ‘talked about’ in ways that encouraged an undermining or questioning of the very notion of ‘aberration’ as related to sexuality and gender, bi-gender normativity was for the most part underlined and reemphasized. Significantly, one finds assumed (and not necessarily spoken) within these discourses a series of binary roles and behaviors which ultimately constitute the very notions of male and female, masculinity and femininity, hetero- and homosexual.”

(p.12) This is quoting from someone named Evans- “Once we know that a ‘real woman’ is a cultural fiction rather than an ontological birthright, have we thereby….reduced at all the rewards of continuing to be feminine in ways that society will recognize and approve?” (No)

(p.15) Longer passage about how because of medical gatekeeping, trans people need to present themselves as normatively gendered, and have social pressure to continue doing so after they get access to (XYZ). “A ___ trapped in a ___’s body” still implies that the first ___ has some essential characteristics. Which is different from being able to say “I would like to take testosterone” and being allowed to for no other reason than you’re an adult and you want to. (Even if some people genuinely do feel the first way.)

(p.7) “Here, Hale suggests that people who are [cis] should feel encouraged to write about [trans people] provided they do so in terms of investigating what the public discourse about [transness] tells us about culturla ideologies concerning gender and sexuality rather than what it tells about [trans] identity (which, Hale argues, should be left to [trans people] to investigate).” Everything in brackets is just stuff I changed to update the language

(p.18) “First, critical rhetoric places its focus on doxastic rather than epistemic knowledge. That is, rather than being concerned with knowledge of the essence of objects (e.g., the ‘truth’ about sex) or philosophical discussions about meanings, critical rhetoric is concerned with public argument and public understandings about these objects.” Rhetoric is about an emic perspective!

(p.19) “As Foucault’s work and assumptions were disseminated…almost every aspect of identity and politics was slowly subsumed under the study of discourse. In the most general sense, one of the vital implications of this observation is that those interested in political change came to think more in terms of slow rhetorical transition than in terms of overnight revolution. Lasting change is always a slow process, if only because it requires changes in meaning, and such changes are intergenerational rather than intrapersonal. In Raymond Williams’s terms, meaningful revolutions are by necessity long revolutions.”

(p.20-22)- on Greene (see “Sources to Look Up”), the materiality of discourse, and how reverse discourses and counterpublics always emerge from the dominant discourses, so they’re limited from the start. Unclear if Sloop is critiquing this or not.

(p.23) “While those in multivocal communities and academics ‘in the know’ might be able to look at these as cases of transgression and liberation [like the John/Joan case and Brandon Teena], those without community as Alfred Kielwasser and Michelle Wolf have pointed out in their discussion of televised representations of adolescent homosexuality, are most at risk precisely because the images they see of themselves are disciplined in advance by a hegemonic understanding that ‘holds them in place,’ judging them. When the only [trans] model one has was killed for ‘deception,’ one has understood [transness] only through the way it is policed.”

Sources To Look Up

Michael McGee, 1982, “A Materialist’s Conception of Rhetoric”

Ronald Greene, “Another Materialist Rhetoric”

The Ethnographic I, by Carolyn Ellis

This book is a fictionalized version of Ellis teaching a class about autoethnographic methods. Most of the characters are real (well, fictional versions of themselves), and two are composite characters. This book made me realize how diverse autoethnography can be, that it’s easier in some ways and harder in other ways than I thought, and that counterstory seems to be a kind of autoethnography with a particular theoretical framework (CRT). That answers the main question I had from counterstory— whether it can be done about oppressions other than race. The answer seems to be no, but you can use similar methods with similar “outcome” creations for other oppressions.. But counterstory is a word that belongs to CRT writing and research.

I liked it a lot! It answered a bunch of questions I had and taught me a lot. I like that she used the method she was writing about in order to write about it. I like the hard conversations depicted, and I like the syllabus and other supplementary materials at the back. Another thing I enjoyed was the chapters that are based on her interviews with her students after she had them read an earlier draft of the book, and they discussed her construction of the book and her portrayals of each of them.

Ellis frequently co-writes with her husband Art, a communications professor. They’ve written autoethnographic pieces about some very personal things— such as an abortion that took place early in their relationship. This seems very very hard to do and I’m impressed. I wonder if their dynamic is accurately represented in the book or if they have more fights and hard times related to their shared work than depicted. Although if they did, I guess they wouldn’t keep co-writing together. It’s also wild to me that they each teach the story of their own abortion in their classes. I could never.

I particularly valued the discussions over ethics in autoethnography, particularly with getting permission from people in your life that you wish to write about. Your story is always also their story, and vice versa. I disagree with some of the choices the characters made. I’ve hurt people in the past by writing about them without taking proper ethical measures (like asking and discussing in advance), and I regret it a lot. Ellis talks about how she published a piece about caring for her mom in the hospital. The story includes some very intimate details/moments between them. She didn’t ask her mom in advance if it would be okay to write that, although years later she did share the piece with her mom and her mom was okay with it. What if she wasn’t? There’s another story in which Penny, a student who wrote about her abusive relationship, gave a performance of her piece for volunteers at a domestic violence support shelter. The event did not go well— the volunteers were super uncomfortable by what they saw as her blaming herself for the abuse and Ellis encouraging it/not supporting her. The fascinating and hard part is, afterwards, the researchers and the volunteers had a series of meetings and conversations together in which they unpacked what went wrong and why it went wrong, so Ellis is able to present a nuanced view of many different perspectives in her book, based on the conversations.

I was also left feeling very frustrated, though. We never learned anything about autoethnography during my anthropology degree! And it turns out there’s a whole ton of scholarship about issues of writing anthropology, and I didn’t know about it! I struggled with finding ways to straddle English and anthropology, my two majors, and it felt like none of the faculty knew what to do with me. But all of this was here all along! If someone had known about it, they could have told me. My whole research trajectory could have been very different. I probably would have done something different for my BA thesis. And definitely might have ended up doing something different for my PhD— going for a different discipline or a different school, maybe. It’s hard to say.

Stuff I Marked

p.22- “for evocation in addition to representation as a goal for social science research, for generalization through the resonance of readers, and for opening up rather than closing down conversation.”

p.30 - paragraph on key features of autoethnography

p.39- examples of anthropologists and publishing venues that do autoethnography/anthroliterary things. Stanley Diamond, Sapir and Benedict (published poetry), Anthropology and Humanism (journal), Laurel Richardson

p.39- discussion of factors that affect whether something is called autoethnography or ethnography, autoethnography of memoir

p.64-66- note about interactive interviewing and how it’s a good strategy when everyone involved has personal experience with the topic at hand (good for me and bi research!)

p.89- Ellis’s advice on what to do if you’re anxious about biasing your data/if people will accuse you of biasing your data

p.116— on truth vs. accuracy and the unreliability of field notes

p.117— difference between field notes and a first draft of a story

p.122- one character lists the different genres she used to write up interviews— she was just experimenting to see which ones worked best for her

p.123-126 more on truth vs. accuracy and the issue of validity in autoethnography

p.125- discussion of guy who wrote fiction based on his fieldwork bc his participants were part of an especially vulnerable population and he wanted to protect their identities extra well

p.240- Hector’s project on bicultural identity is kinda similar to my project! Reference this!

p.252- discussion of how to evaluate autoethnographic projects

p.309- how a student’s experience of pain in her body affects her writing

Sources To Look Up

Geertz, Clifford and Marcus, Marcus and Fischer (p.17) - mentioned as anthropologists dealing with issues on the intersections of anthropology and literature

Ruth Behar, The Vulnerable Observer

“Assessing Alternative Modes of Qualitative and Ethnographic Research: How Do We Judge? Who Judges?” special section in Qualitative Inquiry (journal)

Out in Theory: The Emergence of Lesbian and Gay Anthropology, Edited by Ellen Lewin and William L. Leap

This book, as well as The Ethnographic I by Carolyn Ellis, really made me realize how traditional/out-dated a good part of my anthropology education was. This book was published in 2002, and I got my anthro degree in 2016, and we certainly never talked about any of these trends except for a couple chapters on feminist anthropology in my “history of anthropological theory” class. I didn’t even know that “homegrown anthropology” (doing research on communities in the U.S. rather than “foreign/exotic” communities) was already a well established trend. I thought it was just getting started. Many chapters in this book were interesting to me on that level, yet not particularly useful for where I’m currently at w/r/t research and my relationship with anthropology.

Quotes I Marked

p.123- “Must the solution, then, to our marital woes [between gay male anthropology and lesbian anthropology] be a kind of intellectual bisexuality or perhaps cross-dressing? To put ourselves into each other’s worlds, if not each other’s heads, must we be willing to experiment with sexual identity, to undermine definitions we have long believed in, and perhaps to submit ourselves to the uncertainties of crossing gender boundaries?” Context is, gay male anthropology looks at “men who have sex with men” as a behavior, whereas lesbian anthropology looks at sexuality primarily as a political identity

p.195- safe sex education as particularly anthropologically vital during the AIDS crisis (as opposed to celibacy propaganda) because “lots of sex without shame or monogamy” was a big part of the ethos of gay liberation so people definitely would not have wanted to give that up.

p.206- linking barebacking fantasies with vampire fantasies (Garber!!)

p.229- people Valentine considered to be trans men were called lesbians by their own community, and people he considered to be trans women were called gay by their own community. What do you do when people definitely meet the criteria for a group (like trans) but don’t use those words themselves? This is at the Legends Ball, mostly African American and Latinx, House of Xtravaganza was there

p.230- references to “the transgender spectrum” (on materials from the Gender Identity Project founded at the Center), included “drag, cross dresser, cross-gender, femme queen, bigender, transvestite, transsexual, FTM, MTF, NewWoman, NewMan, and …. “ as potential categories

p.233- quote from Jayne County, a trans woman here writing about Atlanta in the 1960s: “There were certain divisions in the gay world even then, but we didn’t have the words for them. Everyone was just gay as far as we were concerned; that was the word we used…It didn’t matter whether you were a very straight gay man, or a screaming street queen, or a full-time drag queen, or a transsexual who wanted to have a sex change: you were gay” - here, straight gay man means a man who is gay but is normatively masculine

p.235-238- more on butch queens, femme queens, and being “gay”- it’s not contradictory or confusing if “gay” means any deviation from sexual and/or gender norms

Sources to Look Up

p.117- Weston (1991- Families We Choose, 1993, 1998), Kennedy (1993), Newton (1979, 1993), Lewin (1993)- all lesbian-feminist anthropologists whose feminism influenced their gay anthropology

p.122- Suzanna Walters (1996) writing about how the “queer sensibility” entails a “denigration of feminism”

p.131- some gay language studies- Murray (1979), Tannen (1984), Read (1980) and Goodwin (1989)

Writing Studies Research and Practice, Edited by Lee Nickoson and Mary P. Sheridan

Stuff I Marked

p.xii- passage about “pasisonate attachments” (like Joan’s “passionate utterances”) and wondering where “research end(s) and memoir begin(s)”

p.17 - extended quote about narrative and epistemology in the sciences. talks about ideographic vs. nomothetic. How historical sciences (paleontology, astronomy, evolutionary biology) are about telling stories about the past (based on data)

p.17 “While the value of personal stories is now widely accepted in composition, it is important to articulate what qualities of observation, analysis, or representation we require if we are to accept any particular narrative account as a persuasive instance of research”

p.20 “I also believe that it is important to recognize that we have invested a great deal of intellectual capital in rhetorical conventions that primarily use ethos (rather than method) to provide evidence that the researcher has produced an authentic account of her experiences or observations. That is, a great part of our ‘index of reality’ rests on textual conventions to suggest that the researcher has ‘been there.’”

p.26- role of emotion in research design

p.30- “passionate attachments” (Royster) and beginning with your own experience/feelings and using that as a guide in historical research

p.38- thing about the value of “eliciting autobiographical narratives in interview-type settings” and how telling a self-story is also a form of self-formation and co-research

p.39- on how the researchers adapted their methods to be more unstructured/semi-structured.

p.41- Framing of questions— “Can you tell us some stories about….?”

p.80- Extended passage on “Doing ethnography” vs. “Adopting an ethnographic perspective” vs. “Using ethnographic tools” and how each of these can/cannot be applied in writing studies

p.115-116- Autoethnography as a “literate art of the contact zone.” Quote from Mary Louise Pratt- autoethnography as “a text in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made of them.

p.199- draws a distinction between “textual-qualitiative researchers” (people who study published texts) and “empirical-qualitative researchers” (people who study day-to-day interactions between people, some of which may be written)

p.201- on “bias” and phenomenology and how our investments in research ALWAYS shape our perceptions

p.210- “Rhetorical studies does concern itself with how writing works in public domains, but its history and strong historiographic traditions make situated studies of mundane literacies, technologies, and work difficult to value.”

p.211- concept of a research stance- “a position or a set of beliefs and obligations that shape how one acts as a researcher” (I think this relates to how you decide you want to situate yourself politically to the topic/people)

Sources To Look Up

Wendy Bishop, Ethnographic Writing Research: Writing It Up and Reading It

Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author

Lankshear and Knobel, Handbook for Teacher Research: From Design to Implementation

Johanek, Composing Research

Glaser and Strauss, Discovery of Grounded Theory

50 Song Memoir by The Magnetic Fields

These posts have always really just been notes for me and I’m assuming nobody else will do more than skim them, but this one’s really gonna be written just as notes and not for someone else. Merritt says he doesn’t want anyone to have favorites off of this album or listen to songs individually. They are supposed to be listened to in order, all the way through. I like this, and even before I knew he thought that, it’s always how I’ve listened to it. Although that’s partially because I’ve most often listened to it as background music while working or cleaning.

‘66 Wonder Where I’m From- He moved around so much when he was little he has a complex sense of “home”

‘67 Come Back as a Cockroach- About reincarnation and karma, also about veganism. Makes me think of children’s bright imaginations

‘68 A Cat Called Dionysus— I love this one and want a cat named Dionysus

‘69 Judy Garland— Some of the stuff in this one is made up, and Merritt was too young at the time to actually be aware of the Stonewall riots, but this is about that and its a lovely fantasy version

‘70 They’re Killing Children Over There— Merritt goes to a concert when he’s little where the singer sings about how they’re killing children over there (meaning Vietnam) but he thinks they mean on the other side of the building. So, it’s humorous but deeply embedded in global events from the perspective of a 4 year old.

‘71 I Think I’ll Make Another World— this is just a lovely piece about children’s imagination

‘72 Eye Contact— this is about Merritt hating eye contact and how he would prefer to connect with people while…not doing that. This made me wonder if Merritt is autistic, and it seems that while he hasn’t been formally diagnosed, he thinks he probably is, and his friends who have been diagnosed agree. I also learned that he always has his concerts be very muted in sound, which is not actually due to his autism but due to a separate hearing condition that makes loud noises feedback loop in his left ear. I would very much like to go to a quiet concert by a band I love.

‘73 It Could Have Been Paradise— about all the different places Merritt and his mom lived when he was little, as his mom tried to find spiritual fulfillment in a lot of different ways and Merritt just either hung out with local kids or read books by himself. The places seem like paradise, and his mom thought they might be, but they weren’t.

‘74 No- This is about Merritt’s young (8 year old?) self (and his present self) making fun of other people’s faith-based beliefs that they don’t have any evidence for. As someone who became an annoying, angry, and immature atheist at around the same age, I feel this.

‘75 My Mama Ain’t— this one is also about Merritt’s mom’s search for spiritual fulfillment. She tried a lot of things, and Merritt lovingly (I think) pokes fun at the lines she draws (at crystal healing) while also emphasizing that while she has silly beliefs, she’s also a smart lady

‘76 Hustle 76— This is a fun song about Merritt seeing a commercial for a bad quality disco record on TV and wanting it, and dancing and having a good time

‘77 Life Ain’t All Bad— this might be my favorite diss track ever, about one of Merritt’s mom’s ex boyfriends, who was particularly horrible. It’s just so eviscerating while being deliberately vague in order to punish him by not even giving him the satisfaction of being discussed. He also explicitly meta-discusses his memoirs (“When I write my memoirs…”) in this song.

‘78 Blizzard of ‘78— While the blizzard raged outside, Merritt just played music with his friends and started his first (very bad) band and read a lot of science fiction. This made me think about my parents’ stories of the blizzard of ‘77 (which hit their part of NY, which the blizzard of ‘78 did not.) My parents’ did not have a fun time, though. Some people they knew died and my dad nearly got trapped in a car in a snowbank.

‘79 Rock ‘N Roll Will Ruin Your Life— this song is about Merritt and his mom arguing about him wanting to be a musician. She says that it may seem glamorous and fun, but it sucks, just like it ruined his biological father’s life (who Merritt did not meet until his 40s). But he says he’s not interested in the groupies anyway, because he’s shy and gay, and he has hypercausis (his ear disorder) anyway, so he can’t do loud noises. The threat is that it will “make you sad, and I mean sad,” but the joke’s on her, because Merritt is already sad. (I read somewhere an interview with one of his friends, where someone asked if another musician was the most depressed musician ever, and he said, something like ‘Well I guess you’ve never met Stephin Merritt”)

‘80 London By Jetpack— this is about the New Romantic music scene in London and very 80s fantasies of the future (jetpacks). “It's not the going up
It's not the coming down
It's the zooming 'round"
Yep this is what it feels like to be a teenager and immersed in something you love. There’s a verse about him living in London once more and “declar(ing) it’s 1980” and they’ll all fly around in their jetpacks and it will be perfect

‘81 How to Play the Synthesizer— this is about exactly what it sounds like it’s about. It’s weird and sounds weird and I like it.

‘82 Happy Beeping— this is about a rude note another one of his mom’s boyfriends left him after he got annoyed that Merritt was just listening to music and playing the synthesizer all the time instead of doing his homework. He said “Happy Beeping.”

‘83 Foxx and I— this is about one of his musical role models and their shared interests, a fantasy of them hanging out and exploring the world and becoming machines together (something Foxx said in an interview he would like to do)

‘84 Danceteria! - this is about Merritt hanging out with his friends at the club Danceteria and all of the music they experienced there, and how Danceteria was definitely more important than school and helped them learn more things that felt meaningful to them

‘85 Why I Am Not a Teenager - He is a teenager during this time, and this song is about how much he rejects being one, because nobody listens to you and you’re horny all the time but there’s AIDS so you can’t have sex and you have no money, but he has dreams for when he’s older

‘86 How I Failed Ethics— a humorous story about Merritt being too disagreeable the first time he took ethics, so he failed and had to take it again. The second time, he was just as precocious but didn’t give the professor an excuse to fail him because he did all the work (and created his own ethical system). Later, he dropped out to be a musician.

‘87 At the Pyramid— another song about a disco club, this time about a specific memory that stuck with Merritt about a guy he thought was hot but didn’t talk to. He says he doesn’t know why this memory stuck with him, of all the times he went there, but it did.

‘88 Ethan Frome— this is just a song about how much Stephin Merritt likes the book Ethan Frome. I love that so many of the songs on this album are just about seemingly mundane things from each year of his life that just happen to be what’s salient for him about that time.

‘89 The 1989 Musical Marching Zoo— I can’t seem to find anything online about an actual 1989 Musical Marching Zoo or anyone talking about something by that name, so this might just be a fantasy band that Merritt would like to have/would have liked to have (“they’re coming to play inside of your mind”) (“and this is the band that I wanted to be”) It seems like his least favorite part about being a musician is being seen as his individual self (his face, name, distinguishing features) and would like to be anonymous (like wearing an animal head) and really just play his music

‘90 Dreaming in Tetris— this is about Merritt’s brain being totally filled with music at all times (like how when you play a lot of Tetris your brain can’t stop picturing Tetris) and also the existential despair of the AIDS crisis and the Cold War/feeling of impending nuclear doom

‘91 The Day I Finally… — (Snap) — in the lyric notes, Merritt says ‘91 is when he started feeling seriously depressed and so this song expresses how he felt at that time. He plays the whole thing in one go (all instruments at once, instead of recording each track separately)

‘92 Weird Diseases — a weirdly fun song that just lists the various ailments he’s had over the course of his life. He does list “Maybe Asperger’s” here. The next line is “if that exists” but one annotation online suggests that this isn’t doubting autism as a real thing, but due to the fact that Asperger’s got removed from the DSM and reclassified as autism instead of as a separate thing. Also says “from the time I was a young boy, I could feel neither anger nor joy” because he was on powerful tranquilizers since strong feelings triggered seizures. He also mentions Krishna here, which made me reflect on how he really does reference Hindu gods a lot in his songs, and that must be because of his exposure via his mom’s spiritual journeying. Until now I figured he was just informed and liked to have diverse religious references in his music

‘93 Me and Fred and Dave and Ted— this is about Merritt living in a very small home with three other men, pets, and bugs. It seems that they were all mutually in love with each other. The verses about each man suggest some problems/distance from them in retrospect, but Merritt does seem to have place in his heart for this time.

‘94 Haven’t Got a Penny— this is about being poor and depressed because you’re poor. Lyrics Genius notes that The Magnetic Fields were pretty unsuccessful until 1999, when 69 Love Songs came out (and was very popular). I didn’t know 69 Love Songs was so old until just now (I started listening to the album in 2011ish and was the first time I’d heard of the band).

‘95 A Serious Mistake— (obligated to mention this is the year I was born in order to make my professors feel old, especially since now my students say things that make me feel old) This song is about getting into a romantic relationship you know will be a bad idea but doing it anyway because love!

‘96 I’m Sad— the beginning of this song is literally “I’m sad/You made me sad” It’s directed at a person (although it’s vague enough that you can’t really infer much else about them), but I sing this to myself whenever I’m sad for any reason. The instrumentation/music is very dramatic in a way that feels both real and funny at the same time.

‘97 Eurodisco Trio- this song is about being very sad and lonely, while making music as the Future Bible Heroes, which Merritt referred to as a Eurodisco Trio. The chorus is just “We’re a Eurodisco Trio” repeated in 4 languages. The versus are about Merritt contemplating suicide, crying, and feeling lonely.

‘98 Lovers’ Lies — the lyric booklet says this is about an ex who was a pathological liar and told everyone he was HIV-positive even though he wasn’t (among other lies)

‘99 Fathers in the Clouds— this is about how Merritt wants neither his biological father nor his “father in the clouds” (God), and how he has nothing to say to his bio father if he did meet him. Yet he admits their lives do have some odd similarities.

‘00 Ghosts of the Marathon Dancers— marathon dances were 19th and early 20th century events where you would literally try to dance as long as possible (and maybe do drugs). This song is about how even when people stop dancing (and singing), the dances and music always continue in a mystical way and echo around in the spaces they used to be in.

‘01 Have You Seen it In the Snow? — Lyrics Genius website says this song is placed as the ‘01 song because it’s about NYC and ‘01 is 9/11. But it’s about how people say New York is dirty and ugly and there’s no natural beauty (and that’s sometimes true) but sometimes it’s so beautiful, especially in the snow. I wish I’d remembered this song on our good snow days this month! Lots of people have told me that winters in NYC used to be like this a lot, but we haven’t had one like this in years. And I think we probably won’t get any more snow this winter.

‘02 Be True To Your Bar— this is exactly what it sounds like, about being loyal to the bars that you call your own, and being grateful to the role they play in your social life (and in Merritt’s case, his professional life— he almost always writes songs in bars)

‘03 The Ex and I— about becoming fuck buddies with your ex!

‘04 Cold-Blooded Man- I’m not sure if he’s saying his ex (I assume a different ex than the previous song) is the Cold-Blooded Man or if he’s saying his ex wants a Cold-Blooded Man even though that seems to make no sense at all. The note from the lyrics booklet does not clarify this for me.

‘05 Never Again— a very sad breakup song, made sadder by a lyric that suggests that despite his joy at NYC in the snow, he can’t even enjoy that anymore

‘06 Quotes- about some negative press coverage he got that he says was taking his words out of context (he said a song from a racist movie was catchy, people took that as saying the song and movie are good/unproblematic. Also he apparently published a “best music” list that was only music by white people.)

‘07 In the Snow White Cottages— about a time in his life when he lived in a particular set of houses in/near LA

‘08 Surfin’ — about how stupid he thinks surfing is as an activity. He lived in LA during this time too

‘09 Till You Come Back To Me- another breakup song about being sad

‘10 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea— apparently Merritt wrote a score to a silent film about the novel, and when he went to San Francisco to perform it at a festival, he had a very nice romantic time

‘11 Stupid Tears— another sad breakup song, in which he’s mad at himself for crying

‘12 You Can Never Go Back to New York— this is the year he moved back to New York after living in LA, and the song is about how the New York you left will never still be there when you get back, even if you only leave for a short time. But there are good sides (new potential lovers!) and bad sides (the things you loved aren’t there anymore)

‘13 Big Enough For Both of Us— this is about Merritt pining (and lusting) for someone who is far away. The thing that is big enough for both of them is both his heart and his penis, both of which he would like to share with the person.

‘14 I Wish I Had Pictures— he wishes this because his memories are fading and there are so many things he wishes he could hang on to

‘15 Somebody’s Fetish— this is about how no matter your quirks or oddities, someone somewhere will be attracted to you, and he, a very lonely person, wants to write this song to make other lonely people feel a little bit better that someone is out there who will love them

After Sex? On Writing Since Queer Theory (Edited by Janey Hailey and Andrew Parker)

This book is not what I thought it would be. I think I assumed, based on the title, it would be people in lgbtq studies who don’t consider themselves queer theorists. But instead, it’s queer theorists being asked “is queer theory over, if it is over, what happens next, and how does your work you’ve been doing since your queer theory work still relate to queer theory, if it does?”

The pagination is continuous from other issues of this volume of the journal.

Stuff I Marked

p.437 “I have lost the sense of permission to drag readers through a complex process to reach a conclusion I might have just told them in the beginning, using the opinion form, or some other genre.”

p.438 - idea that for many, wanting to desire and wanting to be desired and wanting to have had and have been had are all better than actually being sexually intimate with someone, because being intimate is so vulnerable and scary.

p.479- “So queer denotes not an identity but instead a political and existential stance, an ideological commitment, a decision to live outside some social norm or other. At the risk (the certainty) of oversimplification, one could say that even if one is born straight or gay, one must decide to be queer.”

p.486-487- “In the field of sexuality studies, the space-time problem looked somewhat different but was related: the anachronists collapsed time by universalizing identity across time, while the ethnocentrists collapsed space by geographically universalizing a culturally specific model of “gay.”

p.497- separating the wedding as a symbolic form from “marriage” as an institution, also noting same-sex marriage as an individualistic goal rather than a collective goal like healthcare or immigration or welfare. Can you be pro-wedding but anti-marriage?

p.502-503- “the relationship between queer theory and the history of sexuality still remains an unresolved terrain. Or rather, the resolutions, fastening either on the model of absolute alterity or on the model of ultimate identity, have yet to imagine the possibility of writing a history that attends to the possibility of the non-self-identity of any historical moment.”

p.516- “Queer theory never worked out how to play multiculturalism. It could not write itself into a narrative of minority inclusion drawing on the powerful rhetorics of civil rights struggle in the United States. A formation called ‘lesbian and gay studies’ has had more success, though it has often needed to make a racial analogy in ways that have invited accusations of appropriation.”

Stuff To Look Up

Susan McCabe, “To Be and to Have: The Rise of Queer Historicism”

p.487-

The Lost Autobiography of Samuel Steward, edited by Jeremy Mulderig

Samuel Steward was born in 1909 and was a very unusual man. I had never heard of him before until reading this book. He went by lots of different pseudonyms in his different professions— he was a columnist, an erotica writer, an English professor, and a tattoo artist. He lived alone for most of his life, and was never interested in committed romantic relationships. He was an alcoholic. He was an extremely thorough record-keeper, which included keeping a “Stud File” of every sexual encounter he ever had (and there were a lot—more than 2,000 encounters with more than 800 people). In reading just the introduction of the book, I was left wondering, how can one person literally fit all of that into one life? The partial answer is that professor and tattoo artist were not simultaneous careers, and he happened to live in a variety of different situations that lent themselves to a lot of potential for sex (for example, growing up in a boarding house— he slept with many of the tenants, and many of his classmates in high school, some of his students, many of his tattoo clients, and had a relationship with a porn studio where they would send him hustlers and in return he would give them discounted tattoos). He was also the go-to artist for Hell’s Angels for awhile, and assisted Kinsey in his research. Kinsey couldn’t officially have out gay co-researchers, for fear of being accused of biasing the results, but Steward was an unofficial collaborator. They talked often, and Steward agreed to engage in some S&M sessions while being observed, since Kinsey was interested in that. Kinsey was also interested in why people get tattoos, so Steward kept a detailed log of all of his clients and the tattoos he gave them, and passed along the info to Kinsey.

He wrote an autobiography, but it was published in a highly abridged form. This book is a combination of text from the original longer draft, the final shorter published version, and text from his diaries and letters.

The only part that pissed me off is how easily Steward just traipsed around getting academic jobs. At one point he literally walked into someone’s office and asked if there were openings. The idea of doing that now is just laughable. But I feel this way about any academic talking about their job market experience if that experience happened more than 30 years ago.

Stuff I Marked

p.8- quote from a sociologist studying Chicago gay culture in the 30s who found that in most of his interviews, the people emphasized their discovery of gay culture over their private realization of attraction, and how joining the gay world in Chicago also meant joining a new community of living, working, and socializing in different places/with different people. Participating in gay culture and adopting a gay identity as part of one’s sense of self (separately from one’s actual previous sexual activity) were often concurrent. This is similar to in Look Both Ways— being where it’s okay/cool to be gay makes it more likely you’ll feel comfortable/want to be part of it!

p.10- autobiography as rhetorical rather than “strictly factual” accounts

p.193— Kinsey absolutely rejected the words “normal” and “usual.” Instead, he said “majority practice.”

p.194— Steward’s memories are that Kinsey was either straight or very good at keeping his non-straightness a secret. He certainly had no indication Kinsey was straight. But a different book I read recently (maybe Baumgartner?) said very casually that Kinsey had male lovers in addition to loving his wife.

p.195- apparently the Vatican has a huge collection of porn

p.202— “generalizations about tattoos are extremely dangerous and unreliable. Your reaction to a tattoo is established only be the fashion in which your own emotions and observations, your backgrounds and personality, are fused together.” He also notes 32 different motivations for why people get tattoos, 25 of which were sexual in some way, and the most common of which was to assert your masculinity.

p.210— accounts of some of the strangest and/or most overtly homosexual tattoos he gave

Look Both Ways, by Jennifer Baumgartner

Baumgartner is a journalist who worked for Ms. in the early 90s and has covered bisexuality in her writing across her career. This book is partially history/analysis and partially memoir from her own experiences talking to people, going to events, and working in feminist and queer spaces.

Lots of good reflections/personal experiences relating to the things I’m interested in— fashion and sexual identity, conversational sign posts and bisexual identity, etc. It’s also a little more recent than books like Vice Versa (about 10 years later), so while Ms. and Ani DiFranco were still The Big Thing before “my time” (I do listen to Ani DiFranco though), the cultural references feel a bit closer to me, or I can at least point to memories in my own childhood and recognize how 3rd wave feminism, which I was unaware of, impacted me. Like “girl power" as a slogan to aspire to.

I think it’s an interesting place to be, say, in middle school or in high school, and so to be aware of a cultural phenomenon but not REALLY be able to participate in it, since you’re still too young to do a lot of things by yourself and have no money. That doesn’t directly apply to me in this respect, since I was too young even for that, but I am reflecting on the things that I DID feel that youth-induced FOMO and angst and longing about, and simultaneously thinking about how young teens have felt the same way forever. It makes me think about everyone who was too young in the 60s/70s to participate in all of the activism going on (or at least participate in the ways they may have wanted to), but old enough to know about it and want to be a part of it. I also wonder how this phenomenon works differently for people like me, who needed to ask their parents to drive them to any given thing, vs. people growing up in cities where you’re able to go places without your parents from a much younger age via public transit.

Passages I’ve Marked

p.5- story about how news reported that a study that found bi men don’t exist, but the actual study found that the real results were basically the opposite— almost all the men in the study sexually responded to both men and women in some way, just the extent of the arousal varied (and was small in many participants)

p.26- “AC/DC” as slang for bi, feminist atmosphere of Ms. creating the necessary conditions for JB to experiment with women, song “I Kissed a Girl” by Jill Sobule

p.50 - paragraph on the problems with the word “bisexual” and problems with its alternatives. “As a label, bisexual sounds pathological, academic, and a little embarrassed —- like the identities ‘stay at home mom’ and ‘runner up.’” “Or, as writer Jenny Weiss put it in Girlfriends magazine, “Of all the words for bisexual, the worst is probably bisexual.” This is a big mood.

p.51- “The word bisexual makes me cringe at times, but saying I’m heterosexual or a lesbian feels inaccurate- regardless of who I am in a relationship with. So, cringing all the while, I use the label. Because of my relationship with the word feminist, I have learned that cringing is often a sign of unfinished political business: the label bi sounds bad because, at least in some ways, bisexuals are an unliberated, invisible, and disparaged social group.”

p.52- references Garber’s section on Tiresias, notes that the importance of this story is that it shows that the WHOLE STORY/whole picture is what makes a bisexual, not any snapshot in time.

p.78- “The fact is, second-wave women thought about looking both ways a lot, even though they rarely described their lives or insights as bisexual. Instead, they were woman-identified women or political lesbians (gay in the streets if not in the sheets, to paraphrase rock critic Ann Powers)”

p.100 - description of the outfits of Ani DiFranco fans as emblematic of third wave feminism and bisexuality

p.105- Baumgartner and Gloria Steinem both date “when it was okay for women to be bi” as starting in the early 90s

p.108- extended quote reflecting on Liza Featherstone’s own sense of fashion and gender/sexuality presentation as a bisexual

p.123-126- different examples of bi women talking about the loss/exclusion they felt when they got into long term relationships with men

p.141- some thoughts about how dating women changes how women approach dating men and expectations for being in a relationship

p.156-157- some thoughts about bisexuality and the objectification of women and the male gaze, coming to see yourself as a sexual agent instead of perpetually as a sexual object, and how dating women changed Baumgartner’s relationship with porn

p.170- more about p.141, but also pointing out that just because dating a woman may help you clarify what you want when dating a man, sexism/internalized sexism means you might still not be good at actually COMMUNICATING those things to/with men

p.175— “stereotype threat”- the presence of someone from a dominant group diminishes the performance of a non-dominant group, subconsciously. Can make people from non-dominant groups feel less confident, less smart, like they have less agency, and so act that way.

p.189- describes the “feeling out if someone is gay and implicitly communicating to them that you are also gay” as “embroidery” and notes that her own go-to embroidery is finding ways to work in the phrase, “my ex-girlfriend”

p.194— same as above, mentions the difficulties of having “to constantly crowd every conversation with sign posts (“ex-girlfriend,” “ex-boyfriend,” “baby’s father”) to indicate the whole person I am”

p.220- more about the relationship between sexuality and gender presentation for bi women (shift in it becoming more okay in 3rd wave feminism to be lipstick/femme than it was in the 2nd wave)