In the spirit of self-reflexivity and sharing, I offer my own as yet rather insignificant trans travelogue. Which happened yesterday. So much happened yesterday. Only 48 hours ago it was still Sunday. We were at Club Kooky in Sydney with Liz, Zac, Dan and other spunks, watching a thin man with a straggling long beard rummaging in his handbag as dancers converged on the dancefloor. (“A guru without a cult,” said A.) Yesterday: coffee, packing, a lunchtime meeting with folks from AFTMA, a five minute browse in that bookshop on Oxford St in which I would seriously sweep up whole shelves of books if funds permitted, and since funds don’t permit, I just slaver at. Then to the airport. Sundry farewells. A. went straight home to Melbourne, but me, I flew to Brisbane. I was only there for four hours, not even enough time to bother turning the clock back an hour, but time enough for my purposes.

Brisbane is like no other city I’ve ever been in. I know now why they call it Brisvegas. Not for the tackiness – I was expecting tackiness, and saw none – but for the brash, quite careless throwing of large amounts of money into every public or private facility. Perhaps it was because I was in the wrong suburb, but my only knowledge of Brisbane architecture is the film Praise. Which is not at all representative. Everything in the CBD looks new. The old buildings, at least those I saw, are all refurbished and brimming with ‘exciting’ new bars, etc. Even the foliage I spied from the brand-new “Airtrain” looked like someone had come by a second ago and given it a polish: green grasses and fronded palms, small lakes, flame trees. If the trains are brand-new, then the buses are more so (oddly, however, they look exactly like Sydney buses, but bigger and more shiny, as if Sydney Bus replacements had been diverted to Brisbane by mistake.) (more…)

If you’ve been reading the Archive you may be in need of some commentary on A’s great new Lego-Intellectual, the CultStud Affable Persona™. If you were there, you will get the joke and you may even understand the balloons. If not, read on.

We’ve been at CultureFix, the annual Cultural Studies Association of Australasia conference this week, mostly an excuse to use up my postgrad conference junket fund and deliver a paper, see some people in Sydney etc. The first day of the conference was called PreFix (a play on CultureFix) — it was billed as a professional development day for postgrads and ‘early careeer researchers’. Now, my thesis supervisor co-organised and chaired it, which meant that I felt a compunction to go, aside from the chance for anthropological research relevant to the recent cult stud blog wars. And indeed, if I want to have a career as an academic, I should definitely know certain things: like the fact that for employment and grant applications, journals in which one might publish each have a score, and the more obscure or small the journal, the less scores you will pick up.

Anyhow, to the point: the Affable Persona. At PreFix Mark McClelland (whose writing I am rather fond of) gave a spiel about getting postdoctoral fellowships, advising us that you have to play the game, that we should “see and be seen” at conferences, seminars, departmental gatherings et cetera, developing an “affable persona” with which to deliver papers, network, befriend possible mentors, research grant selectors, et cetera. One began to worry about Mark during the course of his talk. He also suggested that any distractions from research — like relationships — were not to be tolerated.

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So, I’ve been meaning to post a ‘props to this person, and that person, and that other person’ for ages, but I can never seem to get the list clear in my head, it’s so long. So, props: to generous editors who give you six weeks extra past the deadline for essays that you feel nervous about writing; to thesis supervisors who are equally generous about your constant excuses for not having produced a draft of the chapter that was supposed to be finished by now; to these same supervisors and assorted others who challenge the hell out of your ideas and make you work; to Sabdha for making me a CD of Electrelane’s new album and feeding Schnapps while we’re away; to Peter for also feeding the cat and watering the plants and calling me “monsieur”; to Dan, long overdue, for all the Swan Love merch, including the Swan Love birthday mix CD that includes “Shake Your Coconuts” by Junior Senior (DFA mix) and of course the Swan Love zine, an account of Tokyo sexventures, which is too smutty to describe here, but rocks hard.

Today we’re hopping on a plane bound for Sydneytown, for conference junketing and so forth,so I won’t be blogging much for the next week. I thought I’d leave you with something to think about while I’m gone, however:

This is a photo of a trans woman’s foot being massaged on a Thai beach from her sex reassignment surgery journal. I plan on making it part of my paper on travel/transness at CultureFix. What does this photo say about travelling? What does it say about economics? What does it say about feet, tourism, politics, gender and sex? Answers in the comments box please!

Random question for Brisbane readers: can anyone tell me the best way to get public transport into the city from Brisbane Airport? And the best way to get to Greenslopes Private Hospital by PT? I’ll be in Brisvegas for four hours Monday week on a surgeon appointment mission. I’ve been to Brisbane, like, once in my life, and I don’t think we got out of the car…

Thanks!!

Nostalgia in the house. This week I’ve been creating playlists of music I heard at five (James Taylor), seven (Mike Oldfield), ten (Dylan), twelve (Icehouse), nineteen (Blind Melon, NIN, Porno for Pyros). Today I also went looking for a second-hand mobile phone — yep, I’m succumbing, again — in pawnshops around Brunswick.

I don’t go into pawnshops much nowadays. When I was 19, some friends moved en masse from downmarket student digs in the Western suburbs of Melbourne to a tiny terrace house in Fitzroy. I lived round the corner in Carlton, and together we experienced the ‘inner-city lifestyle’. Even paying $55.00 rent per week, it was hard. My friends got into the habit of hocking their CD collections once a month. The cash mostly, or always, fed a raging communal drug habit: even if we needed the money for food, it always ended up going to pot. None of us had jobs except N., who sometimes gave tarot readings over the phone.

I never actually got around to hocking stuff myself. Too middle-class squeamish — plus I only owned three CDs. But I would go with N. in her small yellow car to Smith St, where she was on first name terms with the pawnbroker. And at the same time, we lived in the heart of Fitzroy. When we wanted a coffee, even barefoot, we would go to Mario’s, with white tablecloths and heavy glasses, to be served by waiters wearing ties. Then we’d hang out on the street, or at the outside tables in the Black Cat’s shrubbery, pooling change for a shared beer. I had an ex who used to sit in the Black Cat and ‘write’ — although he was a photographer, not a writer, in fact had a dyslexic inability to read more than the first two syllables of words accurately — pronouncing ‘Rasmussen’ when a sign said ‘Rosamund’, for instance — and I’m pretty sure he just wanted to pick up chicks. But nevertheless. It was thought mean to point out that ‘writing’ in cafes was pretentious horseshit. Every one of my friends was a refugee from the country or the outer suburbs. None of us had ever lived in a place where you could sit somewhere and write without getting beaten up or stared at.

It’s sad, really. We wanted so much to be bohemian. All we ever were was poor. And this is where nostalgia comes undone. If I think about it, I know we were listening to music like Blind Melon because we were hysterically depressed. We smoked a lot of pot because we weren’t really bohemian. Life was crushing us already, on a micropolitical scale, through unwanted pregnancies, eviction, bad trips, parking fines, debt and feuds related to who bought the last drugs and who should buy them next. The thing that got me out, aside from the last and irresolvable feud, was reading The History of Sexuality Volume One and realising that when I grew up I wanted to be Foucault.

Which brings me to my next line of anti-nostalgia. It’s ten years since I first came into contact with the phrase “cultural studies” and thought it was hot. I wonder if, back then, my interpretation of it was a little skewed. Jon at Post-Hegemonic Musings correctly argues that cultural studies is an anti-politics — at the very least, ‘cultural studies’ in its Gramscian incarnation, focused on successive movement through articulation-ideology-right conjuncture-hegemony; and/or a cultural studies which desires to address the ‘government’ or capture the party.

It’s weird. When we ‘did’ Gramsci in a Cultural Studies class in 1996, I didn’t come away with the impression that hegemony was a good thing. Gramsci was more a footnote to some of Stuart Hall’s work on diasporas and anti-identity-politics than a theorist with his own ‘week’. Cultural Studies, or the version of it we were being taught, seemed to be much more about French theorists of postmodernity, Meaghan Morris and some crazy postcolonial stuff than this odd, programmatic neo-Leninist tripe. (On a related note — can someone tell me when, exactly, the ‘Gramscian turn’ happened? When did CS become coterminous with ‘articulation/hegemony’ etc?) CS meant, then, a space for critiques of traditional Marxism that dismissed queer politics, riot grrl, zines, media activism etc as ‘merely cultural’; it meant a space where the old rules governing the critical reading of ‘literature’ no longer applied. It meant having shitfights with Trotskyists about whether the “Cyberfeminist Manifesto” was political.

Maybe that’s one of the weird by-products of returning to the academy after a long time away. Things you think you ‘know’ become other things, the meaning of which you can’t grasp. I’m wondering now if it’s just my own misrememberings that positioned cult stud as the condition of possibility of this rioting, crazyquilt new way of being political. Maybe I was just ignoring what I didn’t like. The important thing is, however, that whatever CS might once have been, even in fantasy, it now has a proper name. And according to McGowan, an Answer. (Oh GOD.) Which makes the task Jon is working on all the more important:

to uncover what has been obscured in these substitutions, and then to outline the means by which their suppression has been achieved, enforced, naturalized, and legitimated. In sum, social order has to be disarticulated, to reveal both its mute underside and the process by which it has been ventriloquized, made to speak but in another’s voice.

Bring on disarticulation.

If you don’t post at least three times a day, spambots will probably infect your blog, trash your archives and turn the whole thing into an elaborate, badly worded paean to “progressive slot machines” or a Linux portal.

(via dissensus via psychbloke)

Commentary from Psychbloke:

when feeling particularly low in self-esteem, I often check back over emails from my loyal friends in the Nigerian diplomatic service, but I thought we were all safe if we uttered those little spells in the comments boxes. This taps into all my blog neuroses – like why is blogger free anyway? Where’s the payoff? Have I sold my soul to Arioch in the small print? Destined in some future hell to post comments on posts about cats? What if the spambots’ dastardly plan succeeds and the whole electronic interweb goes down? I’m not too bothered about the posts – plenty more crap where they came from, but where would we find each other again?

Where, indeed.

I so should be working but had to post this excellent photo of gingerbread leathermen/women, made by Liz. (Check out more photos on her blog.) Is that a strap-on harness made of licorice?

As promised, some quotes from Miranda Joseph’s book Against the Romance of Community, on non-profit organisations, with notations and a rant….

Nonprofits often stand on for community metonymically. One gives to one’s community or to ‘the community’ by contributing labour or money to a nonprofit; nonprofits are asked to represent communities politically, to speak or the communities for which they are metonyms. Written into the Romantic narrative [by which she means a narrative that nostalgically posits community as premodern, idyllic, a lost, and ahistorical past], nonprofits are imagined to be the formal sites for communal behaviour, for caring and giving, supposed once upon a time to have taken place informally among neighbours. At the same time, nonprofits are defined through their relation to profit. (more…)

Since Battlestar Galactica finished, we’ve been feeding the scifi cravings by watching old episodes of Babylon Five. B5 aside, however, those hungry for BG news may turn to Ron Moore’s weblog, in which he answers obscure fan queries and so on. His entries are sparse, long, and difficult to read in white on black, but I am very interested by this (scroll down):

I’ve found it interesting that there’s a school of thought out there which claims that Laura should’ve been completely sidelined from the very beginning, that Adama should’ve declared martial law from the outset and ignored civilian government altogether. It probably says something about me that I found that very notion to be antithetical to the underpinnings of a decent and democratic society, and I remember the very conscious choice I made in the early stages of this project that while Colonial society was going to be flawed and riddled with problems, that at its base, it was going to be a fundamentally decent and democratic one. It was not going to toss its principles over the side in a time of crisis. It was not going to turn itself into a security-above-all state. There were certain things that mattered more than survival, certain things that mattered more than safety. They were going to hang on to their government and their rights as citizens as best they could under the situation, and would give up those rights and freedoms only grudgingly. Laura Roslin is the personification of that idea. She wasn’t elected, she wasn’t chosen, she arguably wasn’t even ready for the role, but she represented continuity to the traditions and principles undergirding their society, and she would stand for them until she died.

This, to me, proves beyond doubt that the creators, at least, envision the Galactica as ‘the good guys’, always: that they aren’t trying to sneak in a critique of militarised liberalism at the same time as offer it as an alternative to the ‘real’ security state(s). The beautiful thing about Battlestar, though, is that a critique of ‘decent’, militarised, principled liberal democracy sneaks in anyhow — despite the bagpipe music. I miss it.

Nevertheless, how freaky is it that a significant portion of the fan base — a ’school of thought’ — claims martial law was the only viable solution to the disaster, and thinks Roslin ‘wussifies’ Adama?

Meanwhile, it’s raining like the monsoon here. It’s been miraculously wet. The plants are going crazy. Well, most of them. In a permaculture experiment, A. planted a little circle of corn in the middle of wild foliage in our backyard, shaded by bamboo, numerous creepers and shrubs. She put in two more stalks in the veggie patch proper. Now, the circle, three weeks after planting, is already a foot high. Meanwhile, the ones in the veggie patch are half that. It don’t make any sense.

Another thing that don’t make sense is that I can’t seem to make the Categories function on this blog work. Hence, manually, I tell you that this blog entry is filed under “From the Ministry of Insecurity.”

I was going to write something about The Proposition, and I did. Except that sometimes even only one day after you see a film, it has already become past, unreachable, fragments. I remember the conversation we had after the movie more than the movie itself.

Instead, via Antipopper, I’m listening to Emma Reverter, Don De Lillo and Paul Auster reading aloud about the state, the state of emergency, in an event in New York a couple of days ago run by PEN International. Paul Auster relates how a French couple during WWII, discussing the possibility of their children being deported to Germany and how they might tattoo their names and addresses on their chests, so they could be found after the end of the war. De Lillo speaks of dreams and the way the state has an ability to act out its fantasies, its dreams, unlike most of us who dream of changing the unchangeable. These are patient, weighted, practiced voices, the voices of the Great Writers, in the heartland of the Civilised World, with civilised, polite applause recorded to accompany each speaker. There is not an audible sense of ‘emergency’. I guess the Moody story is entertaining, and it does sound like he was sneaking in a critique of Liberals — and Americans! — while simply appearing strange. But my favourite is Heidi Julavits reading a story from Donald Barthelme’s Amateurs, “Some of us had been threatening our friend Colby”:

Some of us had been threatening our friend Colby for a long time because of the way he had been behaving, and now he had gone too far, so we decided to hang him. Colby argued that just because he had gone too far — he did not deny that he had gone too far — did not mean that he should be subjected to hanging. Going too far, he said, was something that everybody did sometimes. We didn’t pay much attention to this argument. We asked him what sort of music he would like played at the hanging.

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“If one day we get organized, we’ll have hand grenades, bombs, kalashnikovs… We’ll say meet at the Bastille and it’ll be war,” they warn.

(From Autonomedia)

Lots of this kind of discussion is happening over at Archive, but these people already seem organised to me. A. and I were talking yesterday about the difference between a ‘riot’ and ‘resistance’. Riots are plural, anarchic and spontaneous; resistance is singular, organised and ’strategic’. And what a weird assumption: that unless people are grouped together with a spokesperson, banners, posters, they’re obviously either the puppets of Al Qaeda or just meaningless children whose actions are equally meaningless, removing them from the political altogether. So is what’s happening in France a riot or a resistance movement? Does it matter?

From the same article:

Laurent, 17, the youngest of the band, claims he “torched” a Peugeot 607, a few feet from here, only two hours ago. For them, nothing’s easier. All you need is a glass bottle filled with gasoline and a rag for a fuse, you break a window and throw the cocktail inside: in two minutes the car is on fire, if it doesn’t blow up first.

Why burn these car that usually belong to someone they know? “We have no choice. We’re ready to sacrifice everything since we have nothing,” Bilal says in his own defense. “We even burned a friend’s car. He was furious, but he understood.”

See? The boundaries between the propertied and the lumpen are porous after all. It’s totally impossible right now to express precisely how good that makes me feel.

From a comment by John Ransom on Long Sunday about Zizek’s point that the increase of ‘fundamentalist terrorism’ is actually a goal of the US Administration:

I think that’s the wrong way to look at it. Battles are fought where at each moment the logic of the opponents’ tactics are sometimes almost self-evident, but when turning around and looking back it’s difficult to claim that so-and-so individual or class or cabal ‘wanted’ such-and-such. History is made up of two materials: 1. the desires and motives of humans and their expression in action and 2. the frequently irrelevant outcome; irrelevant, that is, from the point of view of the actor who acted on the basis of some motive.

And so I don’t think it expresses it right to say, “Well, maybe what they really wanted was to push fundamentalism into some kind of open conflict so as to cow domestic opposition.” It’s not that they originally wanted that. Instead, what’s going on is that as the conflict shifts and shapes over time, everyone uses whatever tactical advantage that appears on the horizon. The process here is very similar to what happens in the old video game called ‘tank,’ the first 3D video game. I’m sure everyone here remembers that game. You, the player, rumble around a geometric landscape shooting enemy tanks that move and fire back. If you kill a few of the enemy tanks, *another one slowly appears on the horizon*. And then you take a shot at that one! And that’s what’s going on with the game of exaggerating Islamic fundamentalism in order to quiet domestic opposition.

On the theme of Nate’s comment last week about cultural capital — um, yes, cultual capital has a lot to do with the various shitfights and ownership rituals of community politics. Nate, have you seen a book called Against the Romance of Community, by Miranda Joseph? She does a great analysis of cultural capital, and also real subsumption stuff although she doesn’t call it that, by writing about the performativity of capital. There’s a whole chapter on the politics of working for non-profit organisations. At some point I’ll quote a slab. It feels like required reading.

(Putting romance and community in the same sentence reminds me of a hideous, ironic-but-only-just phrase that circulated around S11 and Woomera. At that stage, I hadn’t seen The Weather Underground and thus wasn’t aware that a band of crazy 60’s ultra-leftists had already taken that advice literally as a recipe for revolution. But I’m not sure it worked out so well for them. All that layin’ never seems to lead to much stayin’.)

What a weird day. I went to sleep at 4am this morning, and woke at 7.30 to have breakfast with the mother and the brother on their way off the Spirit of Tasmania (bro is back from his first, rippingly successful year as a jazz music student in Launceston). They brought bacon and eggs, and we sat in the backyard slugging down orange juice and coffee. My mother gave me a talking-to about Thailand. See, I was conceived in Bangkok, on the tailend of their hippie/do-gooder sojourn in South East Asia as English teachers. This means my parents both feel entitled to lecture me about the danger of being an ignorant white tourist, venturing into places unknown, etc etc. The most famous family tale about Bangkok is that my Dad unknowingly carried some dope through the airport, which, miraculously, despite pulling his bag apart, the customs officers never found. But Thailand, Ma said this morning, was a really scary place — ‘the one place we felt that our lives were expendable’. In the south, looking for an archeological dig, they encountered a town where no-one would serve them and were too scared to leave their hotel. In Chiang Mai, someone stole my mother’s bag, with her passport, etc etc. And they were hassled by gangsters in Bangkok.

Ma and Owen left, and I went to bed for a nap at 12pm and dreamt I was there — in Bangkok, then in the jungle/countryside. Schnapps, my cat, was there too. (He often accompanies me in dreams about overseas places — in another really vivid, intense dream a couple of months ago, I lost him in New York. Miaow.) There were signposts in English about the local flora and fauna, like in an Australian national park. One of the signposts featured information about the the multi-coloured fox: similar to an Arctic fox, but silver, with hot pink, deep blue and purple bits of fur sticking out everywhere. (A bit like Lee from Australian Idol’s hair, except attractive. And fox.) Then the punk fox appeared. It, well, it sort of guided me. Or I followed it. (This dream sounds like the worst queer hippie animal-totem stereotype, doesn’t it?) We came out into a huge clearing, leading to the enormous forecourt of an (ahem) Ancient Ruined Palace. Stone pavers stretched out for like a mile into the distance, in front of the palace. I was all alone on the steps of the palace, except for the fox, which now picked up a circlet of barbed wire and hurled it into the night sky. The firecracker — it was a firecracker! — burst into amazing coloured sparks. More firecrackers erupted. A long way off I could hear people cheering and yelling. The fox had disappeared. I walked towards the yelling and found not only people, but the tackiest mark of civilisation: a backpacker hostel. Some friend of my brother’s offered to share her room with me. In the midst of unpacking her clothes, she offered me a toke of this large, odd-looking pipe with white bubbly powder in its flattened-out bowl. She swore blind that the contents of the bowl was just a new kind of concentrated marijuana, like hash but white. Strangely enough, I wasn’t so sure. In the end I refused the toke and found my own room. Then, poof, it was 3pm, I’d slept through the afternoon, and I desperately needed another round of breakfast.

Research jitters, me? Travel jitters? Subconscious animist-primitivist projections about finding the lost object in some Indiana Jones style adventure in the wild ruins of an ancient land? Never!

Yeah, I have a life. Sometimes I don’t believe it, but then I realise it’s a week since I posted anything here, and the point is proven. I spent most of last week writing a conference paper on autobiography, travel, transness, then test-drove it at the small annual postgrad conference on Wednesday. Not a bad ride; now the task is to pimp it up for CultureFix in 3 weeks.

(Call it ridiculous, late to the table or whatever, but I’m vaguely enjoying this phrase ‘pimp my ride’. Especially when the phrase travels out of the car culture domain.)

The feedback from people was pretty amazing. The 3 members of my supervision committee were there and they all asked tough questions, engaged questions, which made me feel all squishy. And the other panellists were excellent.

Otherwise it’s all been pretty domestic around here. Lots of television, not much braining. We spent lots of the week scraping rust off the barbeque, to prepare for a small backyard soiree tomorrow. Steelwool and elbow grease. It seems that FTMA is shutting down, finally, although the main man behind it wants to start a new organisation called “Men With Transsexualism Australia”. I guess it’s difficult to keep running something with FTM in the title when you’re a man with transsexualism. Immediately, some Sydney and Brisbane folk have begun a replacement with the confusingly similar title AFTMA.

Lastly, I just heard from one of the Thai clinics I applied to do fieldwork with, and they’re happy to have me. Yay, yay and more yay.