So, a Gender Schmender report, at long last.

It was themed “Damnation”. We intended the theme to be a satirical take on the Christian right. It ended up as pastiche of any and all religious/devilish themes. Not really as critiquey as we could have gone, but the theme excited lots of amazing finery: angels, devils, monks, priests, vampires, schoolgirls… All sorts, really. Anyhow, it was an awesome party. As Cassie says, we packed out the venue. People were having so much fun that the owner of Cherry Bomb let us keep partying later than she should have done.

Go look at the Flickr set. All photos were taken by the lovely Dan, who was resplendent in a red sparkly nun’s habit. But in the meantime, here are my highlights:

The MC, Lizzie Blast, introducing herself as the Reverend of the House of Scat, commanding people to kiss her ring. I think my favourite moment in the show was watching her christen people from a potty (still have no idea what was actually in the potty, but hey, who cares.)

Tomoko Yamasaki doing this excellent butoh-inspired geisha , peeling away the layers of her blossom-lined kimono very gradually, to reveal more kimono, and finally the same blossoms painted on her actual skin — which she proceeded to tear away in strips. A little like a whole body facial masque, but with flowers. Really something…

Also something was the way a probably-drunk acquaintance bailed up a friend of mine during Tomo’s show and, since this friend looks Asian, proceeded to ask him to explain the ‘funny writing’ on her back. Because he’d automatically know, right? So not fucking cool. (Also not cool was the fact that Cherry Bomb is upstairs, and not really accessible for disabled party-goers, meaning that at least one person didn’t attend. We are sorry and promise to rectify this situation next time.)

The various trips to nearby restaurants to beg for change. I was dressed in a monk’s habit, so perhaps it’s not surprising that we attracted attention. The owner of a pizza/pasta joint asked me to bless his daughter who was getting married the next day, before he handed over $20 of two dollar coins and a takeaway menu. Why not? Hey, we hate marriage, even for queers, but bless you anyhow. I don’t think they noticed the little flagellation instrument tucked into my belt. Then, at McDonald’s around 11pm, we happened upon about 50 people in business suits. Truly. They were staring at us, and we were staring right the hell back at them. “Bless you, my children! Even those of you attending convention after-parties at McCafe on a Saturday night! Bless you!”

I got kinda hammered in a really ecstatic way, the first time for ages, and left the car in Fitzroy overnight. Which was totally worth it, even if it wouldn’t start the next day and I spent most of Tuesday slouching around Gore St with jumper leads, waiting for someone to help me jumpstart it. But yeah. Sometimes when you help organise events, you end up running around so much that you miss out on the having fun part. This was not one of those nights.

PS Gender Schmender is looking for performers for future shows. I’m not gonna be involved in the next party — thesis awaits and plus I’ll be in Thailand soon (squeeeeeee). But if the above sounds up your alley, and you’re in Melbourne (or can get there) and you perform, email genderschmenderinfo AT yahoo dot com dot au.

Go read this on what’s happening in East Timor. Seems that the Australian military has graduated from its “big brother” role in the Solomon Islands to actively supporting (East Timorese Prime Minister) Mari Alkatiri’s refusal to hand over power. Which is the next thing to actively supporting a dictatorship, no?

Depressing and stupid and just one of the ten million things that makes me want to throw rocks at the television this week. Thankfully, we have new Veronica Mars episodes to convince me that rocks are not the answer.

Oh My God. So busy last night with preparations for the Gender Schmender party that we missed out on attending the Melbourne Zombie Shuffle.

I bet I totally knew some of those people when they were alive.

I’ve returned reluctantly to some ‘proper thesis writing’ while my research cooks. This is a return to unanswered theoretical questions, in particular the question of how to distinguish between modes of colonisation/imperialism without drawing a temporal line in the sand between ‘modernity’ and ‘postmodernity’, or other, seemingly arbitrary ‘transition’ marks that speak more of one’s desire to categorise than of an ability to listen to the messy complexity of the text. (The text of history or the actual book text(s), either way.) I would be more specific, but it’s stuff I’ve written about here before, and I don’t want to bore my readers.

Otherwise, I am hungover and exhausted from a really, really fun night last night.

This has been in my drafts folder for a couple of weeks and I may as well post it, with the caveat that it’s a draft, and I had more to say, but am trying to make good on my promises.

It’s ironic that the discussion about recent interpretations of ‘mateship’ should also become a meta-discussion about snark around the blogging traps: whether friends should snark at each other, and whether, in cyberspace, we can be friends. The discussion on Glen’s blog has finally erupted into an example of the perils of ‘mateship’ itself. Under the terms of mateship, we are all supposedly friendly enough to understand each others’ jokes, even when the supposed joke is not very funny.

In the comments thread on Glen’s response to Angela, I’ve been trying to point out what I understand to be the micropolitical dimension of ‘mateship’. Responding, Glen edited his post — and mis-spelt Angela’s name. The mis-spelling was brought to his attention, whereupon he claimed it was a joke. He also said that those who might not get the joke were evidently “too attached to identity” — academese for “Can’t you take a joke?” He also said something about how lucky it was that Ange’s surname doesn’t have any weird characters because that would stuff him up even more. It’s just… well, it doesn’t feel like the Internet gets more bizarre than this. I don’t understand why Glen keeps going on about recuperating politically dodgy crap like mateship, but if he wants to waste time fdoing it that’s his business.

I have a tendency when these discussions take place to obliquely ‘poke fun’ rather than ‘try to be helpful’, and although I’m not at all sure it will help, I think this exchange finally warrants a serious excavation rather than my previous response, which was spamming, “If you can’t pronounce their name just call them mate!” I still think that refrain says it all: it’s an axiom of mateship and it reveals the moment in which mateship becomes racialised, slightly aggressive, an attempt to de-other the Other.

So I’m thinking about moments in which I’ve had the urge to call people ‘mate’ before. This is ‘mate’ as distinct from ‘matey’, which enjoyed a brief popularity in alterna-left circles around 2000. When I feel like I need to say ‘mate’, I’m usually trying to pass as as a guy. I’m usually talking to a guy, and I’m usually involved in an economic transaction of some kind. I do think ‘mate’ is specific to Australia: I’ve never heard an Aotearoan say ‘mate’, and English people usually think it’s some weird Aussie thing.

Calling someone ‘mate’ has to do with the assumption of a familiarity that is about class, and race and gender. You may refer to your friends as ‘your mates’ in Australia, but the most marked instances of ‘mateing’ someone are with people you don’t know, rather than friends. I’m going to say that this is something like the limit of ‘mate’ as a form of address, and additionally that it’s at the limit that you might identify what makes the rule a rule. The assumption of false intimacy or familiarity can only proceed, in a situation, if someone experiences a managerial disposition in relation to the other person. I mean ‘managerial’ in the sense Ghassan Hage used it in White Nation: managerial meanshaving more social power, the power to imagine managing other bodies who have less power than you — the power to institute the law (of private social exchange or national borders, whichever is at stake).

So, it’s gendered — who would call a woman ‘mate’ unless as an ironic gesture (or he thought she was a dyke?) It’s about constructing a position wherein both parties are on the ’same level’, superficially, but the politics of who gets to be familiar are all about delineating subtle class boundaries. I get to be familiar with you, but you’re still the hired help — or the folks that are only able to dispense ‘exotic’, ‘othered’ hospitality to me.

I’ve been slack with an unholy fire lately. Too many projects on the go; for a while there, too much collective angst in one project, which I found distracting and disturbing, a good reason to retreat to my default project game plan: avoid ‘collectives’ like the effin’ plague. But I can’t retreat just yet.

Jonathan is talking about the new TMGP project idea, born in a meeting last night at our shiny new permanent meeting space at the City Library. The idea is for a toilet art project. Go read about it.

Anyhow, yeah, thesis weirdness. I’m in a mad ‘data collection’ phase: collecting survey results (280 now), trying to find interview participants, heading off to Thailand for fieldwork in just over a month. The survey has fielded a really excellent number of responses, which is amazing. At the same time, collecting responses highlights the holes in my methods of survey writing. I could have phrased some questions far more carefully. And I have this apprehensive feeling about the method: surveys are so sociological, so… in a way… banal. Not that the responses themselves are banal, far from it. I’m thinking more of the way in which a straight question can elicit an almost strategically defensive empty response: I don’t know, it’s just what I felt like doing at the time. Maybe my questions are too banal. Like the stock teenage response to a parent’s question at dinner:

Q: “What did you get up to today?”
A: “Oh, I dunno.”

This is a trouble I think I will experience with interviews too. So far, I’ve done quite a lot of internet spamming of the callout for interview participants, and have had very few responses. On a couple of bulletin boards, people have responded quite critically because the answers to my questions seem to be ‘obvious’. “This seems a thin thesis idea,” says one person (who, as far as I know, doesn’t live in Australia and won’t be taking part anyhow). It takes all my self-discipline not to write an essay in response on why this work is important. Other people have asked why I need to interview anyone when there are so many livejournals and weblogs about trans surgery. A good question. Perhaps because I have questions that aren’t always answered by public first-person accounts? Because depending on personal webpages would be slack, in a way that initiating ongoing conversations with people is not?

In all of these encouters, I’m coming up against a defensiveness that I didn’t really expect. Curiosity seems quite dangerous and threatening, for mysterious reasons. Except that these reasons are not really so mysterious. It doesn’t matter who is asking, most transpeople (most people) are sick of turning their lives and experiences into narratives, or ‘explaining’ their behaviour. I worry that once I’m interviewing, that I’ll come up against that same shrugging disavowal of self-narration. Although if I do, it becomes text, and then I get to think about the paradoxes in which producing ‘transsexual’ self-narrative is so desirable, in a way, and yet so fraught…

Via Anthrochica, a ‘wanted to buy’ ad for an academic paper that just reeks of some family scion getting through Yale via strategic misuse of Daddy’s money. (George Dubya, I’m looking at you.)

Reply to: gigs-160358948@craigslist.org
Date: 2006-05-13, 6:39AM EDT

I need someone to write me a paper by this Thurs 5/17/2006. The paper will have to be 2500-3000 words (about 9-10 pages, double spaced, 12pt font) and am looking for someone who is a current Grad student (Although I may allow exceptions). You must be a History or Government major and have sufficient knowledge in both of these fields (as far as history goes, mainly the past 100-150 years). There is one stipulation: this paper has to be damn good, and I mean awesome, very proffesionally done, citations throughout, various sources, borderline publishable (although it won’t be published). So only reply to this if you are capable of this kind of work. If this describes you and you have this kind of knowledge base, you can make some easy money. Will pay $400 if it is the kind of work described (I will be double checking citations to make sure it is original work). If interested, email me a sample of your work (preferably on a related topic) and why you are more than qualified to write this paper (tell me what other paper/research topics you have had in the past, tell me about what kind of knowledge you have in these fields, your educational background, and the top 2 or 3 historical events/topics in the past 150 years you have the most knowledge of). I will get back to you and let you know further details and more specifics about the exact topic as well.

You gotta admire the shameless arrogance, although it might make you so admiring, you’ll vomit.

Today has been my first day off for weeks. It so happens that it’s not only Marx’s birthday, but also the anniversary of something closer to home. Lazy breakfast at 4pm and a day of doing absolutely no work, marred only by the car’s engine flooding in peak hour traffic and pouring rain. We have a new book, Writing Machines by N. Katherine Hayles. The covers are corrugated so finely and the design so detailed and lovely that I could spend hours fondling it, and am quite serious about taking it to bed with me tonight — under the pillow, for the writing to seep out and infect me…

Right now I’m catching up on a week of installments of Evidence Locker by Jill Magid. You sign up, and each day for a month (I think) you receive emails about Magid’s holiday in Liverpool. Along with the emails come segments of CCTV footage Magid requested from the Liverpool Police. The CCTV footage is all of her — walking about the city, sitting in an outdoor cafe smoking a fag and sipping tea. The footage evokes stalker films and the spectre of obsessional love, despite its ostensible purpose to ‘identify criminals’. It’s hard to know whether someone is on the other end of the cameras, directing the shots, whethre this is all just made up and Magid actually produced the work herself. (She didn’t.) One, on Day Four, stands out. From across the street, the camera picks out Magid as she walks out of a cafe. As she sits in a cheap chrome chair, pulls out her cigarettes and lights up, it focuses in on her, in deep close-up, then deeper so her red coat shines (you realise it’s vinyl, picked out to be visible) and from the side so her hair obscures her face. The perspective changes abruptly: now we’re looking from directly above. The shot zooms in, focuses on her crossed knees, pauses for a beat, pans up her body and refocuses on her face. It’s a cinematic close-up: you can see the texture of her hair, her bored experssion, watching something down the street. At this point the camera stops zooming in and you begin to notice that it’s shaking up and down slightly, waving, a barely perceptible ‘bop’ motion. It’s odd and disturbingly pornographic, as if the camera itself has a subjectivity and is in the throes of a voyeuristic wank. On watching it again I notice that the cameras shake slightly throughout the segment — perhaps it’s the wind? Nicely edited for maximum disturbing effect, I think…

Jill Magid also asked the Amsterdam Police if she could decorate some CCTV cameras with rhinestones as an art project. When they said no, she repackaged herself as System Azure, a fake corporation, and posed as the Head Security Ornamentation Professional. The Amsterdam Police were encouraged to think of it as a public relations exercise — and soon Magid was allowed to cover four cameras at Police Headquarters with rhinestones. Yay.

I’ve been giving thought lately to the circulation of names, specifically my name, as it travels in zeros and ones across the datasphere. For the first time since I changed my name four years ago, my name has become recognisable once again, a sign of particular things about me and the way I write or present publicly. This is kind of weird. Kind of good, but also weird.

A trans friend who is also a writer commented recently about how freeing it felt to detach himself from his previous, female name — a necessary and glad moment of transition, to no longer be ‘femaled’ in that way. But he also said it felt weird, because that name was attached to various stories, essays, projects, his persona as a writer, and he would have to build up a new ‘name’ for himself in order to gain the same recognition as a writer. Or, he would have to stay attached to that old name: the odd, outing logic, “I was once —— —–.”

Taking a new name poses a host of odd decisions. Apart from the Very Important Decision on what to name oneself, there’s the question of traffic between the old and the new name. Should it be public knowledge that this Mr X was once Ms X? How do you deal with publications written in the old name, that you are still proud of and would like people to read?

(more…)

Some really amazing posts blogging against disableism: Nubian writes movingly on her experiences of the state’s solution to its own reduction of support for people with mental illnesses involves turning them into criminals; Vegankid with a beautful rant about some of the more invisible and less-recognised effects of ableism; One Marae and Jay at Jay Sennett on learning and being everywhere. (More here.)

Mayday was yesterday already. Well, the day before if you count right now as already Wednesday. And I didn’t post a Happy Mayday call. Well, Happy May. Let’s think of no work and no capitalism for the whole month.

I’m listening to “We Don’t Need Another Hero”, reminding me not to look for the way home, just life beyond the Thunderdome.
And I’m looking at the birth of a brand new day: a day without immigrants….