Fangirl tagged me for this:

The rules are as follows: Post a picture or make/take/create your own that captures what you are most passionate for students to learn about. Give your picture a short title. Title your post “Meme: I can’t believe it’s not a passion quilt!”.* Link back to this blog entry. Include links to 5 (or more) educators.

In the archive of LTTR (which is perfect for a Saturday afternoon web browse and inspirational for all sorts of reasons, those homos know how to make art and shit) I found this piece by Boots, about an extremely awesome Pudding Tits Project, illegibility and language. Here’s an extract:

Right after I got surgery, I felt strange. I felt strange that I spent so much money on something so self-indulgent. And I felt really strange about my place in the world. I called a friend who, like me, is not taking testosterone, gets read as female fairly frequently, and who had chest reconstruction surgery. I tried to articulate the fact that all of a sudden, it felt as if I didn’t exist in the world, save for in the presence of a few people that understood my wonderfully freakish, spectacularly monstrous gender. He both reassured and disappointed me with his reply: “We’re illegible. But everyone is, it’s just that most people are never confronted with the situation of really realizing it.”

I know this experience of feeling as if I don’t exist. I’d articulate a little differently, though — in the sense that since I’ve begun to be read as unproblematically male, everyday life is a little ‘easier’, but I lose the power of making my own freakishness visible.

For example, I don’t think many of this year’s crop of gender studies students know that I’m trans. A couple of them expressed fairly transphobic sentiments earlier in the semester, along the lines of, “If someone wants to be called a woman, fine. I’d use female pronouns to their face. But to me they were born men and they’ll always be men.” I encouraged other students to deconstruct or challenge those sentiments, and was impressed when the other students in the class rose effortlessly to the challenge. But somehow I could not say, “So I guess that to you I would count as a woman?” Partially this is because being an educator (at least in gender studies) is about dismantling the reliability of students’ individual experiences of their worlds, and offering them a toolbox with which to read the abstract, the invisible. But it was also about protecting myself from surveillance, and not allowing the class to become a space in which my gender performances were scrutinised. I wanted to retain a space in which my identity was unimportant, and where I remained effective as a conduit for learning. Also, I couldn’t think of how to describe my gender, how to account for it, to them. Remaining illegible has its uses.

Perhaps my students would learn just as much if I were ‘open’ about being trans as not. But since I don’t know how to ‘come out’ to them, I’ve tried to teach them that none of us has a stable gender (or sexuality or ethnicity or identity), and that we are all being misrecognised, all the time. If I am passionate about anything, this is it.

Anyhow, since I’ve been back from North America, I’ve been experimenting with style. Long ago, I decided that tight jeans and tight-fitting sweaters would probably make it more difficult for me to pass as a guy. No, worse — because let’s not diminish the homophobia implicit in this arithmetic around tightness and bagginess — it seemed easier to pass as a straighter-looking white boy than a queer. The excuse I gave myself was that my bum was too big for tight jeans. I’ve always felt uneasy about it, but at Transsomatechnics my whole structure of passing anxiety crumbled into dust. No-one cared. Or, people did care, but in an encouraging and nourishing way. So why is it different in Melbourne? We are still operating in reactionary response to a medicalised system in which anyone who wants to modify their bodies surgically or hormonally must engage with the ‘true transsexual’ narrative. The stakes of not passing as a true transsexual at the clinic are high — people self-harm, destroy their relationships, kill themselves. Even in the spaces made to resist this poison, we are still so psychically alert to the prevailing pressures of passing as ‘trans enough’ everywhere else that we cannot entirely innoculate ourselves against it. Lately I have been wearing flamboyantly skinny jeans, pink-streaked 80s ties and cornflower blue sweaters. Eyeliner, too. The world needs more boys with eyeliner. For now, this will be my innoculation.

Tag!: Ika, Jonathan, Craig, Wildly Parenthetical and Mattilda.

PS Today I had breakfast with a friend. After our Minor Place bagels turned out not to fill our stomachs, we went wandering through Brunswick on a mission to find baklava. On the way, we discussed what, if it were not for how the last month has been chock full of brain-shatteringly exciting things for me, would certainly be the most exciting project ever. It makes me shiver with barely repressed glee. Good things are going to happen, I just know it.

Cat Power: What Would the Community Think? (1996)

Spunk Mag is a new publication out of Sydney. The callout for submissions looks kinda exciting and awesome:

Into exploring masculinities and male genders?

We want to make a space were we can create our own visions of sexiness, fluid and diverse, reflecting, celebrating and reinventing our cultures and communities.

SPUNK is a new magazine for boys, men, trans men, butches, pansies, fellas, dandies, billy goats, blokes, arselickers, chaps, buddies, otters, gents, ravers, kings, gigolos, bois, puppies, bogans, lads, masters, banim, guys, bears, slaves, nerds, guerrillas, studs, bottoms, brothers, rascals, queers, rent boys, beefcakes, uncles, cock suckers, doofers, jocks, homos, tom cats, mugs, daddies, geeks, bisexuals, machos, fudge packers, westies, tigers, transsexuals, muscle marys, gaylords, philosophers, dicks, wolves, faeries, rogues, FTMs, cubs, buggers, labourers, alphas, waxheads, gender benders, intersex, queens, stallions, intellectuals, sons, thugs, poofters, males, bulls, gods, chubs, gvarim, fathers, home boys, transvestites, heroes, rams, crybabies, chasers, granddads, lions, bards, brutes, freaks, nancy boys, bulldogs, shamans, tops, bludgers, switches, cocks, poofters, bookworms, trade, sissies, badgers, faggots and other gender fuckers.

Who should submit: Sexy folk who want to contribute fantasies, art, erotica, verse, fiction, soul, thoughts, porn, dreams, photos, magic, ideas, desire, articles, music, lust, interviews, libido, performance, song, sex, poetry, multimedia, creativity, spirit, dance, graffiti, kundalini, words and films.

Show us your spunk! Contribution deadline for Issue 1: 1 August 2008.

Back in Melbourne and the winter is setting in. It’s time to wrap a blanket over my knees and sit at the computer and write. Currently I’m expanding the paper I presented at Transsomatechnics into a chapter. Expanding conference papers this way really demonstrates how slack a scholar I am. And how ridiculous it is to have to make concrete definitions of terms, to begin with. For example, defining subjectivation. Despite having planned the chapter already, ’scheduling in’ the requisite glosses in the correct places, in the paper itself I wrote just whatever I thought subjectivation means. It’s difficult enough parsing the distinction between ’subjectivation’ and ’subjectification’, without realising that a) the Bifo essay I rely on to define Foucault’s development of subjectivation is referenceless, in that beautiful slack Continental fashion; b) Judith Butler talks about subjectivation in The Psychic Life of Power, but, in a move that must have caused who knows what domestic dispute, assigns an argument about identity politics, differentiation and rights to Foucault when her own partner Wendy Brown made it, neglecting to footnote Brown at all. Well done. Here is what I have so far on subjectivation. If anyone can offer insight, please do:

Subjectivation is the Foucauldian term I use to describe a technique of power which forms subjects who are able to think of themselves as autonomous individuals, but simultaneously produces subjection. This technique of power

“applies itself to immediate everyday life which categorizes the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognize and which others have to recognize in him.” (”The Subject and Power”, 212)

Rather than, as with governmentality, dealing with the management of the population on a mass scale, this technique of power is intimately imbricated within the practices of everyday life. To call this form of power subjectivation is also to follow the anti-humanist claim that the ‘human’ does not pre-exist the practices that form subjects (of the law, of the state, of capital, of medicine and so on.) Franco Berardi writes,

“The subject does not pre-exist history, it does not preexist the social process. Neither does it precede the power formations or the political subjectivation that founds autonomy. There is no subject, but subjectivation, and the history of subjectifying processes is reconstructed through the analysis of epistemic, imaginary, libidinal and social dispositifs modeling the primary matter of the lived.”

What Berardi refers to as subjectivation here are the multiple and performative points of contact whereby bodies become identifiable and categorisable. This could be thought of as a similar hermeneutic to the Althusserian concept of interpellation, whereby the state and/or capitalism bring subjects into being through hailing. But distinct from Althusser, Foucault maintains that subjectivation is not entirely oppressive, but that it also encompasses our own production of ourselves in relation to institutions. Thus, subjectivation might also be enabling of resistance to capital, or the state, in the same breath as we understand it to be a technique of either.

In “The Subject and Power,” Foucault implies that the newest modes of subjectivation as processes of individualization and differentiation. These contemporary modes of subjectivation are borne out of the political conditions of contemporary liberal democracies, in which formal rights and recognition are assumed to accrue only in relation to a specific (and wounded) category of identity. These multiple identity categories interface with biopolitical social apparatuses (or what Foucault calls dispositifs) in ways that are constantly mutating, along with the regulative regimes which recognise and manage them as categories of personhood. Gay, lesbian, bisexual, woman, migrant, refugee, indigenous or Aboriginal: these are some of the categories that could be cited in this context. ‘Transsexual’ or ‘transgender’ (with their different genealogies referencing relationships to medicine and politics) are two others.

So D. emails me a couple of addresses of people to look up when I’m in LA, and aside from how S. is driving me around on this mad wonderful tour of the city every day I don’t think I have the energy to meet more than one person so I pick W. Who I hear does amazing art and runs a queer performance night slash party somewhere and has long gorgeous hair and is a transboy and and. So I call W. He tells me to come by his place tonight at 9.30 so we can hang out with him and friends of his who just got in from Berlin. We go, and on the way we stop in Koreatown to eat. There’s a Korean sushi place that’s empty and white and black. The sushi train stretches for a good half mile up and down three long table rows. We want it to go, which here means to take away, but it’s so efficient. This ‘to go’. The waiter hands me a plastic container, a glove, a plastic bag and soy sauce and wasabi. He tells us to take plates off the sushi train and transfer them to the container using the glove. Later he produces polystyrene containers of miso soup, a huge portion of ginger, and a smaller container for the seaweed salad. S. and I watch for the arrival of pieces of interesting looking sushi, a roll with tuna, a roll with salmon, two serves of inari, something that maybe looks like sausage but turns out to be cooked tuna. We drive to W’s place. On his floor we talk with the Germans, who are making a film about a film called Salome. Then we follow their green PT Cruiser downtown to the club. We drive through a skyscraper forest, past old movies theatres that are now churches, featuring sessions with God.

At the door a crew of queens greets us. ‘Thankyou for coming.’ ‘Thankyou for having us!’ The club itself is an old theatre. Balconies above, screens with a textual narrative that reads like Judy Blume on Viagra. An innocent double date at a baseball game turns into a gay — shock! — orgy! — ohmygod. We position ourselves at the door and watch the hott faggots walking in. Someone takes our photo. A boy called Angel tells me I am gorgeous. He’s wrong, it’s him that’s gorgeous. I’m wearing a pin that says ‘I am yours from top to toe,’ and I truly am. Inside it’s hot, and we dance. Me and W. especially. Oh, someone to dance with. Someone to vogue with, someone to ‘ooh!’ and ‘ah’ and ‘oh my god honey!’ and ‘what WAS that?’ A faggy nelly queen in just a little more faggy nelly way than I am, but comparative and just so. Hot stepping, butt cranking. Beautiful. I’m thinking of the last person I danced dirty with and how he’s in this same state somewhere and how great that is, icing sugar on his sleeve, art in his skin. All of us scholars and gentlemen. I’m thanking the universe for making each part of this short North American adventure a step up to a higher level of power/joy/knowledge. Angel comes back and wants to know where I’m from. “Australia,” I say. “Where did they MAKE you?” he says. Yeah people have asked me that before. “Do you dance on the ceiling there? Is everything upside down?” We just dance at him. All these fags, we own them, our eyes are dazzling just a little bit more than theirs. Antony said so in Vancouver, and Antony is a hippie but he is right. We do dazzle. We are fearless and we dazzle.

On the way out W. decries the lack of girls. I am thinking of the so many hot boys, so many, too many. And how for once I don’t care how they read me. A gorgeous drag queen thanks me for coming again, and I say, “It’s been splendid,” and she blows kisses to S. and then me: “Goodbye ladies, goodbye!” Oh no. I walk up to her with big eyes. “I’m not a lady! I’m a boy.” “Oh honey,” she says, “I call all the boys here ladies!” My ‘but of course’ face. “I’m so sorry, I get nit-picky. Well, just for you tonight I’m a big girly faggy lady!” “You take care now, lady,” she says, kissing my cheek, and I will, I will, I will. On my last night in LA I will.

In a bar the other night someone was explaining how some Duke University psychologists in the 1930s developed this instrument for measuring how happy people were. The instrument was a Euphorimeter, and they called the units of potential happiness ‘euphors’. Apparently, when people with very low euphor levels were shown how lots of people had really high euphor levels, the low-euphor people suddenly stopped being as depressed.

Maybe this is not the best metaphor to describe the last week, but it does come close. Transsomatechnics was by far the best conference I’ve ever been to. So little of the usual competitiveness and depoliticised intellectual wankery; so many people humbly offering their ideas in the spirit of collaboration and shared resistance. It was especially refreshing for people not to have to do the ‘trans 101′ spiel at the start of papers; here was a space in which some things were already known, and critical conversations could begin right away (rather than question time being full of random people whose contribution is “OMG that is so INTERESTING!”). A lot of fruitful things will come out of this conference, I think.

And then there was the brilliant high school dorkiness of the after-party, which was just like Trans Prom, and hanging out in Vancouver parks and streets and this tiny slice of beach, and catching up with people I never ever see enough, and making a whole crew of new beautiful friends. Seriously, if someone could measure my euphors right now, I might break the machine.