I’m trying to write my paper for Transsomatechnics, which is in two and a bit weeks, and it’s going dreadfully. Some horrendous stomach bug is making me nauseous and unable to eat properly. On Wednesday I’ve got to pick up 70 essays to mark before I leave for the US. Worst, I brought some bad administrivial magic down on myself, which means that the correct paperwork approving me for a six month scholarship extension hasn’t been processed. It’s possible that my scholarship could stop this week, unless I act fast. Things feel overwhelming, exactly as if everyone were suddenly bursting into musical numbers every third minute and burning themselves up in the process.

(Yes, it’s only six months until I ‘finish’ my ‘thesis’, apparently. The arrival of which foreboding date is surely connected to my body packing it in.)

Therefore: time to get into blanket-couch formation and revisit the Scooby Gang, who always show me how to weather the world. It’s a bit soppy, but “I’ve Got A Theory” is exactly what I need to hear right now. There’s nothing I can’t face. Except for bunnies. And even bunnies can be stared down, with their little red eyes and that carrot fetish.

I wish I could muster the brain energy for a post involving serious cultural analysis, or political commentary. For various reasons to do with stomach-y pain and chronic insomina/fatigue, I’m trying to cut coffee out of my diet at the moment. It’s difficult to think about anything but the raging headache I’ve got, or what I could ingest that would make it better. (A nice strong latte, probably.) Also, today my uni office is playing host to A’s friend’s puppy. One tiny ball of black fluffy hyperactivity and cuteness. It’s enough to make me reconsider (not) getting a dog.

However. I am writing lots of thesis right now, and there is a post being drafted about the difficulty of defining the Australian healthcare system’s ‘approach’ to transsexuality as anything national, or singular, bringing to mind some of the arguments around dispositifs and their contradictory nature as social apparatuses (thus having some systemic qualities) and being wildly fragmentary, contingent, produced on-the-fly at the same time.

Here’s a meme. It came from livejournal, where it circulates around and around, but maybe it’s time that some bloggers got in on the game.

1. Pick 15 of your favorite movies.
2. Go to IMDb and find a quote from each movie. (Or in some cases, just remember them.)
3. Post them for everyone to guess.
4. Strike it out when someone guesses correctly, and put who guessed it correctly and the name of the movie.
5. No Googling/using IMDb/Wikiquote search functions. That would be cheatin’.
6. Tag five people.

I really wanted to quote the line from Aliens, “I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.” But it’s way too recognisable. Some of these are pretty easy, some are a bit more difficult. Oh, and I tag Jonathan, Wildly Parenthetical, Gaylourdes, Eric and Nate.

(more…)

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.

I, too, am having difficulty with the first instruction. Maybe it’s because of my literal brain. See, my desk is right next to bookshelves. If I reach for the nearest book on the desk, that is farther away than the shelf at my left. (And I reach with my left hand, because I’m a left-hander.) Aha. It’s not Anti Oedipus, How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality or Freud’s Introductory Lectures. It’s — see, I really need to sort my books by subject — Homocore: The Loud and Raucous Rise of Queer Rock. Which is just because it’s a large format book, and the spine juts out further. The three sentences:

“I don’t want my art to be quarantined, filtered, and safe. I am quite open with my sexual preferences, which do give me some sort of edge. If my behaviours are offensive, I take the apprehension of others and use it to my advantage.”

That would be Joshua Starr, from the Dead Betties, who is apparently the “gay Kurt Cobain.”

Don’t think I’ll tag anyone at this point (maybe later) but if you feel like doing it, you can say you were tagged by me. I’m off to see I’m Not There this afternoon, as a reward for being very studious all yesterday and today. And to the travel agent!

Pinocchio! So, this is where I find you! How do you ever expect to be a real boy? Look at yourself. Smoking! Playing pool!

Wildly Parenthetical tagged me for the 8 random things meme. Like roughtheory, I’ve been blogging for a long time (er, since 2000) but I don’t think I’ve ever actually been meme-tagged. This reflects something of my lackadaisical relationship to blogging as an ongoing, and especially social, activity. I disappear for months at a time, I don’t keep up a coherent [life] narrative, I don’t keep up reciprocal linking duties, and I’m quite bad at giving shout-outs to other bloggers I admire or read. In fact, you’re lucky if I even respond to your comments. Plus I have the attention span of a gnat, so when I do post it’s likely to be absolutely random, with no follow-up.

I guess I could see this meme as a duty, and subtly overlook it — keeping on with the net equivalent of smoking and playing pool. But WP is too nice to have her gesture thrown in her face. In fact, insofar as the improving dimension of being social deflects the rather messy politics of self-revelation, maybe this is my chance to make good! If I do this meme, finally I will be a real blogger too.

So, eight random ‘facts’ about me: (more…)

On Tiny Mix Tapes you can submit a theme for a mixtape and someone will make you a track listing for the mix. The archive of mixes is pretty awesome. My favourite theme so far is called, we have tricked a homophobic future investment banker into thinking my male friend desperately wants him. now we need a tape to continue the ruse, and to accompany the cupcakes we’re putting on his doorstep. I’m also kind of partial to Soundtrack to low-budget movie about a group of mid-twenties misfits joined together by their love of horror movies and cross dressing (both guy to girl and vice versa).

Speaking of homos and corporate schmucks, this morning Mattilda brilliantly skewered this article about how gay company executives are turning back the tide on homophobia and increasing productivity, just by existing:

Snyder tells us that “out-of-the-closet gay executives in companies like Deloitte, Disney and Morgan Stanley are managing employees who report significantly higher levels of job engagement, satisfaction and morale than employees of straight managers in other environments.” Isn’t that so cute? Singing show tunes and organizing potlucks have really paid off for the corporate gays — they keep their employees in line by entertaining them! That’s right, if you do the can-can right, your employees don’t even notice that they’re indentured servants.

I wasn’t into the whole kitteh meme until I realised the potential for theorist lolz. You can find a lot more here.

I still lived, but without being able to see three paces in front of me.

It’s been a long time since I posted. It’s about the same amount of time since I worked on my thesis. Major life upheaval has a way of scotching the capacity for thought. Although you could claim that the whole concept of ‘life upheaval’ happening at a critical PhD point means it’s about distraction, fear of ’success’, fear of completion.

So I’m coming back to work slow. Blogging and thesis. ‘Normal life.’ Trying out a new work program: work at uni, at a desk, and work at home in bed with a laptop. And I’ve got two abstracts due in the next week, so to start the ball rolling, I might muse a little about the subject matter of both here. Just to get me in the mood.

On Tuesday I spent the whole day in the city doing things I hadn’t planned on doing. I was supposed to meet someone at 11am for a fieldwork interview (yay! Back on the horse with fieldwork, finally.) But ze called at five to eleven to cancel. Later, A. and I fronted up to the National Gallery to see a Juan Davila retrospective, only to discover that the gallery is closed on Tuesdays. Who knew.

To make up for this, we wandered into “Eyes, Lies and Illusions” at ACMI. It’s awesome. The exhibit that makes it great, though, is “The Sound Before You Make It” by Jaki Middleton and David Lawrie. In the centre of a small white room is a large disc at chest height, covered around the perimeter by three rows of figurines. It whirs and spins faster. Then the strobe starts, with music, and if you can let your eyes unfocus (like for a 3d image) you’re suddenly watching a line of dancers performing this unbelievably fast, unbelievably funky routine. Or you can watch the shadows of the dancers on the wall, performing in perfect synchronicity (more perfect than real dancers could).

I couldn’t make head nor tail of the title — the sound before you make it — but later in the afternoon, in a retro clothing shop above Swanston St, Michael Jackson’s Thriller was playing. The whole album.

Of course, the strobe routine mimics the zombie dance routine from ‘Thriller’, and the title is a snatch of lyric:

You try to scream but terror takes the sound before you make it
You start to freeze as horror looks you right between the eyes,
You’re paralyzed

If the city is sending messages, I interpret them as saying, “Dance now.”

If you’d like to see me do a rare spoken word gig, and see some other great queer Melbourne words and cabaret, I’m performing at two Midsumma events in the next couple of weeks. It’d be great to see you there if you’re in town.

Gendermash @ Gasworks

Following on from the popular Tranzlezbian Readings, held regularly over the last 6 years at King Victoria drag kings, Gendermash is a deliberately controversial, positive, and sexed up journey starring Gender creators, morphers, questioners and revellers.

Saturday 27th January @ 10.15pm
Gasworks Arts Park (Foyer)
21 Graham Street
Albert Park
$15/$10

and….

Come As You Are

Readings about bisexuality and desire for more than one gender. Performers are bi, straight, gay, trans and queer. Featured readers are: Aren Aizura, Tim Baxter, Peter Davis, Lisa-Skye Ioannidis, Jennifer Lee, Paul Mitchell, Jo Mundy, Megan Petrie and Catherine Padmore. Shelley O’Reilly will MC. Music performed by Duncan Graham. Image by Paul Rasche. Includes a door prize.

Thu 08 Feb @ 7.00pm
Dantes (upstairs)
150 Gertrude St,
Fitzroy 3065
$12 Full, $8 Con.
For bookings email lisaskye@gmail.com

See you there maybe!

Summer finally came and with it, a month entirely free of thesis. My brain knew summer was coming, and went on holiday early. Unlike Benjamin, I haven’t written a line for weeks, let alone every day, and it may be months til the next.

In the meantime, this is what I’ll be doing: making things out of wood. MC’ing the inaugural Melbourne Tranny Awards. Sleeping in tents. Drinking beers at the bottom of the garden. Playing with small silver men in dresses. Finishing off the entire works of Diana Wynne Jones. Seeing CSS. Eating. A lot of eating.

Til then, hiatus.

The last three ways that people got here via Google:

problems encountered when employees engage in multi tasking (page 18)
gay self fisting blogs (page 13)
spivak poststructuralism, marginality (page 1)

Sorry, no gay self-fisting here. But good luck, and please wear gloves.

Number One perk of getting home late and drunk on a Saturday night: being awake at 2am to watch Straight Plan for the Gay Man. It does sound kind of wrong, yes. But it’s actually not. And best of all, it’s totally unhomophobic.

Straight Plan is obviously a parody of Queer Eye (ie, bathroom jokes about getting rid of all th gay man’s ‘product’ and giving him a bar of soap) but it’s a parody that beautifully reveals the class politics concealed in the original’s fables of dorky/slobbish hetero men getting groomed for success by their pink-dollar-lovin’ Queer Eye team. The Straight Plan crew aren’t interested in aspirationalism; being straight, according to the show, is about being poor. They like to shop at the Salvo’s and buy furniture from the backs of trucks; instead of talking about the best boutiques for ’straight men’, they decide on where to shop baed on the proximity to hotdog stands. The gay men who agree to go on this show are not looking for self-improvement: they just want to slum it for a day. The slumming can happen literally — getting their apartments infested with beercans — or symbolically — being groomed to pass as a straight, blue-collar worker. (Oh, except hello, the blue collar work our gay hero must excel at is in a meat packing plant. Nice line in revealing the hidden queerness lurking in every beacon of heteronormativity…)

Contra to some commenters on this thread, I don’t think the show necessarily reinforces stereotypes about gay men being wealthy or upper-class. It’s a direct response to Queer Eye in which the constellation of stereotypical discourses that align under ‘gayness’ (aestheticism, standards, fashion sense, culturedness etc) become a vehicle for messages about masculine social mobility. By reversing the terms, Straight Plan uses parodies of stereotypical straightness to talk about the importance of downward mobility. Which is, okay, kinda ‘gross’ (living-room full of Rolling Rock, anyone?) but at least it’s not about promoting capitalism.

Phwoar. Fanning myself after watching the hott Tex Royale showreel. It’s viral marketing for the actual Tex Royale show, Saturday night at the Commercial Hotel in Yarraville, and brought to us by the awesome Gender Schmender folks. Check out the Gender Schmender myspace page for more details.

Eric reminds me that Wendy Brown’s new book, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire, is out. I’m looking forward to reading it — Politics Out of History wasn’t my cup of tea, and States of Injury has been cited far too many times in things I’ve written to bear much more. If I owned a copy of the latter, it would be faded, battered and dogeared. Instead I just have numerous photocopies of the same chapters from moments when I couldn’t find them in my enormous photocopy piles.*

Speaking of the US feminist/queer left (or maybe queer leftists Taking A Break from feminism) I finally started reading Janet Halley’s book Split Decisions after BitchLab’s enthusiastic recommendations. (Princeton University Press: what all the cool kids are wearing this season.) One of the things it does very well is to rearticulate some of Wendy Brown’s thought about rights, democracy and coalitions in a manner akin to how Kate Bornstein’s My Gender Workbook made trans theory immediately conversational, personal and ‘tasty’ reading ten years ago.

But with an added kick. Reading Split Decisions is a bit like doing a one-night refresher class in queer and feminist theory over tequila shots, one shot per theorist. It can make you feel a little drunk. There’s an amazing recapitulation of Leo Bersani’s “Is the Rectum a Grave?”, which makes me yearn for thinkers like Bersani. Obstinately Freudian and only interested in ‘gay men’ he might be, but at least he never wanted to assimilate. Not even deep down. He just wanted to be taken apart.

I feel particularly gleeful about Halley’s reading of Jay Prosser’s conflicted relationship to Butler — “an oedipally murderous prodigal son who wants his father to approve the prodigal’s depredations at the homestead.” Ouch, Jay. She just said your book was all about daddy issues. (With a daddy like Butler, no wonder you got issues, boyfriend.) Actually, this has got to be the most incisive and perceptive reading of Second Skins I’ve encountered. Halley neither bows to Prosser’s demand that we read his interpretation of the transsexual body as the only one available, or tries to water down the more useful claim that trans politics cannot collapse its deeply conflicting claims into one united community.

I’m not sure if it was reading Spilt Decisions that fired me up, or because I stopped working on the most boring chapter in the history of theses and got cracking with a paper on Paper Dolls, but I’ve been working very hard this last week. I’ve also been experimenting with filing notes, full-text articles and writing drafts in Keynote, this tree-structured note manager. It’s fully searchable, which is a huge improvement on the strange collection of word documents I’ve collected in my phd folder that all seem to called ‘plan.doc’ or ‘thoughts.doc’. I’m now wishing I could combine EndNote, Keynote and a note manager that read pdf’s and multimedia files, so all my references, articles, random notes and chapter drafts could be accessible in the same interface. If anyone knows of such multi-tasking software, I’d be very interested in finding out more.

*Memo for November: buy a freakin’ filing cabinet.