One of the beautiful things about being post-phd is that it doesn’t matter how many times you listen to “Buffalo Stance” and dance around the house. It doesn’t matter how long you want to read about student occupations in Zagreb or New York (via @rchive). Words won’t “suffer”, they’re no longer holding you hostage. And as much as I liked this other occupation of my time and affect and brain power (”brain power”! said brain is still evidently mush) it’s rather delicious to be free. Even less than two days in.

Next stop: that third world country I’ve taken a shine to, the US of A. Tennessee in mid-June, for a Dollywood pilgrimage and Idapalooza Fruit Jam, after which San Francisco for six weeks of summer. Then in August I’ll be driving across the southwest and up into the midwest: specifically Bloomington, Indiana. Where I’m going to be living for the next two years, apparently. Because the postdoc gods were smiling on me.

Since I’m still pretty exhausted and have precisely 12 days before leaving Australia for the foreseeable, this post is another promise of future content. There’s furniture to sell, books to pack, clothes to throw away, farewells to be made. But I want to keep this blog going. Or, more to the point, I’ve been thinking about how to blog, nowadays. A lot of my communicative output on the nets has been channelled into Facebook or other more “bite-size” media like Twitter lately. I find the latter especially frustrating: you can’t even begin to say anything in 140 characters. By comparison it seems like a luxury to think of writing blog posts, short essays that might even contain a thought rather than, like, an eighth of one. So. When there’s time. And maybe even when there’s not.

I’m still alive. Truly! The last three months have been whirlwind. I finished a draft of my thesis in January. Then I took off to San Francisco for six weeks to see loved ones and friends and somewhere in there made it across to the other coast for Lavender Languages. The trip was also to test the waters a little about opportunities in the US for post-PhD life. Nowhere has ever quite felt so much like a cultural home as San Francisco, and I’m having a hard time missing it now I’m back.

At any rate, post-PhD. In the belly of the beast. I know exactly what I want — to keep working, writing, thinking — and an idea of where I might do that, maybe. Or how. But it’s fascinating to learn how to negotiate a whole new academic labour market (not that my knowledge of the Australian one is really so extensive, more spectatorial.) I’ve re-written my CV a few times and am working on a “statement of teaching philosophy”, etc. The latter especially is pretty odd. Well, the cultural disjuncture is odd. My dear friend S. likens the standard Australian teaching philosophy to this pithy sentence: “I try not to turn up to class grumpy and I don’t drink too much when I’m marking essays.” Whereas those I’ve read, American style, take it seriously, or rather one must perform an earnest interest in pedagogy — and why bother to perform that earnestness when maybe you could actually teach better if the philosophy framing your work were on paper?

Anyhow. I have a thesis submission date. And the feedback on my work so far is that it needs some minor revisions, a very little restructuring, footnotes all formatted correctly and a conclusion. So if nothing goes wrong between now and then, I will hand in on May 10. And by June I’ll be back in the US for their summer, having a real and actual “proper holiday” with roadtrips, adventures in the South and gay Christmas. In the meantime I have three part-time jobs and two article deadlines to meet. Working working working. Probably not much time for blogging. But I feel the space in my head opening up to blog again…

Maybe about this: an ad for an Argentinian bank. In it, a bank’s “acceptance” of a transwomen client helps others around her become more accepting. A lot of people are apparently thrilled at it. I’m really not so sure. Capitalism and rather cliched tolerance discourse, all in one neat package. Ugh.

I’m still alive. I’m just buried in thesis writing hell. And freaking out about the future of my life/career/life after thesis/anything else I can think of to freak out about. Also procrastinating by reading US election commentary, which has become far less entertaining than it was a few weeks ago. And, oddly, working on a really amazing collaborative writing project so writing a lot of fiction — which I seem to need to do more in proportion to how much thesis I churn out each week.

I’m not feeling inspired about blogging at the moment. But I’ll come back at some point. Maybe I’ll do a redesign; maybe that will get me motivated to blog again. Til then, adieu and thanks for reading.

Lately I have been reading The Post Card and having discussions offblog with Carol (whose book is coming out very soon now) about schisms between Foucault and Derrida, and the tendency to fold both back into a generalised ‘post structuralist’ hermeneutic that erases difference: both the crudely empiricist reading of their methodological difference as one separating signification (language) and discourse (which can be more easily recruited into talk of acts, reality) where Foucault gets marginally more brownie points; or the more complex reading of the argument about whether it was essential to return to a consideration of metaphysics and the violence at the heart of all language, rather than ‘merely’ relying on genealogical or historical question of how.

Rewriting my thesis introduction (which doesn’t quote Derrida once, at yet) I realise that all the way along, I have been pretending to be a total Foucauldian/marxian/anticolonialist/feminist. When in fact, the whole thing begins as a problematic of language, the impossibility of language, the violence of not being able to think transness in many other frames than geographical traversal. Which is a Derridean problem. Even as what I’m doing shoots off straight away into genealogical method and critique of political economy and so on.

Who can say why I’ve been ignoring Derrida until now? Maybe it’s because for a long time I have only read Derrida for pleasure. For quoting in letters. For play. But perhaps this is the point. Eli Clare, who (just like Jacques) refuses to step on one side of the line between play and work, poetry and theory, brought me back to an awareness of this — and even more, an awareness of the specificity of language’s violence as it adheres to gender variant bodies:

In English there are no good words, no easy words. All the language we have created—transgender, transsexual, drag queen, drag king, stone butch, high femme, nellie, fairy, bulldyke, he-she, FTM, MTF—places us in relationship to masculine or feminine, between the two, combining the two, moving from one to the other. I’m hungry for an image to describe my gendered self, something more than the shadowland of neither man nor woman, more than a suspension bridge tethered between negatives. (“Gawking, Gaping, Staring,” GLQ: Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 9: 1-2, 2003: 260.)

I have gotten into a bad writing habit where if the work I have to do is below a certain size (say 3000 words, or more of revision/rewriting) I’ll slack off until the last day I can possibly submit it. Then I write the whole thing in one 12 hour sitting. Which is how I have come to be wide awake at 6am. But the paper is finished, and apart from presenting it on Friday, I won’t have to think about it for a while. I also had quite a lovely weekend. Yesterday, big Footscray mission with S., including pho, op-shopping, and Asian grocery shopping. I came away with: a full belly; a cream silk ascot; a lemon-coloured shirt with French cuffs; a tan-and-brown scarf which will do as a neckerchief; a verrrrry cute red-and-blue neckerchief, which I can’t seem to take off from around my neck; and last but not least a black, red pin-striped blazer which will do as a spruced-up conference outfit with the shirt and one of the scarves. Oh and a really skinny, shimmery, deep blue tie. And that was just the clothes. Then there were the two shopping-bags full of frozen Chinese buns, and special home-made Shanghai dumplings from the bakery. I ate them this morning as a hangover breakfast. Because that’s right, even with three months to go until I submit my draft, I’m still going to parties. And dancing.

This week is shaping up pretty steep in terms of time management. Lauren Berlant’s in town… There’s a conference on Embodied Globalisations on Thursday and Friday…. And tomorrow I am seeing a dentist for the first time in three years. Ouch. (This post has been brought to you by the vague feeling of guilt I get every time I think about my blog, and not updating it.)

Okay, here’s a teaser, from one of my more ‘ethnographic’ chapters:

During a process that involves considerable prolonged experience of pain, the practice of care above all demands attention to a patient’s comfort. To offer comfort, of course, is distinct from the state of being ‘comfortable’: one does not guarantee the other. Neither is comfort merely a state that pertains to the corporeal—pillows, climate control, relief of hunger or thirst. It registers an affective disposition, and so does its antonym, discomfort. As those familiar with the previous Australian Prime Minister John Howard’s fantasy of [white] national subjects feeling “relaxed and comfortable” might recall, comfort may also settle on its intended bearers with more or less success according to the vicissitudes of racialisation. “If whiteness allows bodies to move with comfort through space,” Sara Ahmed writes, (more…)

The other day I wrote a Sticky note with a list of people whose reading eye I want to keep in mind while I’m finishing my thesis. Only a couple of these people will read the thesis, this is certain. But the list includes a bunch of people with fierce intellects and diverse interests. Writing ‘for’ them, addressing them, helps me attend to what they might wish I performed rigorously, the questions and critical eye they might contribute.

This person, for instance, will want me to go for the jugular: what theoretical density can I sustain, how can I push a line of argument further, how can I shock myself out of wishy-washy cult stud gestures? This other person will be attending to what he talks about as “having enough death” — acknowledging the material violences of inequality, the bodies that are regarded as disposable and whose deaths don’t ‘matter’. One person will care that the words are clear and readable and beautiful, because otherwise they won’t bother reading at all. Someone will attend to philosophical complexity and how I define my theoretical frameworks. Someone else will be interested in the rigour of my critique of political economy and what I’m doing with Marx. Someone else again will want my Thai history and politics to be accurate. Someone else will attend most to my treatment of transnationality and gender/sexuality, and the postcolonial. And so on. It’s a long list.

The beautiful thing is, most of these people are friends. The political and theoretical networks I inhabit are full of people who I respect totally. I feel so grateful to have these people around. Even if they don’t actually read anything I write, in the future, imagining how they might read this work forces me to write as if it were a conversation, larger than myself. (And some of you are reading this, anyhow, which means you’re already part of the conversation.)

I am having a really great time with writing at the moment. When it flows, I know exactly how to stitch everything together. This is why people spend three or four years on the same project. One simply knows, finally, how things fit — and one knows exactly what one doesn’t know, also, and why. But I’m only at this point because of conversations that have already taken place, and because of the generosity of those who have engaged with me, here, and in other spaces.

Did I just write a draft of an acknowledgments page? I think so.

I ate dinner at the library, rode home, tried to begin work again and realised I couldn’t concentrate until I made a cake. A semolina syrup cake with orange blossom water and coconut milk, to be exact. Rather an experiment, but we shall see. (The coconut milk is in the cake, not the syrup.)

I’m working on a draft of my final thesis chapter, which is also a book chapter due very soon, and have had my head in gendered and postcolonial theorisations of affective labour all day. I’m reading some fantastic books on migration and gendered labour, such as Rhacel Parreñas’ Servants of Globalization, an ethnography of Filipino/a migrant women, most of whom do domestic work. On the other hand, Parreñas focuses on the familial and resistant practices of her informants outside of the workplace, and what I need right now is writing on gendered and racialised subjective relationships within workplaces. Never mind, it’s a great book and well worth the read.

Today in the Reserve shelves I also randomly found a really awesome critique of the political economy of Thai sex work, Thanh-Dam Truong’s Sex, Money and Morality. Truong talks a lot about women’s ‘emotional labour’ in the context of tourism. I’m not writing about sexwork, but I do draw a parallel between sexwork and the new Thai health tourism economy — this latter is a less explicity sexual economy, to be sure, but it still draws on the same repackaging of ‘traditional’ Thai femininity and requires workers to perform that traditional femininity. Truong’s marxist politics are spot-on, and it’s from 1990, predating any post-autonomist writing on affective labor. This feels like hitting the jackpot, just a little, as if the library was in a good mood and decided to give me a present. I should hang out in the library Reserve section more often.

But for now, because it’s 2.58am and I wrangled another 3000 words into place today, and tell me that’s not excuse for a little self-congratulatory calculating spree:

Thesis progress, the math version:

1. (intro) 5,500
2. 5,400
3. 7,100
4. 11,000
5. 4,000
6. 9,500
7. 6,900
8. (conclusion) 0

Total goal: 80,000
Total now: 49,400

I can so write 30,000 words between now and October 31. Moments like these, I actually believe my supervisor when she tells me I’m on track.

Here are a couple of paragraphs of what I’m working on right now. Comments please!

_________________________________________________

In this part of the chapter, I want to explore the logic behind posing, as I’ve done, a distinction between two subtly different ways of articulating resistance to gender variant patient subjectivation. On one hand, as we’ve seen, a sense of disempowerment frames the experiences of subjects who come into tension with modes of gender variant patient subjectivation in Australia, but have no other option to fall back on. On the other hand, the transwomen interviewees who obtained GRS with Thai surgeons enunciated their disposition to gender variant patient subjectivation in terms of dissatisfaction. Initially it seems obvious that of course, gender variant individuals who were able to do what they wanted were happier with the overall outcome. This is the case even given that many of the transwomen I interviewed in Thailand and Australia, intent on journeying to Thailand, were either midway through a number of surgeries and revision work, or had yet to undergo any procedures at all. (more…)

I’ve got a bunch of posts stored up to write about things that are making me very mad right now. The Bill Henson thing, for one. — Except that people have already responded in ways that do not require repetition. To wit: archive, on the way Henson’s photographs implicate the viewer in thinking about the awkward sexuality of adolescence, and comments on the spuriousness of many critics’ desire to draw an easy distinction between art and porn; and also Stop Anne Geddes, which ought to have been done a long time ago.

On the other hand, here is something else. Mal Brough, the ex Minister for Indigenous Affairs, architect of the Northern Territory Intervention into ‘child sexual abuse’ and a prospective Queensland Liberal leader, apparently, did a press interview at his house in which he and his son put on fake Aboriginal accents and mimicked/mocked “traditional” Indigenous practices, playing didgeridoos and clap sticks. Putting on the family fun for the benefit of a journalist. As Ana points out, apparently they thought they were just having a laugh. Like blackface is a joke, or the Stolen Generations was a joke, or black deaths in custody…

Apparently, in the privacy of one’s own home, it’s more than acceptable to mock people you once talked about saving. I would like to engage in some critical discussion of this, in light of how the Intervention has passed from the headlines, and now that the panic-mongers have found a new arena in which to police sexual normativity. Under K-Rudd, the Intervention continues to spread to other indigenous communities in South Australia, as Ruth McCausland’s excellent commentary in the National Indigenous Times points out. But I’m trying to finish a chapter, so it will have to wait.

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.

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.

Faculty Review Traget: 25,000 words
Current Word Count: 19,400 21,938 words
Deadline: Tuesday

Buried in work. Burying myself in thinking back to the beginnings, all of them, every beginning of every thought. At last I’ve approached the moment where I’m no longer writing preliminary notes in notebooks; I’m returning to my notebooks (8 or 9 A4 spiralbound notebooks, real notes, a correspondence, littered with doodles, diagrams, plans, plans of the same thing, often, over and over for pages) returning to my notebooks and harvesting the best lines.

To be writing again, really writing, is also to stop thinking of this upcoming deadline as a judgment. And to realise again that my reviewers will be engaging in a critical dialogue. The question is not, will this writing pass the test — will it ‘pass’ in all the negative ways that passing connotes, a surface engagement only — but how can the readers help? How can this process transform what I’ve done already?

I’m listening to Sasha and Digweed on repeat. Driving techno. I wish I was dancing with my whole body; instead I let my fingers dance. The rhythm forms a structure; words stream out to fill the gaps between the beat.