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.

Back in thesis mode, I’m once again tied up in crazy [massively self-absorbed] theoretical knots. For the fourth time this year, I’ve lost a sense of how my chapters work, as a logical progression through particular theoretical sites. Sometimes I know exactly how it all works, but it’s a really blink and you miss it enterprise: like one of those 3D pictures. There really is no logic, actually, just a cosmetic one that looks okay in thesis plans but comes apart when I try to write it out in those required linking sentences that end up about a paragraph long. “While in Chapter Two, I argued [insert long, grammatically suspect clause], in Chapter Three I shift registers to [insert another, longer, more grammatically suspect clause].” Hysterical.

Structure, discipline, thought order… All the things I mark my first-years down for in their teensy 1500 word essays, I fail monstrously at.

I think too much. I have too many ideas, and they all shoot off into the outer atmosphere right away. It’s like when I tell people what my thesis is about, and if they’re nice they generally say, “Wow, that’s so interesting, yeah, wow,” and tell me how they’ve heard that Singapore is the gender reassignment capital of the world or whatever, random contributions to the archive of trans travel practices. This archive is busting at the seams, it’s so huge, and I have decided for some insane reason that I should be the person to file it all under headings. I’m mostly interested in the crazy stories, the tiny details, the archive; not so interested in contextualising it all, making sense of it, fitting everything in boxes. But this is what a thesis does. Or so I’ve heard. It’s like P. said, after hearing one of my ‘o-hai-here’s-a-crazy-idea-i’m-still-working-on-the-theory’ papers earlier in the year: “So exciting! Or it will be, when you tie it all down.” And the bitch is, I know this monster won’t be readable or coherent unless I do that grounding work.

It’s hard to tie down. Maybe I should just throw the whole thing out and start again.

I am sad. I tried to install Google Toolbar and it broke Firefox. (Yes, stupid! Lazy! Any self-respecting geek would have designed a customised search engine toolbar instead of relying on the packet mix.) Does anyone know where to find the actual files Google Toolbar uses, to delete them, on a WinXP machine? Or does anyone know a shortcut to open Firefox in ’safe’ mode, disabling extensions? Google is, of course, no help. (Edit: done! One can, indeed, restart Firefox in safe mode. Really easily.) Meanwhile I’m discovering the weirdness that is IE 7.0. Looked like they finally discovered tabbed browsing! Hilarious.

I’ve been writing about methodology tonight; a summary of some Foucauldian strategies like geneaology and ‘histories of the present’, which, although I’m familiar with them (or perhaps because I’m familiar with them) I need to piece together again. Which brings me back to the beautifully blunt familiarity of Rabinow and Dreyfus’ Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics:

In Discipline and Punish, Foucault says, “I would like to write the history of the prison with all the political investments of the body it gathers together in its closed architecture. Why? Simply because I am interested in the past? No, if one means by that writing a history of the past in terms of the present. Yes, if one means writing the history of the present.”

This approach explicitly and self-reflectively begins with a diagnosis of the current situation. There is an unequivocal and unabashed contemporary orientation. The historian locates the acute manifestations of a particular “meticulous ritual of power” or “political technology of the body” to see where it arose, took shape, gained importance, and so on…. [T]he genealogist, having destroyed the project of writing a ‘true’ history of the past, has no recourse to its comforts. The correspondence theory of reality is dead. The search for finalities should be over.

On Friday afternoon I’m giving a little talk about trans masculinity, sex and refusing lack at a symposium called King Power: Designing Masculinities at RMIT. It’s on at 4pm, in the Storey Hall Seminar Rooms. King Power is on in conjunction with a range of bizarre events celebrating Elvis. It should be kind of fun.

I found out today that I have two chapters and my thesis intro due on 6 September. Somehow I managed to lose the paperwork telling me this back in March. Quick calculations: if I write 500 words per day, 5 days a week (and those solid finished draft words, not write-and-throw-out words) I can submit the package only two weeks late, on September 21.

Back in full-blown thesis mode. In an effort at treating this blog like the laboratory it was once intended as, I’m going to explore some ideas here. Feedback and questions are welcome, as always.

At the meeting to confirm my candidature a year ago, one of my supervisors suggested I dig deeper into historiography in answering the question of how (I think) discourses of travel are central to the emergence of practices of transsexuality. At that stage — at the initial stage of rejecting transhistorical narratives that place transsexuals in every era and locale — it seemed fairly obvious that transsexuality was a specifically ‘modern’ thing. The particular technologies that enabled hormonal and surgical transition were only just developing in the early 20th century; they didn’t become legitimate medical practices until the 1960’s. And it was only at the beginning of the 1920’s that European sexologists split off same-sex object choice from cross-gender identification, arguing that just as there could be homosexuals who did not present as inverts, there could also be ‘transvestic’ persons who were not to be categorised in the same class as homosexuals. Hirschfeld locates what he refers to once as Transsexualismus on a continuum with homosexuality, but argues it’s a fundamentally different order of identification/desire to homosexuality. This is part of what enables ‘transsexuality’ to emerge as its own sexological category, with its own set of diagnostic procedures and (at that time, extremely speculative) treatments. (more…)

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.

I’ve been writing like crazy this week, sleeping far less than adequate hours, feeling alternately groggy and work-drenched. Kim Beazley is an ass. (A. tells me that I should write, ‘arse’, but that word is way too good for him.) This week I found that people in Argentina, South Africa, and the UK (not to mention Australian and the US) are writing about trans citizenship. I’ve got this crazy idea to put on some kind of trans citizenship symposium a la Long Sunday, sometime in the future.

Also Battlestar Galactica is screening on US television in less than a month — squee — and I’m about to turn 31 20.

[Edit: chest pic link taken down, after unwanted interaction with creepy person.]

I’m wading through the statistics gleaned from the survey on trans travel I ran earlier in the year. Aside from doing a crash course in how to get what I need from Excel, I’m finding some interesting stats in there amongst the more immediately arresting answers to open-ended questions, like “Why is it necessary for you to travel in relation to gender identity?” It feels odd, sort of Enlightenment social science-y, to have this package of ‘data’ that can be caused to ‘reveal’ information. Except that with 300 participants, this is a tiny sample, and even then, I wouldn’t want to regard it as proper social ’science’. Plus, a surprisingly large number of people either got bored and didn’t finish the survey, or just didn’t feel like telling me the gender they’d been assigned at birth. Which is kinda great, actually. I would be disappointed if it was possible to neatly categorise everyone’s answers according to a binary system that I don’t actually believe in.

Anyhow, on to my ‘findings’… Tonight, pace issues with binary gender, I compared gender assigned at birth with limitations on travel, and in particular, financial limitations. Financial hardship is one of the biggest themes of the survey, in fact: about three quaters of the participants said their financial status would have an affect on their ability to be mobile. I was wondering whether there would be a skew towards male-id’d folks or female-id’d folks in this question, and there was: more of those who said they’d been assigned male at birth (70%) felt their economic status affected their ability to be mobile than those assigned female at birth (50%). Crazy, huh.

At some point in the next three months I plan on releasing some findings, statistical and qualitative. This will be independent of the thesis (which doesn’t use stats much — I’m more focusing on profiles of participants and their experiences.) Anyhow, I have a mailing list, so if anyone’s interested in reading the results, leave a comment here or email me.