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.

Eduardo Cadava is visiting Melbourne and doing workshops at Melbourne University next week. Apparently everyone is welcome to attend, even non-postgraduate students and those who haven’t submitted an application:

Eduardo Cadava Graduate Seminars 2008

Seminar 1 – Monday, March 10, 2008 5-7 pm
Location: JT Reid Room (Elizabeth Murdoch Building, 234 St Kilda Rd)
Nadar

Seminar 2 – Tuesday, March 11, 2008 5-7 pm
Location: CFI Seminar Room (Arts Hub, Level 2, 234 St Kilda Rd)
The Poetry of Photography

Seminar 3 – Friday, March 14 2008, 5-7 pm
Location: T Reid Room (Elizabeth Murdoch Building, 234 St Kilda Rd)
Photography and Reproduction: Walter Benjamin

2008 Eduardo Cadava Public Lecture

Thursday, March 13, 2008 5-7 pm
Location: Federation Hall, Victorian College of the Arts
PALM READING:
FAZAL SHEIKH’S HANDBOOK OF DEATH

Wednesday I’ll be back in Melbourne town. Probably I’ll already miss the hum of the air-conditioner and the goldish fug of Bangkok smog, even as I cough up the residues of said smog all next week. I’m certain to miss the smells and the tastes of this place, particularly som tum on demand, menthol inhalers, cooling powder and sweet-sweet-sweet iced coffee. Also, I will miss people. Especially B. — we’ve been working together a lot, but we’ve also become great friends. She says all her friends leave Bangkok, and I hate to reinforce a stereotype. But I guess, after all, that this means I’ll be back sooner rather than later.

Anyhow, I’m going home to a huge week. Even apart from how first of all there’s an airport reunion to be had with an enchanting giver of Wizz Fizz, who has been missed like crazy. This would be huge and exciting enough on its own. But wait, there’s (a lot) more. On Saturday, Midsumma fun begins with Transdestinations. Transdestinations is the first ever trans-dedicated symposium in Melbourne.

This is the rough schedule:

• Gendermash on Saturday night, including performances by… Actually, the website doesn’t say who’s performing, but I can tell you that I am! I’m planning to read some porno stuff I’ve been working on specially over the ‘holidays’. (Also, Gendermash is hosted by the great PJ Fotiades, which is reason enough to attend even if you don’t like the sound of porn.)
• There’s an all day talkfest on Sunday, with loads and loads of amazing people, including visitors from interstate like Norrie May-Welby, and Julie Peters, and other denizens of awesomeness.
• Upstart Alley on Sunday night — featuring my favourite Aotearoan boys Tom Erge and Jack Byrne, plus Husny from Australian Idol. No I’m not kidding, he’s really going to perform! It’s gonna rock.

But the fun doesn’t end on Sunday, because Monday is the Big Day Out, and we’re seeing Bjork AND Dizzee Rascal AND the Arcade Fire AND LCD Soundsystem and possibly Billy Bragg or Spoon and finally, most unexpectedly, DR OCTAGON…. I never dreamed I would see Kool Keith perform as Dr Octagon live, it’s making me wheezy with excitement as I type this. Then on Tuesday, if I’m still alive, the Arcade Fire solo show. And then Thursday there’s some other spoken word thing I’m reading at, also featuring Ed Burger who I remember from distant Fitzroy spoken word days. Hopefully I won’t be dead from thrill overdose by then.

Oh me oh my
I think it’s been an eternity
You’d be surprised
At my degree of uncertainty
How can moments go so slow
Several times
I’ve seen the evening slide away
Watching the signs
Taking over from the fading day
Perhaps my brains are old and scrambled.

It’s been far too long. The heat and noise of the city shuts off thought, reflection, philosophical meandering, and even when I shut the windows and doors, there’s the air-conditioner cranking, or when I turn it off, next-door’s air-conditioner, which is just as loud. Bangkok renders thinking about carbon footprints and decreasing individual pollution an exercise in liberal, cool-clime futility. Everyone wants air-conditioning, hell yeah, it’s fucking hot. Why would you walk anywhere in the heat when you could take a taxi, or a scooter — at least on a scooter there’s a breeze.

Parts of Bangkok are resolutely capitalist, at least on the surface. But I’m learning something about the history of the left here. At a session on Thai academia and activism at the Thai Studies conference last week, someone began to talk about the history of marxist women’s groups in Thailand, and their relationship to liberalism. Apparently when the Thai government granted women suffrage in 1932, a marxist group called Ying Thai (Thai women) rejected it as a bourgeois recuperation of women’s political energy. Awesome!

Political history seems to reside, in the present, mainly in the form of hauntology — sometimes literally. At Thammasat University there’s an elevator painted red, to commemorate how student protesters were shot in it, many years ago. The lift is apparently haunted; one can hear voices, and sometimes it goes up and down of its own accord. But the ghosts aren’t always the dead kind. Last week, also, was the First Annual Thai Sexuaity Studies conference, organised primarily by feminist academics, held at the Royal Hotel near Thammasat University. At a dinner the weekend before the conference, someone was talking in Thai about how after the death of Princess Galyani, all the ghosts were kicked out of the Royal. Someone else translated this, and explained, “At the May massacre in 1992, the Royal was being used as a medical centre. When the troops started shooting, everyone crammed in there and people were crushed. So there are supposedly ghosts at the Royal.” The first speaker intervened, and corrected my translator. In fact, ‘ghost’ is slang for ‘rent boy’. What actually happened was that the rent boys who cruise outside were ‘relocated’, so that proper royal mourning could be observed.

This brings us to the present, and scary figures. Last year’s HIV rate amongst men having sex with men was estimated to be around 32% — although there’s some dispute about the figures, given that most random sampling is done at beats, saunas and bars. Scary.

Before I started this blog, I used to have a blog called ‘theorybitch’, mainly written for friends, in which I was pretty up-front about personal goings-on, queer drama. Back then, blogs were new, Blogger was a ’self-publishing revolution’, and pseudonymity hadn’t quite cracked itself open as utterly mythical. This blog, I intended, was not about creating an intimacy with the readers, my friends; it was about finding connections with other theory nerds, other people on the same wave-length politically — I would develop a written persona divorced from the ongoing conditions of my private life.

But blogging slips towards an inchoate, weirdly intense intimacy even when you don’t intend it to. Reading back over the archives of this machine, I’m surprised at how much I let slip through, but also how that intimate voice is impossible to separate from the more ‘intellectual’, rhetorical, theoretical writing. I’m still very proud of that weird essay I wrote for the Spivak blogweave. Not because I think it made important contributions, but because it was a performance, an ironic, baroque response to the banal, distanciated academic tone of some of what passed for “debate” in that dialogue, where the so-called theoretical discussion of Spivak’s work was so separated from the political conditions of life, writing, gender, bodies. And of course, in the intervening months, that small constellation of dialogue has crumbled into the ether; I don’t even read Long Sunday anymore. (Maybe that’s a good thing: dissolution is always preferable to hauntology.)

Tongue-tied: that’s a good way to describe my state in relation to blogging these last months. If the writing of this blog became, at certain points, an even more intimate practice than I’d ever intended it to be, over the last year I’ve been consciously toning it down, removing myself, posting less. The flow of thesis writing has largely stopped, too. While I’ve been uber-anxious about having thesis block, I haven’t worried so much about the blog. But it seems like the two are connected, and that having a personal, intimate voice in which to think theory out loud facilitates its degradation/development into ‘proper writing’.

I’ve been reading less, too. Perhaps that’s part of the trouble. Writing can’t happen without reading. But at a certain point I realised I didn’t know who else to read. Writing and reading for a PhD is all about repetition; it’s about demonstrating one’s citational acumen, one’s expositional skills. When I had just returned to study, I really enjoyed the process of stringing together citations in the weave of the text: this obscure Foucault article, this obscure commentary, this even more obscure response to the obscure commentary. Shoehorning a 200 word footnote on “Towards A Gay Communism” into my Honours thesis just because I could. Treating it like a game. At some point last year, I realised I didn’t have any new books to want to insert, couldn’t bring myself to love that weaving process anymore. I didn’t ever want to quote Foucault again. Maybe I just read way too much bad writing and stopped rereading the good stuff. Or maybe I stopped reading for the joy of it and started reading as a task, a list of tick-boxes; maybe two and a half years of the same content over and over eventually grinds you down.

I haven’t posted much about my daily life for the last year, either. There are various reasons for this. Without going into detail, it seems impossible to read or write without the effects of sociality, intersubjectivity, the mediations of daily life and relationships intruding and/or inspiring, setting you off on one trajectory, closing off others. Since trying to filter out that dimension of the process only resulted in my inability to write, this post is an attempt to trace the symptomatology of that blockage.

I am writing thesis again, not as much as I’d like, and the plan of actually publishing something I’ve written has been subtended, of late. But in the spaces where I’m not a thesis machine, I’m living. Eating, dancing, swimming, talking, dressing up, dressing down. I’m revelling in the aleatory, discovering all kinds of new and half-forgotten pleasures, the beautiful randomness of the world and its unexpected gifts.

In short: I’m back. (Again.) Maybe back to posting personal stuff again, given time.

At Recording Surface (back posting again!), Eric uses a Yo La Tengo lyric to prise apart the propertarian nature of intimate knowledge:

The get in the title of Yo La Tengo’s “Sometimes I Don’t Get You” should be taken in its double sense, as understand and as possess. The two are really inseparable. Complete understanding is an attempt to possess, just as possession requires a high degree of understanding. Under the rule of capital, the axiom of interpersonal relationships demands that the flows between intimates represent the totality of possible flows. Nothing should escape and nothing should stay a mystery. If some bit of history or a feeling remains a secret, if it is not shared or revealed, that is an infidelity. It is in fact the definition of unfaithfulness. Secrets are always dirty little secrets. In the Yo La Tengo song, the feeling of not understanding the other is also the sense of losing possession of the other and the discovery of something new only induces crisis:

Sometimes I don’t know you, it’s like we never met
The way it seems to me is that you’re having regrets
Am I clinging to something that’s past?
That was never intended to last?

Lately, fiction-wise, I’ve been reading a lot of Ursula Le Guin. I’ve been working back through the canon, from Voices and The Telling to The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. While the former feels as if it should resonate, in its experimentation with writing a differently gendered world through an interlocutor whose universe is distinctly binary gendered, The Dispossessed continues to fold me back into a consideration of its philosophical undertaking. It’s still the best fictional example I can remember of an attempt to think outside capital. But Le Guin attempts something more ambitious, as well: to critique the subjectivity of capital itself from a place entirely other. (more…)

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.

The man’s age doesn’t matter. He can be very old or very young. The important thing is that he doesn’t know where he is, and wants to go somewhere. That’s why he always catches a moving train, the way they do in American Westerns. Without knowing where he comes from (origin) or where he’s going (goal). And he gets off somewhere along the way, in a four-horse town with a ridiculous railway station in the middle of it.

Saloon, beer, whiskey. ‘Where d’ya hail from, bud?’ ‘From a long ways off.’ ‘Where ya headed?’ ‘Dunno!’ ‘Might have some work for ya.’ ‘Okay.’

And so our friend Nikos goes to work. He’s a Greek by birth who immigrated to the USA like so many others before him, and he doesn’t have a penny in his pockets. He works hard, and, a year later, marries the prettiest girl in town. He scrapes together a little stake and buys the first cattle in his herd. Thanks to his intelligence and knack for picking out young livestock (horses, cattle) he ends up with the best bunch of animals around — after ten years of hard work.

The best bunch of animals = the best bunch of categories and concepts. He competes with the other landowners, but peacefully. Everyone admits that he’s the best and that his categories and concepts (his herd) are the best. His reputation spreads throughout the West, and then the whole country.

From time to time, he catches the moving train in order to see, talk, listen — like Gorbachev in the streets of Moscow. Besides, one can catch the train wherever one happens to be!

More popular than anyone else, he could be elected to the White House, although he started out from nothing. But no, he’d rather travel, go out and walk the streets; that’s how one comes to understand the true philosophy, the one the people have in their heads and that is always contradictory.

This is when he reads the Hindus and Chinese (Zen), as well as Machiavelli, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Cavaillés, Canguilhem, Vuillemin, Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, and so on. Thus, without having intended to, he becomes a quasi-professional materialist philosopher — not that horror, a dialectical materialist, but an aleatory materialist.

He attains the level of classical wisdom, Spinoza’s third kind of ‘knowledge’, Nietzsche’s superman, and an understanding of the eternal return; viz, that everything is repeated and exists only through differential repetition. Now he can engage in discussions with the great idealists. He not only understands them, but also explains the reasons for their theses to them! The others sometimes come round to his views with great bitterness, but, after all,

Amicus Plato, magis amica Veritas!

–Louis Althusser, “Portrait of the Materialist Philosopher,”
from Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978-1987

Today has mostly been spent doing last minute stuff for this:

(Un)Making Queer Worlds: Transformations in Asia-Pacific Queer Cultures
Roundtable Workshop for Postgraduate and Early Career Researchers

June 22-23, 2007
Graduate Centre
University of Melbourne
Parkville, Victoria, Australia

If you’re in Melbourne and you’re interested in Asia-Pacific stuff, or queer stuff, come along. It’s free! I would particularly recommend coming to see Peter Jackson’s keynote, entitled “Capitalism, Queer Autonomy, and the Historical Production of Sex Cultural Difference.” Here’s a part of the abstract for his talk:

Simplistic, but nonetheless influential, “McWorld” accounts of cultural globalisation draw on political-economy models of imperialism that portray capitalism as a force that homogenises world cultures along Western lines. This line of thought has influenced many accounts of the global proliferation sex cultural difference, which is often portrayed as the “spread”, “borrowing”, or “imposition” of originally Western, usually American, models upon the rest of the world. In these accounts the West/America is positioned as active/dominating, while the rest of the world is positioned as passive/subordinated. Somewhat oddly, despite their political differences both conservative pro-globalisation analysts as well as anti-capitalist critics of imperialism often share this basic model, differing only in whether they value the assumed Western/American dominance of world cultures as a good or a bad thing. However, the results of Asian queer studies research seem to question both the traditional conservative and critical positions on the role of capitalism in contemporary cultural production, and to reveal both as being deeply infected with West-centric assumptions.

You can also catch papers during the day on Friday and Saturday by amazing people like Katsu and Bobby, for whom I can’t find a good link but who talks awesomely about cars, speed and gay clubbing in Manila. I am giving a paper too, on Saturday afternoon, but it’s (embarrassingly) a referenced and expanded version of the paper I did in February at Queer Asian Sites, and not the sparkly new material I’d hoped to have written by now.

I’ve been reading Warren Montag’s book on Althusser this week and wrote this huge post the other day about Althusser, blogging, getting back into blogging, all sorts of crunchy stuff, but it’s not ready yet.

At Somatechnics back in April, I was lucky enough to meet the fabulous Susan Stryker and hear her present about her latest research project, on Christine Jorgenson’s career-cum-hobby as a film maker. The project relates Jorgenson’s visions of herself behind the camera, making films, with her production of a public self as the ultimate, perfect, man-made woman. Along the way, Stryker makes some great links to the racialisation of that vision of Ultimate [Trans] Womanhood, and talks about the production of ‘transgender whiteness’. Really exciting stuff. I also met Eliza, who’s writing on trans pornography at the Uni of Amsterdam and has been making queer/trans porn with various collaborators all over the world forever. Along with Zoo, we went swimming at Coogee Beach, just as a thunderstorm was breaking overhead, in the craziest downpour. Eliza gave this quite stunning paper relating Walter Benjamin to transness, with the result that maybe we can talk about ‘gender affinity’ as a concept rather than ‘gender identity’ or ‘gender role’ or gender… binary? Affinity as in affinity groups, but also affinity as in a space permitting the micrological difference of everyone to each other. Pretty damn fun. Actually, the number of trans theorists at Somatechnics was really heartening — it’s the first time I’ve ever felt surrounded by people who were at least on a pretty similar wavelength, politically and theoretically, and I’m hoping to be enjoying conversations with them for a long time to come.

Eliza also alerted me to the awesome, AWESOME cinematic talent of Oakie Treadwell, director of Phineas Slipped and a feature called Maggots and Men. Maggots and Men is a trans/masculine re-telling of the Kronstadt sailor rebellion. Gender anarchy, alright. Phineas Slipped, a short, is about an English class in a boy’s school. As the teacher asks questions about a homoerotic novel, the boys/bois flit off into porno fantasies about Phineas and what happened when they met him.

Finally, an article by Emi Koyama from Intersex Initiative about the change from talking about ‘intersex’ to ‘disorders of sex differentiation’, covering the intersections between intersex activism, disability rights work and disability theory. I’m not sure I agree with her on some points — ie, it seems a mistake to return to a model of activism that works mainly for people who feel they embody a ‘normal’ gender, rather than taking gender apart altogether. Then again, different battles, different strategies.

PS I accidentally closed the tab I was writing this post in just now, and thought I’d lost it. Then I realised Firefox has a ‘recently closed tabs’ option in the History menu. It’s like a magic ‘restore’ spell. One more reason to convert to Firefox, folks. I also have a ‘light’ bout of pneumonia and have been mostly bedridden since Friday. Bedridden and rediscovering the internet. Wish my lungs luck with their struggle against the nasty bug.

When I started doing research on Thai gender clinics, I joined an email list for Asian transmen. I thought that maybe this would provide me with contacts of transpeople to meet with in Thailand. While this wasn’t the case, the list did give me some perspective on how many transmen have surgery in Thailand. Being on the list has also been an education in the vagaries of politics and daily life for many transmen in different urban centres around the Asia Pacific, especially in Singapore. For whatever reason, Singaporean transguys make up the majority of vocal list members.

A couple of months ago, someone on this list posted a link to a very large, ‘straight’ web forum in which a Singaporean FTM had come out, explaining about his life, being on hormones, surgery and so forth. The person who posted the link opined that this act of coming out was about attention-seeking, and that the poster was not a ‘real man’ at all, but maybe just transitioning for the attention. Some other people agreed. The discussion deepened when those against ‘public’ posts about FTMs pointed out that the costs of being found out are so high that they would prefer ordinary people to have no idea about the existence of transpeople at all.
(more…)

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.

Ika’s awesome new blog is up, reminding me that it’s high time I posted . Sydney was already two weeks ago. I wrote assiduous notes on most of the papers I attended, meaning to write a full report. But of course when I did arrive home after a slightly odd roadtrip from Sydney to Melbourne, I was too tired to write. Now I’m all distracted by other things — such as last week’s battles to save the Ungdomshuset in Copenhagen, a squatted social centre and house. The following ‘mobilisation video’ movie is propaganda in the most beautiful sense of the word:

(found via @rchive)

I’m so glad someone came up with a more useful deployment of that grand tearjerky soundtrack from A Perfect Storm.

Anyhow, Sydney. First, some photos: from the Queer Asian Sites conference and shots of South Durras, near Bateman’s Bay, which was as far along the beach as we got in our shiny silver rental car before it became clear that none of us really wanted to spend three days driving along a windy coastal road, and headed for the Hume via Canberra.

It’s funny how one can invest so much hope in the idea of ‘queer conferences’. One almost expects that things might turn out to be really queer. Instead, one finds that ‘queer’ to most academics still means ‘gay’, or to really stretch matters, ‘gay and lesbian.’ I found Queer Spaces more underwhelming than Queer Asian Sites, apart from Ika’s paper about how slash fanfiction offers a way to read textuality itself as spatial (and possibly utopic), with reference to a lovely montage of scenes from Blakes 7. The paper, and talk of utopic spaces generally, reminded me of a recent post by Steven Shaviro on Delany’s Mad Man riffing the distinction between utopic and heterotopic spaces (or ‘pornotopic’ and pornutopic’ spaces.) Is there a way to think queer sex and queer space without utopias, as already circulating in the everyday?

Possibly the worst moment at Queer Spaces happened in a session on Transy House, a trans communal house in Brooklyn mostly inhabited by transwomen, many of whom were previously homeless. The presenter had spent some time in Transy House doing fieldwork for a sociology PhD. She admitted at the start that she’d gone there expecting the transpeople in the house to all be engaged in dissolving gender binaries — which they manifestly failed to do! Her method, therefore, involved extrapolating the transpeoples’ ‘identities’ by reading the look of the house. Ie, the house was messy and there were numerous maintenance problems = transpeople are self-hating and underconfident; some of the transwomen had decorated their rooms with ultra-feminine accoutrements = they were recuperating gender norms; there was a house mother, a house dad and ’sisters’ = repeating heteronormative nuclear family dynamics, and on, and on, ad infinitum.

It didn’t seem to occur to the presenter that she would probably gag if someone told her that because she had (for example) a satin doona cover, she was recuperating binary gender norms. But things got even more weird when Elspeth Probyn, from whom you might expect more smarts, responded in question time to the photos of the house by saying, “Yeah, the house looks like it’s full of a bunch of blokes!” Right. So on one hand, the transwomen who live there are ‘too domestic’ with their frilly sheets, and on the other hand, their messines indicates that they’re really just blokes. Far too much enjoyment of passing judgment on transpeople for my comfort, there. But hey, that’s queer space for you!

(Part II to follow)

Okay, so I claim I’m on hiatus and immediately realise there are heaps of things to blog about.

1000 Tiny Sexes. (Courtesy of Ange.)

Print Fetish. Look, pretty things in print! Reviewed!

And now, a really lovely fragment from Michael Taussig’s The Magic of the State, about extrajudicial papers, bribery and crossing the borders of a semi-fictional Latin American state:

The Costaguanians would buy forged immigration papers although, truth to tell, it was not that easy to see any difference between doing that and the even more common procedure of ‘buying’ non-forged paper from State officials bribed with the ‘tarifa extraoficial‘ or peaje.

Like the official and the ‘extraofficial,’ the true and the forged were flip-sides of stately being; neither could exist without the other and this strategic confusion, together with the mystery therein, was dramatically magnified at the border diving the two republics. What do we mean by ‘dramatically magnified’? We mean a ritual, but more precisely a literalization, as if staged, of the mystique of sovereignty.

You pass your paper as into a cave at waist height through a semi-circular hole cut into a wall of dark glass. They can see you but you can’t see them. And who is looking harder? There is a thump. A primeval force has been disturbed. And it’s not so much the rule that has been broken but a matter of knowing the rule or even knowing that there is one. The presence at the other side refuses to reach six inches forward for the papers. They have to be pushed across, deep into the dark womb of official territory known only by the father, possessor of all women, swelling belly and moustache bristling.The tax! The tax! Where is the tax! it bellows. The stupendous brutishness of this desk-thwacking demand announces but one thing: the tarifa extraoficial. It seems like the state of the whole has but two discursive speeds: too much or too little. One is grand rhetoric; the other is the silence of the un-sayable, the tarifa extraoficial, the un-said that is not so much the limit of language but its presupposition, the spirit queen behind the Liberator.