Fangirl tagged me for this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m really looking forward to the release of Fatih Akin’s new film, The Edge of Heaven. Akin directed the incredible Head On (or rather, Gegen Die Wand, not to be confused with Ana Kokkinos’ film adaptation of Loaded). The Age entertainment guide did a story on Akin today, burbling ridiculously about his ‘political humanism’ and how even if he wants to make films about American pioneers colonising the Wild West (the project he’s now working on), he’ll eventually have to return to speaking about the Turkish-German ‘cultural divide he springs from’. Because apparently, according to liberal white film critics, migrants are destined always only to talk about their experiences; that’s all they’re good for….

Never mind. From the same article I learnt that Hanna Schygulla is in Edge of Heaven. Even more reason to go see it pronto. Here she is, playing a German mother hanging out with her daughter’s new girlfriend, an activist without papers fleeing Turkey:

What a lovely moment of meta-commentary on European imperialism…

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.

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…)

Last boat, stand in a river;
Muddy river, how I love her
Hawk flying is fooling his folly
Gas hurricanes spray over Heaven
Weeping willow is bawling the light
On fire.
Humans running for cover,
Wishing for life, gripping the light
House lift up, trees lift up
Cars intersect in the middle of the sky.
No time before, no pull, no gravity on the ground
Give it up–it’s over
The world’s weight is over
The limit
Our bodies are exploding
As the sky spills through our mouths.
All the blue blood is flowing
The cities, its contents have been ripped out.
The world is gone.
Did you know it would last this long?
You made it to the dark, now you’re gone.
You are gone.
Great waves
Frozen in a secret space
A great big place,
Dark-spilling universe.

Last boat, stand in the river.

(Chan Marshall and the Dirty Three, “Great Waves”, from Cinder)

Sorenson has been talking about this song on her blog already, and now I’ve got it on a mix cd courtesy of nixwilliams — but it’s worth posting the lyrics here. To consider apocalypses, big and small.

Ridley Scott: I went to art school in west Hartlepool in the north of England, alongside the Durham steel mills and the Imperial Chemical Industries plant. The air smelled like toast. Toast is quite nice, but when you realize it’s steel, and it’s probably particles, it’s not very good. Crossing the footbridge at night, you’d be walking above the steel mill, crossing through the smoke, dirt, and crap, looking down into the fire. Later, I spent a little time in New York, which always seemed to be a city on overload, and Hong Kong at the time it was wonderfully medieval — pre-skyscraper, when the harbor was filled with junks. When it came to deciding whether to go Hispanic or Asian for what seems to be the majority culture on the streets in San Angeles, I opted for Asian. And I felt I knew what it would be like to ride in a spinner. In the years when I was doing a lot of TV commercials, once a month I’d fly into New York. I’d get off the plane at JFK and take a helicopter, which cost $20, to the top of the Pan American building. Winter or summer, high wind or balmy evening — it was hairy. I did that for almost two years. Then, one stormy winter evening, a chopper nearly missed the top of the building because of the wind gusts. It perched perilously on the edge, and they nearly lost it. And that was the end of that. There were no more helicopters; they just closed them down. But I always remembered that.

Ridley Scott is about to release his final cut of Bladerunner.

(via nulldevice)

Todd Haynes made a movie about Bob Dylan. Here is a clip from the movie. And yes, that’s Cate Blanchett. Right there.

Reading:

• Wildly Parenthetical.
• Slaves of Academe on interracial marriage and miscegenation politics.
• Kpunk and Poetix on Lee Edelman, a crossover of theoretical fields (queer theory-freud vs high-philosophy mondopostlacanian-badiouism) that has resulted in some unintentionally amusing claims. Like, ‘the queer event’, assuming there was only ever one and we can know it: Stonewall, or Freud? People are seriously debating this.

  On the other hand, Kpunk’s musings on Rebecca are serendipitous (as well as interesting), as I’ve been rereading that novel this week, enjoying the slow build of our unnamed heroine’s desire for this hauntingly beautiful, but curiously also genderbent, object of desire: “I knew her figure now, the long slim legs, the small and narrow feet. Her shoulders, broader than mine, the strong and clever hands.” Mmm, gotta go watch the film again soon.

TV is driving me a bit crazy at the moment. I stopped watching for a few very busy weeks, and now that it’s raining and I’m at home more, I’m being re-exposed to the madness. To wit, a 4 Corners doco last night on Telstra call centre workers. Telstra has been steadily changing its labour practices over the last five years — making sales of new services a part of ordinary customer service work, instigating sales targets for ‘customer service’ workers, then increasing the sales targets to unrealistic heights, for example by 200% in 2005-6. Two Telstra workers have committed suicide in the past year, both suffering from depression due to work-related stress.

What was striking about the stories of these two people is that they were both so-called ‘high achievers’ at Telstra, and both became disillusioned, and finally suicidally depressed, after having apparently believed in the dream. It appears that if you have the resources to create an emotional boundary between yourself and the workplace, you can survive inevitable harassment much more easily than if you identify with your job, and the company you work for. Anyhow, it sounds like a scary place to work, Telstra. The team leaders go on training camps where they are taught to group trouble-makers into three distinct behavioural patterns: dragons, the people that actually oppose the smooth distribution of team efficiency and/or obedience, like union reps; submarines, who pose an obstacle to increased sales by ‘flying under the radar’, ie underperforming just enough not to attract attention; and savages, those recalcitrant types who don’t give a rat’s arse.

We can all go away now and work out our own individual under-performing personality type. I would totally be a submarine. In a moment of supreme pop-politics geekdom, A. pointed out astutely that all the talk of ‘flying under the radar’ on Big Brother actually references this corporate lexicon. We spent hours a few weeks ago watching Sunday night nomination while waiting for Ugly Betty to start, trying to figure out what it meant when one of the housemates nominated someone for eviction for ‘flying under the radar’. It’s like the worst Big Brother sin; every eviction, at least three or four people are nominated for it. So, mystery solved: housemates accused of ‘flying under the radar’ are not meeting their corporate duty to perform, as housemates, in the workplace that is the Big Brother house. That is, according to their peers, and/or self-appointed team leaders. Weird.

(The existence of Big Brother is enough in itself to make me want to break the television, yeah. On the other hand, Big Love Season Two just started. Who could refuse the mixed pleasure of re-acquainting oneself with Bill, the hick polygamist with a heart of gold, and his three ambivalent wives? Not forgetting Wanda the AWESOME serial poisoner.)

Sometimes you get so angry you just have to imitate David Byrne’s lamp dance.

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.

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.”

Un Chant d’Amour (1950), Genet’s only film, from UBUweb.

You could say that it’s a pornographic film, and it is. But if it was only that, you would be discounting how it’s also a film about the grief of lost love, not only sex. Genet lovingly and ruthlessly catalogues the multiple surfaces that one comes to substitute for the feel of another person’s skin/mouth/cock: the wall, a tattoo, a cigarette, a straw, smoke blown through a straw. A toenail, a shoulder, a nipple, the bedclothes, one’s own hand on the back of one’s neck. A singlet. Feet. An eye pressed to a spyhole. Flowers.

Even as it doubles as a weapon of the prison, of colonialism, the gun also expresses desire and loss. Despite its violence, the gun is an instrument of corporeality. It only becomes useful when the panopticon is too alienating even for those who claim the privilege of surveillance. This is why Genet is ruthless: he refuses to compartmentalise ‘violence’ and ‘love’, ‘good desire’ and ‘bad desire’. It’s all about need. And that’s why the film makes you (me) cry. Just a little.

If anyone wants to get me a Christmas present, you really couldn’t go wrong with this. Edited by Mattilda (Matt Bernstein Sycamore), with contributions from the excellent Dean Spade, film-maker and sex advice columnist Amy Andre, Irina Contreras, Benjamin Shepard, Kirk Read and various other beautiful writers.

And speaking of not passing, the editor of Nobody Passes, Mattilda has a gorgeous new blog right here. Go read.

And photos from the Tranny Awards are up on my flickr site. What a lovely and tiring day it’s been.

The other day I had coffee with a friend, and a friend of his who recently finished Honours in Cinema Studies at our [growing] esteemed institution. Cinema Studies has been rocked by controversy lately, and it’s all the fault of Jean Seberg. Apparently, some of this year’s first year Cinema Studies students were shocked at finding a picture of two men in a romantic embrace on the cover of the Cinema Studies 101 photocopied reader. They continued to be offended until it was pointed out that the ‘two men’ were actually Jean-Laul Belmondo and Jean Seberg, from A Bout de Souffle, and that what they’d been reading as homosexuality was, in fact, heterosexual love between a man and a 60’s androgynous gamine.

To be sure, Jean does look pretty boyish. Boyish enough, I think, for some queer Godard fan of yore to deliberately read her in key moments as male, turning Breathless into a story about a boy failing spectacularly to find a Daddy. You would have to explain the pregnancy somehow, but it could be done.

Anyhow, what-philistines-isn’t-that-that-hilarious! Not so much, it turns out. Some of the students were so offended that they complained to the Vice-Chancellor. So the VC had words with the Cinema Studies department, and as a result, Jean and Jean Paul were removed from the reader cover, along with the week on pornography in cinema. It looks like A Bout de Souffle itself only just managed to escape being pulled off the syllabus completely. (more…)

Check out Bordersphere. Among other things, there’s an essay by Yugi Agematsu about being arrested on Roosevelt Island; audio of one of my favourite writers, Lynne Tillman, reading from her work and William Haver talking about “Public Enemies”.

One of the Tillman stories is especially great. At a party dressed in her dead father’s suit, she meets Clint Eastwood and they talk about masculinity, the western and other stuff. She has such a beautiful reading voice.