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.)

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.

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…)

But just as we might garner courage to reinvent a new world and live new fictions — what a sociology that would be! — so a devouring force comes at us from another direction, seducing us by playing on our yearning for the true real. Would that it would, would that it could, come clean, this true real. I so badly want that wink of recognition, that complicity with the nature of nature. But the more I want it, the more I realise it’s not for me. Not for you either…. which leaves us in this silly and often desperate place wanting the impossible so badly that while we believe it’s our rightful destiny and so act as accomplices of the real, we also know in our hearts that the way we picture and talk is bound to a dense set of representational gimmicks which, to coin a phrase, have but an arbitrary relation to the slippery referent easing its way out of graspable sight.

Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity

Riki alerted me to to this excellent article by Dan Irving, “Normalized Transgressions: Legitimizing the Transsexual Body as Productive,” in the Queer Futures edition of the Radical History Review. He quotes a line I’m proud of writing. But better, he takes a beautifully hard line about trans studies’ almost complete ignorance of gender variance as a form of consumption/production that is entirely very enmeshed within capitalist relations:

Scholars within trans studies rarely contextualize trans identities, subjectivities, and activism within historical and contemporary capitalist relations. Much scholarship seeks to save trans identities from invisibility, as well as to counter the ongoing reproduction of the heteronormative binary of sex/gender through detailed analyses of the vast array of existing trans identities. There is a tendency within this commentary to reify trans identities as solely matters of sex/gender and to challenge state and institutional dominance over trans people by emphasizing the necessity of self-determination of sex/gender. Such advocacy of self-determination is often coupled with arguments for human rights protections. Progressive scholars must question the theoretical and political implications of putting forward individualistic strategies of sex/gender self-determination, especially within the contemporary neoliberal context, where the minimalist state and a free-market economy demand individual self-sufficiency. While some texts address the impacts of capitalist socioeconomic relations on trans people’s lives, a critical analysis of the exploitative labor relations that comprise the logic of capital remains lacking.

Yes! Yes! Yes! Where is this Dan Irving, we must converse.

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.

Some days the Internet is boring, and you skim through the RSS feeds with cursory attention. You know all these people, you already know how their new posts will read. More of the same. On other days you find yourself making beautiful discoveries at random, and whiling away hours. Here are two recent discoveries:

End Times, explorations on music and life out of Dorset, with a really lovely post about Roxy Music’s “Virginia Plain” as seen on Top of the Pops. (Via the also excellent and complex fangirl.)

Lauren Berlant’s blog, Supervalent Thought. As always, incredible.

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…)

Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy 1949-1975

I was just doing a quick search for bibliographic details of Origins of Totalitarianism and found this. Conversations between two incredible twentieth century lady communists. I wonder if they gossipped much; my guess is often, with arch subtlety. (At least, McCarthy would have done arch subtlety. Who knows about Arendt.)

I guess you don’t have to be a fly on a wall to read a book of letters…

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.

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

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.