reification of gay identities
By Michael | July 5, 2008
Some interesting sites I just came across:
• via queers united, born different.org, which claims that gays are just like everyone else, except born gay. Their analogy: Norman the dog, who is just like every other dog, except he moos instead of barks. Additionally, other animals are born gay as well.
• also via queers united, g0ys.org — gUys into gUys — not gAys. From their site:
G0YS (Spelled with a ZER0) are guys who find men physically & emotionally attractive, but (for whatever reason) are offended with the stigmas that currently define the ‘gay community’ in the public psyche. G0YS recognize that the prominent facets of the “gay-male” community tend to embrace every gender-bending act, fetish & affectation; –And include those things in the general specter of the image that “gay” projects publicly. The easiest to observe example is the commonly used acronym “GLIT” (sometimes “GLIB”) meaning Gay, Lesbian, Intersexed, Transgendered (or BiSexual). The fact that “GAY” is grouped with “Intersexed & Transgendered” is evidence to our primary point showing what the term “GAY” has morphed into. G0YS reject those associations completely & consider it a form of gender-prejudice against men who love men.
Behaviorally: Anal-sex is innately shunned by g0ys - as it represents the ultimate form of sexual disrespect whether male/male or male/female. Other distasteful stereotypes include (but are not limited to): Effeminate behavior, extreme passivity (like cowardice) & drag. G0YS don’t call other men “girl”, “bitch”, “queen”, etc. You probably get the idea.
Two interesting approaches to normalizing same-sex love. One reduces gayness to a biological factor; the other express abhorrence at gay identities but attempts to normalize same-sex love (as long as it’s not enacted as anal sex).
Topics: Queer issues and theory | 6 Comments »
sexual politics of meat
By Michael | June 30, 2008
In some respects we all acknowledge the sexual politics of meat. When we think that men, especially male athletes, need meat, or when wives report that they could give up meat but they fix it for their husbands, the overt association between meat eating and virile maleness is enacted. It is the covert associations that are more elusive to pinpoint as they are so deeply embedded within our culture.
[…]
By speaking of the texts of meat we situate the productions of meat’s meaning within a political-cultural context. None of us chooses the meanings that constitute the texts of meat, we adhere to them. Because of the personal meaning meat eating has for those who consume it, we generally fail to see the social meanings that have actually predetermined the personal meaning. Recognizing the texts of meat is the first step in identifying the sexual politics of meat. (Adams 13,14)
Adams, Carol. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory. New York: Continuum, 1990.
Topics: Feminism, Vegetarianism | 4 Comments »
compositionists as public intellectuals
By Michael | June 30, 2008
A while ago I commented at The Blogora that it seems that the positive press about composition and student writing always comes in the form of newspaper articles written by reporters about the classroom, but negative press always seems to come from teachers themselves in the forms of essays. These seem to carry a lot more credence and be printed in national publications rather than regional or city ones.
This was written after the Atlantic essay by Professor X, In the Basement of the Ivory Tower. I’m thinking about how composition is portrayed in the national media — especially those periodicals that seem to get the most attention: The New York Times, Atlantic, The New Yorker, the Washington Post, and so forth. And I’m thinking about who gets to do the portraying.
This is especially true after reading this Feministe post:
Apparently a new study shows that academics chosen to write op-eds for three major newspapers are overwhelmingly male. The Wall Street Journal was the worst of the bunch, with 97% of their op-eds by academics written by men.
The study doesn’t get into the fact that this gender bias isn’t limited to op-eds by academics. At the New York Times (which features 82% male writers of op-eds by academics), two out of 11 regular op-ed columnists are women. At the Washington Post, two out of 16 columnists are women.
Ashley at Feministe also quotes The Campus Climate Revisited: Chilly for Women Faculty, Administrators, and Graduate Students:
In one study, first done in 1968 and then replicated in 1983, college students were asked to rate identical articles to specific criteria. The authors’ names attached to the articles were clearly male or female, but were reversed for each group of raters: what one group thought had been written by a male, the second group thought had been written by a female, and vice versa. Articles supposedly written by women were consistently ranked lower than when the very same articles were thought to have been written by a male.
So, then, I wonder when rhetoric and composition scholars write for a general public audience, who is speaking “for us” and how are they listened to? How does the work of composition get portrayed. I’m reminded of some of Lisa Ede’s comments from classes, that even within Composition Studies, it’s not even those that do the most teaching of first year writing that do scholarly work in it, and the within the public of composition scholars, composition is often represented/portrayed by those no longer teaching first-year composition (or teaching it much less frequently than graduate students and adjuncts).
Topics: Gender, Teaching Composition, public sphere | 1 Comment »
a genealogy of american anti-intellectualism
By Michael | June 30, 2008
I’m enjoying sitting in on Sara’s Writing 323 class this summer, and I’m looking forward to covering it next week. The students today had an interesting discussion about anti-intellectualism. Sara asked why US Americans have such a distaste for public intellectuals (example: one student noted that some believe Gore lost in 2000 because he was perceived as too smart and Bush was the type of guy you’d have a drink with). Students came up with a variety of ideas that I’d like to return to sometime and ponder:
- Post World War II ego and a disregard for criticism. Intellectualism, as practiced in the West, is largely a practice of critique, and the US ego might not be amenable to such critique.
- A preference for the simple over the complicated
- Stronger capitalistic heritage, which rewards luck and business over intellectualism
- A value of results over ideas
- American individualism
I also thought about the tradition of anti-European sentiment in the States going back to the early 1800s. If intellectualism is seen as a European pursuit, perhaps it is something to be eschewed by Americans. This seems particularly true of “French” theory. Additionally, I thought of Max Weber’s project arguing that Calvinism was integral for the advancement of America’s industrial revolution. If our grace is rewarded on earth, then material wealth becomes much more worthwhile than intellectual pursuits.
Topics: WR323: Writing With Style, public sphere | 2 Comments »
the secular society vs. the post-secular society
By Michael | June 28, 2008
This 2006 video of Barack Obama’s speech (video below) is interested to read in juxtaposition to Jürgen Habermas’s recent essay on sightandsound, Notes on a Post-Secular Society.
If you are interested in a response to this video from Focus on the Family, their show Turn Signal has a 3-part interview with Tom Minnery (part 1, part 2, part 3).
This would all be interesting to put together with Sharon Crowley’s Toward a Civil Discourse: Rhetoric and Fundamentalism, if I had read it yet.
(videos via Pam’s House Blend)
Topics: public sphere | No Comments »
from 13 to 8
By Michael | June 27, 2008
I started out this summer with only 13 students in my writing in business course. In the first week, the enrollment has dropped to 8. This is the smallest class I’ve ever taught — well, tied with an 8th grade exploratory creative writing course I taught my second year teaching middle school. I’m excited for the extra attention I can give students, especially as I’m only teaching one course this summer (well, I’m also covering Sara’s class for a week later this summer, but there are only 6 students in that class). It will be interesting to see the new challenges and rewards with such a small class.
Topics: WR214: Writing in Business | 1 Comment »
the problem with engineering ethics
By Michael | June 26, 2008
My friend Luke is working on his M.A. thesis in applied ethics. It’s on ethics in engineering, and while doing some web research, he came across Texas State University professor Karl Stephen’s blog, where he argues that same-sex marriage is bad for engineering. Barf:
I’m going to go out on a limb here. But I’m sure that the limb’s pretty solid.
[…] I am going to argue that allowing same-sex marriage will endanger the future of the engineering profession in this country.
He goes on to explain that if same-sex couples marry, their children will be less likely to succeed, and be less likely to be good engineers. With less people already going into engineering, and with good engineering students (supposedly) coming from traditional families, engineering would be harmed by same-sex marriage. Go read his post. I left a comment. You can also read my comment below the cut.
Topics: Ethics, Queer issues and theory, Social Justice | 4 Comments »
new books
By Michael | June 24, 2008
Because I still have some faculty development money left over for the spring term, I get to order books! Lots of them (the category distinction below is a bit arbitrary):
Rhetoric and Composition Studies:
Textual Orientations: Lesbian and Gay Students and the Making of Discourse Communities by Harriet Malinowitz
Literacy, Sexuality, Pedagogy: Theory and Practice for Composition Studies by Jonathan Alexander
Fragments of Rationality: Postmodernity and the Subject of Composition by Lester Faigley
Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures: Refiguring College English Studies by James Berlin
Toward a Civil Discourse: Rhetoric and Fundamentalism by Sharon Crowley
Geographies of Writing: Inhabiting Places and Encountering Differences by Nedra Reynolds
Moving Beyond Academic Discourse: Composition and the Public Sphere by Christian R. Weisser
Literacy in the New Media Age by Gunther Kress
A Place to Stand: Politics and Persuasion in a Working-Class Bar by Julie Lindquist
Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness by Krista Ratcliffe
Tactics of Hope: The Public Turn in English Composition by Paula Mathieu
The Rhetoric of Cool: Composition Studies and New Media by Jeff Rice
Acts of Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Zizek, and the Return of the Subject by Thomas Rickert
Queer Theory/Sexuality Studies:
The Queen Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship by Lauren Berlant
Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex by Judith Butler
The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life by Michael Warner
Publics and Counterpublics by Michael Warner
Queer Online: Media Technology and Sexuality by Kate O’Riordan and David J. Phillips
Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability by Robert McRuer
Queering Gay and Lesbian Studies by Thomas Piontek
Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, edited by Michael Warner
Not sure if I’ll get each one or not, because it depends on shipping costs, but man, this is a boon! And yet another load of books to take with me on my 3,000 mile trek across the country.
Topics: Uncategorized | 9 Comments »
blogging the iowa floods
By Michael | June 24, 2008
cross-posted
My friend Eric Stoller was covered in the Corvallis Gazette Times for his blogging on the floods in Iowa:
Quickly, Stoller’s blog switched from site mainly focused on education and diversity issues to a repository on the latest news about Iowa flooding. Culling from local newspapers, wire stories, television news and even YouTube videos, Stoller’s blog featured a variety of sources and perspectives. He also included some personal sources, and some of his own commentary.
Interestingly, the print edition includes the URL of Eric’s blog (as well as his favorite blogs), but the online edition doesn’t.
Congratulations Eric for the press coverage, and thank you for posting about Iowa!
EDIT: They’ve added links to the online edition. This blog is one of them. 
Topics: Blogs | No Comments »
compulsory meat eating
By Michael | June 24, 2008
Of course you can always count on secular colleges to promote absurdity. One recent workshop at the University of California Santa Cruz was entitled: Compulsory Meat-Eating and the Lesbian Vegetarian Connection. The thrust of the workshop was how eating meat is as horrible as being heterosexual!! (The Christian Observer 1998)
This last spring, a few grad student friends of mine were taking Contemporary Moral Philosophies, and toward the end of the course, they began talking about vegetarian ethics. I had some lively discussions with them outside of their class about the concept of “compulsory meat eating.” This morning I saw this CFP for the NeMLA: “Queer Ecocriticism and Theory.” Immediately, I thought of compulsory meat eating, so I googled it.
According to the Appendix of The Nature of Homosexuality (Google Books), the concept isn’t new: there was a paper delivered at the 1998 University of California Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgendered Annual Conference and Assembly in Santa Cruz titled “Compulsory Meat Eating and the Lesbian/Vegetarian Connection” (which the Christian Observer refers to in the passage above). Marti Kheel, PhD, also uses the term in her paper for the Pacific Division of the Society for Women In Philosophy, “Toppling Patriarchy with a Fork: The Feminist Debate Over Meat” (doc file), in which she writes:
Rather than attempting to answer the question of why someone should choose to become vegetarian, I ask the deeper question, Why do people eat meat? And why do they resist change? I do not attempt to “defend” vegetarianism as a universal norm to be imposed on all people as a moral imperative; nor do I rely on the model of autonomy, which presumes that people freely choose their diets. Rather, I ask, What are the factors that support meat eating as a dietary norm?
[…]
Meat dominance and male dominance are intimately intertwined as ideologies, practices, and norms; those who resist either form of domination therefore encounter similar obstacles. When people become vegetarians they are typically asked to explain their dietary choice. But no one thinks to ask meat eaters why they became meat eaters. An analogy with the institution of heterosexuality helps to shed light on this phenomenon.
Interesting stuff. A quick perusal of various journal databases didn’t reveal anything further.
EDIT 25 June 2008: EGADS! I just realized that The Nature of Homosexuality is some conservative book meant to explain what causes homosexuality. I started reading some of it on Google Books and it’s atrocious! The author got the title of the conference paper from the Campus Report, published by Accuracy in Academia, an anti-liberal, anti-leftist non-profit. Two of the three references to compulsory meat eating I found are anti-queer!
Topics: Feminism, Gender, Queer issues and theory, Vegetarianism | 2 Comments »
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