A Collage of Citations

From Dennis, Time Wise’s article arguing that Jeremiah Wright was right:

Indignation doesn’t work for most whites, because having remained sanguine about, silent during, indeed often supportive of so much injustice over the years in this country–the theft of native land and genocide of indigenous persons, and the enslavement of Africans being only two of the best examples–we are just a bit late to get into the game of moral rectitude. And once we enter it, our efforts at righteousness tend to fail the test of sincerity.

But here we are, in 2008, fuming at the words of Pastor Jeremiah Wright, of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago–occasionally Barack Obama’s pastor, and the man whom Obama credits with having brought him to Christianity–for merely reminding us of those evils about which we have remained so quiet, so dismissive, so unconcerned. It is not the crime that bothers us, but the remembrance of it, the unwillingness to let it go–these last words being the first ones uttered by most whites it seems whenever anyone, least of all an “angry black man” like Jeremiah Wright, foists upon us the bill of particulars for several centuries of white supremacy.

[…]

Wright said not that the attacks of September 11th were justified, but that they were, in effect, predictable. Deploying the imagery of chickens coming home to roost is not to give thanks for the return of the poultry or to endorse such feathered homecoming as a positive good; rather, it is merely to note two things: first, that what goes around, indeed, comes around–a notion with longstanding theological grounding–and secondly, that the U.S. has indeed engaged in more than enough violence against innocent people to make it just a tad bit hypocritical for us to then evince shock and outrage about an attack on ourselves, as if the latter were unprecedented.

The rejection and vilification of Wright’s rhetoric by white society seems so very similar to the rejection and vilification of critical theory post 9/11 by folks such as Jean Baudrillard, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, and David Simpson. That an analysis of a situation — a critical inquiry into causes and effects and ideology — is read as a justification of events. No, Wright is not arguing that America deserved to be attacked on September 11, 2001, and neither was, say Jean Baudrillard. Instead, they argue that it was predictable, something that could easily be foreseen because we have done it to others so many times before. And, as Wright so smartly notes, to express so much anger and grief at the attacks on the World Trade Center while not blinking an eye at Hiroshima — to condemn one attack and not another — is to mark quite explicitly what bodies matter as human: white, Western, “civilized.” Butler makes a similar point in Precarious Life, noting that we can tell who we value as human based on who we mourn. Simpson, too, notes this, and argues, as I recall, that now is the time when we need philosophy (or critical theory): in society that reacts quickly and moves increasingly faster, we need to slow down and call attention to the injustices of our society.

We need to be indignant, and white folks (myself included), middle class and upper class folks, men, straight folks, need to accept that indignation. But as Wise notes, people don’t want to be reminded of the horror they’re implicated in. This leads to labeling Wright as racist (against whites, of all people!) and anti-American. In the theory class I sat in last term, some students critiqued Precarious Life for the inordinate amount of space Butler devotes to defending herself and her theories against charges of Antisemitism, as she critiques Israel’s imperialism. It seems that we are in a time when not only do we need philosophy, but we need to defend it now more than ever.

I’m enjoying teaching business writing a lot more this term than I did last term, but I’m still frustrated with my students business proposals as I read them. There are some things that I thought I was clear on when giving in-class instruction, but must not have been, and then there are some things I realize I didn’t cover enough. The old cliché is true: that in order to learn, we need to encounter something three times. This is my third quarter teaching this course, and I’m just now figuring out some steps I need to take in order to help my students understand the conventions of proposals and reports (their proposals are for projects that will end in business reports). Each term, I’ve added more scaffolding to this assignment, but the genre is so new to most students that I feel I should be more explicit and guide students through the basic aspects of business documents. Luckily, next term, my last at OSU, I’ll be teaching business writing in a wireless lab, so some things I can guide students through instead of just showing them and having students lose whatever I say.

Some things I want to do next term in regards to the proposal:

1) Focus on the sentence level a bit more, especially in regards to clarity. Many of the proposals that I read don’t explicitly state what they are proposing. When they do state what project they are proposing, it’s not necessarily clear or concise.

2) Discuss primary audience and secondary audience in more concrete terms in regards to a reports. Though I stressed multiple times that general audiences, such as “students,” don’t read business reports, students are still writing in their proposals that students will be a secondary audience of their final report. I need to stress explicitly that a secondary audience of a business report would be individuals or small groups of people who either a) the primary audience sends a copy to, or b) the writer sends a copy to in addition to the primary audience. I think a role play might make this more explicit, rather than just talking about it.

3) Have a more explicit discussion about how to build one’s own credibility in a proposal — how important research is to this. While I stressed that research was necessary, I found quite a few proposals lacked research, which left students proposing projects and not having enough background information or blatantly admitting that they didn’t know information in the proposal that would take easy preliminary research.

4) Engage in activities to show how research methods are meant to be directly related to investigation topics. After developing a list of topics to investigate, the methods one decides upon should directly correlate to those topics. It should answer how one will go about answering those questions.

5) Since we’ll have laptops, we can actually create tables for budgets and schedules together! Exciting! I’ve shown students how to do this, but I still get schedules written out in paragraph form or budgets with money expressed in different forms within the same column.

Overall, I just need to break this big assignment down into smaller parts and tackle them methodically. Some of these activities/concepts I can still incorporate in this term’s class over the next four weeks, of course, so this is good.

this comic seems all too accurate.

I just got a call from a friend who works as an academic adviser on campus. He told me that a student complained to him about my extreme delay in getting work back to students in her class. This is a very understandable complaint — I’m way behind in grading in technical writing. I’m all caught up in one of my business writing classes, almost caught up in the other, and all caught up in LGBT studies except for the book reviews that were turned in on Friday. Technical writing, however, I’m super far behind in work.

Last term, this was a bit more understandable. It was my first term teaching the course, and I overloaded myself (and the students) with the amount of work. I revised the syllabus to require a bit less and tried to spread out the work differently. However, I’m finding I didn’t plan very well still. Being behind in work now is a little bit a matter of circumstances (such as traveling too much for conferences, especially early in the term). But it’s also that I didn’t think about how my technical writing and business writing schedules would wind up with conferences on the same week (week 3) and turning in major assignments at about the same time. I made a huge scheduling biff, and the consequences are there: poor feedback, hurried grading, and delayed returning of paper. Heck, I have one minor assignment that I have still not finished grading from week 2!

Sara and I were talking the other day about this position (the bridge appointment in the English department). When she had it, she said she had to work harder than she did in graduate school, and that she’d be up until midnight grading and was constantly working. I feel the same: I put in 8 hour days, work again after the gym or dinner, sometimes until 11:00 or 12:00, and even sometimes until 1:00 or 2:00 (and once until 5:00 am this term). And then there’s the weekend. While I had some fun this weekend, I think I also worked around 14 hours or more. I’ve learned to focus more this term and procrastinate less (one can tell from my decreased blogging).

This last paragraph is to just complain; it’s not meant as a justification of being behind in grading.

I shouldn’t even be writing this right now, but it was weighing on me as I was grading. I feel slightly better, so now it’s back to work!

Looks like I’m headed to the 2008 Thomas R. Watson Conference, themed “The New Work of Composition,” in October. I found out a few days ago that my proposal, titled “Ann Coulter, Discourse, Desire, and Dignity: Figuring Words that Wound in the Liberal/Libidinal Blogosphere,” was accepted. The conference is in Louisville, a 9 hour drive from State College, which isn’t bad, considering a week ago I made a 14 hour drive to Long Beach for the American Comparative Literature Association Conference.

But next year, I’m backing off from the travel. Three national conferences, a trip to Europe, two campus visits, and two trips to visit friends is a bit too much in one school year.

On another note, what was I thinking when I wrote that title? It’s ridiculously long.

This week my tech writing students formed groups for their final project series (a group policy manual, a proposal, a set of directions, a usability report, and a final presentation to the class). I’m amazed with how quickly and smoothly most of the students got right to work on their group policy manuals Tuesday and today. I’m always worried about collaborative writing: will someone get stuck doing too much work, will group dynamics cause huge ruptures amongst members, will someone get sick and find it impossible to catch up with their group, will someone who the whole group is depending upon drop the class week 7 and not leave his or her work in the hands of a group member? There are so many more possibilities for failure when we ask our students to write collaboratively.

But, especially with technical documents, collaboration is the way writing is often done. And there are many benefits: writing is made explicitly social, the classroom is more verbal and students become more engaged, I don’t get burnt out on reading 55 assignments and instead get the pleasure of reading 15-20 assignments.

When I was an undergraduate, I hated working in groups. It meant relying on other people (I was and still am a bit too much of a rugged individualist), working around schedules (I was always so busy), and sometimes me having to re-teach the material that others didn’t get. Now, I love collaborating. I’ve had a number of successful collaborative efforts: Luke and my workshop at a conference, Sara and my talks at a couple conferences, Heather and my LGBT studies class, Sarah and my paper for a course last year. These were all fun, and I learned a lot from those I worked with and from the process itself.

And I’ve become sold on incorporating it in the classroom. This term I’m stealing an assignment from another instructor: the group policy manual. It seems like a great way to start off the collaborative work because it explicitly asks the students to create guidelines for their collaboration and clear expectations for each other. And, at least from the work I’ve seen students do in class, because writing this document requires discussing various aspects of group work and coming to an agreement, I am not seeing the most common problem I usually see in collaborative writing: one person carrying the majority of the weight.

Now, if only our quarter system was a semester system…

I haven’t posted here in nearly a week and a half because I’ve been quite busy and really rather exhausted, but after having a wonderful conversation last with a friend and philosophy professor, my mind is a flurry with thoughts. I just read this story about citizens of the island of Lesbos suing a gay and lesbian group in Greece for the use of the term lesbian:

A Greek court has been asked to draw the line between the natives of the Aegean Sea island of Lesbos and the world’s gay women.

Three islanders from Lesbos - home of the ancient poet Sappho, who praised love between women - have taken a gay rights group to court for using the word lesbian in its name.

[…]

A Greek court has been asked to draw the line between the natives of the Aegean Sea island of Lesbos and the world’s gay women.

Three islanders from Lesbos - home of the ancient poet Sappho, who praised love between women - have taken a gay rights group to court for using the word lesbian in its name.

[…]

“This is not an aggressive act against gay women,” Lambrou said. “Let them visit Lesbos and get married and whatever they like. We just want (the group) to remove the word lesbian from their title.”

This is a conflict I had never considered (in the case of this particular word, I mean). I’m not sure what to make of it. I’m certainly for words having multiple meanings, but then this is complicated by this being about identity names.

So writes Eve Sedgwick in Tendencies (155). As I read more queer theory and more about the history of LGBT movements, I have become increasingly interested in the sissy: the faggot, the “effeminate,” the girlyboy. In LGBT Studies this week we’re reading a chapter from Piontek’s Queering Gay and Lesbian Studies about how the Gay movement has left the sissy behind, especially in regards to the inclusion of Gender Identity Disorder of Childhood in the DSM. Sedgwick takes this up in the essay “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay: The War on Effeminate Boys” in Tendencies as well.

What is the lot of the sissy in our current cultural climate? Maligned in his youth (beaten up, threatened, insulted) to the point that suicide rates for queer youth are two to three times higher than for straight youth. Ostracized from many gay men communities (”I only date men. No sissies,” the common mantra on online dating services). Only safe in urban settings (and a few rural settings). And even in those urban settings, it is only within certain pockets that one is truly safe. And then there is the dramatic, entertainment value of the sissy: valued more for his drama, flamboyancy, queeniness, drag performances — his caricature of the faggot — the sissy who is adored for his absurdity, his adorableness…

If I hear another straight woman who I do not know tell me how cute I am, I might scream.

I think there’s a lot of work to be done to understand not the sissy, but the place of a sissy in our culture, the reaction of others to sissies, the pathologization of this maligned class. As Sedgwick quotes psychoanalyst Richard C. Friedman’s views of the young effeminate homosexual: “The distinction between noncomformists and people with psycho-pathology is usually clear enough during childhood. Extremely and chronically effeminate boys, for example, should be understood as falling into the latter category” (Male Homosexuality: A Contemporary Psychoanalytical Perspective, quoted in Sedgwick 156). Sedgwick does not say this (she is writing academic writing, after all), but fuck you Friedman.

I didn’t grow up as that much of a sissy. It would have been a hard thing to do in Mount Ayr, Iowa. I wasn’t too butch, either, but I was an active leader in FFA, senior class president, active in 4-H. These things were important parts of who I was, but they may have been impossible had my gender performance been even slightly more feminine. I even dated a woman who lived a few hours away my senior year. Her straight, male friends read me for what I was (and wasn’t, and today am and am not): gay. I hated their ignorance.

The beauty of being “straight” at the time was the safety I had in wearing pink, in dressing oddly, in wearing fingernail polish, in wearing a dress to “Come as you future day” during Homecoming week (meant as a joke on those men who wore dresses during “Dress up day,” this act has, in retrospect, been a foretelling of my drag performances and comfortability wearing various gendered clothes). While these acts marked me as a fag to some, they marked me as brave to others because I was comfortable in my own masculinity.

I wish sometimes that I had more comfortable in my femininity.

But I digress. I feel like I could teach a whole course on the sissy. Learning along with my students: How does society react to the sissy? How is the sissy interpellated (he is a “boy” more than any other gay or queer man, he is a “girl,” a “boy,” a “faggot,” “queer,” and so forth). Even amongst gay and queer men, the sissy is maligned, marginalized. He doesn’t pass as straight in as many places, he calls attention to himself, he flaunts himself — why can’t he just be gay and be a man?

I’m excited to see where class discussion goes this week.

A few weeks ago, Dennis linked to this amazing review of Outside, which is, unfortunately, only part of a longer thread. Classic:

Traditionally Outside receives extremely high ratings by those who like to see others play it, and these people are in many cases comfortably ensconced Inside themselves. Outside was released many years ago, it was in fact the first massively multiplayer game, and yet it has always managed to avoid the double-edged Retro tag. In its favor, continual user updates have kept Outside current; there are always new things to see and do Outside. Participants are permitted, to some extent, to modify their own areas of Outside, which is a large part of the fun of the game. However it seems that in the end one is modifying Outside largely for the sake of it, and having done it, there is a distinct feeling of “now what?”

Go read the rest. (Thanks to Luke for pointing out that Dennis was not linking to a review of an actual MMORPG.)

I saw Stop-Loss last weekend, an intense movie about soldiers returning to Texas from Iraq. A few of them are stop-lossed, meaning that although their service is supposed to be over, they are being redeployed. The movie revolves around the struggle of one soldier, played by Ryan Phillippe, of not wanting to return to Iraq and trying to get the unjust decision to stop-loss him reversed.

While watching the film, I couldn’t help but think of Lacan, especially in regards to identification (as discussed by Marshall Alcorn in Changing the Subject in English Class) and in regards to the Symbolic Order and the Real.

The latter first. There is a scene in the movie in which Phillippe’s character is accepting the Purple Heart at a rally in his hometown. He is asked to give a speech, and he is surprised and doesn’t know what to talk about. There he is, stumbling, and he begins to talk, inarticulately, about the smells he encountered upon returning to Texas. It’s awkward, he’s obviously talking about what he’s not supposed to talk about. The crowd is silent and confused. He can’t find the right words. There isn’t language, it seems, to describe the feeling of returning home from another place and time for which there aren’t words to describe either: war. Another soldier steps in and tows the party line and riles the crowd up with war rhetoric. Was Phillippe close to the Real: the area of life that can’t be known, that can’t be put into the Symbolic Order? And as he approaches the Real, as he has smelled it and tries (and fails) to relay this Real to the crowd, the Big Other steps in, the narrative is re-stitched and the Symbolic Order again rules.

The former, identification. As Alcorn writes, if I remember correctly, to change one’s mind is akin to an act of suicide. We identify so much with our beliefs that often we’d rather commit suicide or die than change our minds. To change one’s mind is not simply a logical matter, but a matter of attachment: we must dis-attach from our beliefs, an emotional and often traumatic move. To dis-identify with the military, we find in this film, is to dis-identify with so much more: the family, the community, friends, comrades, the state. It would be a radical rift with the self, made apparent by the actions of so many soldiers who have gotten new identities and moved to Canada to live as different people, never able to return to the States and see their families again. A lawyer is consulting Phillippe’s character about making this move, and tells him he’ll never see his family again, never be able to return to his hometown for a funeral, for anything. Phillippe’s decision (which I won’t reveal) is obviously not just a decision of what is right, but of attachment and identity: can he break with his old self, can he (metaphorically) kill his self? And as we see with another character, the metaphorical killing of the self can actually be intricately linked with actual suicide.

This is the first movie I’ve seen in theatres in months and months (since September probably). It was the most intense movie I’ve seen in the theatres in years. I couldn’t do anything afterward but think.