July 2009 – Page 2

in these troubling times what we need is some queer optimism…

A few days ago I wrote about troublemaking hope here and queer hope here. At the end of my post on queer hope, which was primarily about Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, I pondered:

The idea of no future, at least at first glance, indicates that we need to function without hope. If there is no future (no better world on the horizon), there is no hope that things will be different. Because isn’t hope a futural term? Edelman seems to be rejecting the possibility for queer hope. But is hope fundamentally counter to queer? Can we imagine these things together?

In the midst of doing more prep work for my queering theory course (and by prep work I mean finding books on amazon that I might want to use and then skimming through the “customers who bought this item also bought” section), I came across a book by Michael Snediker called, Queer Optimism. The description of his project intrigued me:

Michael Snediker offers a much-needed counterpoint to queer theoretical discourse, which has long privileged melancholy, self-shattering, incoherence, shame, and the death drive. Recovering the forms of positive affect that queer theory has jettisoned, Snediker insists that optimism must itself be taken beyond conventional tropes of hope and futurity and reimagined as necessary for critical engagement.

Cool. So, we can have a positive vision of queer ethics/theory/politics that is not shaped by some futural vision of hope. Instead of queer hope we have queer optimism. This idea hadn’t occurred to me and I am very interested in reading more about what Snediker is suggesting. I haven’t had a chance to get the book from the library yet, but I did find Snediker’s earlier essay from 2006 about queer optimism. I am in the process of reading it right now. In this essay, Snediker assesses the foundational queer-as-pessimistic suffering theories of Judith Butler, Leo Bersani, Eve Sedgwick and Lee Edelman and argues for an alternative: queer-as-non-futural-optimism. Huh? Here, I will let Snediker explain. Queer optimism

doesn’t ask that some future time make good on its own hopes. Rather, queer optimism asks that optimism, embedded in its own immanent present, be interesting. Queer optimism’s interest–its capacity to be interesting, to hold our attention–depends on its emphatic responsiveness to and solicitation of rigorous thinking (2).

I am not sure if his explanation helped any better than mine. I will have to tackle this again once I have read the whole essay–all 50 pages of it! At this preliminary stage, Snediker’s counter to both hopeful optimism (what he calls utopic optimism) and queer pessimism has got me thinking about hope, troublemaking, and queer ethics as something more than just a rejection of ethics/politics/culture (which is Edelman’s position). I especially appreciate his critical approach to Butler’s emphasis on melancholy, suffering and grief. As someone who is in the process of grieving for a loved one (who, while still barely alive, has virtually no livable life), I have found Butler’s work to be very helpful in my reflecting on the process of grief/mourning/loss. Yet, as I experience the pain and suffering of that grief, I find myself wondering, should grief (being undone by others) be the only, or at least primary, foundation for an ethics of accountability to others/the Other? Are there alternative, more positive and perhaps joyful, ways in which to think about how and why we are accountable to and responsible for others? Personally, I think being in a constant state of grief is exhausting and overwhelming and one that I am quite ready to get out of. I like the idea of imagining an ethic that is queer (and full of troublemaking) but not predicated on this negative sense of loss.

Can Snediker deliver on the promise of his concept? Wait, am I imposing hopeful optimism on him? Hopefully (argh! there I go again), I can wrap my brain around his vision of optimism by the time I finish the essay.

oh bother, part 2

This is the second in my ongoing series of events/ideas/objects that make me say, “oh bother!” As a reminder, here is the purpose of these brief entries (you can also find this explanation at the end of my about the categories post here:

This category will include anything that I find particularly reprehensible, repulsive, or just plain annoying. The term, bother, has been one that I have adopted as of late in order to stop saying f**k (which is a favorite word of mine) in front of my highly impressionable kids (who are 3 and 6). Any resemblance to Winnie the Pooh’s catch-phrase is purely coincidental. (Don’t get me wrong, I really like classic Winnie the Pooh. But, somehow, I don’t think Pooh meant “oh bother” in the same spirit that I do.) Like I said, I started uttering “oh bother” about a year ago when my kids got old enough to understand and repeat inappropriate words. It seems rather fitting to use this phrase in relation to making/staying in trouble. After all, to be bothered by something is another way of being troubled by it, right? To bother someone is to trouble them, right? To be in a state of botherment (is this a word?) is to be in a state of trouble. This category is different from my other categories. The “oh bother” examples are meant to be analyzed by you, dear reader, and not me. I want to know what you think about these examples. Perhaps the “oh bother” is a request or a command–as in, (won’t you please) bother these examples for me because I can’t or don’t want to.

Check out this news article about Harvard Professor Gates being arrested for breaking and entering into his own home. I first heard about it on facebook and then saw this blog entry about it on Angry Black Woman via Alas a blog. Words cannot express how much this bothers me. What about you?

Trouble as tonic?

Check out this “Briefly Noted” review of The Generalissimo by Jay Taylor in this week’s The New Yorker. Here’s the line that got me thinking:

Chiang [Kai-Shek] saw himself as central to China’s destiny, yet his years in exile were some of his happiest; as he once wrote, “Trouble is an excellent tonic.”

What exactly does he mean by trouble being a tonic here? It could mean that the trouble that Chiang experienced at the hands of Mao, that is the losing of mainland China and being exiled to Taipai, was not all bad. Chiang’s time in exile was productive and happy and may end up being more important for the success of modern China than Mao’s cultural revolution. What else might he mean? I wonder if this is a focus of the book or just the reviewer’s take on the book? I often find that The New Yorker book reviews are more interesting than the books that they review. I do like the idea of thinking about trouble as tonic as healing, restorative and invigorating. Cool.

Oh, did I happen to mention that I was obsessed with China and read way too many books about it in high school?

Word Count: 200 words

Blog Writing: For Students, part 2

In part one I offered some of thoughts on blog writing. I suggested two things about successful blog entries-as-critical-thinking: (1) They are not just unfiltered/unprocessed brain dumps and (2) They require more time to write than you think. My emphasis in that advice was on the process of writing for the writer. It was about using blog writing to engage in the practice of critical thinking, questioning, and troublemaking.

Blogs are not just about the writer, however. Many types of writing can enable us to use the writing process to engage in critical reflection on what we mean and what we want to say. But a blog is unique. It is public and is necessarily and immediately about sharing our ideas with others. So in this entry I want to discuss blog writing as writing for others.

Because blog entries are posted on a public site that anyone who has access to the internet can read (well, unless you put a password protection on your blog, but why would you want to do that?), the process of writing about an idea or theory necessarily requires that we think about how we want to present those ideas to others and what the impact of our ideas might be on those others.

There are several ways to think about the significance of writing in a public forum. Many people will warn you that you need to think about how anyone can read your entry and possibly use it against you. They will caution you to always be very careful with what you write. While I agree that it is important to think about the issue of safety (yes, the lurkers and trolls are out there), safety is not the only (or even most important) way that I think about blog writing as public.

The fact that one’s writing becomes public the moment it is posted can have many positive effects on what we write and how we understand the topics that we are writing about. In particular, writing in a public forum can help us to be more accountable for the claims that we make. Simply put, when you write something and post it on your blog under your name (or even under a pseudonym) you are responsible for the claims you make, the critiques that you offer, and the facts that you present. You should be willing to stand behind them when challenged and to explain them when questioned. In other words, you are accountable to others–you should, when called upon, be able to give an account of what/how/why you wrote what you did. Being more accountable for the claims that we make helps us to be more careful and thoughtful about making them. The knowledge that others are going to read what we write encourages us to really think about we are writing–Does it make sense? Is it truthful? Do I really agree with it? For more on accountability, and the integrity it requires, see Rebecca Blood’s post on blog ethics.

Of course there are many bloggers who do not act as if they are accountable to others. They write whatever they want. They dump the contents of their brains out through their keyboards (and often produce stuff that resembles the result of another form of dumping). Rebecca Blood argues in her post on blog ethics that the ability to abuse the blog process by not being accountable for your claims is built into the system when she writes: “Let me propose a radical notion: The weblog’s greatest strength — its uncensored, unmediated, uncontrolled voice — is also its greatest weakness.” This is the darkside of blogging. But, we can use the uncensored, unmediated, uncontrolled nature of the blog to produce insightful, creative and critical prose that helps us to understand the world better and moves (and provokes) others to think about the world differently (and perhaps more justly). These postitive aspects (making us accountable to ourself and others) are yet another reason why blog writing is a great way to engage in critical thinking and troublemaking.

oh bother, part 1

I am starting a new category this morning called “oh bother.” This category will include anything that I find particularly reprehensible, repulsive, or just plain annoying. The term, bother, has been one that I have adopted as of late in order to stop saying f**k (which is a favorite word of mine) in front of my highly impressionable kids (who are 3 and 6).

Have you seen the promo for More to Love? No? Well, here you go (and down below too!). Enjoy!

All I have to say is, “OH BOTHER!” There is much to say about why this show is a problem (and perhaps a little about why it might possibly have just a tiny bit of good deep within it), but I simply can’t be bothered to respond. It just bothers me too much. I would rather leave it to Kathleen LeBesco, Big Fat Blog, and you. Seriously, I would love to read your reactions to this promo. Go ahead, tell me why I should or shouldn’t bother.