End of Year
Dec. 31st, 2022 09:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ateolfMary Beth and I did an off-cycle Fresh Market run for a few things last night. Not a whole lot else, just a lot of reading mostly. Mary Beth finished reading to me The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson. Then later I finished reading Literal Madness: 3 Novels: Kathy Goes to Haiti/My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini/Florida by Kathy Acker (calling "Florida" a "novel" is pretty generous though, I mean, calling it a "novella" would be exceedingly generous, it's definitely a straight up short story and not even a long one at that...I guess "2 novels and 1 short story" didn't have the snappy ring to it to place on the cover though!). So it was goofy, but I had this consuming drive to finish it before the end of the year. So, I knew I was going to finish the first book in the omnibus before the year was over, so then my dumb pedantic brain is mildly concerned over finishing part of a book that's in itself a separate book (outside of this volume) in one year and the rest of the book in another year and I was making peace with this "conundrum" but then I made a calculation and realized if I really pushed it I could finish the whole book this year so the past few days have been a little bit of a reading frenzy and then I finished a little ahead of schedule last night. So...go me?
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Date: 2022-12-31 04:46 pm (UTC)for a while now i keep noticing the internet/social media's messed with notions of collective social tempo rhetorically/epistemically. i think about this a lot. like in some ways the major parameter of intellectual, political, social validity and legibility is almost not content (if content can even ever be named/a real solid its own thing thing) but time, windows of time to let new-to-you notions sink in, long enough for that so say, you get over your kneejerk transphobic self-centered responses in what to you is at first wilderness, but not so long you become outdated/yesterday's scene, which lately is disturbingly synonymous with considered politically invalid, rendered invisible/invalid. (speaking of forgotten...) and it's almost like the "winners" now in terms of amplified voices anyone can find at all to say things at all adjacent to refreshing or whatever is still, for all its surface gloss of yeah, refreshing and needed now and whatnot, are who have honed in, managed deftly staying in the confined narrow parameters of that window. that it's more about that selection-wise into legitimacy and visibility/viability of discourse, even academic or supposedly radical discourse, than the specific content of one's discourse anymore. it's, did you arrange it right for this narrow sliver of time as we understand it now. you've got to fit in the legible locus, and that matters more than anything else (which is inherently going to reify over time, a kind of ungenerative unchallenging epistemic dead end of course--what i already sense the results of growing now).
the other related also disturbing to me aspect to that is the "en masse" thing i also feel social media and opaque internet tampering/distortions caused, and i do loathe seeing that _still_ be Such A Thing in academia, ugh. oh my god, a person can propose another way of being out of frustration and political rage and not have it mean what they're proposing is for everyone--so, so obvious!--but academia still (!!!) does this amazingly tired thing of holding it up to the standard of "but if everyone did that that'd be bad so therefore it's invalid". omfg!...niche, ecosystem, whatnot. i remain appalled--and the thing is many of the worst clueless seeming offenders here use the very notion of, we are not all the same of course, that's foundational to my writing/art/worldview! which also just so happens to conveniently buoy and protect my own expressions; ahmed and nelson among them--and also fascinated that feminist thinkers in genre fiction are a zillion miles and years ahead in this regard (kress in the '80s, leguin earlier, gah). sometimes it feels like academic humanities in a bid for legitimization and "rigor" got infected with some of the cognitive tics of the sciences (this obsession with universal consistency when it comes to viable proposed theory, for one), in ways that are totally inane and useless, even harmful in a social/relational context. and it's why noone says anything particular, specific, actually riskily its own thing online anymore now: because there's some overnight-happened collective sense if just one person could then show up to say "well, that's not how it is for me though" it'd render your account invalid, even if the account was already presented as merely yours, just one of many. watching this pervasive universalizing beige-borg editing become compulsive everywhere's been so bizarre and disturbing.
which is to say the thing so obvious it makes me mad i feel compelled to type it out here anyway: if your response, after yeah, using all that "we're not all supposed to be the same, we are not all the same, we do not all live the same lives" to fortress your own inconsistencies as a form of artistic and theoreotical and political intention (which i don't in itself have a problem with!), to edelman talking about a queerness that says fuck the future and to hell with "The Child" is "but really if that were the only way to be queer it's maternal-exclusionary and then yeah there's no future, not just for the suburban bigots but for the planet and human life!!" i just...lord can i even explain how obtuse that is. UGH UGH UGH. apparently you're the only one allowed to define which kinds of queerness "get through", and you think any definition of it by others that doesn't pertain to or involve you can't be the real one. and i know, i know, all her sedgwicking is to bulwark against what i'm trying to get at, something so obvious it appears nelson anticipates it but i'd say not really, not deep deep no. bc if you really don't get edelman's notion isn't meant to work for everyone, at all (!!!), _including some queers_ (!!!), you've totally missed the fucking point, and no amount of feminist-angled grievance at it overcomes missing the very basic but very deep point.
and those 2 dimensions, they remind me what i said on our walk the other day: like so!many!things! right now, i'm not even angry at nelson or her book really, or her life or anything obviously, and it might sound that way but what i am actually angry about is this is readily visible, publishable, discussable, prestigious and taken seriously in our shared cultural sphere (and there is no getting around the privilege there, on a zillion levels--double-edged to be sure, the outrageous sums of money for the still in many ways shitty medical care nelson brings up as a societal criticism and that's def. valid--but that shouldn't make it impossible to point out as an elephant in the room), but someone like the queer of edelman's imagining/dreaming, or Nora in wizenberg's book, remains invalid and invisible, unable to be reached in said sphere relatively speaking. and to have that still invisible queer then called actually passe-ly unradical if you really think about it, by the one with the prestigious career and family and amplified voice (no matter how many deft little breadcrumbs they drop timed and spaced just so to signal "i'm as liberated and radical and queer and Other as anyone can imagine!"), seemingly totally innocent of how fucked up that is, gets under my skin in a huge way. this interaction, right here, this one, what are these power dynamics? they're fucking rotten (speaking of foucault...heart heart). and this is hardly the first time, or at all unusual these days, in academia and online and in book shop spaces etc.
it's a little like similar now something like 50 +years long endless dismissive reactions to certain feminisms, coming from an aggrieved place of, "those feminisms were downright imperial! (and always will be everywhere at all times)" ...which i suppose in glib general sense is the whole, man oh man the left has a major problem still with immediately smacking down everything within it. edelman's queer theory felt potentially powerful for approximately half a fucking second (!), and god knows it never even made it out a hair's breath to the mainstream but people ever since are still acting like it ran the place in some majorly chafing universalist way forever and ever when it's so obvious in the shared collective political sphere it never even had a chance. it is bizarre to act otherwise--yes, even with feminist critique at the ready to dismantle it (and don't even get me started on, again so obvious it shouldn't even have to come up at this point, whole, not all of us women identify with the earthmama thing more than with edelman).
like why yes, i _am_ pretty confident that too many hedonistic public sex clubs and not enough baby strollers is not the problem, and pitting the one against the other, no matter how indirectly and cagily you do it (this i feel is where the deftness is quite a feat, from someone so seemingly candid and matter-of-fact about the importance of sex, and/but proportionately dishonest in at the most subtle and awfully itchy way), is outrageously predictable and politically pointless in the worst way. "fucking radically differently won't change the world!" is exactly what someone only seemingly more-experienced-than-thou in this position would say, and is inarguably handwavily dismissive of those who have felt and do truly feel otherwise, sounds so clear and obvious but doesn't actually offer real engaged argument (and to be fair, i do have more sympathy with some others who argue this--ahmed for instance--but here i really can't stand it, it's what someone who benefited from it all in the first place says after they've eaten the whole cake and don't expect anyone else to still want some or derive meaning from it because they themself have "moved on"--that maddening cloaked condescension, again). ah, there's that issue of fitting with flying colors within a narrow legible locus again.
i just want to scream sometimes, often in the wake of all the pro-sex radical queer documentation and resources of the '70s through '90s fading, being disappeared lately while feel-good blandly assimilationist reboots of queer eye get celebrated and picked up by netflix and autostraddle and jezebel are deeply disappointing in every way imaginable "oh my god, you fucking won relatively, over and over and over, you WON. and the ways you didn't, or haven't yet fully--that maternity is bullshit hard in this country and elsewhere--are hardly this other queer life path's alienated anger's fault! are you ever going to stop kicking this thing that's dead dead dead, barely ever had a chance to live at all in the first place? yes it's still hard to do get what you want--a jillion dollars a vial and casual medical dehumanization, my god--but you do have your family and this book is getting published and read, that is possible. is the other way still even/ever fucking possible really, in a visibly viable way?" jesus.
and while i get and deeply relate to nelson pointing out them passing as a nuclear patriarchal family or whatever is not a straightforward or unfraught thing at all, it is misunderstood every which way, i think that valid grievance doesn't negate that there is a dearth of similarly found in major bookstores and discussed widely stuff on a queer peer with just as much fraughtness always, who will never remotely pass in that way, still. again, this is all so obvious it galls me i'm trying to lay it out here clumsily step by step, i can't believe i feel it's still needed. ghastly.
don't even get me started on trauma (speaking of edelman!...nelson seems to breeze right by this, to me very key queer element to his work, that Othered children are often traumatized for it in childhood, grow to be Othered adults, and therefore often have a should-be-legible-by-now-to-someone-like-nelson but generally oft-obscured Different perspective on childhood and notions of The Child, that render his premise quite coherent and understandable). it follows a similar line (one i also think current internet/media and political dynamics hepped me to), where nelson makes it seem unassailable because yeah, she too has known it, and a lot of the winnicott quotes lapping over and over are meant to indicate how very aware she's become of notions, dimensions of it. but this is that thing, where sure, but it's maddening/crazymaking to act like any gesture or indication of something is just as...i don't know, functionally identical or interchangeable i suppose, as one more severe or further on the spectrum or something. no. i am really tired of this, and the seeming willful blindness to the truth of that, how it makes someone in yes (!) an easier cushier whatever position get to willfully ignore and in fact condescendingly criticize other tactics from those in different, yes harder (!) positions. and call that actually more radical. it.is.not! it's like the more privileged in terms of legibility person is collapsing real-but-as-yet-unnamed-and-therefore-even-more-downtrodden difference, while going on and on about how much more difference-informed-than-thou they are.
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Date: 2022-12-31 09:59 pm (UTC)...
i actually don't mean to criticize difranco here (or not criticize her either for that matter), but the example is specific and a real memory that seems related: it all reminds me of my most thoughtful ex decades ago saying of ani franco that he wouldn't mind if she was aggrandizing all women in her rah rah way, it was that he suspected really though it wasn't that, it was just rah rah ani difranco specifically and only. yeah, kinda that, and making sure to smartly employ academic inflected cleverness, beat-you-to-the-punch anticipatory taut acrobatics and quotation deftly harvested and arranged to make it always more than that and also unassailable. also, whether that personal aggrandizement "works"/"succeeds"--gets put in the public sphere for discussion and engagement on a wider, respected level--comes down to how relatable it is to those who decide and consume these things en masse enough to be viable. which i'd say has little necessarily to do with being radical or even insightful, sometimes because of those mechanics especially lately much the contrary. which is in itself not worthless but is a problem when you're presenting it as that other thing, yes refreshing, yes about more than you and people like you. and i say this as someone not unfamiliar (obvy) with the dictums used as its foundation here--feminist personal as political, the active validation of what has been seen as woman-coded trivial or narcissistic, etc. but that isn't used consistently, nelson herself brings up criticism of other writers/artists/thinkers and isn't consistent about (couldn't be--this is that whole "i'm ok/you're illegal" thorn) when it's deep and radical and "acceptable" and when it's privileged and/or silly, when she herself dismisses it in an "of course, duh" sort of way or does her own "queerer than thou if you really think about it how i word it" whatnot. a seemingly endless tension in academia since at least the '90s, and i'm reminded why i got tired of it used this way here, winning its prestige but yeah, only its most specific, still clueless about Other Others terms.
...so. probably no more nelson for me. not all her fault but still--turns out too gauzily weasely in a silken, socially sanctioned way i can't deal with right now. still like bluets as the antidote to other blue(ball/beard) books tho. and i do like the title, the notion/theme of the title.
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Date: 2023-01-01 12:09 am (UTC)and it's maybe not their (not just nelson i mean, the people who do this, who i've come to recognize do this) fault but that always frankly to me has some whiff in common with the antichoice folks' weird obsessive fantasy of the perfect child to protect: one who doesn't really exist, is in an imaginary (or in the case of these fiercely book-wielding new mothers, so brand new nearly so) and sanitary conveniently tidy vacuum vs. actual flawed or hard to understand resulting real persons now, bearing specific difficulties and coping accordingly, nonstandardly. that child's fine, you're their self-appointed defender--until they grow up and say things you don't understand and don't agree with, because your histories (including revolving around these issues you're going on about) are different. it's blindered and self-centered and claiming to be the opposite, deeply informed and "helpfully" bestowing some of that easeful enlightenment onto little old misinformed/mistaken/misbegotten scrubby urchin-outsider you (edelman's angry outsider queer, etc.).
like. i guarantee you some of the same women who might go on and on to me about all the reading-learning they've done for the sake of their child about attachment, trauma, sexual abuse, neglect, being always seen as Different/Other/Outside (or rather, not seen at all, left unnamed, unidentified), whatever (usually without any sort of display they've considered i may well know all that, and for much longer, and for more direct reasons), would have no problem wielding all that terminology to condescendingly tell someone like me i'm not behaving psychologically acceptably, at full potential or however they'd put it, socially acceptably or "enlightened" politically (like in nelson's case re: planetary concern, feminist "care", etc., but in this more general kind of interaction it'd probably play out with yeah, milieu-acceptable othering psych diagnoses terms or notions of "unwellness" and "dysfunction") and all i'd need to do to be "better" obvy is whatever they do when they feel bad to feel better (for the last 20 years it's mostly been the socioeconomically foisted "take a brain chemistry-altering prescription drug") because of course there's no difference between them and me (that blind collapsing of difference!) besides i'm just not doing it right, unwilling or dumb or lazy or uninformed or whatever...and have zero realization what exactly that bundle of shit really is, what it means, what it's saying a la foucault.
...
keep circling back periodically the last 6-10 years to the idea of a visible politics of "the loser" or "the failure" and what they have to say that's very worth understanding, epistemically amplifying (bit adjacent to halberstam, speaking of queer theory...). being more aware of who that might really be, unsung, relative to nelson. and why you can never find them, given where they can't be is where everyone goes to listen. and yeah it's not a "derby"/contest of downtroddenness, but collapsing this dimension so much, predictably, sometimes nearly entirely--and who then distortedly floats up at the top to speak for "us" marginalized all, advertently or no--remains insane to me, totally suspect. every single one of their grievances are allowed to balloon the entire room we're all in they read from, suffocating, while they breezily do their own harm onto others in ways they and the rest of the room seem like they will never recognize understand or acknowledge. mm.
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Date: 2022-12-31 06:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-12-31 09:27 pm (UTC)in the book the places nelson seems most earnestly/straightforwardly put out, on any actual kind of offense (generally she's far too slippery for that, which is both impressive and frustrating), it's like she feels left out, and then, being her with her background and skills, responds to feeling left out by using intellect and rhetoric to try to point out that anything purporting to be liberating/refreshing/radical/queer that leaves her out isn't, can't be really (and worse, is likely misogynistic!)...seemingly unaware that her life and this book leave many, many (women, queer, othered, unable to access such medical care, non-white, less educated, socially "maladjusted", etc.) people out, inevitably. which ends at one of my main points, precious little if anything at all (?) includes everyone, fails to leave someone thoughtful out, but i'm not sure that in itself means the proposed thing is invalid, without any salvageable promise, always everywhere. quite the contrary. (and, that rhetorical takedown tactic gets employed very spottily-inconsistently as well as cloaked-hegemonically these days: back to my thing about the white workshop rock and a hard place thing, just a single example. and how surreal and yet tiredly predictable it is to have the "actually, queerer-deeper than you" takedown tactic against "saying to hell with The Child and the future" amount really, if you examine closely, to exactly what patriarchal homophobic conservatives said all along, that it's immature/undeveloped/not very well thought out and selfish, here glossed the contextually more acceptable feminist-paradigm way as environmentally unsustainable and UnCaring.)
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and, i want to note here what i already said, that i appreciated your chuckle of recognition when i realized aloud of course i'm looking in all the wrong places (the wire's "where do i find homeless people?" "not at home i suspect"), the person i want to read didn't get an MFA or guggenheim fellowship and isn't constantly booklist lauded yet, etc. etc. but it's getting harder and harder for me to find those places. again, where will i find someone whose work means/meant as much to me as patrick califia, joan nestle, minnie bruce-pratt, leslie feinberg, barbara smith, sally miller gearhart, kitty tsui, janet hardy, deborah sundahl? it's getting so hard (seriously, as far as contemporaneous tanya saracho kind of feels like it so far for many years for me? and is damn near impossible to share with anyone in order to discuss!), and in the meantime that shamefully/dreadfully unarchived past continues to feel like it's getting lost like windswept sand with zilch fanfare or recognition.