the odd personal interlude

I don’t spend a lot of time discussing my own personal life in my blogging. I’m not sure why that is. I guess I’m generally a somewhat guarded person. I also don’t want to presume that the details of my life are interesting to others. When I share certain intimacies, it’s often with a degree of bombast, as if to proclaim my invulnerability: “Look at what I’m telling you, when I could be silently embarassed or ashamed – how ironclad I must be!” Which is, of course, bullshit. I’m terribly vulnerable, sensitive, and soft-bellied after my own fashion, although the distribution of these chinks in the armor follow no predictable pattern.

Tonight I’m alone, reeling after a week spent in a perpetual state of manic anxiety: illogical crying spells, discreet hyperventillation. School is back in session. Having been officially accepted into “the Program,” I look out over the next fifteen months with some imbalanced quantity of determination and terror. I have a limited amount of time to accomplish an absurdly huge roster of goals, many (most?) of which are self-imposed.

I want to keep blogging. I think it’s important to my overall growth as a thinker. It also helps my sanity, and makes me feel connected to some kind of rather ambiguous audience.

Public Toilet, Private Sex: Senator Larry Craig, “Hypocrisy” and The Closet

Finally! Pulling together this analysis has been like pulling teeth. Up until a few days ago, when it was preempted by anticipation of Britney’s comeback and the oh-so-utterly-impossible-to-anticipate contents of the Petraeus report, the Larry Craig scandal was on everyone’s mind. And certainly, I’ve set a precedent in this blog for discussing sex crimes, sodomy and men’s bathrooms, among other related matters. It seems inevitable that I should have something to say on this new and still-relatively-topical issue. It’s just taken a while to figure out what precisely that commentary might be, but perhaps now I’m ready to engage in some productive analytical meandering.

I think of myself (perhaps self-indulgently) as being radically sex-positive in my outlook. Sex is not merely an enjoyable pastime, or potential source of fleeting happiness. At its best, it constitutes its own topos parallel to or overlapping the rest of the world, an odd borderland between public and private, spoken and unspoken, in which fertile potential exists for liberatory moments and subversive revelations. Just because sex has all of this radical potential (and I’m defining “sex” far more broadly than others might) doesn’t make it innocuous. In fact, if it is to maintain this potential, it cannot be purely innocuous.

There is strong socio-political pressure to promote and accept that non-married, un-sanctified sexual behavior may be worthwhile only if it is utterly toothless, banal “lovemaking” by a committed pair of near-aged adults. Preferably with the lights off. Fucking or being fucked by a potentially dangerous stranger in a public toilet, as Senator Craig was apparently wont to do, is clearly not in line with this model. Just as clear, however, is the fact that participation in this kind of encounter does not always stem from closeted-ness and the inability of participants to live openly gay lives. Plenty of openly gay individuals may participate in “cottaging” and other such practices, although in so doing they risk being admonished by those intent on mainstreaming gay culture.

Alyson’s Getting some Attention…

Alyson’s recent installation at the mayor’s office is getting some some under-the-radar attention… here, go check out what snarky blogsters are saying about the work they’ve dubbed (to Alyson’s amused chagrin) Ku Klux Kondoms…

Lesbians! Nymphomaniacs! Prostitutes! Ah, blessed academia!

Okay… I know I’ve been somewhat lax in posting. I’m working on something about Larry Craig and right-wing homoerotics. It’s forthcoming, and soon. I promise.

In the meantime, haven’t you been thinking to yourselves, “Golly gee, if this is the sort of shit she writes for fun, I wonder what her actual term papers are like?” Perhaps in spite of my better judgement, I’m giving you a chance to find out. I completed the following paper for Prof. Jonathan Walker’s excellent Queer Theory class this past winter.

It has a weak ending, perhaps, and some egregious tendencies towards the tangential. But I actually think it’s pretty good. I might even say I’m proud of it. At about 4000 words, it will be the longest single piece of writing I’ve posted here. If that’s the sort of thing you’re into, dig in.

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Falling into Obscurity: Lesbians, Nymphomaniacs, and Prostitutes and the Triangulation of the Transgressive Woman in the 19th and 20th Centuries.

Women of a certain inclination know how much they have to hide. They know about boxes kept under their bed, and the importance of setting up passwords on their laptop. They know, on their internet browsers, how to erase the history and empty the cache. They know when to lower their voices, and when to keep their mouths shut. They know a great deal about volume, actually, and the muffling of sound. They know when to roll over and try to sleep, when asking for more is asking for too much. They know about catalogs that sell items to be delivered in plain brown paper wrapping, and stores at which the shopping bags are black, unmarked, and opaque. Perhaps they even know phone numbers to call. Or bars at which to linger. Or maybe they don’t know any of these things. Maybe they only know how to get in trouble.

It’s not a matter of being caught with one’s pants down, a matter of slipping self-control on display. What “natural female impulse” could, in excess, manifest itself in such a way? No, to transgress in these ways is to admit to one’s disease. A (heterosexual) man can proclaim, “I’ll do anything to anything.” And he may be classed as a bad man – immoral, or weak, or a pervert – but at least this badness is imaginable, is somehow in keeping with the irrepressibility of a free man in a free society. In fact, what seems more natural, and more imaginable, than a bad man? And what more natural than a good woman?