Research and That Lightbulb

I'm actually a huge research nerd. I find research intimidating, but I love, in the age of the internet, how much you can unearth about a subject, and how quickly. (What researchers and students did BEFORE the internet I sincerely never want to know. Terrifying.) Research was, at one point, my profession, something I was paid to get up every morning and do; that was absolutely one of the happiest and most fulfilling periods of my life.

Now, of course, I pay other people to let me do research, to give me a direction and an idea. It's interesting and challenging in a different way, and unlike the extremely guided work I did as an undergraduate, generally allows for a great deal of agency. I also happen to love my subject matter and the different questions it allows me to ask. This semester, I have committed to writing a paper on the antichoice movement's targeting of African-American women, particularly through visual media, and a Marxist analysis of Wes Craven's "Last House on the Left." So. That should be. good.

The thing is, during research there is this LIGHTBULB moment. It's amazing. It's so cool. It's the moment where you stumble upon an article and you think, "OH MY GOD, THIS IS IT, THIS ARTICLE IS THE ARTICLE THAT MAKES MY PAPER, IT PULLS IT ALL TOGETHER, THIS IS THE ARTICLE I WROTE THIS PAPER HOPING TO FIND." You think this, as indicated, in ALL CAPS, in a circular way, happy ideas chasing one another around in your mind like so many hamsters on a wheel, and you can hardly breath as you start searching for the full text. Of course, you have based this joy, this glee, this conviction entirely off of a title and, very occasionally, an abstract, BUT THAT IS NO DETERRENT. Naturally this article, this essential, paper-making article, is not available online. You cannot find the full text and google, sweet sweet google, of all things, is insisting it does not exist, although you have a title and an author and HOW CAN THAT BE, but OK, keep breathing. You check interlibrary loan - nada. Not happening. You despair. You awake in the morning. You try again. You despair some more. And then a week later, another related search makes you realize this "article" is actually a chapter in a book, and the library has two copies just. sitting. on the shelf. Your heart rate goes back up. This is it. It's aaaaaaaaallllllllll comin' together.

And then you pray, as you descend the library stairs, that this article is everything you hoped it was, or even just a fraction, or maybe even just tangentially related to your topic, because you realize you have based this hope for fulfillment on a title, a wing and a prayer.

Oh yeah, I love this stuff. And in case you're wondering, the chapter is "11. High and Low: The Transformation of the Rape-Revenge Movie – Carol J. Clover" in Pam Cook and Philip Dodd's Women and Film: A Sight and Sound Reader, and I'll know Monday if there is a Patron Saint of Desperate Grad Students, and if s/he heard my prayers.

Freud

"Aha! Freud has told me why I am uncomfortable discussing sex! I DO wear a thick overcoat as though it were bad weather in the world of sex!" - My amazing grad school Job

I was pretty much in it to win it with Freud when he got in to the gays, because quite frankly, the dude was pretty damn open-minded even by today's standards, never mind over a century ago. His metaphors are, as my job noted, hilarious, and every now and then he'll come out with something that really is kind of pure poetry:

"That cruelty and sexual impulse are most intimately connected is beyond doubt taught by the history of civilization."

WORD, Freud. Word. But then, every now and again, he will just totally, completely lose me, and, I believe, any sane and rational reader. To wit:

"The significance of the factor of sexual overestimation can be best studied in the man, in whom alone the sexual life is accessible to investigation, whereas in the woman it is veiled in impenetrable darkness, partly in consequence of cultural stunting and partly on account of the conventional reticence and dishonesty of women."

Soooo... ok then.

Freud is turning out to be quite the challenge. An enigma, if you will, which was the title of a recent message I received on OKCupid, which went as follows, true story:

You’re Julia Child on acid meets Betty Page’s masculine side on Prozac.
You are a riddle wrapped in an enigma dipped in chocolate.
I want to wrap you in cellophane and throw marshmallows at you.

Which I have to say, I think Freud would have had a fucking field day with.

Traditiiiiiiiiooooooooon

Raymond Williams, Marxist scholar, breaks down the meaning of "tradition" in Marxist terms in his book Marxism and Literature. He defines it in part as "the most evident expression of the dominant and hegemonic pressures and limits." What we see of tradition is inherently selective, an active process of choosing what will be represented and what will be discarded of the history that we use to shape our present. According to Williams, the hegemonic sense of tradition is the most active - meaning the structures that shape our whole social process, the process of social domination that keeps everyone in line, is the most active in the process of selection which accounts for what we see in the present tense as tradition. It "offers a historical and cultural ratification of a contemporary order".

What does it mean, then, when our President refers to the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits the use of federal funding to provide abortions, as "tradition"? The idea, when expressed, was politically loaded, but upon re-examination, so is the word itself. This means that the President is actively participating in establishing "dominant and hegemonic pressures and limits" on a woman's right to choose an abortion specifically, and on women's access to reproductive services generally. It means of the many traditions to choose from, including the tradition of unfettered access to legal medical services, the President has chosen instead to align himself with the conservative tradition of treating women's bodies as a grounds on which to establish extensive policy. And that, I feel, is much more deeply disturbing than the sentiment itself - what it means to uphold the tradition of and behind the particular sentiment, to choose that tradition over all others, and the ways that tradition over all others will shape the future of women in this country.

Oh Yeah, That Happened

As last semester was the age of Foucault, so is this semester, clearly, the age of Marx, to the extent that I have named my car battery charger (don't ask) "Karl", and when people inquire to my relationship status and I say I am sleeping with someone, I am referring to this German, long since passed from this world and also, married. The fact that this does not strike me as at all odd until I actually write it down says something deeply disturbing about graduate school which I will endeavor not to examine.

I am house and puppy-sitting for the weekend, which is really enjoyable. I love having a new environment in which to sit for hours, head in my hands, drowning in theory and coffee. And for the record, these wonderful people have AMAZING coffee. They also, apparently, have a housekeeping service.

So this one time, I was sitting at someone else's kitchen table, reading the works of Karl Marx while chatting with the housecleaner.

Oh yeah, that happened.

I could unpack the experience, but let's just go with the facts:

1) The two ladies, Lucia and Maria, were absolutely lovely.
2) Lucia was from Brazil, where dogs, apparently, drink beer.
3) They both spoke much, much better English than I speak Portuguese.
4) They are self-employed and make an excellent living.
5) I was also, in this case, "the help", but I am to all appearances white, I speak English, I am pursuing higher education, and I have a more personal relationship with our "employers".
6) I did not grow up in a house that used a cleaning service, so I am unused to the situation generally, and kept apologizing and trying to get out of the way.
7) I found the whole situation both intensely awkward and completely hilarious, which might mean I'm a terrible person and definitely means I am an inadequate revolutionary site.

My Friend's Gchat Status Message

"My feminist Marxist dialect brings all the boys to the yard."

Girls to the Front

For Christmas, my best friend Will, a long-time feminist, bought me the book "Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution" by Sara Marcus. I read the brief introduction detailing her experience with the movement, limited but, for her, life-changing. It made me want to cry. It made me want very much to finish the book. It made me want to throw the book away.

I began my political work as a feminist, I remain a feminist. I work and live and interact with other people as a feminist. But I have made my brand of feminism a very palatable thing. The more conservative people in my life would disagree, but I think the mere fact that I am close to so many truly politically and socially conservative people is proof in and of itself: I am no longer the kicking, screaming, angry little feminist I began as. Three years in non-profits in DC and a long relationship with someone in the military have something to do with it. Time spent working in communications has also been a factor; I came to see the ability to communicate effectively as vital to the survival of policy, and anger often doesn't communicate well. It doesn't necessarily help you (or me) accomplish what you wish to accomplish.

But anger and the "strident feminism" of my life a decade or so ago accomplished other things. For one thing, it was loud. Gloriously, amazingly loud. Which means it got heard. I wish I had words for how hard it is to be heard as a woman. We still make less on the dollar than men doing the same job, we still get raped, we still get told what we're allowed to do with our bodies by people we've never met, we still get told what we should do with our bodies by every media outlet on the planet earth, and on and on. And we are taught that the way to be heard is to be polite, and ask nicely, and work hard. It is important to get along with people and not make enemies; making enemies is not the way to get what you want. And to a certain extent, I very much believe that. I bought in enough to have ended up, at this point in my life, as a pretty moderate version of a feminist working hard for what I believe in.

But like the LGBTQ(QA) movement I have spent the majority of my life working in, I believe anger from the left is important fuel for the fire in the middle. I believe a push from the far left moves everything along on its way. I think left to its own devices the middle will dawdle for an eternity, because the middle is comfortable, and most people in the middle are there because they are comfortable, and who wants to move when they're comfortable?

No one, that's who.

So this book makes me think back to an angrier but louder and more joyous time in my life, a time of more clarity and perhaps more sincerity and wonder: what do I want from this degree I'm pursuing? What do I want to change, and how? What kind of feminist do I want to be when I grow up? Studying incredibly personal issues in the dense theoretical abstract of grad school has still managed to make me squirmy and uncomfortable with the sense that I no longer know the answers to these questions, and now that my first semester has ended, it's time to consider them.

Terrifically Subtle Dreams

In my dream last night, I decided to pour out everything I was considering for my seminar paper onto a document, and go back and edit it later. After writing down everything I could think of, my paper was 2 pages long. Double-spaced.

It needs to be 15.

On a related note, I am supposed to be seriously dedicated to said paper today, but instead I keep hopping onto the New York Times, hitting refresh on Nate Silver's fivethirtyeight blog, hoping he will say something encouraging about the Nevada race. That it is not only possible but incredibly likely that Harry Reid will lose to Sharon Angle is, to me, astonishing, and the clearest indicator yet that the end times are upon us. Let others obsess over Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh - media figures are powerful, certainly, but the batsh&* crazy woman will probably, by the end of the day, be one of the 102 most powerful people on the entire planet. Yes - on the planet. No one holds more power than Senators in this country, particularly with the way the Senate is currently dividing and operating, except for the President and Vice President. And until China knocks it out from under us - due to happen any day now - we still stand as the most powerful country in the world. ERGO.

Today, probably in honor of CNN, is our Black in America class in my GCS seminar (since race in America is always constructed in terms of the visual and therefore the only race in America is, obviously, Black, and therefore race in America is actually about Black in America and I think you follow me on this, yes? Sorry Asian people. Sorry Middle Eastern people. etc), and I am trying to figure out exactly on what grounds to argue that stalking the election results throughout the class will directly relate to the material. I think there's a strong case to be made here.