Back Porch Blogging: An Update

Right now I'm sitting on my backporch using Roommate L's computer to blog. My computer is packed cozily into my carry-on luggage so that I can fly to RedState this evening to go see TP for two weeks. I wish I had a digital camera so that I could post a picture from this porch. I love it, it is one of the best things about this apartment, and I really feel like I have my own private treehouse when I'm out here.

My weekend was wonderful, and totally insane. Friday night, I was flying because I had left OldJob and gotten New(nee Dream)Job, so I drank many Dark and Stormies and snuck into the graveyard up the street and it was all *delicious*. I spent a lot of Saturday helping a sister with a broken car, and driving her through HarborCity to her new place to help her paint and thither and fro. The rest of Saturday I forgot eat lunch, then I went for a run, then I waited three hours to eat, and then ate a LOT of chinese food before falling asleep.

Sunday was my birthday. I woke up next to a doctor. How did this happen you ask? Isn't TP a doctoral student thousands of miles away. Yes, I woke up next to my sister, who recently became an MD. Now, unlike many, my sister is absolutely adorable when she's sleeping, and so I rolled over and watched her sleeping and thought how nice it was that she was moving to HarborCity and then I did a total double take because I realized that the person I was in bed with was VERY well-educated. I don't know why this struck me... but, well, I'd never slept with a doctor before. Sunday night I had a lovely party with barbeque, beer and friends. I have yet to be given a book for my birthday, which is perfect because I have far too much to read as it is.

Tonight I'm flying to RedState to see TP. We will spend most of our time in Liberal City, but we will take a detour to DarkRedState to visit TP's ancestral home and I will meet hir father. I will keep you all posted. In driving from RedState to DarkRedState we might drive through New Orleans, and I will definitely blog about then if/when it happens.

Some things to read:
-- Jackadandy's post on outdressing the grooom at a wedding.
-- Mamita's post on marriage. I'll get back to that later.
-- FarmGirl thinks of something so delicious I wanted to eat it off my screen.

Please Don't Forget

About this

It's still important and the struggles there are still very real, if there is going to be a movement against racism and classism in this country, I think it might start in New Orleans, but only if we don't forget about it.

Three Excellent Things About Today

1. I got DreamJob (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)
2. It's my last day at OldJob
3. To celebrate both our office is ordering Thai take-out, and so a spicy order of Pad Thai has my name on it.

After All the Nights Apart Is There a Home for the Travelling Heart?

The post formerly known as The Rollercoaster, Part II.

I wonder how many consecutive blog posts I could name after random remembered Indigo Girls lyrics.

Tonight after my penultimate day of work (!!) I met two good friends from ELAC, W and B for drinks. W is maybe the most straightforward person I've ever known, blunt, really is the word. Many find her abrasive, but we jive in this pleasant way, and I haven't seen her for about a year so we had a lot to catch up on. Including TP and hir decision to go on T. W was no less blunt talking about this than she is talking about anything else. It threw me off guard.

It probably wouldn't have thrown me quite so much if I hadn't decided today what my least favorite thing in the world is. I think my least favorite thing (or certainly high up on the list) is when someone I love asks me if something is going to be okay, or expresses a fear that something will go badly, and I can't tell them that everything will be fine because I'm struggling with the same fears and insecurities. It sucks. I want to be able to tell TP that everything will be fine, but I just can't. I'm not that good a liar. While I believe that everything will work out, that T will not be the deal breaker that W imagines it might be, I can't promise that, and so I say nothing.

W is grilling me about T, and I want to present to this (somewhat concerned) friend* of mine that I'm grounded and realize both the immensity of this and my faith that it'll be okay, and the (important) fact that overall the relationship is good for me. Period. This much representing can really tire a girl out. I hate that too. The fact that I'm constantly representing this relationship and teaching people about it. Part of it is the long distance, part of it is the queerness. So I try to be honest to present the good with the bad, I fairly accurately describe myself as 25% scared shitless and 75% excited.

However the more she asks me these blunt questions the more I feel poked. The more I feel like I'm 75% scared. This song, quoted above is so sad, about leaving, and only being able to leave, and being unsure that the "fire will burn on [her] return". I always thought of that fire as the homefire until tonight. Homefire is a fairly neutral domestic thing, but then I realized that it could just as easily be the fire and passion between two people.

In five days I'm seeing TP for the first time in about two months, and all the usual fears we both have are amplified by all the changes going on in both our lives, but T does loom large. I know that things will go much more smoothly if I can manage to be 75% excited, and not be scared shitless. I have faith that if we make it through the first 24 hours, we'll make it through an amazing summer. I just can't be paralyzed with fear and doubt, I need to be 75% excited so that TP knows that nothing approaching a dealbreaker has occured due to this crazy chemical. And all this representation would be easier if I could quash** my own fears.

OH! Unrelated. The drink I had with B and W was amazingly good. Bellini Martini. Vodka, champagne, peach nectar. Booze of the gods, folks, booze of the gods.

*W has every right to grill me about my relationships. She had to sit through two years of me almost deciding to leave my abusive girlfriend in college before I finally did, and she didn't even say "I told you so" once. So bonus points for W.
**Excellent word. In the Thursday New York Times crossword, which I finished this very evening with Roommate L. and friend M.

The Good, the Bad, the NPR

NPR was full of wonderful things this morning. I love NPR, the theme song is like Pavlov's bell since the news was constantly on in the kitchens of my childhood, and I would be an uneducated idiot without their news... and then there is always Will Shortz on Sunday mornings, CarTalk, This American Life. Yes, yes, I love it.

I've been here. It was one of the most amazing weekends of my life, and his description of the process of traveling to get there almost does it justice. Let me say that it took me longer to get from Quito to Tiputini, than from HarborCity to Quito.

This story has some interesting perspectives on women, men, family, and the once and future workforce. Sometime I will blog in earnest about motherhood, but not today.

And finally, Frank Deford starts talking about gender and sports, and almost does a good job, until he makes it seem like it would be better if we were still living in a cult of womanhood. I'm all for being lily-white, except when I'm not.

Carrots in My Mama’s Garden (Another Post that began Its Life in my Journal)

Digging carrots is my favorite chore. In late October the ground is cold, dark and already barren. It looks like there may be nothing there, perhaps a stalk, withered, emerges here and there. But we know from experience that there is a wealth underground. In the deep, dark, cold chambers that they have created for themselves, the carrots are waiting. Because my mama never really thins her carrots, they are intertwined and twisted, growing together and shaping each other.

Your fingers are cold, and the ground is hard. The carrots want to stay hidden, their sweet goldenness hidden from your soup pot and eager mouth. I like to dig carrots with my bare hands, loosening the soil, exploring the dark, my own pale fingers mirroring the carrots themselves. Sometimes you can only dig two up together they have grown together so, and seeing their intertwining makes you feel like you have uncovered a dirty secret, a carrot sex scandal. It is a slow chore, pulling together details until you have a bushel of them and all their connections and intertwinings, their hidden twisted shapes, are revealed. This digging up of roots, this slow chore on the cusp of winter exemplifies the kind of radical I want to be.

We are on the cusp of a winter. The ground can feel pretty barren. It is hard to have conversations about the sexism, racism, heterosexism, and fear that grow tangled under the surface of our society. To say that they are there is easy; to admit that at times they ‘intersect’ is simple – and inherently insufficient. Intersection, a mere crossing of paths, fails as a description and analytical tool. Race and gender do not intersect, they have been growing around each other in the fertile ground beneath our feet for a very long time. To explore them is to sit, getting dirty, getting cold, loosening soil and gathering details. Digging through our lives and common history we find a stray news clipping, from last week or the last century that tells the same story. We add this to our basket. Digging carrots takes a skill and patience. As a child eager to collect and gather, I would break them, leaving their deeply buried, probing tips still in the earth. I do not want to make this mistake with my radicalism. You have to loosen the soil fully, wiggling the carrot you can see to create space to find the other half, or its still hidden partner.

In this world our ideologies have grown thickly and without tending. Once dug, you can take carrots that grew together, separate and put them back together, matching their cleanest, softest sides to each other. These are their repulsive, gleaming bellies, where they grew together, rubbing, untouched by dirt. These are the vulnerable spots of our ideologies. It is in the intertwining that they reveal their true oppressive capacity. When shown the belly of our oppressive techniques we recognize their true gruesomeness and are more willing to fight their continuing dominance.

Once dug I want to place details side by side, showing the way in which they fit together. There is value in realigning the carelessly planted bed, tracking history and current alliances. Surely in knowing both the true power and the true geography of our ideologies they become more vulnerable to our desires to rework them in a revolutionary way. The formerly smooth barren ground will be rutted, it’s secrets exposed,

It is lonely. In high school I was blessed by the fact that we were not wealthy enough for me to have access to a car and I spent most of my time declining the few invitations I got, saying that I couldn’t come. Secretly, for in adolescence so many things must be secrets, I was glad for the chance to spend time by myself or in the company of my mother. There are things you learn in the loneliness. Songs that you can sing yourself and stories you tell about why you like being alone. There are ways to glorify it to friends and family. And there are ways to truly enjoy it. Annie Dillard once wrote that writing a book was not an act of creation, but more akin to sitting up with a sick friend. Such is my relationship with these harvested details. I have stayed up with my mother past midnight canning vegetables, at time raucous and at times in reverie at our task. Now, I want to explore so many questions following their twists and turns toward unexpected connections. I want to steep and distill my findings. Scattering them across a table, with a pot of tea holding their corners together, rearranging them, like a quilter.

I feel an urgency about this project, I hope I'm starting it here, the carrots are continuing to grow and in that growth getting woody and bitter. Resistance, possible anywhere there is power and room to move, is the work of digging carrots, the push against the hardened frozen ground.

Things I Need to **Not** Do with my Last Four Days In this Cubicle

1. Avoid all the work that is still on my to-do list.
2. Track all the food I've eaten today into a calorie counting website.
3. Obsess over said tracking.
4. Lose precious hours looking at websites that mean nothing to me, like the character defect personality test, and sites about which scale is the best one.
5. Blog.

Cold Beer and Remote Control*

I had my second interview at DreamJob today and I think it went fine. I didn't get a strong gut feeling in either direction. The people I talked to were certainly interesting and nice, and I hope they liked me as much as I liked them and their shiny, sparkling research projects.

I'm heading home in a few minutes. Tonight we are giving our friend the check for the car, and then roommate L. and I will own a car together -- and I will officially have wheels to escape to friends still at ELAC and the idyllic ancestral home, and more mundane destinations like a decent grocery store.

And yes, I am also looking forward to having one of the cold beers that are currently residing in my fridge. I don't know whether there will be a remote control in my evening since the only thing we have from Netflix right now is a Jim Jarmusch movie about New Orleans, which feels like an undertaking. I might not be rated for an undertaking, especially since I didn't really sleep last night on account of the nerves about the interview.

*I love this Indigo Girls song, even though, apparently they were bad for music.

The Trojan Horse

3.10.2005
I'm at a conference on the relationship between American Studies and "Ethnic" Studies, George Lipsitz is talking, later in the conference Robin Kelley will also talk, and I have no idea that I am in the presence of extreme greatness, I'm sitting in the back, worrying about my thesis and feeling for the first time in months like I could be an academic, like there was something worthwhile to the whole enterprise. These folks have figured out some things that I haven't. The conference was held in a room at ELAC that is pretentious to the nines -- painted a historical color with historical plaques, and captain's chairs. I take copious notes when I listen to people speak, I can't help it. I have to, part of them are snippets of things they say, some of them are questions I ask myself as they speak. Later I go back to those cramped sheets and pull things out of them. From that Lipsitz talk I remember him saying that you shouldn't do your scholarship out of habit lest it become like scandinavian cooking. I remember him saying that there are serious people everywhere thinking about hard issues and the task of a radical scholar was to make our work like a Trojan horse, to carry with you all of those people who don't have access to places like ELAC and then to open it up and give them a voice. It was after this conference that I really started to think about where I would want to fit into academia in a real way and asked myself really hard questions about that space.

3.15.5
I'm writing in my journal for my senior seminar for Women's and Gender Studies, it's part reaction to the conference, part reaction to a class discussion -- recreated here.

Last week in class S. and I talked optimistically about taking economic theory and radically infusing it with a sense of the value of caregiving/mothering. H. rose the issue that maybe we don't want to marketize everything and maybe this feeds right back into the system. I still agree with my previous statemet that true change can be achieved through invading the system/status quo; but the ways in which these are possible is highly circumscribed. you have to use data that is out there, you have to build on previous studies and write the way that everyone else writes - stupid peer review. It's not really unlike the way that legal reform will never really be radical because it depends on stare decisis and precedent.

There are two sets of reasons for these rules. One is to prevent the deconsolidation of power. The other is to have a code and language that is intelligble. (Not that the language reason is disconnected from the power one). I digress. How do I hold onto my previous idea? This past weekend at the conference, Lipsitz talked about our ability, as people who make it into the academcy to have our work be a Trojan horse for every serious thinking person we come across who doesn't have access.

I agree with this while also acknowledging that there are real ways that this invasion is more challenging in the discipline of Economics. That suburban lawn is particularly dense, coated with extra layers of pesiticide. Can I be a different kind of Trojan horse? There are fields that have a traditional connection with liberation struggles and radical political actions, like ethnic studies, I have never head of any Econ student/faculty ever hunger-striking for anything. Economics, for the purpose of this metaphor, is the inner citadel. I'm in that citadel. I am bi-lingual. I'm there, not by mistake (as it sometimes feels), but because at some point that was a strategic choice I made. I just didn't know what I would do once I was where I am.

So, back to the Trojan horse, and smuggling more generally. Can I smuggle things out, can I take what I know and translate and reconfigure and produce it on the liminal? Is that possible?

5.21.6
DreamJob is as a lowly-research-thing in academia. I have my second interview in T minus 33 hours, and I want this job, so bad. When I heard Lipsitz talk last March, and wrote about it for class, I believed in the Trojan Horse idea, and I believed that there were serious people navigating their lives in every community and doing that with grace and some analytical skills. I know it now in a way I didn't before, and if I never leave academia again I'll be happy to have had the realness of this year of shitty non-profit job. Further I find myself in a similar place that I was in last year. As a lowly research thing, my ability to translate and smuggle will be limited. When I think about academia I keep putting off smuggling until I've gotten my degree, until I've gotten tenure, and by then I might have forgotten what I was supposed to be smuggling in the first place, and to whom.

Like most things posted here, I have no answers, it's just something I'm mulling over as I try to fall asleep.

In other news:
--My window is open and fresh spring air is coming into my window, I can smell rain and I think I can even smell the leaves growing on the trees.
--I miss TP terribly because hir phone is kerflunk and may not be resurrected for some time; on the other hand we are seeing each other in 10 days.
--Room L. and I finally put up a shelf in the kitchen that we've been talking about putting up for ages... like since we moved in.

Pronouns and Privilege: An Essay in Vignettes

1. I'm seventeen and dating a boy for the first time. He is a gentle, sweet, young man, and I'm pretty in love with him. I hate being seen in public with him. Having dated girls for most of high school I was used to walking around ready for the abuse to fly from people on the street, and I was ready when it did. Walking around with K. I was constantly and painfully aware of the privilege I had. Privilege is funny that way -- before you know that you wear it, it's an invisible cloak and you never know how much it protects you and lifts you up -- once you have it, you notice the distance between you and others (or you and who you were) constantly, and it's painful, hard. It's hard to give privilege back, say "no, thank you". I didn't like being read as straight, I didn't like the approving glances I got from strangers, like this relationship was so much better than the ones I'd had with girls. I hated it.

2 . ED, my gay, biracial, boss at OldJob, is talking to me about something, and I say something about "someone I used to date" and he says "Oh, did he...". And then he catches himself and talks about he can't believe how sexist he of all people just was. I say that we all do it sometimes, and that with me it's a good guess either way, and with TP (who he has met) you would be equally accurate either way.

3. I'm having a networking coffeedate with someone who works at the DreamJob place of employment and mention that I'm going to RedState for a visit in June to visit the person I'm dating, and she uses "he" and I use that to, wincing slightly, knowing that it doesn't quite fit, but not ready to go seven rounds on gender identity in an already tense situation. Ditto with regards to my aunt's reaction to finding out that TP lives in LiberalCity in RedState. "Oh, what does she do there?"

4. I had been dating TP for longer that I would like to admit before I fully integrated hir gender identity in the way I see hir. For a long time I (mostly) unconsciously continued to think of TP as "really a woman", as the decision to start T loomed closer, and as we talked about it more, I realized that this has to change and, finally, I think it has. How do I know? My boss, mother, and sisters continue to use "she" for TP, even after meeting hir, and I wince the same way I wince when someone uses "he". Sometime I'll have to decide whether to enforce the most complicated grammatical shift ever onto my family, but for now I'm just happy that I wince.

5. I'm talking to my queer neighbor (as if I had just one, ha!) about her partner who is working class (a cop, so sexy in the uniform) and butch, and about TP and pronouns. She says that she doesn't think her partner identifies as a woman, but neither does she have pronouns to use to describe the place where she is -- the partner identifies this as being about "not having read Kate Bornstein, or Butler". Those two writers aside, I point out that I think it is about class, and priorities. TP is getting a Phd in English Literature. Pronouns will be important to hir because language is of primary importance.

TP, and the people that surround hir, use privilege everytime we use the correct pronouns for hir. Beyond that, I shift in and out of privilege, like a garment that is visible only to me. Everytime I use "she" or "he" they are both inaccurate, but differently so, I never thought that letting people assume I was straight could feel so subversive or that being recognized as queer could feel so erasing. I don't know how all of this works, or what I think about it. But I do know that I feel the same way I did when I was seventeen and walking around with a boy on my arm for the first time, without the tools to handle the new ways the world was handling me.

Competition

Mac of Good (Almost) Man fame stopped by my office today to hang out and shoot the breeze. I love it when he does that, I almost always learn something about his grandkids, life, dreams, etc. He really is a remarkable person and community activist, but that's a story for another day.

He was telling me about how a few years ago his old lady left him because she found God. He told me this story and then said, shaking his head and playing with his whiskers -- "and how can a fella compete with that? I'm a good man, but I can't compete with God."

Second Interview at DreamJob!!

Please cross any free appendages in my honor.

Value Judgements (cont) -- More Politics, Fewer Equations

In which Lisa Duggan, queer academic extraordinaire, says in two sentences much of what needs to be said in the world today, and I nod my head in agreement, too tired to write a more indepth post, but too connected to the blogosphere to crap out on my promises.

“In the real world, class and racial hierarchies, gender and sexual institutions, religious and ethnic boundaries are the channel through which money, political power, cultural resources, and social organization flow. The economy cannot be transparently abstracted from the state or the family, from practices of racial apartheid, gender segmentation, or sexual regulation” (Lisa Duggan, Twilight of Equality, xiv)

Value Judgements

Everything has an ideology. Or rather, ideologies come out in most of the things that we do in this life. Nothing bothers me more than when people claim that economics is objective, that once you create an economic model you have created some divine and authoritative account of it. Models are no more authoritative than a poem. They are just poems that people tend to believe, and listen to.

Deciders, All of Us
Being an economist means making a lot of choices that your readers never see. This is why there is that quote about "liars, damned liars, and statisticians". Let me give you a couple of examples. For any model to work you have to make assumptions; assumptions are based on your point of view, which is based on your set of preferences, your worldview, your upbringing, on and on. The problem is that economics has gotten very rigid in what assumptions are made. For instance, we always assume that people act rationally. People might not act rationally. Period. We also might assume a certain set of preferences onto people, like a preference for labor over home production -- or home production over labor depending on the gender of the person. Heck, some of the Becker's theories in A Treatise on Family are premised on the idea that there are biological differences between the sexes that predisposes woment to have a comparative advantage at housework. Think about that for a second. You can't include everything in a model, it cannot recreate real life in equation form. That means making decisions about what to include and what to assume away.

Assume that the credit market works, poor people should be able to pay for education by borrowing money and therefore pull themselves up by the bootstraps. Can we assume that? Does that make sense given what I know about the world? No, would things work more smoothly if the credit market did work, yes. But it shouldn't be assumed a priori like that. It's irresponsible. Decisions we make matter, they hide or expose people's lives.

Choosing Costs, Choosing Benefits
Along with these decisions of modeling, we also have to make decisions about what costs and benefits to include in our calculations. Let's think about a basic problem -- how many gallons of GOOK Factory A should produce. I'll give you the answer first, and then explain it a bit: Factory A should produce where marginal benefit equals marginal cost.

1. GOOK is good for the residents of East Gookville who buy it, they use it for a lot of things -- it might even cure cancer. There are benefits to the production of gook for the people who buy it. We will call these benefits to people who buy GOOK marginal private benefit or MPB ( for now, don't worry about why it's marginal, or ask me in the comments and I'll write another post with graphics to explain).
2. GOOK costs money to make, Factory A has to pay residents of East Gookville for their labor, and there are the raw materials that go into GOOK. We will call this the marginal private cost (MPC) of GOOK.

So we should produce X number of GOOK when

(Equation 1) MPB(x)=MPC(x)

Incidentally, the price of GOOK will be equal to MPB or MPC at this point.

Got it?

Good, now, let me complicate things. This is the private equilibrium point, all the private costs and benefits are taken into account.

The production of GOOK produces this nasty smoke and gross slime that pours out of the factory and into East Gookville. It smells bad, it makes kids sick. It's Erin Brockovitch territory. There are two ways to think about this smoke and slime. It is either a increase in the cost, or a decrease in the benefit. It really doesn't matter which way you think about. I'll go with the cost model here. Normally, in the market, the slime and smoke would not enter into the equation, neither Factory A nor the people who buy GOOK have to pay to help clean up East Gookville. It is an externality -- a cost or benefit not borne by any of the agents managing a transaction. They are maybe my favorite thing you would learn about in the first semester of microeconomics.

So imagine that we added in the Social Cost (SC) or the slime and smoke (if you want to think of it as the Slime Cost, I'll support you).

(Equation 2) MPB(x)=MPC(x) + SC(x)

This will increase the price, right? Because this number will be bigger than the number in Equation 1. And an increase in price means fewer units of GOOK are sold, which means that the benefits of GOOK to the community of East Gookville offset the costs. Now, we are producing a socially optimal amount of GOOK.

Here is the trick -- which costs do you include. If you think that there are social costs or benefits to an action that has a market (or one that doesn't have a market) they need to be taken into account if we want to reach a social optimum, and as the person writing the equations I get to decide what to include, and how to quantify the benefits.

Warning: Once you start doing this, and applying it to your everyday life, you can rationalize *anything*. I should have this piece of cake, because it will make me happy, and my happiness will confer a social benefit on all the people I smile at in the train. You see what I mean, tricky business, and economists rarely talk about the decisions they are making behind the scenes and the implications that they have. A continuation including my "most quoted quote" will follow sometime before bed.

Haiku/Senryuu Festival

My contribution is up here, and there are lots of good, funny political contributions -- so take a peek, and everyone has some time for a 17 syllable poem.

I hold one red glove
fitting two or three fingers
wet, unlike leather.

[edited to add my haiku, for curious minds who want to know]

Here is a Shocker!

You scored as Postmodernist. Postmodernism is the belief in complete open interpretation. You see the universe as a collection of information with varying ways of putting it together. There is no absolute truth for you; even the most hardened facts are open to interpretation. Meaning relies on context and even the language you use to describe things should be subject to analysis. Postmodernist 100% Cultural Creative 63% Materialist 50% Modernist 38% Idealist 31% Romanticist 25% Existentialist 13% Fundamentalist 13% What is Your World View? (updated) created with QuizFarm.com

Bestiality and Contraception

If that title doesn't get me some google hits, I'm done for.

An update on my personal life is at the bottom of this post, if you care about that and not about bestiality, you have a bizarre sense of what is interesting, but you can scroll down nonetheless.

So, last week Shorto wrote an article for the New York Times about the ongoing and burgeoning war on contraception in American society. It was a flawed article, sure, but he made some good points, and opened up the eyes of many about the slippery slope problems that could be associated with letting some rights to abortion fall to the wayside.

Another thing that I think he did fairly well was pull out the logic of those who would like to reserve sexuality for Christian heterosexual marriage, and think about the arguments they make. I think those folks really do think that back in the day, when sex only happened in marriage, and the body was a temple, there was less homosexuality, and not the undue emphasis on sexuality that there is today. As Shorto says, "Contraception, by this logic, encourages sexual promiscuity, sexual deviance (like homosexuality) and a preoccupation with sex that is unhealthful even within marriage."

If you are wondering how the availability of contraceptions increases homosexuality, this is not the blog to answer your questions -- I am flummoxed as to how they got to this conclusion.

Stephanie Coontz in writing about marriage and how we think about it today, has pointed out that we have a false and rose-colored idea of what marriage used to be, and in all of our romanticizing and white weddings we are harkening back to an ideal than never existed. The same is true with these people's ideas of sexuality in heterosexual marriages back in the olden days.

It wasn't all it is cracked up to be. Sure, we don't know a lot about how marriage really worked for the people involved because history decided as a discipline a while ago to pay less attention to the private sphere, but some good scholarship has been unearthing it. Sure, men had sex with their wives, maybe their wives only had sex with them. But marriage is certainly not the only place that sex happened.

a. It's called the oldest profession for a reason. Enough said.

b. Casual MSM sex was a lot more common. Men who have sex with men were more common than they are now. Men were often bedfellows, and often had sex with each other. Usually whoever was the penetrator got to keep their identity as a man, and whoever was penetrated lost that identity -- or at least that identity became more troubled.

c. Bestiality happened. I think in part it happened, like MSM sex, because there was no fear of pregnancy. In those days, we lived more closely with our domestic animals and livestock, and opporutunity was definitely a factor. If you want a conversation of this that doesn't rely on the vague and unsatisfactory term "in those days" check out the first chapter of this book. It talks both about MSM sex and bestiality/buggery. Also, if you are in this field, it's a great teaching text.

Do I think that if contraception is made illegal or inaccessible in this country there will be an increase in prostitution, casual homosexuality and people screwing their sheep? No. I don't. But I am also very wary of people who say that it will make marriage in a sacred and pure (barely) sexual union that it never was.

Personal Update:
I was in BigCity this weekend for the exciting FamilyEvent. It was nice, I'm so proud of my sister it makes me cry. It was also very stressful, as spending time with broken and blended family is.

I greatly underestimated my aunt and uncle who live in LiberalCity in RedState where TP also lives. I had been putting off coming out to them for months because they are Republicans and Catholic, and maybe the most classist people I've ever met and I was terrified of them. When I told her that I was going to be in LiberalCity for two weeks, she asked why, and I said that the person I was dating lived there, and she immediately said "Oh? What does she do there?". Which was a relief. We'll deal with gender identity another day. Honestly, I think their biggest concern is that I promise to always call when I'm in town and let them take me out to dinner, mooch off their privilege, and, of course, drink their ginger margaritas (YUM).

I haven't heard from DreamJob. Fingers still crossed, should hear about whether I'm getting a 2nd interview this week.

Rape (again)

I posted a comment over there. But think it's important to add here. Basically a quick discussion on why rape crisis counselours need to believe the people who call them.


I think a lot of this hangs on our definition of the word “advocate” and “counselor”. I’ve been a rape crisis counselor for an anonymous hotline on a college campus. I fielded calls from women who thought that they had been raped, women who thought they had had “a bad hookup”, and once even a guy who was *terrified* that he might have raped someone. In each and every case my job was to be an advocate for that person — to help them through how they were feeling about the situation, listen to them, help them make decisions, present them with options so they could decide what they needed to do to keep themselves safe. It wasn’t my job to tell the women who had been raped that I wanted DNA evidence to continue the call, and it *equally* wasn’t my job to tell the woman who had “a bad hookup” that she had been raped, or to tell the guy that he needed to learn how to talk in bed, or his sex life would suck for a long time.

We ask lawyers to be advocates for people, to help them tell their stories in the court so that they can receive a fair trial. Rape crisis advocates should (and do) have similar standards of professionalism, that involve listening, and believing. Period.

For more about how I feel about rape, read this.

Notes from Backstage

I love performances – live music, movies, plays, even sports events take on a certain kind of loveliness to me. But my favorite performers are everyday people; their performances are live, candid and fresh. I like to watch them from the other side of coffee shops through car windows and from afar in public forums. Some of the performances that I have enjoyed the most though are the ones with which I have been most intimate – the ones where my friends have designed the lighting or watching someone I know talking to a stranger. All the things that I love about them become new again in watching them deal with something new. I can see how her eyes imagined this sunset and how she designed it. I like being in on that part. I like knowing the art and craft that goes into that performativity.

Gender is also a performance. The way that we wear clothing and take up space and relate to others is all part of complex performance that constitutes gender identity and expression. My steady is genderqueer, doesn’t identify as a man or woman and uses gender neutral pronouns, ‘ze’ and ‘hir’ whenever possible. For hir gender performance is particularly important. The name ze uses is one that folks usually assume is male. Ze presentation is fairly masculine – the performance is important to hir. And most people don’t get to be backstage for that. I am. And sometimes that’s uncomfortable. There is something hard about having the person for whom you perform be the person who is backstage. Not in a cool backstage pass, meet the band kind of way; in a nitty-gritty I’ll do the grunt work kind of way. I love that intimacy – being the one who knows how to help choose a binding, or talking about the consequences of going on hormone therapy. We talk about the parts that are painful and we talk about the consequences. Sometimes my steady worries about letting someone in… I’m the first girlfriend ze has had since starting to blur the gender categories and I think that I’m the first person who has ever been in hir backstage.

My gender is in some ways easier to pin down which makes the performance harder to pin down. I am feminine for the most part, except when I let my inner butch come out and play. But I’m just as anxious about handing out those backstage passes. I don’t know if TP knows that, that for me it is as terrifying to talk about wanting to be equally sexy in a three piece suit and a velvet dress, as it is for hir to talk about hir body and how ze wants it to change.

Sometimes this all puts me in a funny place in the trans community, especially in HarborCity where no one knows TP, and I just look like another femme-ish lesbian on the train. While they are dismissing me, I’m looking for clues -- shorter men, with acne, and a voice that sounds like they have a cold, that extra curve of hip under men’s pants. I notice things I never did before. It’s like being part of a club by only looking through the windows.

A while ago TP mentioned something about how I have a queer body. In that queer theory sort of way. I think of TP’s body as queer all the time; but mine, with the gender identity and sex assignment nicely lined up, I, unfairly, put into the “normal” and straight” categories. However, in reality, my performances pull my body to the edges of woman, but to different edges than the ones that TP goes to with hir performances. Once you add in my desires, and the performances I watch mesmerized and entranced – I’m back behind backstage in this queer liminal place, finding folks to kiss before I know what their genitals might look like. In the meantime, no one even knows that I have a backstage.

I don’t know what implications this might have for my life, this invisible backstage, but welcome, so far only TP and the blogosphere really have a pass.

Read the New York Times

If you haven't already find some way to read the Shorto article on Contra-Contraception in the Sunday magazine of the New York Times (I'm not linking here because you can find the NYT, I know you can, and I can't figure out how to link without you learning my user name, which is pas de cool). The article is pretty shocking, and therefore hard to read, but is so very, very important. In the, joking, words of a good friend, "No, you can't have your body back".

-- In other news, I need to start finding ways to organize and follow-through on blogging ideas as they come up -- does anyone have a system for this? Things that are still on the list are: men who contra dance, bestiality and contraception, queer femininity, what I wear when I'm not in drag, and more things that I do that are radical fun that I thought up over the weekend.

-- I had a first interview for DreamJob today, it went well, I think. My interviewer was a graduate from ELAC, which was weird, but not altogether unsurprising.

-- Roommate M. is moving out on Saturday, I'm leaving town on Wednesday (for the first of a series of exciting family events)-- I'm sad about her leaving. L. and I sent and email to B. (who might soon be roommate B.) formally inviting her to join the People's Republic of OurHouse, I hope she gets back to us soon.

-- Work is insane.

Radical Fun

Today is Radical Fun Day!

First of all I apologize because I had totally forgotten about it, and so blogging more about testosterone, teen motherhood, and my interview will all have to wait. I have to have fun!

Radical fun. Part of being queer, in my head, is being disruptive of normative places. Sometimes I do this by having loud sex (yes, college dorms are still normative places), sometimes I sit like a man on public transit, taking up a full seat, sometimes I ask the 'wrong' question in a meeting or classroom. But my favorite way to do it -- is to laugh.

My laugh is loud. Really loud. It sounds like I'm choking, and really when I laugh really hard it is difficult to breathe because I'm laughing so hard.

In high school, every morning we had Chapel, it was non-demoninational -- full of announcements and inspirational readings. We sat in our Advisory Groups. I sat next to a wonderful queer boy for four years. He was also a close friend, he had all the dance moves of Britney Spears memorized, we would have a BadPopSong of the week to sing to each other in the hallways, and every once in a while he would bite me in Chapel.

You have to picture an old auditorium, with a lovely and moldering proscenium stage. You have to picture an overweight Catholic arch-nemesis with a face that resembles a beet trying to be inspirational. It's quiet, other people are saying the Pledge of Allegiance, and then I start laughing. I'm about two thirds of the way back and the whole place can hear me, and I can't stop. I am a total disruption, and I don't care, I'm having too much fun.

I was pretty quiet in high school -- the only times I was loud was when I was angry and railing against aforementioned Catholic Arch-nemesis, and while playing lacrosse (when I was known to growl at my opponents). But there was very little joyful noise in my life, I was struggling to feel like I had space in the world, my laugh was always a disruption. Now there is a lot more laughter and a lot more space -- or I take the space more freely than I did then. I'm not sure which.

I love laughing, I love the way it takes my whole body and demands attention. I love the fact that my joy takes over and I can't stop it sometimes. I love it for the same reason that I love sex -- the ecstacy. From the Latin ex-stare, to stand outside oneself, to be taken outside oneself. It may not sound so radical, I hope it sounds fun. But it's what I hope to be doing in the face of this old, tired, beautiful, screwy world... that and you know, agitating

TP Alert

1. I had to give TP the URL to the blog so that ze could cite some of it in a paper for a class. While I was at it, I gave ze the permission to look this place up and leave comments. So be aware, TP might lurk, and might comment.
2. So, in case there were any illusions, my real name is not Corinne. Most people in my life don't know about this blog, and I'm strangely protective of it.
3. TP is also not TP's real name, it stands for Theoretical Partner. Language is a funny thing, because we have developed gender neutral terms for pretty much everything except the people we date. If you have a life partner you can use "partner". But there isn't really a gender neutral alternative to "girlfriend" and "boyfriend" unless you resort to the saccharine "sweetie", "babe", "main squeeze". So TP is my theoretical partner, not quite a partner, we haven't really made that committment, but something more than simply "the person I'm dating". Also, TP loves theory, queer theory, literary theory, theory for theory's fuck's sake; and I love that about TP. Hence the nickname.
4. I'm going to blog about teen motherhood later. Check back.
5. I have a very exciting (!!!!!) interview on Monday.

Queer Family Quiz

Roommate L. and I are looking for a new roommate for our lovely apartment in HarborCity. Roommate M. is moving out a week from tomorrow, though we don't really need someone to move in until July 1. There are a couple alumnae from ELAC that would be good roommates. The problem is we aren't really sure a "roommate" is what we want. L, M, and I live much more like family in ways that are hard to quantify, and we like it that way. So in an effort to figure out which ELAC alumn to have join our family, we sent out this email. Feel free to write your own answers in the comments, it could be amusing, although I don't think any of my (2.35) readers are prospective roomies in HarborCity.

Some questions we have for you:
- We, in the past, have split all food and made meals together fairly
often. What are your expectations and thoughts about food, grocery
shopping, and meal cookin'? Do you have any dietary restrictions?
- What are things you like to do with rainy saturdays?
- What kind of hours do you anticipate keeping?
- How do you deal with stress? Conflict? How would you like others to
deal with your stress or conflicts with you?
- Are you looking for an apartment to come home to with family-like
friends or are you looking for more of a roommate situation?
-What are you feelings on nudity in the apartment, and open bathroom doors?
-What's your favorite room in a house?
-And, finally, do you have any questions for us?

For the Next X Number of Years

Friday night, my roommate L was marooned on a side of HarborCity that is hard to get home from by public transportation, but easy to get home from by car, so I took the car and my good friend who was over for dinner and we embarked to pick her up. Relatively easy driving in HarborCity means you might get there if you don't really care about seeing any road signs ever or having to deal with insane drivers.

My friend and I started having a heavy, deep, and real conversation about what I'm going to do with my life. Do I really like economics more than I like queer theory? Would there be a way to blend them? Would that way be martyrdom? How do I feel about that? Do I really want to be doing economics graduate school until I am in my thirties? What then?

The problem was that I was driving in the dark, and could only sort of answer all of these questions that she was so gently posing. I can also only sort of answer them when I'm not driving, it's brilliantly sunny and I'm sipping lemonade (yes, lemonade works like truth serum). I have mixed feelings about economics. Can the master's tools dismantle the master's house? What other tools do we have, especially in academia, don't we all use the master's tools sometimes? Every weapon is a tool if you hold it right, every tool is a weapon if you hold it right. I think I could hold it right. On the other hand I endured years at ELAC of being the outsider in my economics classes where the thing was talked about the most was the "profit maximizing firm", and I had amazing EconMentor, who taught me how to disagree with them and showed me the place I could have in that field, and believes in me. (Curse mentors who believe in you and push you to be your better self/academic).

I also have an unhealthy and large dose of self-doubt. I don't know if I can emotionally survive more years in an economics department dominated by men who are maximizing profit at every turn, often at the expense of people in their department. I also don't know if I can do the math.

But I do know that I like economics. The games that it makes you play with your brain have never grown stale for me. I also think that I could be a good teacher, and have interesting research. I also have accumulated some pretty specific human capital (come now, can you draw the Solow Model and explain it in spanish? I thought not). It seems like a waste to throw that away.

It is also the strongest and most flexible tool I have at my disposal, and getting a Phd in Economics does not mean that I have to end up somewhere like ELAC, I could end up somewhere like here So right now, I'm still driving in the dark toward a Phd in Economics. I'm not quite sure where I'm going, there are trickier intersections ahead, but I also haven't run right smack into anything yet.

First Injection

Friday, 1:30.
First injection of testosterone for TP.
Grinning, excited, slightly nauseous.
Fingers crossed.
That's all.