Writing the Impossible: Three Letters

So, in the last few days I've had to write three fairly impossible letters (two down, one to go).

1. CreativeWritingMentor from HighSchool, who is also a dear friend, the next door neighbor to my mother's house and the woman whose wedding I trespassed to get to in time is just entering second trimester of a difficult pregnancy (and her first): difficult decisions have had to be made, she is physically and emotionally totally exhausted, and the end isn't really anywhere in sight, the likelihood that she will lose the whole pregnancy is still fairly high. I love this woman and she has shown unfailing support for me in all of my endeavors: personal, political, intellectual, and creative. I wish that I had the write words to lift her up and support her from hundreds of miles away, but I'm at a loss. She is also a fairly private person and that makes things trickier especially because I got this update through my mother, who bless her heart, is a pregnancy gossip. On the other hand, I can't NOT write a note.

2. WomenStudiesMentor and mother of children who I babysat and adore was diagnosed with epilepsy this summer and continues to struggle with meds, seizures, and managing life and family with this evolving and changing disorder. I love this woman and she has shown unfailing support for me in all of my endeavors: personal, political, intellectual, and creative. When I go back to ELACtown in a couple of weeks, I'll probably stay with her and her family. It's a funny thing to try to be the friend of a former mentor. I definitely get the vibe that she wants me to be her friend -- but I feel like I'm flying by the seat of my pants in that friendship more than I do in most. Probably because I hang on to boundaries that aren't there anymore. I just wrote her an email pinning down details of my stay (and checking *one more time* that I'm not imposing).

3. HistoryActivismMentor is applying to a tenure track position at the school where her partner teaches and has asked me to write her a recommendation letter. I love this woman and she has shown unfailing support for me in all of my endeavors: personal, political, intellectual, and creative (are you sensing a theme?). The department that she is applying is has asked me to evaluate her skills as a teacher. HOLY SHIT! I told my sister, who was also HAM's student that I was doing this, she agreed that it was an impossible task and we decided the letter could go something like this:

"When I was a freshman HAM taught me what gender was. Then she taught me what history was. Then she treated me like a fellow scholar. Then she taught me about campus politics, myself, housesitting for her adorable cats, being a bitch to get out of being overcommitted, and gender. I still don't think I'm done thinking about everything that HAM taught me. If you don't give her this position you are damn fools, but I'll be happy because she will still be on the East Coast."

In closing:
GAH. Does anyone know how to write this kind of letter?

A List of Five

1. Right now, I'm doing that classic Friday night thing -- drinking beer, watching television, and blogging. Okay, well, at least the beer and television are classic.
2. I've been writing and thinking a lot about butch/femme. I know that that line alone has made some of your ears perk up. I'll get back to you. Yes, this is in part been prompted by my illusions of grandeur and Maria Angeline's call for submissions. Truth of the matter is that I've been writing more, which is part of why I've been seeming a bit scarce around these parts. But the files are piling up, in my Documents\writing folder and someday the better ones may see the light of day.
3. I went for a run on Wednesday morning, and I've only weighed myself once this week. Both of these are good things.
4. I agreed to take on five more hours a week of research time. In some ways it's great. Doing more research, more, always more is the key to the game. It means that some of time that I spend working on PotentialCoAuthorship Project will be paid. I need to broach the "taking work home" subject. Because while I think that I'm happy to take on five more hours a week in front of a computer thinking about economics, I'm not sure that I want to spend more time in front of *that* particular computer. The work I do is pretty portable, and I don't really think that my boss will mind but I'm still nervous about bringing it up. (By the way, it's really funny to refer to a professor as a boss, because he doesn't have any of that boss vibe to him).
5. My dear, dear friend B. played her guitar and sang songs that she had written and we were all there sitting in a coffeeshop while she *featured* at our local OpenMic and clapped like mad. It was a good night.
   

Sunday Afternoon Meme; Narratives about Unpleasant/Naked/Trespassing Pasts

1. Dated outside your race? Yes.
2. Singing in the shower? Almost always.
3. Spit in someone’s drink? No.
4. Played with Barbies? Like once, maybe.
5. Made someone cry? Far too often.
6. Opened your Christmas presents early? Never, some things are sacred.
7. Lied to a friend? Yes, not proud of it.
8. Watched and cried while watching a soap opera? Nooo.
9. Played a computer game for more than 5 hours? Yes. Myst. I was 11.
10. Ran through the sprinklers naked? Yes.
11. Ate food that fell on the floor? Almost daily.
12. Went outside naked? Yes. (Has anyone ever heard of an indoor sprinkler?)
13. Been on stage? Yes.
14. Been on stage naked or close to it? No. My apparent love of nudity has its limits.
15. Been in a parade? No, I don't think I have.
16. Been in a school play? Yes, sadly.
17. Drank beer? Yes, indeedy.
18. Gotten detention? Yes, twice. Once for being loud in study hall, flirting with the girl next to you has its price. And once for attempting to strangle a boy who told that girls couldn't play with boys, he also called me a "blonde bimbo"; I called him a "brunette bastard", chased him down, and tried to strangle him.
19. Been on a cruise? No.
20. Broken into a house? Yes. I forgot the directions to my friend's wedding and so I broke into a house in the middle of nowhere, said hello to the dog, and looked up the phone number for her parent's house and got directions. Got there just in time.
21. Gotten a tattoo? No.
22. Gotten piercings? Ears, and a nose stud.
23. Gotten into a fist fight? Unless you count the wrestling matches with my older sister or the "brunette bastard" incident, no.
24. Gotten into a shouting match? Yes, with my older sister, and AbusiveCollegeGirlfriend. Both periods of my life I want to move beyond.
25. Swallowed sea/pool water? Yes.
26. Spun yourself in circles to get dizzy on purpose? Yes.
27. Laughed so hard it hurt? Yes, including last night.
28. Tripped on your own feet? Sure.
29. Cried yourself to sleep? Yes.
30. Cried in public? Yes.
31. Thrown up in public? No.
32. Lied to your parents? Yes, being in the closet for a while will do that to you.
33. Skipped class? Yes.
34. Cried so hard you threw up? Yes, see shouting matches, crying to sleep, and AbusiveCollege Girlfriend.
35. Had a one night stand? Yes.
36. Left restaurant without paying tab? No.
37. Been fired from a job? No.
38. Wanted to make out with your massage therapist, therapist OR hairdresser? I have an active imagination, so that is a yes.
39. Had a drink "sent" to a stranger at a bar? No, wish I had the balls for that. Or that someone would do that to me someday.
40. Been winked at and loved it? YES.

Evidence of La Femme (Identity)

So, I bought myself these two colors of lipstick this weekend along with some other markers of femininity that are highlighted later in the post. It was wonderful. I was shopping with TP and hir roommate B. -- so, essentially, for the purposes of makeup consumption -- two gay men. They bought eyeliner, I bought the above shades of red. (Mouths look so weird without faces, btw). Then we went home and played. I don't think I have ever *played* with makeup before in my entire life -- it has always been a tooth and nail struggle to the bitter end with haphazard results. Last night, it was so much FUN. Why don't most women give themselves permission to do that kind of thing?

Also, I got these at a thrift store -- there combined price was $55, but I was freaking out about being a capitalist, so I only bought the cowboy boots, and then after much conversation and
consternation. I went back and got the heels. Two things to know about these pairs of shoes:
1. They are both comfortable. I have big and wide feet, comfortable shoes are basically the holy grail.
2. The heels are a much more amazing deep plum color in person, and yes those heels are HUGE by my standards.

In Defense of Data: Long, Meaty, and Raw

Background: I have a major in Economics, a research job, and an interest in Sociology, Demography. I spent about twenty hours this week doing data programming. Also, if this were a working paper in my field it would read in big block letters:

PRELIMINARY AND INCOMPLETE: COMMENTS WELCOME.

A while ago EL of My Amusement Park posted about the New York City's board of health allowing transfolk to get new sex-corrected birth certificates, and asked an important question about why we feel to need to ask that question there. I posted a response. And so did Jenn. You can take a look at the whole exchange here. Though I will also quote below.

Jenn wrote:

I know demographics are supposed to be terribly helpful. Like, they're supposed to help the medical establishment deliver better health care... to those tragic white men who can't get their peckers up. I know demographics help the government figure out what "minority" groups really need, so they can withhold it until they get enough vote service. It helps teachers know which kids to attend to and which are destined to fall through the cracks anyway and aren't worth wasting time on. And don't forget how it helps businesses determine that yes, Virginia, only the needs of white male consumers matter.
Without demographics, we'd have to go back to plain old KKK style bigotry. It's so much nicer to be able to couch it all in lots of scientific-sounding numbers (that we've manipulated to support our pre-existing POV).
Bigotry is dead! Long live Bigotry!
What does knowing someone's gender really tell the govt that it needs to know? I can't think of anything except whether the person deserves first-class treatment or second.

And I understand her point. Demographics can be **terribly** helpful. They are a lynchpin in the bio-political power that the modern nation state has had in the last one hundred and fifty years. Now, some theory:

Bio-power is one of the many technologies of power that was elucidated by Michel Foucault. In History of Sexuality, Vol. I. he describes “the emergence in the field of political practices and economic observation, of the problems of birthrate, longevity, public health, housing and migration. Hence there was an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations” (Foucault, 140). It is closely linked to bio-politics, which David Hoy defines as “the strategies that are to be pursued in implementing bio-power”; these two are so linked that at points one of them will be used to signify both (Hoy, 74). This “management of life” permeates into people’s private lives through the techniques of bio-politics that govern people’s sexuality and other aspects of their biological existence (147). Sexuality is more intensely regularized in this framework because it is at “the juncture of the ‘body’ and the ‘population’” which are the main targets of disciplinary and regulatory power respectively (HOS 147). He describes the place of sexuality in a bio-political framework thus, “Through the themes of health, progeny, race, the future of the species, the vitality of the social body, power spoke of sexuality and to sexuality; the latter was not a mark or a symbol it was an object and a target. Moreover, its importance was due less to its rarity or its precariousness than to its insistence, its insidious presence” (147-8).

The fact that bio-politics creates a poor population that is inherently “lazy, indigent, and undeserving” blinds those with who have privilege from interrogating the structures of poverty in their society. As Foucault notes the divisions in society take on a biological rather than political level. This allows those with privilege to be politically complacent and ignorant. They are permitted to think about poverty as the problem of a population rendered as other through appeal to unchangeable characteristics. Because this is the dominant view, mobilization does not occur in resistance to the techniques of bio-power. This complacency breeds more privilege and the perpetuity of those ‘unchangeable’ characteristics. This social blindness and abdication of responsibility is one of the most pernicious effects of the bio-politics that surround welfare policy and poverty in the United States.

And I get all of that, heck I wrote that above "block-quote-bigger-than-something-big-in-your-vicinity". But I also think that data has some advantages that I break into two main sections (for now).

1. The Master's Tools will Never Dismantle the Master's House
And yet, they are what we have. They are like props for some grand improv theater game, and while I think that other tools will be created, imagined and will become powerful, I also am not quite ready to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I also think that the "Master" probably doesn't exist anymore: what we have is whole cadres of people who are trained to think like him who may or may not agree with him really -- but only know how to talk about things that the way that they were taught. I want to talk to them. A lot of scholarship in Sociology and Feminist Economics is using these tools, and using them to ask the questions in different ways. [examples will be included in full version~]

2. Narrative is Also a Trap: Pixillating the Narrative Trope
The only opposition in the world is not: Data v. Narrative. But let's pretend for a moment that it is:

The discourse of confession and truth-telling has made the creation of a personal, individual narrative an imperative. Often this personal narrative follows a pattern that is edging on trope whether it is a story of birth, death, or coming of age. Because of this patterning, the narrative may not be liberating or reflective of much, as was noted by Eve Sedgewick in The Epistemology of the Closet. In this way the individual, in a true sense, is lost in what the current age rabidly declares is an expression of that very individualism. Part of this mythic belief in the personal narrative is the idea that any method of truth gathering that denies the individual the opportunity to tell their own story is inherently oppressive, veiling, and authoritarian. These methods, typified by data collection, reduce the ‘individual’ to a mere number, masking the nuances of their experiences.

In this scenario the individual was lost to the collective, and individual lives were created and ended on the basis of the desires of a racist state with police powers. This power dynamic can have significant pernicious effects on populations, as evidenced by institutions like public assistance programs and AIDS funding policies in the United States.

Generally the very methods of data collection feed into the power of the state, limiting the ways in which people can identify and describe themselves and their families. I faced this in a very tangible way when I realized that the data set that I was using for my thesis did not allow respondents to label themselves as either more than one race or as Latino/Hispanic (decidedly, and happily, NOT the case with census data). Another example is the way in which sex and gender identification are constantly regulated through data collection that only allows people to identify as “male” or “female”. These racist and hetero-normative assumptions about the ways in which respondents will identify and respond clearly truncate the potential for liberating truth gathering. However there is no requirement that questionnaires be constructed in this manner, they could allow for a much broader range of responses with only minimal inconvenience to the statisticians who analyze the data. While there is major institutional foot-dragging to prevent this from happening, it is possible. Ultimately more accurate and precise measurements are always in the interest of the researcher because it means that they can state with more confidence that their findings actually mean something.

If we return to the problem of the narrative as oppressive because of the way in which it compels subjects to follow a preset trajectory, what are the possibilities associated with looking toward data collection? Data collection has many problems, yet it is very effective at breaking up the stories that people tell about their lives. Instead of asking people if they are healthy, there is a series of questions that ask about specific behaviors that a healthy person can do in a day, such as climbing a flight of stairs, and then codes them along a preset scale. While these scales, particularly of health and fitness, may be very subjective and problematic there is a value to the way in which people’s experiences are pixilated – broken, disintegrated, and potentially distilled. The conscientious researcher could rearrange these pixels, creating them into an aggregate picture that was used not to oppress or regulate, but describe the lives that people are living in ways that they may not be able to articulate. Once these new articulations are provided, the possibilities for uses for the new information abound. This is particularly true where the stories that people tell about themselves serve as barriers to the building of coalitions and communities. If there were data explaining the common problems between various populations with the state policing their family structures it is possible that a coalition would be more forthcoming. Whereas without that data, strong narratives of gender, sexuality, race, and class might prevent those coalitions from being built.

Further, often the narratives are not personal, but rather are cultural. I think probably the best example that I can give of this (without revealing where and for whom I work, and what I'm working on) is the narrative about the middle class. The middle class in America is constantly thriving - everything is constantly getting better. This is the story that is told and that we tell ourselves and often believe. However, in the last few years this has broken down -- crumbled even - why? Data. Data that says that homeownership is a trap that is just as likely to put you in debtor's prison as deliver you to a white picket fence. Data that says that the rich are, in fact, getting richer, and the poor are getting poorer, and everyone else is just scrapping by. And folks are starting to not believe quite as much anymore Do you need to know people's gender to know that this is happening? No, you don't, but you do need it to talk about the ways that elderly women are more likely to be poor than elderly men because pension benefits screw them over (if you have access to JSTOR or other academic loveliness - do yourself a tiny lil' lit search, if not take my privileged word for it).

Ok. I'm done. I'm sitting in a coffeeshop in LiberalCity, RedState, with TP. And I have some work that I brought "home" with me over the weekend, not to mention a novel to read, and a person to kiss. Congratulations for making it this far.
___________________________________
Dork-out further here:

*Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Translated by Robert Hurley. Random House, Inc., New York, 1978.
*Foucault, Michel. Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the College de France 1975- 1976.Translated by David Macey. Ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana. Picador, New York, 2003.
*Hoy, David. Critical Resistance: From Poststructuralism to Post- Critique. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

~Said version may never be written.

26.6 Miles Later: Another Random Ten List

1. I have a big meaty post in the editing stage about how data can fight racism, sexism, classism, etc. I talk about Foucault, and my work and it makes me smile. But it does not cohere, so it is not posted.
2. Backpacking was fabulous -- the most technically challenging stuff I've ever done, and one 11.8 mile day, so today is the first day that I'm not sore, but good God, was it gorgeous!
3. Today work was insane, maybe because it started out with me learning about improper integrals (you know the type, who show too much leg as they take the limit to infinity), and then I gave a pint of blood, and then, then, I actually started to deal with two data projects, a finance SNAFU, a new job assignment, and a new data project (with co-authorship potential!). Whew!
4. I'm performing at the QueerOpenMic tomorrow - an updated version of the piece about landscape/sex/home/transitioning that I posted here about a month ago. Someday, maybe I'll gain legitimacy in that space without being the partner of a transthing, maybe someday I'll stop worrying about my own legitimacy enough to live my life. Maybe, someday, my concerns about legitimacy will focus themselves on something other than what I should wear.
5. Friday I fly to RedState to visit TP. Just thinking about it makes me feel like I have wings.
6. Planning trip to ELAC-Town for Veteran's Day weekend, but HistoryMentor has a house guest that weekend so I can't stay with her. She just asked me for a letter of reference ::BLUSH:: and is one of my favorite people in the whole world, and sent me back an email with the houseguest news and the words "are your dates firm?" Well, I thought they were until I got that email.
7. It's National Coming Out Day. I'm living in a gray space with this at work right now. I know that some people assume that I'm with a man, and I know that some people must see my little sticker saying "Transsexual Women are Our Sisters", and I know that I hate not knowing who knows about my queerness.
8. I love working my body hard, depending on it to get me through the day -- why wasn't I called to be a construction worker or a farmer instead of a sedentary, data-crunching, academic. I would be just as useful to the world if my brain were hardwired to a keyboard.
9. I'm totally open to advice on any of the above 8 bits of life drivel.
10. Did you see the part in #3 about potential co-authorship? OMG.

Songs In My Head

So, I've been remiss in my blogging efforts the past few days because I've been getting ready for my backpacking trip this weekend. On the other hand -- I'm going to be hiking up there for the next three days, and 25 miles. Ok, except tomorrow because I have to go to work and play with data.

But before I leave, a meme (my first!) from the lovely GreyMatters over at LobalWarming.

Seven songs in my head *right now* (in no particular order):
1. Thea Gilmore, Call Me Your Darling
I love the term of endearment darlin', especially coming from TP, and this song is happy and upbeat and yet yearning at the same time.
2. Indigo Girls, Lay My Head Down
Sometimes I feel this tired, and this in need of someone to hold me tight.
3. Leonard Cohen, Tower of Song
Always a fav.
4. Old Crow Medicine Show, Down Home Girl
"Every time you move like I've got to go to Sunday class ... your perfume is made out of turnip greens, every time I kiss you, girl, it tastes like pork n' beans" It is just so inexplicably sexy.
5. Black Cadillac, Roseanne Cash
I spend too much time thinking about death, this album helps me do it to a tune, with good rhythm.
6. Ordinary Town, Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer
Thinking about home, where I'm happy and find my peace -- very ordinary.
7. Not Pretty Enough, Kasey Chambers
"Is my heart too broken?" Good question, my lady, good question.

If I were a flirt, I would flirt with Sly, Jack, and Prof. Weezy.

Trig Function

Trig functions make me want to gouge my eyes out with my mechanical pencil.
In other news: I made yummy cranberry almond chocolate chip granola bars for my backpacking trip this weekend.