Archives and Feelings

The Chaos-Worshiper in the Closet: Theorizing, Stories, Killjoys, and Social Justice

Megha Baikadi

December 16, 2013

¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0  

¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0  

Megha Baikadi

985 archives and feelings

Dr Alexis Lothian

¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 0 Writing Assignment Five, 12/10/2013

¶ 7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 0  

¶ 8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 0 Expand and elaborate a previous essay. Cite 5 readings from the course and two from outside.  [3000-6000 words.]

¶ 9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 0  

The Chaos-Worshiper in the Closet:

Theorizing, Stories, Killjoys, and Social Justice

¶ 12 Leave a comment on paragraph 12 0  

¶ 13 Leave a comment on paragraph 13 0 The essay I am expanding for this is from the fourth writing assignment, an extended reflection on one passage from the readings.  It is entitled “Successful Attempts at Failure”, and can be found at http://985archive.queergeektheory.org/sucessful-attempts-at-failure/.

¶ 14 Leave a comment on paragraph 14 0  

¶ 15 Leave a comment on paragraph 15 0 I have spent a great deal of time this semester exploring the connections between my theoretical framework and my way of looking at the world.  Of the texts we covered in this course, there are so many of them that I liked, that made sense, that I find spoke to me and were relevant to my thinking.  And, as we have also spent a lot of time looking backward, looking inward, and finding the ways we connect to our ideas, our histories, and our truths, we have spent time writing them out to each other and to ourselves.  As I’ve mentioned several times, I want third places, fourth ways, fifth alternatives, boths and neithers and sudden reversals into actually-we-were-really-arguing something else.  I think spreading the ability to look at problems in different terms, questioning the ‘obvious’ rhetorics and prying at every edge for other possible ways to see and know the situation, is something really strong and valuable for students to learn.  And the reasons I look for these things, and find them valuable and teachable do have something to do with the life I’ve lived.  They have to do with a life of being someone who didn’t fit in, who found a lifetime of looking for an option of “other” absolutely necessary, who has had little choice but to realize so many systems of classification, so many ways of categorization broke themselves on me – and wondered who else might not be included, which other possibilities are unrealized.  This ends up being my theoretical approach, one that’s grounded in a lot of stuff that’s personal.  I wanted to include some chaos, something to shake up the binaries and bring change.  Be a bit of a killjoy to the way other people assume the world is and should be unquestioned.  Glorify, and worship the chaos and confusion, rather than try to tame it down and sort it into neat little boxes.

¶ 16 Leave a comment on paragraph 16 0 I’ll take a detour, here, to talk about how I’m getting to all of this individualistic theorizing.  My view of intellectuals, and myself as an intellectual, is something I’ve drawn and adapted (probably severely so) from Gramsci’s work when I first read it, some years ago.  The degree to which anyone else would see my ideas as similar, I don’t know, but so it goes.  Everyone is an intellectual to some extent, everyone thinks and reasons and understands the world around them, but only some people are recognized as intellectuals, and given the access, training, and prestige necessary to make their intellectual activity public.  So, kinda, anyone can run, most can get pretty good if they work at it, but not everyone’s an Olympic athlete. Some people have not only an affinity, but also the resources and tools to develop into some of the big names in academia.  Others, with hard work, good tools and (often) passion, they become respected professionals in the field.  Organic intellectuals, therefore, would be those people who can’t not, who can’t limit their thinking to what’s necessary to get through the day orwhat’s accepted without question or to the intellectual tools available to most people (which often have biases of various kinds). This isn’t the same as innate talent like the Olympic athlete, it’s the same as, I dunno, hyperactive who has to run to keep their energy under control.  It might go with other factors like talent, nature, and a willingness to work hard to produce someone who’s extremely good, or it might just be someone who doesn’t fit what they’re supposed to be because they’re doing something else.  Gramsci’s organic intellectuals, then, would be those who can’t not, and are also in situations where this kind of theorizing is neither encouraged nor expected – and thus either break out to become self-made, or become revolutionaries. 

¶ 17 Leave a comment on paragraph 17 0 And I, in this paradigm, am one of those who can’t not think.  Doesn’t make me better, just kinda incapable of being otherwise.  I have to think, to figure things out, to reconcile them to my own beliefs, irregardless of how many people disagree with me.  So when I’m looking at my own experiences, pushing for space, for more alternatives, greater complexity, and problematizing everything – it is because I’ve been coming from a very individualistic perspective.  I can’t not think like this, my experiences and history are the primary ways in which I approach theory and thinking.  Even reading theorists who make a lot of sense, even with a great deal of time learning academic culture, even in the middle of discussions and debates, I still have to waste, I mean spend the time to pick holes and pry at edges, to always push farther and make more complex and cause more problems.  Take neat theoretical landscapes an unleash chaos.  I see a lot of overlap, here, with Ahmed’s view of the killjoy.  The feminist killjoy takes the happiness script, and not only doesn’t follow it, but questions it – so other people who want to believe it, are made uncomfortable by someone challenging something they thought was good and happy and natural.  And I, well I’m a chaotic killjoy.  All of those neat clean, clear assumptions people make, the simple theories and clean-cut categories… I do question them.  People point out, time after time, that it is human nature to categorize, that even where they’re problematic (like race, or class, or gender, or a hand-anda-half of other “isms”, it’s just the way people’s minds work.  I literally cannot describe how often I’ve heard this.  So I’m the killjoy, who not only questions the categories, not only makes them think about things instead of taking shortcuts, but who questions the ideas of ‘natural’ categorization itself.  Maybe humans do think like this, but I don’t and never have.  I’m challenging the script (or most sincerely trying).  I’m messing everything up, jumbling things together.  Chaos to our enemies and confusion to our allies!

¶ 18 Leave a comment on paragraph 18 0 So, I didn’t fit into the academic category very neatly, despite (or because) of my inability to stop thinking in certain ways.  It’s remained difficult for me to deal with the midlevel arguments since I end up right back at the very personal and very abstract, instead of the larger social or cultural spaces where I’m not well equipped to argue but academia so often is, where the consensus of experts outweighs individual experience and reasoning, sometimes quite rightly so but sometimes in ways I strongly disagree with.  And that has shaped my experience… to take a bit from Halberstam, I chose to oppose this with a commitment to “childish anarchy”, to value multiplicity and alternatives, to always, always hunger for more complex ground and more open possibilities, to reject for always and always the right of anyone else to say it must be “either this or that”, either what they say (always-right), or that thing (always-wrong).  Reject that it is legitimate to define my argument as nothing more than the mindless opposite of theirs, or attach all of the multitudes of things they don’t mean to my argument, to refuse on grounds I wasn’t quite arguing anyway.  This is, I think the thing Halberstam meant when saying the book “makes its peace with the possibility that alternatives dwell in the murky waters of a counterintuitive, often impossibly dark and negative realm of critique and refusal…into a more chaotic realm of knowing and unknowing”.

¶ 19 Leave a comment on paragraph 19 0 As much as I advocate mental flexibility and adaptability, as much as I have framed my belief that teaching this kind of open, questioning and critical mindset is not only valuable in the classroom, but outside it… in framing it on the individualistic level, I may have been neglecting to explain, even to myself,  the degree to which  I think this way of looking and knowing might serve social justice, might make people more likely to look beneath the surface, and once it is seen more will act on it.  I am most comfortable on the individual level, talking about myself and my understanding and the reasons I believe this is relevant even at discussions of issues at a higher level.  I can talk about the ways a larger idea of categorization, especially ones with no provision for any kind of exceptions, can be confounded by the fact there are exceptions, that there are scenarios that don’t and can’t be made to fit.  And the incidents I know and can challenge on, are those I know personally, and can draw on, and it feels both more provable and less arrogant to stick to what I can prove.  So I’ve been jumping between the deeply personal and the broadly, even abstractly, theoretical, without realizing there’s a whole section that I actually did mean to address, I just hadn’t figured it out.  When I saw Janelle’s comment (and my own response) to the most recent assignment, the analytical reflection, when she asked if my ideas could be represented on a larger level, moving from parent/child dynamics of failure and normalcy to larger cultural relationships of power, I said, of course.  Then I had to think about why that was an of course, why I expected my analysis of a personal understanding to have larger social and cultural implications without mentioning it, and why it wasn’t included in my essay.  It also ties back into some of the things we’ve been exploring all semester, questions of what does our academic work mean to us, and what are we trying to do, and what archives are we drawing on to accomplish this.  

¶ 20 Leave a comment on paragraph 20 0 “Failure preserves some of the wondrous anarchy of childhood and disturbs the supposedly clean boundaries between adults and children, winners and losers. And while failure certainly comes accompanied by a host of negative affects, such as disappointment, disillusionment, and despair, it also provides the opportunity to use these negative affects to poke holes in the toxic positivity of contemporary life.”

¶ 21 Leave a comment on paragraph 21 0 This passage from Halberstam speaks so strongly to me because, the difference between failure and success has often been to me one between children and adults – between who has the authority to say one way over being over another is right, or is normal (and not just “more common”).  It has been the way that two arguments, well thought out but based on two different understandings of what the world should be or what has value, are not even allowed to be in conversation with each other, that one is automatically accepted and the other rejects because one speaker is taller than the other, is ‘older’, has the power to label adult and child, “experience” and “stubborn childishness”, has the power to just refuse to listen, refuse to understand.  The difference between children and adults and the difference between winners and losers can so often be neatly laid atop each other, with overlaps so few and gaps so far between.  It goes far enough, I think, to see that often winners and losers will have the difference between adults and children laid back on top of their challenge or loss.  The metaphor of parent and child is what is there in the depths of so many relationships of power.  It is not just an imbalance, but an imbalance with a story, a rationale, a built in defense.  This story has served the colonizer against the colonized, the ‘advanced’ against the ‘undeveloped’, those with power – political, social, financial, rhetorical, against those who do not have ways to refute that power.

¶ 22 Leave a comment on paragraph 22 0 I would see colonizer and colonized as  cultural versions of this adult/child concept, colonized countries are termed third world, less developed, backward, young… while others are more developed, advanced, first world.  It seems to me to be very rare to have raw power differences at the heart of a conflict, without the stronger taking a parental rhetoric.  Actions being justified as for the best, something they will understand, lasting only until they pass some marker of status (shifting over time, of course) that will let them finally deal as equals.  Which won’t happen, at least not without a fight, of course. The relationship is a power dynamic at heart, no matter how it is dressed, and the story of parent and child is just that – a story used to justify and explain, that allows people to accept actions that should not be accepted because the story (not reality) makes sense.  Because it is such a strong and versatile metaphor, because it justifies a relationship of tyranny that may be needed (or may not be, depending), and because it is designed to be unarguable – after all, who would give a child something dangerous, or not guide them properly no matter how hard it is on them?

¶ 23 Leave a comment on paragraph 23 0 Sincerity and cynicism, as Goffman puts it.  Some acts are very sincere – that is, people believe in what they are saying even if it might not be true, and some are outright cynical with their instigators very aware of the gap between what they are saying and what they really intend (18).  Sometimes it”s hard to tell which is which, if someone genuinely didn’t think of something, not realizing there were other ways to think and know, or if they just didn’t want to because of their own preconceptions and prejudices.  Sometimes, as Taylor puts it, performances are (culturally) about what’s false and put-on, sometimes about what’s most culturally true (4).  Sometimes I’m not sure of whether some wildly inappropriate mismatch is due to cynical manipulations, or if people are really on such a large scale unable to think things through in a way that I can understand.  Post 9/11, I thought there were gaps in the way the terrorism was linked to the war on Iraq – they were more juxtaposed than causally linked.  I thought it might be the national culture of grief and vengeance which lead to this conflation, a kind of scapegoating – but on finding the juxtaposition was cynical, an attempt to use national outrage to fulfill a private agenda, I was less surprised than many others. 

¶ 24 Leave a comment on paragraph 24 0 Maybe I should have known it wasn’t sincere, because it didn’t quite make sense the way things were laid out so people would assume connections without being told… but know my way of thinking is different enough, that I don’t know how to tell if it shouldn’t make sense to others or if it only doesn’t make sense to me.  My own version of cynicism and sincerity draws a lot more from Scott Adam’s views on religion.  If you see a truck coming, belief doesn’t mean you yell that you believe in the truck, it means you get out of the way (28).  Belief should mean acting in a way that is at least consistent with one’s own worldview.  If I think it is a problem, I should be working to change it, if I think it is good, I should be promoting it, if I think this is the way the world works, I should be working that way if I think it should, or be trying to change it if it should not be that way. When I look at these cultural acts, I find myself not thinking they’re very sincere.  People pay lip service, but in the end I’m not seeing the commitment that would make me believe them.  The other principle I’ve found personally compelling, on the spectrum of sincerity and cynicism comes from Erik Flint, yet another reason Mother of Demons remains a work that I keep returning to theoretically.  “When you lash at those who are weaker than you, you will be whipped by those who are stronger than you.  Do not curse then, fool, was it not you who blessed the whip in the first place?” (ch 25 index 3850). Belief means acting on one’s beliefs, and it also means, morally, being willing to subject oneself to the same judgment (or the same kinds of judgment) one is willing to pass on others.  I will not oppress those weaker, unless I’m willing to be exploited by those stronger.  I will not force others’ religion, or ethics, or morals, unless I’m willing to myself be challenged in this area (and I might).  I will judge where I am willing myself to be judged.

¶ 25 Leave a comment on paragraph 25 0 There was this tv show when I was younger – I don’t recall the name although I’ve been informed it is likely Stargate – someone else was watching it while I was in the living room reading, so I only caught bits and pieces.  One thing I remember was that there were these ‘great races’ (of aliens), and humanity running around a wide and dangerous galaxy with relatively uncomplicated badguys who preyed on others.  Anyway, one thing that I noticed at the time was the great races used a parental metaphor, which for me at the time flopped so badly it didn’t even make sense.  And still doesn’t.  The claim went something like these races wouldn’t share technology on the ground that humanity was too young, had not developed on its own, and some emotional “would you put a gun in a child’s hand?”.  I wanted to know if they believed the adult-child metaphor, how could they justify leaving the ‘children’ undefended against the badguys?  And not just offer not tech or weapons, but no teaching, no safe places, no other help?  What people would treat actual children so harshly, getting nothing at all till they’re adults? 

¶ 26 Leave a comment on paragraph 26 0 The answer is, I guess, what I’ve been talking about.  Parent/child is a powerful metaphor, one that lets all kinds of things be justified.  That isn’t the same as being real, or offering the positives of the relationship like protection and responsibility for along with the negatives, like control and inequality.  They didn’t believe this metaphor of theirs, this story, enough to act in ways that were convincing.  They also weren’t willing to accept judgment as easily as they handed it out, being willing to accept help but not offer it, willing to judge victims for their ‘youth’ but not badguys for their wrongs.  This was the analysis from a tv show, I mentioned… but these are drawn from the now, the ideas we have now.  This is a metaphor that isn’t questioned, as far as I can see, in the story where it was set – the contradictions didn’t come up or were thrown back at those races by those who said, this doesn’t make sense.  I don’t know if the audience thought differently, but I suspect not because of the way it was naturalized in the show, and in our culture.  These metaphors have been in use, and are now in use, in the colonizing mindset, in the cultural imperialism, in a lot of the dynamics between ‘developed’ and ‘undeveloped’ nations.  And, I also see my own tendency to avoid the social, cultural space.  I chose a snippit of tv show, and at that not one I’ve watched.  It is harder to put politics and history into context, or to take them out of context and have them make sense.  I intend for this to be taken more broadly, to point out the ways this overlaps real attitudes, real prejudices, real metaphors-for-something-else.  In the same way, I’ve always intended my critiques, often based on literature (especially science fiction), or on my personal encounters and anecdotes, to be taken further than I feel I can myself take them, to be about the world we live in and the things in our history and our present.

¶ 27 Leave a comment on paragraph 27 0 I have seen these kinds of attitudes historically, the colonizers and colonized. The echoes of a paternalism towards ‘lesser’ cultures like the Native Americans, the Hawai’ians, the Phillipines, the Middle East, the Orient (an old term, but pointed).  A paternalism that wasn’t real, didn’t match deed to pretty and useless storytelling.  And that’s just thinking of America.  And I have seen it now, with cultural imperialism, with ‘more developed’ and ‘less developed’ countries (aka first, second and third world, I think is the common terminology), with peoples more or less ‘advanced’.  I am reminded of a political cartoon I saw some time ago, “A Concise History of Race Relations in the US”, where one race advances through the exploitation of another, “for their own good”, but even after acknowledging the injustice won’t turn to help the other… they got there on their own, why can’t anyone else?  As if the development these nations boast of didn’t not only casually make use of, but actually require the exploitation of the resources, wealth and labor of the undeveloped people.  In the way that any attempts for other countries at development comes in the form of loans from the first world, loans which turn debt into control and, gee, exploitation again.  Isn’t that what was going on with the IMF and the World Bank? The story doesn’t match the actions taken, I literally cannot believe they are sincere. 

¶ 28 Leave a comment on paragraph 28 0 But politics is hard to talk about.  As I mentioned, it’s harder to put into context or take out of context.  A storybook story gives us, makes a point of giving us, the context we need for our analysis.  All relevant factors are included, or they’re not relevant.  With the real world, with politics, there can be layer after layer after layer of influences, situations, conditions, ideologies and practicalities to wade through.  There are secrets and silences that are extremely hard to fill.  Time is a question – either to wait and see what new information might bring to one’s understanding of a situation, or do one’s homework on the past influences, or just to realize by the time all facts are known and can be analyzed, people are already looking to the next, current, incomplete happening.  When I’m talking about analysis, about power and silences and secrets, about ways of looking and thinking but most of all questioning, about the social structures of storybooks or the interactional dynamics of things I’ve seen… I intend to share with my students multiple possibilities.  I intend to open their minds to different viewpoints, and encourage critical thinking and questioning (and even arguing).  I intend to make them paranoid, as Sedgewick means it – looking deeply and with an eye to the things not obvious, and perhaps not known even by those being analyzed.  To look for potential harms and hypocrisies and weaknesses.  But also, to look reparatively, to see what might be done.  Not just hunting for racism and classism and cynical paternalistic manipulations, but also seeing ways to offer alternatives.  To introduce ways of thinking where things aren’t either-or, where harm isn’t so deeply inevitable that hunting for it is never-ending paranoia, with no solution.

¶ 29 Leave a comment on paragraph 29 0 In a twist and a turn, I come to the story of Omelas.  As I mentioned in class, the story of Omelas is one that I’ve read often, and thought deeply on, and liked (mostly disagreeing with, it’s fun).  Povinelli takes the point that it is less a thought experiment, the idea of living in a society where the good of the people depends on the misery of another, than an actual reflection of our society.  A society which has had historically, and still has forms of a great number of exploitative, dehumanizing ills.  Which ignores and forgets those who have suffered.  It makes a great deal of sense, after all, to look at Omelas in the context of the world we have.  Or maybe Omelas is not just about the world we have, as the world we think we have (or would like to have).  How many people would refuse the thought experiment, only to find the essay that tells them this world is essentially our own, and what might it mean if it did happen like that? 

¶ 30 Leave a comment on paragraph 30 0 One of the major problems I have had with the story, is it doesn’t make sense to me on a metaphysical level – that one person’s unhappiness can pay for another’s, that one child can pay a whole city’s worth of success, or surplus, or ease.  I believe in balance to strongly for that.  Balance, and payment, and price.  For every price a power, and so it goes (so I believe).  It doesn’t, and has never matched up that cruelty pays for prosperity, and helplessness for suffering.  So, being the self-certain English literature person I am, I found an analysis that did make sense to me… that there was a price the people of the city paid, and a power given to the child, that made the story work, even if those involved didn’t realize it.  For the people of the city, it is in the narrative that part of their dedication to happiness was the knowledge that a child suffered for it.  So it became a responsibility, not something to be taken lightly.  I think the price they paid comes here – not in the child, but in the moment they stood before a child and made the decision that their good lives is worth it, they lost something of themselves.  Innocence, maybe, not in the childhood, naive sense but in the legally-not-guilty sense.  In entering into the not-so-secret pact to never lift a hand against the abuse of this child, they become what we in this world would call, accomplices.  And, conversely, the child is granted some power – a power he does not understand, that she doesn’t know how to use, that remains hidden. If the child had strength and purpose, in a way that most children put in closets don’t have the opportunity to think about, he or she might wreak havoc.  Might verbally lash at the Omelas visitors, challenging the morality of a people that makes this monstrous choice, or might win free, at the moment the closet is opened, and dart off to freedom.  Imagine the discomfort, if the child will not stay in his place, will not learn her role.  The confusion at finding the closet empty one morning, with the possibility of that forbidden help or kindness offered by someone, or the child growing strong and returning, one day, to accuse Omelas.  By investing the entire possibility of Omelas into the child’s closet, it is vulnerable to hir.

¶ 31 Leave a comment on paragraph 31 0 In this scenario, I’m walking away.  I didn’t make the bargain, as it stands, I never agreed that this was right or good or acceptable, never consented to trade my good life for the suffering of others.  I don’t want it to be this way, even if I benefit.  Given my ethics and other considerations, however, walking away is not a good moral position. Not one I approve of.  Just walking away, refusing to participate is a half-measure… and, drawing my standards of sincerity, from Scott Adams and Erik Flint, back down through the essay, something less than a half measure.  After all, my execution isn’t perfect – I try to make most ethical choices, but there are times when availability or convenience wins out.  Times when I believe in the truck, but I’m not off the road.  I’m being hard on myself, but my ethics require no less of me.  It isn’t enough, in the real world, to say I never consented to the suffering of others, or even that I will not profit from them… the right thing to do is to not let others consent or profit, to end (or work towards ending) their suffering.  To not only leave, but take the child with me.  Working towards social justice, civil rights, equality.  But I don’t know how how to make it work. Povinelli writes that our good life is already in the child’s closet. It may be terrible of me to think that if this translated a little more directly, I would know where to go, how to begin.  Our society, unlike Omelas, has this huge flaw of not having an easy, well known off-switch.  That there must be political solutions, social reforms, and worldview adjustments is obvious… but which ones, how to create them or promote them, how to begin?  That I don’t know.  If I had a solution in hand… well, that’s what everyone says.

¶ 32 Leave a comment on paragraph 32 0 So let me tie it all together.  I’ve been talking a lot, this term, about the way my individual history informs my theoretical work.  How the life I’ve lived influences my particular variety of killjoy, where I’m always asking questions, where I’m always searching, paranoid, for any place where the corners don’t quite fit, where categories become confused, where trying to put things in boxes finds all the shapes a wrong fit. I would like my students to learn this.  I would like them to learn the poking holes in the world, questioning everything, looking for answers more and more complex, more problematic, and more interesting.  In their lives, and future analysis, and personal adventures.  And not just to be rational, reasonable, and clear thinking, but to be emotional, irrational, chaotic.  To embrace change, alternate possibilities, and truths that need not be reasonable.  And while I use literature, and science fiction as my ground, as the place through which my analysis runs, and as I use my life and experiences, to talk about the dynamics and exchanges and limitations of accepted wisdom… I also expect students to go further.  They will be able to, I hope, analyze literature of all kinds through this lens, and be paranoid about what they might find. They will be able to, I hope, look at the lives they live, notice the power plays and opportunities and limitations of the situations they find themselves in.  And, I hope, they will be able to go further. Not only to look at the world we live in – the political maneuvers, the cultural rhetorics, the historical precedents – but also to act.  To work towards social justice, challenge wrongdoing, demand clarity, refuse the pretty useless stories.  Demand sincerity, and refuse cynical manipulations. 

¶ 33 Leave a comment on paragraph 33 0 I’ll borrow the concept from Matt of the tricksy narrator (which I partly inspired – yay to circular theorizing!).  I don’t know the answers to what should be done, in the larger sense.  Social justice, activism, how to create the changes to make our world more ethical. I can’t teach my future students what to do, either.  But I can show them how to look.  I can poke holes in the world, and even if they never learn how to prod just right, they can look around, and maybe notice other places the world doesn’t quite fit.  I can be the tricksy narrator, and encourage them to notice things, to see the world in different ways.  To prevent them from thinking the way things are, however unjust, is the only possibility.  The fact that I haven’t (quite) walked away, might mean that I’m still close enough to let others know there are other possibilities.  I can teach people the truck is around here somewhere (couldn’t resist),  only if I’m still near enough the road.  Even if I don’t know where the answer is, how to get the child out of the closet, the more people I can get looking, the better the chance it will be found.  That’s the ethical imperative of my theorizing.  That’s the reason I think its’ so important to teach students to be flexible, intuitive, questioning, confrontational.  I’m a chaos-worshiper at heart, I’m better at pulling things apart than putting them together… but I can help my students figure out how to look for what goes where so when they start plotting and planning, they’ll be able to put things together in their own style.  I can point out the ways things are wrong, to encourage the creation of more and more ideas from my students on how they might be improved, instead of trying to preach my uncertain own. I can believe that my students can move beyond what I’m capable of, and encourage them to do more.

¶ 34 Leave a comment on paragraph 34 0  

¶ 35 Leave a comment on paragraph 35 0  

¶ 36 Leave a comment on paragraph 36 0  

¶ 37 Leave a comment on paragraph 37 0  

¶ 38 Leave a comment on paragraph 38 0  

¶ 39 Leave a comment on paragraph 39 0  

¶ 40 Leave a comment on paragraph 40 0  

¶ 41 Leave a comment on paragraph 41 0  

Works Cited

¶ 43 Leave a comment on paragraph 43 0  

¶ 44 Leave a comment on paragraph 44 0 Antonio Gramsci, “Intellectuals and Education.” From An Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings 1916-1935.  Ed David Forgacs.  New York: Schocken Books, 1988.  300-322.

¶ 45 Leave a comment on paragraph 45 0  

¶ 46 Leave a comment on paragraph 46 0 Diana Taylor, “Acts of Transfer.”  The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003.  1-51.

¶ 47 Leave a comment on paragraph 47 0  

¶ 48 Leave a comment on paragraph 48 0 E. Goffman, “Performances.” The presentation of self in everyday life.  New York: Anchor Books, 1959.  17-76

¶ 49 Leave a comment on paragraph 49 0  

¶ 50 Leave a comment on paragraph 50 0 Elizabeth Povinelli, “The Child in the Broom Closet” from Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism.

¶ 51 Leave a comment on paragraph 51 0  

¶ 52 Leave a comment on paragraph 52 0 Erik Flint, Mother of Demons.  New York, New York: Baen Books, 1997.

¶ 53 Leave a comment on paragraph 53 0  

¶ 54 Leave a comment on paragraph 54 0 Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity.  Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.

¶ 55 Leave a comment on paragraph 55 0  

¶ 56 Leave a comment on paragraph 56 0 Matt Loudain The Tricksy Narrator.  Draft of Writing assignment Five.  From 985 Archives and Feelings, Fall 2013, Professor Alexis Lothian.

¶ 57 Leave a comment on paragraph 57 0  

¶ 58 Leave a comment on paragraph 58 0 Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure.  Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2011.

¶ 59 Leave a comment on paragraph 59 0  

¶ 60 Leave a comment on paragraph 60 0 Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness.  Durham and London: Duke UP, 2010.

¶ 61 Leave a comment on paragraph 61 0  

¶ 62 Leave a comment on paragraph 62 0 Scott Adams, God’s Debris.  Andrew McMeel Publishing, Kansas City, 2003.

¶ 63 Leave a comment on paragraph 63 0  

¶ 64 Leave a comment on paragraph 64 0 Ursula K Leguin, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”

¶ 65 Leave a comment on paragraph 65 0  

¶ 66 Leave a comment on paragraph 66 0  

¶ 67 Leave a comment on paragraph 67 0  

You can follow any comments on this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.