Sexuality and space
Posted on | August 25, 2010 | No Comments
Over the past few months Kane Race and I have started a working group in our department called “Sexuality and Space”. The idea is to develop an archive and a network of resources, ideas and events about the politics of urban space in Sydney, particularly as this relates to gender and sexuality.
The group builds on the foundation laid by Kane’s fabulous book, Pleasure Consuming Medicine, and recent work I’ve done on the night-time economies of Australia’s inner-cities. It is also a chance for us to work collaboratively with students in the department who are leading the way in researching these issues locally.
In my case the project continues a set of concerns I began to investigate in Brisbane through essays like ‘Normal Homes’, which deals explicitly with city space, sexuality and ideas of kinship. It also develops from writing I did at the outset of my forthcoming book, which describes changes to Brisbane in the wake of the creative industries policy drive. In that context, Fortitude Valley was just one area to be transformed from eccentric haven to jewel in the crown of a new leisure economy marketed to wealthy locals, cosmopolitan tourists and interstate migrants. In a further paper I co-wrote with Jason Wilson, these transformative acts of urban entrepreneurialism are described as a “cultural economy of infamy” – its ultimate manifestation being the Underbelly franchise.
The S&S project is an attempt to chart these trends in Sydney specifically, answering questions like these that Kane has summarised:
*How do strategies of city branding appeal to, and repackage, histories of subcultural and illicit activity in their attempts to market the city? What are the implications for sexual minorities and how are sexual subcultures transformed in this process?
*What are the effects of current policing initiatives (drug dog operations, patrolling of beats, etc.) on the shape and social possibilities of sexual communities in cities like Sydney?
*How is the night-time economy represented, marketed, and governed? What forms of consumption (licit and illicit) does it depend upon – explicitly and tacitly – and what relations are there between them?
*How do we resist the sanitization of sexual cultures as these cultures begin to feature in more extensive networks of commerce, government, and public representation?
At the moment we’re meeting fortnightly to discuss readings that set up our aims for the group. Later in the semester this will expand to include a selection of guest speakers from scholars, activists, community and council reps and more.
One of our researchers, Viv McGregor, has started a tumblr blog featuring images of sexuality and space. It’s a work of art in itself! Well worth a bookmark. Viv has also started a delicious page for relevant links – feel free to link to us and add more with the sexuality_space tag.
We welcome involvement from anyone interested in cultural economies, consumer culture, cultural geography, criminology and urban governance… and most of all those whose precious intimacies and alternative forms of sociability are increasingly subject to arbitrary surveillance and suspicion.
The Facebook page is one of the easiest ways to keep in touch.
Tips from an ‘ECR’ survivor
Posted on | August 19, 2010 | 2 Comments
I promised to report back on the career pathways discussion but I got distracted. One reason is that straight after the talk that Friday I went to my office and received a special, hand delivered notification from the Provost saying I had been promoted! So, even though I think I was supposed to keep it secret for a while, the news is now official.
In the wake of that happy event I felt momentarily obliged to stave off my cynicism about ECR life, since it seems I may have finally graduated from that particular purgatory. But the euphoria hasn’t lasted too long.
I should write separately about the performativity of promotion applications, which are a pretty horrible subspecies of the application genre. If you are looking for resources on career things of this nature Jonathan’s site is well worth consulting. I don’t really want this to be a career advice blog though, despite the fact that lots of you seem to like it when I write this stuff. I need my own advice – and not just on careers! So let’s help each other out, please…
In the talk I basically just explained that networks are the basis for career opportunity. Not a revelation in itself – especially to anyone who knows my research interests. But what I was trying to emphasise was that integrating yourself in a field beyond your department is crucial at an early stage. Personally, I think it’s the only way to learn the resilience and context you need to stay sane in a profession that is so affected by institutional politics of one kind or another. For postgrads, looking beyond the local is about the only way to position yourself confidently if and when you finish.
I would even go so far as to say that the very successful graduates I have seen in recent years (and here I’m measuring success in a range of ways, beyond paypackets) are those that remained modestly invested in their department during candidature. Looking beyond the intensity of close role models is an important way to cope with the human failings that are inevitable in any large workplace. You will probably never feel as vulnerable as when you are writing your PhD. So, protect yourself.
This means getting involved in what you care about – your disciplinary association, perhaps, or working for a relevant journal (for free). Pursue tangents beyond the immediate scholarly problem: films, music, reading groups, sport, politics. Travel. Go to conferences. Get your research heard, known about and tested by an audience beyond your particular university context. Consider starting a blog.
Why? Because publicity brings benefits. Don’t kid yourself otherwise. Once your name is known in relation to a topic, you are more likely to be remembered when panels need presenters, chapters need authors, and jobs need filling. You may even get asked to write about things that you don’t care about precisely because of the strength of your research identity. Your name is your asset.
When I was a grad student, I volunteered to set up an email list, csaa-forum, for the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia. This was pre-blog, pre-Facebook; a different world of online experiences. It played an active role for a while, hosting some memorable exchanges between colleagues. A side effect of this initiative – one that the application genre lets me count as “service” – was that my name regularly appeared in people’s inboxes all over the country for several years. If people didn’t know what my research was about, at least they knew my name. I’m still convinced this was the main reason I was shortlisted for my first job interviews.
Bottom line though: publications are your best currency for career mobility. They are also the fastest way to get more publications. There can be a very swift transition from the PhD experience of thinking no-one will publish your work to the point where you are struggling to respond to multiple invitations. The strategy and etiquette needed to navigate that problem are part of the phenomenon we might call the “mid-career abyss”.
You don’t necessarily have to publish during your PhD if it means you finish it on time. Your biggest test is to show you can design, manage and complete a large project without getting side-tracked. But sure, publishing is key to the job market, and going to conferences is one of the surest ways to make it happen (see how these things start to reinforce each other…?). A physical audience is an initial and immediate peer review that can improve the quality of what you eventually submit to journals. Remember conferences are always attended by journal editors and board members. There are so many journals and they all need filling.
People will give you plenty of advice on the relative prestige of journals. But you know what? Getting used to the experience of peer review is what matters. It’s an imperfect and inconsistent practice, which is why it’s often worth learning through less prominent journals. These are the ones that tend to have a personal dimension to the editorial process (no robot emails from online repositories) and the commitment to give your work due guidance and attention.
Certainly I would question anyone thinking they should only submit to highly ranked journals. At the last ECR event I attended at Sydney this was literally the advice given. In the majority of university settings (that is, beyond the elite) you need fast publications as much as quality ones – you need to show there is an appetite for what you do. When I submitted my thesis I had 5 publications out or in press. “In press” is an important category to exploit because it shows that you have momentum.
In the pathways session I was also asked to talk about the transition from postdoc to teaching & research. I had to say: it’s hard. The skills you learn as a postdoc are limited and focused, so it should be obvious that all of the above advice is biased. Going straight to a postdoc after your PhD, you learn to view your research as the sole measure of your worth. In a teaching department, by contrast, you can show up for work every day without ever having to mention it. Research can even feel like a taboo topic, and for many it seems to be the thing you do on weekends since the rest of the week is overrun by teaching and admin.
I will say more about the inevitability of teaching and admin later. What I’ll say now is that serial postdoc fellowships risk giving you an unrealistic idea of research metrics. It’s a poor apprenticeship in learning a sustainable publication rate. To get a fellowship in the first place you have to show publishing form. To get another one you have to show that you used the privilege of a “research only” position wisely. (For the record: Sydney’s “research active” definition is currently 5 publications averaged over 3 years.)
The research career path also has collegial consequences that would be worth discussing more openly. That is, it can have a knock-on effect on the expectations placed on teaching colleagues trying to get a foot in the game. Your productivity affects others. I’m not at all convinced that the industry as a whole is adequately supporting teaching and research as the ideal model for academics. That would require a lot more serious attention to the question of workloads at every level, and the gendered, raced and classed bodies that are carrying them.
Learning to labour
Posted on | August 1, 2010 | 2 Comments
To anyone who might be interested, there is a brief summary of last year’s State of the Industry conference in this month’s NTEU Advocate. I have no idea how many readers of this blog are union members, and it’s debatable whether the conference would have generated more applications to join, so I thought it might be worth pointing out. Thanks to Jen Kwok for asking me to write something (in lieu of what would have been a far more depressing report about HASS on the Hill last year…)
Chris’s comment prompts me to write a little more about academic labour in the lead up to the anniversary of this event. A number of people have been asking my advice about postdoctoral fellowships at Sydney, and I have been quite honest in offering caution to those thinking of applying. Increasingly I don’t subscribe to the view that smart people should spend untold hours writing proposals for grants with an insanely small success rate, just as I don’t ever want to contribute to delusional ideas about open fields for applications. In the current operating environment, universities only favour particular kinds of work. As one of my correspondents put it – showing a ruthless pragmatism that is itself symptomatic of the state of the industry – there is much to be said for minimising the pyschological damage in desiring opportunities that are actually “out of reach for all sorts of inscrutable reasons”.
I was reminded of this when reading Nina Power’s article, Axiomatic Equality: Rancière and the politics of contemporary education (thanks to edu-factory for the link). Amidst her elegant reading of Rancière, Jacotot, Bourdieu, and others, comes this insight on the British system:
The supposedly elite institutions are still there at the top, the old-boys and girls networks still churning out elite fodder for the same kinds of jobs – politics, diplomacy, high-end culture industry work, etc. At the same time, the expansion of higher education and the re-branding of ex-Polytechnics as universities in the UK has created a situation in which no one need be excluded. It is no longer a question of keeping them out, but of ensuring they go where they are supposed to.
This relates to some other articles I was sifting through this afternoon, which add to Power’s observations about the economic changes affecting university life:
fees have created a kind of split-subject of the university: the “client” who pays for a service and yet is still a subject “supposed to be criticized” or even failed. Endless feedback forms, along the lines of customer satisfaction surveys, entail that students are supposed to know how well that which they don’t yet know is being conveyed. We could call this “the subject supposed to know how it will know what it doesn’t yet know.”
It’s 18 months since I started working full time at the University of Sydney, and 12 months since I began a teaching position. Power’s article, and the further sources I’ve been mulling over the past few hours, slightly minimise my shock – still fresh from a staff meeting announcement on Friday – that my university is now embarking on a cost-benefit analysis of its units. This audit, which asks staff to tally the amount of preparation time for courses offered in 2008, will have who knows what consequences. But it’s another example of the forms of value currently dominant where I work.
This week I have been asked to present at a “Career Planning” workshop for “Early Career Researchers”, which will involve me speaking for 10 minutes about my “career pathway” to a room of my peers. I’m the person speaking as an example of the Postdoc to Tenure path, I suppose; the other two speakers will talk about the challenges of taking on administrative roles immediately post-PhD (X became Chair of his department upon submission of his thesis) and entering academia as a career change following other professional experience (Y was a journo and came to Sydney from a more teaching-intensive university).
The mere fact that this kind of session is conceived – as part of a package of “Learning Solutions” for personal and professional challenges – is a sign that Sydney is a leading university. Career training sessions, indeed the ongoing fantasy that one might have the luxury of planning a career, comes straight out of the management textbook. Yet it’s a major incentive to join the competitive queue to enter research active universities, even when the reality of the training sessions may counteract the intent.
The irony that will need to be downplayed on Friday is that given the competition for Go8 jobs, Sydney University ECRs are already likely to have shown more career productivity than many non-metro “MCRs” and even Professors. For me, this was one of the stand-out lessons from the State of the Industry conference. What we’re dealing with is as much a geographical divide as a generational one.
Well, I’ll report back on the session later in the week.
The case for a queer Bella
Posted on | July 24, 2010 | 6 Comments
Spoiler alert: If you intend to see the current Twilight movie, maybe don’t read this til later.
After writing the love post this week I went to see Twilight: Eclipse - part of a bonding session with K, who is writing his thesis on feminism and film. The last offering in the series was fairly ludicrous compared to the delightful angst of the first. Unlike the gender issues that continue to be the main source of outrage for many, I found the patriotism of New Moon much more of a concern. Too silly to be camp, it conveyed and I think perpetuated the claustrophobia that marks the despair of small town life for many young women. But more than that, it also depicted the contagious and fearful sensibilities that can drive certain kinds of nationalist military fervour. It was a very War on Terror kind of chick flick.
By contrast, the latest release arrives at a much more optimistic juncture. From the outset we know that Bella intends to change and join Edward in the most complete sense after graduation. Meanwhile Edward maintains he will only ravage her once he has her hand in marriage. You can connect the dots here when it comes to all the usual postfeminist positions: pro/anti marriage; career vs man; abstinence vs. rape fantasies; choice, etc. But the film actually goes on to present a very queer set of encounters.
My favourite scene is when Bella is hiding in the snowy mountains, far away from the major battle. Edward guards over her tent through the night, ever the protector. But since she is human, she feels the cold. There is nothing Edward can do to warm her that won’t add to her present danger.
In steps Jake, the perpetually shirtless rival for Bella’s heart, triumphantly entering the sleeping bag. As a human/werewolf, Jake has a simple advantage over Edward. The presence of body heat makes all the difference in this most unlikely of scenarios, with or without further exertions.
Cradled in Jake’s arms, we wonder if Bella is really asleep, while the two boys partake in a whimsical exchange. They tease each other for their respective shortcomings, and in this playful audit of strengths and weaknesses a momentary accord is reached. Without recourse to extremes, or any spectacular conflict, Bella succeeds in bringing both boys into the tent.
The metaphor is worth pressing. While clearly the two aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, there is a simplicity to this resolution that allows us to consider as a rational proposition: what girl wouldn’t want the best of both options? If two people claim to love someone, are there ways it could work? The possibility, even the ordinariness of this question – for it is the pivotal question of the film – seems important in light of dominant cultural narratives. Can we imagine multiple lovers existing without jealousy or violence, as even producing new kinds of intimacy?
The tent scene provides an opening to read this film as a much more radical fantasy than many commentators admit. What other mainstream film of this economic magnitude seriously posits that it is possible to love more than one person at once?
To this I would add: how damaging a message is it, really, for young girls to see that they might deserve a plenitude of offers for love? Or that it might be worth being prepared for the turmoil such circumstances might generate? The relationship dilemmas our heroine negotiates are actually resolved with great skill, given the paucity of ethics guides she has available.
But what kind of world would we have if there were more opportunities to admit that we can’t be everything one person might want us to be? That it’s quite okay to be intimate with a range of people who make us feel happy and safe in different ways?
For a Hollywood film, Eclipse displays a refreshing ambivalence about love’s longevity. As Bella comes closer to her irreversible decision, a succession of stories line up to demonstrate why she should be wary of transitory feelings. Conservatives obviously welcome this aspect of the franchise because of its convenient synergy with abstinence campaigns. But this needn’t be the only way to celebrate Bella’s story.
Our very desire to imagine eternity alongside the current spate of vampire narratives says so much about our culture’s stunted registers for history. And with love, timing is everything. We excel in love’s early stages, in the feeling of infatuation. But as John Armstrong argues, we’re less adept at celebrating love’s later chapters. “Mature love” can be unrecognisable set against a relationship’s opening backdrop, and this goes some way towards explaining the simultaneous rise in divorce rates and the therapy industry. Eclipse teaches this lesson too.
Its suspended status as “the transition” story in the saga makes this film a more honest reflection of the love plot. It shows that there is no such thing as The One – it’s never going to be that simple – just as there is no way of getting involved in a relationship without taking on the expectations of others. Remember Bella must be initiated into Jake’s extended family before they will defend her. The loyalty they demand in return is tremendously suffocating. This is at least one of the ways that Jake’s counter-offer starts to look intimidating. Note too that in the final scene, as her commitment to Edward becomes clear, it isn’t so much the novelty of the-two-of-them that matters. Rather, it’s the litany of signs that Bella interprets as manifesting a larger destiny, proving that she belongs with his kin(d).
There is an inevitable dystopia to all this that the film’s title gets about right. For an average American teen, Bella’s experiments with polyamory show promise, and it’s not completely clear by film’s end whether she has successfully rid herself of these desires. Given what we know from the books however, and indeed the state of queer politics, we have little reason to be hopeful. The forces of nature will soon move these alternative ways of loving and living in to the shadows, having been allowed ever so briefly to shine. We are left wondering whether the next film can keep at least some options open, and what efforts it will take to ensure that the necessary complements to mainstream history can still see the light, and thrive.
Telephutures
Posted on | July 22, 2010 | No Comments
Thanks to Andrew Davies and Antony Funnell for inviting me to be on Future Tense today. You can hear the program, “Ditching the Landline”, on the ABC website.
It was a nice coincidence to arrive at work to a copy of Genevieve Bell’s final report for the Adelaide Thinkers in Residence Program, Getting Connected, Staying Connected: Exploring South Australia’s Digital Futures. Her recommendations show what it would take to develop a “whole-of-government” approach to technology use and roll-out, and in particular, the need to invest in community hubs that enact connectedness beyond the individual home.
Genevieve’s ideas also reinforce the need to consider issues such as service provision, maintenance and disposal – the ongoing infrastructure that IT policy initiatives often overlook. As an anthropologist, she does this with requisite attention to the specifics of (South) Australia’s unique cultural and demographic make up.
Imagine if these recommendations could be implemented nationally…
Guess work
Posted on | July 21, 2010 | 5 Comments
‘Lovers are like detectives: they are trying to find something out that will make all the difference.’ — Adam Phillips, On Love
Probably the least useful thing to do after getting married is to have to go back to work and put together a course reader for “Intimacy, Love & Friendship”. I haven’t changed the structure too much since last year, but this time I have some teaching relief, so there will be a couple of guest lectures.
This week I’ve been revisiting some long standing recommendations – Laura Kipnis’ Against Love and Adam Phillips’ On Flirtation (it was funny – or uncanny? – that while doing so, I saw Kipnis being quoted in a weekend newspaper feature on adultery… it sounds as though she may have softened her position with time.)
It’s hard to teach students about love when so many of them claim to have never felt it before. Of course, this proves that they already have clear ideas about what “it” is; that they are already convinced they will know it when they see it.
When we talked about this in class last year, it was only a brave few – those who admitted to having mourned lost loves – who felt confident enough to identify the experience “accurately”. It worried me that so many others seemed fixated on epistemology over ontology. They mostly seemed concerned about being marked down in the course if they hadn’t experienced “authentic” love… yet.
The course was originally written (not by me) to explore erotics, but a significant number of students were only comfortable talking about love when it was devoid of sex/romance: sibling or parental love, for instance – and I realize that isn’t a clear distinction in this context. The point is they would do this without any attempt to understand these relationships according to cultural narratives, Freudian or otherwise.
On romance, Phillips is useful because he shows how ‘our languages of love are versions of theology and epistemology, they are relentlessly redemptive and enlightening.’ Part of his project is to force us to question the psychoanalytic ‘romance of disillusionment’:
in which falling in love is the (sometimes necessary) prelude to a better but diminished – better because diminished – thing; a more realistic appreciation of oneself and the other person (to which the rejoinder of the aesthete can be: If this is ‘real’, then let’s make something else).
Like Lauren Berlant’s essay, “Love, A Queer Feeling”, Phillips explains how ‘the fluency of idealization’ that we feel in the falling of falling in love comes to be ‘replaced by the halting of ambivalence’.
In his view:
…it may be that in this twilight home of disappointment, which psychoanalysis promotes, people are not suffering from their knowledge, but from losing a more ruthless capacity for self and/or reinvention. It is not truth that they have gained but their versionality, so to speak, that they have lost.
In several different essays, including an amazing one on the paradoxes of “success”, Phillips makes us aware of the many lives we could be, indeed already are, living. Right now I find this a comforting kind of ethics because it forces me to pay attention to contingency. The stories that have been dominating my life to this point do not need to stay in the spotlight for good.
In coming weeks, though – particularly when it comes to talking about the changing function of marriage – I want to think more about:
the senses in which knowing people – or certain kinds of knowledge about people – can be counter-erotic; that the unconscious intention of certain forms of familiarity is to kill desire.
For Philips, at least:
certain ways of knowing people diminish their interest for us and… this may be their abiding wish. So we have to watch out for the ways people invite us – or allow us – to know them; and alert ourselves to the possibility that knowing may be too tendentious, too canny, a model for loving.
Manchester
Posted on | June 3, 2010 | 6 Comments
Did anyone see that film with Sandra Bullock, The Proposal? I’m in Manchester now and being here is like the place she went to meet her PA’s folks. It is light all the time. It was light when I went to bed, it’s bright blue sky at 4.30am. The joys of cross-hemisphere travel!
Anyway, this a phatic post. I’m excited because today is my first ever keynote. Hope I don’t stuff it up; it’s going to be recorded and podcast. See, this proves my point – digital technologies exacerbate the already manifold anxieties of the white collar worker.
Wish me luck!
White collar intimacy
Posted on | May 27, 2010 | 1 Comment
This is my abstract for the Affective fabrics of digital cultures conference next week. It is a bit of a synopsis of my book… although only a bit.
This paper provides an historical overview of writing on white collar work in order to assess the novelty of social networking practices emerging in online and digital cultures. An important legacy of thinking in sociological studies of the past century discusses the work- and life-styles of the salaried middle class, including the friendship networks and leisure practices accompanying the rise of office-based employment. Extending the example of writers such as Sigfried Kracauer, Henri Lefebvre, C. Wright Mills and William H. Whyte, and the more recent work of Alan Liu, I suggest that digital technology exacerbates anxieties particular to middle class subjectivity. It is here that the political claims for affective labour in recent years warrant greater elaboration.
Combined with my own empirical research from a three year study of information workers, this wider history of white collar work-styles will also serve to indicate the compelling pleasures that professional work generates. These affirmative encounters and their seductive qualities are what online technology finally allows us to see, shedding light on the limitations of policy initiatives centred on notions of “work-life balance”. The most successful online platforms of recent years, social networking sites, build on the deliberate confusion of work and friendship that have been hallmarks of professional middle class office culture for decades. The ambiguous distinction between “contact” and “friend” in a range of software packages and platforms underscores an already blurry line between professional and personal identity.
The performative intimacies of Facebook friends and Twitter tweets are the latest of a long line of professional networking practices in which the middle class engage willingly, outside paid hours, often to the point of abandoning more familiar forms of intimacy and fulfilment that stand in their way. Appreciating work’s intimacy in this sense helps to pinpoint what is at stake in the move to work-centred identities and cultures in the white collar West. That is, if our capacities for intimacy are most regularly exercised in the pursuit of competitive professional profit, we face the prospect of being unable to appreciate the benefits of intimacy for unprofitable purposes. The consequences of such a shift will be the grounds for my conclusion.
Done
Posted on | May 27, 2010 | 1 Comment
The Affect Theory Reader – available September
Posted on | May 24, 2010 | 6 Comments
The index is being compiled, the proofs corrected and soon there will be a book. You can even order a copy now, ready for publication in September! Here are the contents. Thanks to the contributors for your unending patience; hope we can celebrate this together somewhere soon.
keep looking »THE AFFECT THEORY READER
Edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth
Forthcoming with Duke University Press, Durham & London 2010Acknowledgments
An Inventory of Shimmers
Gregory J. Seigworth & Melissa GreggONE
Impingements1 Happy Objects
Sara Ahmed2 The Future Birth of the Affective Fact: The Political Ontology of Threat
Brian Massumi3 Writing Shame
Elspeth ProbynTWO
Aesthetics and the Everyday4 Cruel Optimism
Lauren Berlant5 Bitter after Taste: Affect, Food, and Social Aesthetics
Ben Highmore6 An Ethics of Everyday Infinities and Powers: Félix Guattari on Affect and the Refrain
Lone Bertlesen & Andrew MurphieTHREE
Incorporeal/Inorganic7 Modulating the Excess of Affect: Morale in a State of ‘‘Total War’’
Ben Anderson8 After Affect: Sympathy, Synchrony, and Mimetic Communication
Anna Gibbs9 The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia, and Bodies
Patricia T. CloughFOUR
Managing Affects10 Eff the Ineffable: Affect, Somatic Management, and Mental Health Service Users
Steven D. Brown & Ian Tucker11 On Friday Night Drinks: Workplace Affects in the Age of the Cubicle
Melissa Gregg12 Desiring Recognition, Accumulating Affect
Megan WatkinsFIVE
After Affect13 Understanding the Material Practices of Glamour
Nigel Thrift14 Affect’s Future: Rediscovering the Virtual in the Actual
Lawrence Grossberg
(An Interview with Gregory J. Seigworth & Melissa Gregg)
Afterword.Worlding Refrains
Kathleen Stewart
