I interpreted Mel’s post as simply wanting validation for the work she does, and as such I saw Az’s last ‘angry’ comment as the most interesting because of its talk of privilege. It’s an important point. But what if this were not a group that assumed privilege, but a group that assumed pragmatism? Like the young mums in Mel’s example who take care of each other?

If I had a band, I might called it The Peeks in the Pants. Makes for a good pun, too. Bolt is a genius poet indeed.

*ducks*

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I’m not talking about ‘choice’ here, I’m trying to explore the possibility that even accidents have effects/patterns. That could be interrogated, given a chance, quite productively.

Mel wrote:

I just feel unable to engage with it when cultural studies is described as lame, or people make claims about it I don’t understand or recognise (when I’m writing a book about it! It makes me panic!), or when one of my most important mentors is dismissed as some kind of evil scurge on the quality of scholarship in our universities… It makes me feel really crap and isolated. In those contexts it doesn’t sound like there is an opportunity to talk about politics. I just don’t feel welcome…

Well, I can understand that it would make you panic. But can’t panic be productive? Doesn’t it mean a chance to explore new ground, in a weird way? Doesn’t misrecognition signal that something different is happening from what you first thought?

And I’m not sure who you’re talking about re mentor — but my own comments about particular theorists are based on what I’ve read and what I really think, not the desire to be a hater.

And this last thing is going to sound pretty ‘angry’, so bear in mind that I’m really not, but for god’s sake, cultural studies people need support groups so they can feel okay about having the time and privilege to read Morris, Bennett, Grossberg, Stuart Hall or any other theorist? The only way I square the privileges I have as a postgrad with a knowledge of how fucked it is for most people out there in the real world, in so many ways, is a sense that I’m trying to make my work count for something, politically, and trying to do some other political stuff with the resources of my scholarship, access to university ‘facilities’ etc. Sometimes I don’t feel like I manage that very well. But hey, I’m trying — in the knowledge that this probably won’t get me a job, or if it does, it’ll be a job I have to re-apply for every six months, etc, and that any ARC grant I apply for will get vetoed automatically as ‘peek in the pants’ work. (Andrew Bolt, you poet.) That’s if I manage to finish my thesis. I’m in CS because it allows me to do work I would have difficulty piecing together elsewhere, and because that’s where I have found someone amazing and inspiring to help me do it. I am being openly strategic, a bit, about careeer stuff now because I would really like to get paid sometime to do this stuff. But I would last about 2 minutes in a hypothetical CS support group, because I would get so frustrated with the unconscious privilege assumed by the participants that I’d start frothing at the mouth. Support and soldarity, my ears and whiskers!