Welcome homotectonic and thoughts on academic blogging

Posted on | March 21, 2012 | 5 Comments

At the risk of aggravating my loyal spambots still further, I wanted to share the great news that my colleague Kane Race has started a blog, homotectonic. It’s partly to document work that’s emerging from his new ARC Discovery project, ‘Changing Spaces of HIV Prevention: a cultural analysis of transformations in sexual sociability among gay and homosexually active men.’ But it also promises to be a lot of fun.

Those of you who know Kane will already be aware of his local and international influence in the sociology of health. His new work is adopting cultural theory in fascinating ways, moving deftly between popular culture, critical theory, and embodied practice to address pressing issues for gay men. This is a really welcome addition to the list of cultural studies scholars already experimenting with the publics available for their work online. That it accords with the porous, mobile, ambient dimensions of the research object being analysed is terrific too.

This happy development has prompted some thinking on the changing nature of blogging. It comes alongside a fabulous PhD thesis I’ve been reading on feminist bloggers in Australia – which, incidentally, is the first example I’ve seen that’s able to demonstrate the political significance of affect and emotion in feminist blogging communities specifically. I’m looking forward to seeing more of Frances Shaw’s work after the momentous achievement of submission, particularly as a riposte to some of the established modes of representing so-called political blogging in this country!

I’ve also been thinking about the reports for my current ARC Future Fellowship application which, when they mentioned my blog, did so with enthusiasm – recognising that it has served a function for junior scholars over the years. This seems a notable development from the days when young academics were warned not to talk about their blogs in professional settings for fear of the perceptions that might be triggered – of time-wasting, on the one hand; or too much self-promotion, on the other. Oh how we debated these matters! I remember long, anxious discussions of what it all meant for the profession, in places like csaa-forum… though I can’t locate them now. Maybe it was at MACS. The ephemerality of such topical fixations is surely the point.

I wonder, then, whether Mark Zuckerberg is on to something when he says – in the otherwise alarming quote:

people have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.

Have perceptions towards blogging changed over time to recognise it as a legitimate supplement to traditional academic research and output? Certainly others have been discussing this at length recently. Far from being a threat to scholarly integrity, we may be seeing a new kind of default logic attached to the practice for universities desperate to retain a claim on public attention in the wake of the social web.

I’ve been saying for some time now that social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have normalised and democratised blogging’s ‘broadcast impulse’. Today we are in a much better position to assess whether bloggers were always self-promoting careerists or perhaps searching for something else entirely from writing, scholarship and online community.

Regardless of these wider issues, I hope Kane’s blogging experience is as rewarding and sustaining as mine has been. Enjoy!

Category: Cultural Studies, Reading, Sexuality, Web studies

Adultery technologies and ‘intimacy’s work’

Posted on | March 10, 2012 | No Comments

I haven’t posted much about my own research lately, even though I have been writing constantly since the new year (my aching arms can attest to this!). Much of the work is still under review, and needs time to breathe, or is the kind of writing that doesn’t circulate beyond specific audiences: thesis reports, peer reviews, ARC assessments and rejoinders, EMAIL.

But for those who were interested, here is a draft of the piece I presented last month on smart phones, intimacy and adultery.

This paper brings together some of my home/work research with theories of intimacy and love that are taken from my course.

I feel like there is more to go with this project yet, and had to stop at a certain point before delving further. I wanted to write more about the history of flirtation that is missing in this version – and the way ambient technology platforms thrive on the contingency of mobile (or what Bauman calls) “liquid” lives.

I am not sure of the disciplinary “home” for this work though – and am wondering where it belongs. I feel that my writing is moving away from cultural studies towards something I can’t yet name. Any thoughts on audience/readership would be really welcome.

Since I am currently destined to teach love full time (!), I am even contemplating a short book that brings together some of these ideas alongside other pieces I’ve published. My colleague Annamarie planted this seed when she suggested some time ago that the follow up to Work’s Intimacy should be Intimacy’s Work! What do you think?

Category: Gender, Research, Sexuality

From teleology to topography: Kerryn Drysdale on auto-ethnographic encounters and the archive

Posted on | March 2, 2012 | No Comments

I want to introduce this by recounting an experience I had at the beginning of my auto-ethnography. I was going regularly to Queer Central at the Sly Fox Hotel – one of my ethnographic sites – where drag king shows have been running for nine years. I would take along my notepad and try to diligently record all the feelings I had about the shows, the bonds I felt with the audience, and what I could observe of other audience members. It was a great night, great performances, and I was enjoying it, and enjoying the audience’s enjoyment. Then, my ex walked in. It would be an understatement to say that we no longer get on. Immediately my stomach hurt, my hands went clammy, and I felt physically upset by this intrusion into what I thought was my research space. My friends rallied around me, momentarily forgetting their own enjoyment of the show. All I could think was ‘Damn her, she’s fucking up my research’.

My research is intended to be an ethnographic exploration of the affects generated by the event of drag kinging. Via the notion of ‘communities of investment’, my research interrogates how different ‘flows’ or ‘layers’ of desire both constitute and represent various participants in the Sydney drag king scene. I ask: what are the ways in which the drag king scene constitutes and facilitates relations between bodies and desires? What are the ways in which these desires are embodied and articulated within this context, and what does this mean for participants invested in ‘the scene’? That is what I was trying to record that night.

Drag kinging is the lesbian subcultural practice, usually by women but sometimes trans- and otherwise identified- men, of a consciously enacted masculinity within the context of performance. It exploded in popularity in lesbian bar culture and queer scenes in the early 1990’s, and drag kinging has been increasingly recognised by participants as a viable subcultural phenomenon.

As the popularity of drag kinging has increased within lesbian and queer performance communities, academic interest has followed. As I developed my literature review, I began to run into difficulties in situating my research questions within the existing consolidation of drag kinging as an object of academic knowledge. Judith Halberstam, arguably the scholar on drag kings, produced a groundbreaking chapter in her 1998 text Female Masculinity, which highlighted drag king culture as a visible cultural phenomenon and a viable object of study. She produces a taxonomy of drag kings that looks to the embodiment and employment of masculinity in performance, for the wider project of illuminating the ‘transgendered’ or ‘gender-ambiguous’ figure as a symbol for the importance of promoting non-normative identities and practices.

This produces the drag king as a particular category of knowledge. In the current field of drag king scholarship, the figure of the drag king becomes the key theoretical figure for articulating drag king practices; he is elevated to be representative of drag king culture. I suggest that this produces a relationship between visibility and intelligibility. The primacy of his form enables a mode of analysis through which drag kinging can be understood as transgressive. Conversely, the relevance and meaning of drag kinging can only be identified through the affects of which the form is taken to be representative. This generates an established methodological approach to drag king research.

Subsequent scholarship has continued to produce knowledge about drag king practices within these two discursive frameworks of visibility of form and political effects. What interests me is this process by which research objects become concretized in scholarly work, and subsequent compulsion to approach those cultural practices in future scholarly engagement through those same frames. I suggest that this is the inevitable result of an archive predicated on the visibility of the drag king performer. But, what happens to other participants in drag king culture in this existing body of work? My concern is to move past this form of intelligibility produced about the drag king in order to approach drag king culture in a way that considers the multiple forms of investment by all participations in the event. How can I approach the ways in which the audience participates and the desires that are introduced, enacted and transformed, without positioning them in relation to the more dominant figure of the drag king performer?

The problem with an archive based on visibility is that is requires an additive approach premised on the priority of content. If one can find those missing people, objects or practices, it can be added to the existing archive in order to make it more ‘complete’. An additive archive, just like that process whereby cultural objects are turned into research objects, is based on the notion of visibility. This is because all it requires of the researcher is to bring the missing object into focus – to shine a spotlight on – to recover what is missing. It doesn’t allow for the interrogation of how the archive structure might privilege certain forms of engagement, or how alternative forms of engagement are restricted or constrained within that archive. An archive established on the visibility of the drag king form will not be fundamentally changed if the voices of audience members are simply added, as the underlying methodology is not identified and challenged. The drag king is still, so to speak, king.

What I am working on at the moment is using the work by queer theorists to move towards an archive based on affective relations – an archive understood in terms of spatiality rather than visibility. Through the interventions of queer theorists into the forms and functions of the archive, the concept has been expanded to be now capable of capturing and constituting the ephemera and the affective relations of queer subcultural identities and practices. In demonstrating new capacities of the archive, we can now speak about archives of performance and desire, and the relationship between the two.

Both archives of performance and desire constitute and are reflective of the subcultural community that operates at an affective relation to them. Queer archives draw on an already established and recognizable ‘archive of feeling’ – of the fleeting, ephemeral moments, memories and experiences that render the performance and desires relevant and affective to participants. These archives draw their affective power from each other, where the individual is moved in the moment that collectively produced ephemera is mediated through bodies. This operates at the interplay between the shared and collective memories and fantasies that comprise queer desires and bonded experiences, and the individuality of the access and embodiment of each one’s own archives of memory and desire. Yet, in the moment of feeling, it simultaneously constitutes a new archive comprised of a moment of queer experience generated by the affective relation of those desires in the performance space, which can be drawn from in future moments. The affective relations between the collective and the individual play the key part in how these archives of desire are constantly regenerated.

If we can talk about archives predicted on spatiality, rather than visibility, then the researcher is necessarily imbricated in the construction and re-construction of the archive at every moment of interaction. True of any research, but especially so in relation to queer subcultures, the researcher builds on an existing affective connection, one developed from the intimacy of emotional investment. This means that the archive’s meaning emerges from the queer sensibility of the researcher rather than being intrinsic to its objects. Therefore the researcher, in reviewing the archives of performance and desire, likewise draws on, interprets, and feeds back into these archives, and, as with all participants within the subculture that is constituted and sustained by these archives, reconfigures them at the moment of connection to them. This generates the notion of the archival practice as an event, in which objects, participants and researchers are all necessarily imbricated. Accordingly, my interaction with my ex did not ruin my research for the night. Rather, my relationship with her was drawing on and reconfiguring the archives of performance and desire in that instance of affective connection. I, as well as she, was invoking a shift in these moments by virtue of individualised and collectivised participation at the event.

Auto-ethnographic accounts are a way of tracing these relationships between the researcher and other participants, and as participants themselves in drag king events. An archive, based on relations, proximity and layering – something than we might be able to call topography of the archive – is one where I form part of that terrain, essential as any other participant, venue, intoxicant, bar stool, etc. Therefore, the utility of queer approaches to archival methodology lies in how objects of knowledge can be reused, revitalised and revalidated. Instead of notions of intelligibility that have over-relied on the visibility of research objects, these queer approaches to archives recognize that intelligibility is produced as part of the affective register, in which I am also implicated. It provides a way of understanding the topography of the related drag king archives, the process of producing frames of reference to read that terrain, and the opportunities inherent in shifts in those frames.

This is a slightly modified transcript of Kerryn Drysdale’s presentation as part of the postgraduate panel, ‘Researching Queer Scenes, Spaces and Practices’, at last week’s workshop. Kerryn is a PhD student in Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney.

Category: Academia, Cultural Studies, Gender, Sexuality, Sydney

The long walk: Kate O’Halloran on researching queer scenes, spaces and practices

Posted on | February 29, 2012 | 1 Comment

In light of the panel topic, I thought it was appropriate to reflect on my own relationship to this kind of research. While I have been heavily involved in various queer scenes over my formative years this relationship has never been an easy or uncomplicated one. My very first encounter with ‘queer’ was walking into the ‘queer lounge’ at Melbourne Uni. I found my first year of Uni incredibly hard, and found ‘making friends’ with people from tutes almost impossible. So my instinct had been that it might be easier to find friends here. Still, the queer lounge was at the end of a really long corridor, on the 4th floor of the union building, and there were some windows facing out onto the corridor. You could see inside and people from inside could most likely see you. Nothing had ever felt so difficult as walking down that corridor and into that space. Like most difficult things in life, I found I could do it with the help of a friend. A friend and an excuse to be there – which was handing out some flyers. So my friend Owen and I, who both identified as bisexual at the time, made the long walk.

When we did arrive, people were surprisingly welcoming, although when they asked if we would like to stay and if we were ‘queer’ I panicked a bit. I said – and I still find this funny today – that I wasn’t sure because I was ‘half’ queer. Of course people were quick to correct me and explain that ‘queer’ encompassed all sorts of non-straight sexualities and identities, and invited me to a queer women’s group called ‘Girlzone’ in the womyn’s room on Wednesdays. Although I found the name pretty awful, I went, and Girlzone would become an integral part of my time at University and ‘initiation’ into the queer scene.

It’s clear to me that my experiences in the queer scene have influenced my academic life and interests. Although I have an incredibly varied disciplinary background (from creative writing to psychology to cinema studies) I seemed to always write my undergraduate essays on the stock-standard weeks of ‘feminism’ or ‘queer theory’. Yet I often felt that what I was writing about remained wrapped up in a higher theoretical plane that didn’t address the very basic interactions and emotions I experienced within queer spaces. Often, I blamed academia for this – on Judith Butler’s inaccessible writing style, on the course coordinators who assigned our readings or on musty old academics who had no grasp on the ‘real world’. Yet, I would say that the older I get the more I realise how implicated I am in this too.

When given free reign over what to write my postgraduate diploma on, I still chose to do an in-depth analysis of Judith Butler. I guess I felt that to get at what ‘queer’ meant I had to engage with some of the most difficult writing on it, a process which often becomes overwhelming and disempowering, even as you feel like you are making some inroads into it. Of course there’s nothing wrong with Judith Butler per se – only that I was a culprit of what I sometimes felt she was guilty of: remaining locked on a theoretical plane. While my theoretical interests connected with my everyday ones, I still felt that I didn’t have a way to connect the two and felt invariably split in my life – manifest I think in my dual personas of academic and journalist – one who could talk freely and the other who could write about theory.

When I speak in the past tense like this you might be mistaken for thinking I mean a long time ago. But these are issues I still grapple with now and possibly partly why it took my thesis so long to get ‘off the ground’ so to speak. It’s still quite fresh and raw, but one of the things I want to do is engage much more closely with the events and emotions taking place within the queer scene and to question – and bring in somehow – my own relationship to it. So while I am now writing on how the concept of ‘queer’ has been strictly defined, policed and fought over within queer ethical scholarship, I am undertaking an ethnographic approach in my work to get to the bottom of how the same tensions have manifest within urban-based, radical activist communities in Sydney, Melbourne and Berlin specifically.

For example, when “Feminist Futures” happened in Melbourne last year I was quite upset about some of the fights and rhetoric that flew around queer forums about who should or shouldn’t be presenting. Sheila Jeffreys was part of a panel due to present on the topic of sex work, but was subject to a targeted campaign by many members of the queer community to remove her from the panel. She was deemed to represent the ‘past’ rather than the ‘future’ of feminism because of her views on the subject. And so I found myself ‘defending’ Sheila Jeffreys’ right to speak even though I feel politically quite at odds with her. Anyone who has been part of the queer community knows that to defend Sheila Jeffreys is social suicide. When I was invited to a facebook event encouraging me to protest against her inclusion in the “Feminist Futures” program, I felt it was finally time to speak up. But when I held out against the belief that anyone should be able to specify what a ‘future’ feminist looks like, I almost physically felt the blows directed at me in response. It was an extremely unpopular thing to say, and I still find myself avoiding eye contact with those who took me apart online.

So part of what I want to do in my thesis is tackle some of the things that have recently made me feel uncomfortable or unhappy within the queer community. Utilising an ethnographic approach helps me, I think, to ‘bridge’ the gaps I’ve felt between my academic and personal or ‘journalistic’ lives and to raise some of the important insights I have. But because I feel that the community (myself included) is often pressured to ‘band together’ and can be defensive in the face of criticism, this makes my task – and the political stakes – difficult. In many ways, I feel the anxiety of walking into the ‘queer lounge’ all over again. Somehow, although I have been variously embraced within and accepted into queer communities (at one point being a rep on the queer committee at Uni, being a journalist for ‘queer press’ and so on), I still have never felt completely comfortable in queer scenes and spaces, with the impression that I often say the ‘wrong’ thing or am resistant to trends within the community.

Fast-forward to this year and I’m writing a chapter about how arguments about ‘heteronormativity’ have become unhelpful within queer ethical scholarship and the community itself. Against the tide of many of my own friends critiquing the ‘drive to normalisation’ within queer communities, I have argued that the singling out people’s ‘normative’ behaviour for critique has had very damaging consequences. There seem to be very real pressures within the community – with no better way to put it – to be an ‘exemplary’ queer citizen, where ‘queer’ is very specifically and strategically defined against ‘inferior’ subjectivities like gay and lesbian, feminist and so on. Part of my task, then, is learning to draw on my own, and others’, lived experiences of these pressures in my work, something which drives my search for a methodology that can faithfully – and non-judgmentally – represent these pressures and their affective and emotive dimensions.

And yet, once again, I feel the fear of being unpopular in my stance – something that makes it very anxiety-provoking to write this paper. The idea that I could be saying the ‘wrong’ thing is something I’m trying to critique in my own work, but also something that still haunts my own involvement in these scenes and research work. I hope that by sharing some of these thoughts and feelings with you today I can go some way towards addressing my own difficulties in carrying out this research, and for others to share some of their own thoughts about how best to approach researching often politically and emotionally fraught spaces.

This is a slightly modified transcript of Kate O’Halloran’s presentation as part of the postgraduate panel, ‘Researching Queer Scenes, Spaces and Practices’, at last week’s workshop. Kate is a PhD student in Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney.

Category: Academia, Events, Research, Sexuality

Postscript: Researching intimacy, sexuality and space

Posted on | February 28, 2012 | No Comments

I have posted some pics from Friday’s workshop on Facebook and Flickr for those who couldn’t make it. This was a fantastic prelude to Saturday’s Queer Thinking… and Sara Ahmed’s amazing talk, “Wilful Queers: A Queer History of Will”.

I am still a bit overwhelmed by the quality of presentations and the quantity of people in attendance at both days. I wish I could have seen everything. It also seems significant that we could fill a lecture hall beyond capacity to debate Why Gender Matters in the middle of summer in 2012. This was a very happy Sydney moment.

Feel free to share comments and feedback on the event here. I will be posting a couple of the presentations in separate entries to follow. Thanks to everyone who helped make such a special day. As I said in my welcome – we need to enjoy and celebrate these spaces and discussions when they exist! Never take them for granted.

Category: Academia, Events, Gender, Sexuality

GCS hosts CSAA 2012 – Call for papers

Posted on | February 22, 2012 | No Comments

‘Materialities: Economies, Empiricism, & Things’

Cultural Studies Association of Australasia annual conference 2012

Hosted by the Department of Gender & Cultural Studies, University of Sydney

Dec 4th-6th (pre-fix pre-conference Dec 3rd)

Organising committee: Fiona Allon, Prudence Black, Catherine Driscoll, Elspeth Probyn, Kane Race & Guy Redden.

Call for Papers

Cultural studies has a long history of investigating material practices – indeed it was a founding tenet of British cultural studies – but recently a new turn or return to materialism seems to be emerging in the field. What this materiality now means is still open, but we suggest that it flags a renewed interest in questions of how to study cultural objects, institutions and practices (methods), what constitutes matter and materiality (empiricism), and how things (humans and non-humans) are being reworked at a time of global economic, environmental and cultural flux.

Our keynotes have all directed critical attention to these questions – to the more-than-human, to new philosophies of matter, to the gendered material and economic circuits of media, and to ‘the heavy materiality of language’. We have invited them to help us in reinvigorating what cultural studies can do today. They include: Ross Chambers (Michigan), Katherine Gibson (UWS), Lesley Head (UoW), Bev Skeggs (Goldsmiths, London), and Sarah Whatmore (Oxford).

We encourage proposed panels and individual papers that engage with the wide spectrum of issues flagged by our title, including submissions that focus on:
· the crossing of science studies and cultural studies;
· questions of method;
· the relation between culture and economy;
· cultural histories of objects and forms;
· new ideas about empiricism;
· placing sexuality, gender and race within the more-than-human;
· the materiality of texts and genres;
· the future and the past of material cultural studies;
· environmental humanities and changing ecologies;
· cultural studies within the anthropocene;
· cultural relations with/in primary and natural resources;
· the new materiality of globalism

Papers and panels not focusing on the theme are also welcome.

Please send submissions to csaa.2012@gmail.com by August 24th and include your name and affiliation. Abstracts for papers should be 250-300 words. Panel submissions must include three individual abstracts, a panel title and 100-150 word rationale for the panel as a whole.

We will advise all proposers of accepted papers within 4 weeks of this deadline. Please note that accepted presenters will need to register before their paper will be scheduled in the program.

There will also be a separate event, “Pre-Fix”, geared to the needs of postgraduates and early career researchers, on December 3rd. Details of this and the main conference will be on a dedicated conference website soon.

CSAA website: http://www.csaa.asn.au/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CSAA2012
Twitter: csaa2012

Category: Academia, Cultural Studies, Events, Sydney

Notes on Jason Read’s ‘Starting from Year Zero: Occupy Wall Street and the Transformations of the Socio-Political’

Posted on | February 18, 2012 | 1 Comment

NB: These are highlights created by instapaper on my kindle. Read the full essay here. I am experimenting with this and other ways of taking notes “in the cloud”… Follow @melgregg on Twitter if this is your kind of thing.

As students take on more and more loans to fund their education, their education changes form. Anyone who teaches at a University is perhaps aware of the chilling effect that student debt has an intellectual inquiry and education. Students do not ask themselves the questions: what interests me? And what discipline or field do I show talent for? But ask instead: what will get me a job? What will the market demand? Debt is the future acting on the present. The idea of future debt, of the cost of student loans, acts on the present, determining choices and limiting possibilities. Debt is mode of governmentality, a way to restrict and curtail actions; a mode that is all the more effective in being internalized.

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Student debt can be understood as a transformation of the educational experience and the university, one that uses the power of the state, taxation and the allocation of funds, to restructure the university from below. Indebted students, students desperately seeking wages adequate to their debt, are less likely to demand courses and programs engaging in critical thinking, let alone engage in the political activism that made the “student” a political transindividual individuation, defined by its liminal position between home and work, immaturity and maturity. Debt produces students who are desperately try to match their actions to the mercurial job market, rather than rethink society and their place within it. The politics of debt are produced from above, but the effects are felt from below in the daily actions of not only students, who ask only “how can this course get me a job,” but also an increasingly precarious adjunct teaching faculty forced to tailor their teaching to whatever can get them work. 

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It is very difficult to say “we” debtors, in the way one could say “we” citizens or “we” workers. Part of debt passes beneath us, in the calculations, quantifications, and aggregations that make up our digital self, our virtual identity, and is this respect we cannot even say “I.”

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debt is seen less as a collective condition, as part of a new regime of accumulation and a new governmentality, than as an individual fate.

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we should not spend too much time mourning the lack of the worker as an identity organizing Occupy Wall Street, or hold out hopes for unions to be revitalized. Such actions can only lead to reforms, to better wages and more work, and would return us to the division of worker and student, waged work and unpaid reproductive work.

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debt is dependent upon a new technological regime of surveillance and data sharing, is part of a political strategy of neoliberal governmentality, and perpetuates a subjectivity of isolation and anxiety. 

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Work, even the work at a given office, call center, or distribution site, is no longer that of a “we,” of a collective identity, but is individualized into temporary contracts, continual performance reviews, and dispersed incentives. To call this an “I” with all of its connotation of independence and autonomy, is not entirely accurate. As with debt the balance sheet of any one’s particular performance and hard work remains completely outside of their efforts.

==========

This is a situation in which any lateral connection, any connection with other workers, students, or even other customers of insurance, that is not networking, not oriented towards maximizing one’s potential is unnecessary or avoided. It is perhaps more accurately described as class decomposition than composition, as students and workers are isolated and fragmented into individuals and aggregates of fragmented bits of intelligence and knowledge. The identification is not between other individuals, any collective, but with capital itself, with the enterprise. The worker becomes an entrepreneur of the self, and the student an investor in one’s own human capital. It is perhaps in this sense that “corporate personhood” should be taken as issue: it is not that capitalism would be better if we could some how just return it to individual’s exploiting individuals, but capitalism functions by modeling a person that aligns his or her striving, with its functioning.

I love this last paragraph in particular. But it makes me wonder whether anyone would ever claim that this situation is true of their own actions. Do we need a more subtle language for our descriptions of these experiences? Or is the manifesto tone a necessary part of the genre? I am interested because it is a problem I have all the time with my own writing – and my own problems with writing are the reason I am doing a blog post right now rather than my conference paper for next week!

One of the many thoughts this piece prompted for me was a sense of the varied force and scale of the student debt problem in different national political cultures. If #occupy has effectively mobilised awareness of the debt issue in the US and in Europe, our government-led student loans system in Australia presents another front for analysis. The funding of universities here involves particularities that matter, even while our campuses reflect in practice some of the same tendencies shaping the experience of university life elsewhere (thanks again for these ideas, MFD).

What I suspect is even more important is the role our education system plays in the wider region of Asia, and how this does or doesn’t equate to the same kinds of imperial legacies of Anglo-American capitalism. We have already seen inklings of what an #occupy movement of international students would look like in the streets of Melbourne. Have these connections been made in the wave of more recent commentary? (Scholars like Brett Neilson have been writing about transformations in worker/student relations for some time.) Ultimately it is my parochialism, my lack of understanding of the routes our “international” students take to enrol in our courses, that makes me pause before disowning the traditions I am now implicated in perpetuating as faculty. Because who am I to know – how does my own employment situation even encourage me to know – what difference a Western education might make in a range of other countries? This seems to me one of the more crucial philosophical questions raised by these times.

I guess another way of saying all this is: where is Asia in the global economy, of knowledge and its debts, imagined by #occupy?

Category: Politics, Reading, Work
Tags: > > > > > >

Week Three – Space

Posted on | February 15, 2012 | No Comments

Here are the readings for the last meeting of the Sexuality and Space/ Queer Thinking reading group, in which we will discuss a number of approaches for researching intimacy, space and scenes.

Everyone is welcome, and this week Elspeth Probyn will join us for the discussion along with some other department colleagues.

If you would like the readings emailed to you let me know – although most are already available online through academia.edu or other sources (tip: add “pdf” to a Google search…)

Don’t forget to register for our workshop and Sydney Ideas events on Friday, February 24… we need to be sure the rooms are the right size :-)

Gordon Waitt and Kevin Markwell, “Touring the Sexualized City” in Gay Tourism: Culture and Context, Haworth Press, 2006: 159-202

Kane Race, “Party animals: the significance of drug practices in the materialisation of urban gay identity” Forthcoming in S. Fraser and D. Moore (eds.) The Drug Effect: Health, Crime and Society. Cambridge University Press

Will Straw, “Systems of Articulation, Logics of Change: Scenes and Communities in Popular Music,” Cultural Studies, Vol. 5, No. 3 (October, 1991) 361-375.

Elspeth Probyn, “Glass Selves: Emotions, Subjectivity, and the Research Process” in S. Gallagher (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of the Self. Oxford UP. 2011.

Optional:

Guy Davidson,”‘Contagious Relations’: Simulation, Paranoia, and the Postmodern Condition in William Friedkin’s Cruising and Felice Picano’s The Lure.”  GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 11.1 (2005): 23-64.

Judith Halberstam, “What’s that smell? Queer temporalities and subcultural lives” International Journal of Cultural Studies 6,3 (2003): 313–333

Elspeth Probyn, “Only connect? Communicating across the coreperipheries of geography and discipline”. Address to the Australian Academy of the Humanities, 2011.

Category: Events, Gender, Reading

Researching intimacy, sexuality & space: Full program

Posted on | February 15, 2012 | 3 Comments

A free one day workshop in conjunction with Mardi Gras/Queer Thinking

Friday 24 February, University of Sydney

Location: Main Quadrangle, behind the Jacaranda tree: S224, S225 and S204

*To register for Researching Intimacy, Sexuality & Space on the 24th please email: sexualityspace@gmail.com. Please let us know of any access requirements in this email.*

PROGRAM

9.15am S224 Welcome and introductions

9.30am S224 Keynote: Annamarie Jagose, ‘Behaviorism’s Queer Trace: Sexuality and Orgasmic Reconditioning’

10.45 Break

11.00 S224 Plenary: Queer Style: Film, Poetry, Soap Opera

Speakers:
Dr Lee Wallace
Dr Kate Lilley
Dr Melissa Hardie

12.30 Lunch break (BYO)

1.30 – 3.00. Parallel Sessions

1. Transnational Queer S224

Queer thinking and thinking queer in Latin America
F. Serrano-Amaya, M.A. Viteri, & S. Vidal-Ortiz

The diary of an activist abroad: queer transnational flows and activist kinships
Daniel Marshall

Sex, tourism and desire: the emotional labour of gay hospitality
K. Markwell & Gordon Waitt

2. Liminal texts/spaces/events S225

James Franco’s ‘thing’
Adrian Jones

We will eat you, after we eat your children: queer futurity and narrative
Anna Westbrook

Queer Olfactories: Smelling Feeling, Disorientation, Peculiar Pillows
Kurt Bugden

3.00 Break

3.15: S224 Postgraduate panel: Queer methods

Kerryn Drysdale, Jess Kean, Kate O’Halloran + more TBC
Chair: Melissa Gregg (postgrads interested in joining can contact MG)

4.30 Break

5.00: S204 Sydney Ideas Panel: Why Gender Matters

Professor Sara Ahmed, Gilbert Caluya, Jennifer Germon, Annalise Pippard
Chair: Elspeth Probyn

Full details: http://sydney.edu.au/sydney_ideas/lectures/2012/why_gender_matters.shtml

6.30 Close – Cash bar on campus

Queer Thinking – Saturday 25 February – Seymour Centre

Featuring Professor Sara Ahmed, ‘Willful Queers: A queer history of the will’ – 7pm

Queer Thinking consists of a number of events on the 25th from 12pm – 8pm
For the full program see: http://www.mardigras.org.au/queerthinking/index.cfm

Bookings are advised.

Category: Events, Gender, Sexuality, Sydney

Celebrity studies conference panel?

Posted on | February 14, 2012 | 2 Comments

The first Celebrity Studies conference is being held in Melbourne later this year, with a great lineup of speakers. I am thinking of putting together a proposal on Steve Jobs, and wondered if anyone else might be interested in joining a panel on this… It could be on Jobs in particular, or the celebrity CEO, or something I tentatively want to call “dot.com celebrity” (if anyone can recommend other work on this please do). You can get a flavour for the kind of approach I might take here. Submissions are due March 5, so contact me and we can brainstorm!

Category: Cultural Studies, Events
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