Queering Theory: Fall 2009

Queer Blogging: Some Sources

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 19:11:10 +0000

This entry is also posted here.

It is the first week of the semester. In anticipation of my blog experiment in queering theory, we are reading several essays on queer blogging. While I have spent some time thinking about feminist blogging and have read a few articles about the (specifically) feminist possibilities of blogging for teaching/thinking/activism, I have not given that much attention to all of this in relation to queer/queering. For class today, we are discussing: Jill Dolan's "Blogging on Queer Connections in the Arts and the Five Lesbian Brothers" (2005), Rahul Mitra's and Radhika Gajjala's "Queer Blogging in Indian Digital Diaspora: A Dialogic Encounter" (2008), and, if we have time, Julie Rak's "The Digital Queer: Weblogs and Internet Identity" (2005). Here are some notes/thoughts about the readings:

Dolan. "Blogging on Queer Connections..."
In this article, which was written in 2005, Dolan discusses her experiences creating and writing in her feminist/queer/arts blog, The Feminist Spectator. The article is divided into three parts. First, Dolan offers some reflections on why she started her blog. Second, she provides, with only a few minor revisions, an entry from her blog on a performance in New York City by the Five Lesbian Brothers (here is the original entry from her blog). Third and finally, she offers some concluding thoughts (responses and reflections) on her blog entry and on blogging in general.

Initially I chose this article for us to read for a couple of reasons. First, Dolan offers some brief reflections on why blogging is a useful way to write and think which can be helpful as we try to understand how and why we will use the blog in the course. And second, she provides us with an example of blog writing that doesn't fit the popular image of blog writing as confessional and purely personal (okay, perhaps we should interrogate what we mean by "personal" a bit more...how do we think about personal/"person"/body in relation to Mitra/Gajjala?).

Here are the reasons Dolan gives for why she started her blog:

1. Immediate critical (thinking) writing: A blog allows her to write in a timely fashion (as opposed to waiting 6 months or much more for an academic article or book to be published). And it allows her to write about performances that don't usually get much attention. The idea of immediate critical writing is something that I also like about the blog. I really appreciate the fact that I can read an article (like this one) and immediately post my critical reactions to it on my blog.

A note of caution: The critical aspect of this process is crucial. Effective blog writing, for Dolan and for me/my course, goes beyond immediately posting every reaction to an idea or article. Effective blog writing requires critical reflection and the filtering and shaping of your reactions into a coherent and focused response.

In her concluding remarks, Dolan cautions against the dangers of immediate writing in her own blog. She writes:

I've found, in my very maiden adventures in blogging, that its immediacy lends it to an aura of risk. That is, rather than running my ideas through an intermediary like an editor, I offer them here with much less outside manipulation and consideration. The freedom of such a venue in which to write appeals to me; at the same time, I worry that I've been intemperate, already, in my writing here (505).

I agree with this caution. In previous entries, like here, I have talked about the dangers of immediacy, especially for students who are all fired up at 2 AM after reading a particularly problematic article for class. Here was the tentative conclusion that I came to in that entry:

The trick, I think, is to find a way to balance the benefits of immediate access (to expressing ideas, to connecting with others) with the necessity of posting thoughtful, responsible and accountable entries.

Perhaps one way to create this balance is to find ways to remember that blog writing is always for an audience...an audience that we are (whether we recognize it or not) accountable to and responsible for. I briefly talk about blog audiences here.

2. Freedom. Dolan wants to start her blog so that she can write as much as she wants. In her past experiences writing more immediate reviews of non-mainstream performances for small papers/dailies, she was limited to a very short word count. This prevented her from going beyond the "slash-and-burn, 200-word consumer reporting that too often characterizes arts coverage" (August 25, 2005). Because she wants to "stage a more deliberate, extended, generous kind of conversation about things I see at the theater, at the movies, or on television" (August 25, 2005), she wants to be able to write much longer entries.

I like her point here, but I wonder: Does limiting the number of words necessarily lead to a less thought out entry? Is it possible to engage "deeply" and critically with a topic in 200 words or less? On this trouble blog, I have experimented with this possibility (see here). Does it work? I am not sure, but there is something helpful about learning to communicate an idea/concept succinctly.

3. An outside/outsider space. Drawing upon her training and experiences, Dolan wants to write a blog that deals with gender and race and that is written from a queer perspective. Her blog is aimed at those outside of mainstream media. A blog allows her to stay on the outside, to not be (as) concerned with any "mainstream readership" and what they might think or understand about her queer musing on gender/race/identity.

Questions: Is a blog an outsider space? A queer space? If so, how? Is it always outside? Do you see any ways that a blog can/does perpetuate dominate ideologies or participate in oppressive systems?

4. A specific (friendly) audience. Consider what Dolan writes about her ideal audience:

I was looking for a forum to read friends, colleagues, and other sympathetic readers interested in a discussion about the meanings of the arts in this moment in U.S. culture. I think, in fact, I was looking for a place to preach to the converted through a more in-depth discourse about the interrelationship between the arts, identity, and culture (492).

Questions: Is this the type of audience we want to create for our blog? What are the advantages and disadvantages of writing for sympathetic readers? Dolan links the idea of a friendly audience with "preaching to the converted." Are these two always connected? Is it possible to write for a friendly (that is, not hostile but respectful) audience that is still critical of your ideas and comments? Should the blog be a safe space or something else?

Later in her opening comments, Dolan indicates that her blog is meant to be widely accessible and aimed at "any reader/spectator/practitioner" or "citizen/scholar/artist" who is committed to the arts (493). I really like this term, citizen/scholar/artist, and her description of what she wants to do in her blog.

What do you want to do in our blog? Who do you want to read it? What audiences are you writing for/to/with?

Mitra/Gajjala. "Queer Blogging in Indian Digital Diasporas"
This essay is a "dialogic encounter" between two scholars (one a grad student, the other an associate professor at Bowling Green State) who do research on and participate in "queering in the Indian digital diaspora" (400). The tone is very different from Dolan and so is the focus. Whereas Dolan looks at her own (individual) experiences of creating and writing in a blog about performance and art, Mitra and Gajjala weave their own performances of blogging (by interjecting entries/comments into their essay) together with other bloggers' entries and comments and with theorizing about queer Indian identity/blogging, power, and blogs as spaces of situated practice.

Situated Practices: Dolan is focused (almost exclusively) on writing about her own blogging as the (somewhat situated) practice of an individual critical thinker/spectator/graduate program director in the U.S. who writes about peformance and writes to others who value/engage in exploring arts and their meanings in U.S. culture. In her concluding remarks, she does offer a few cautionary words, but her overall tone reflects hope and excitement about the possibilities that blogging opens up for citizen/scholar/artists like her. Mitra and Gjjala are focused on providing a space for thinking about/reflecting on both queer blogging and "the negotiation of online queer Identity" (402). Their intent is not to celebrate the blog as a liberating space for oppressed populations to express themselves, but to examine "how queer/GLBT presences are manifested in blog spaces" (402). And they want to present/perform their own researching and writing of their article as the situated practice of queer bloggers/researchers who are (re)negotiating institutional power in relation to dichotomies of public vs. private, offline vs. online and person (as identity/Queer) vs. practice (non-normative sexual practices).

Personal and the Person: Dolan is interested in distancing her own version of blogging, what she calls "ruminations" and "think pieces" on arts and culture, from the personal (that is, confessional and self-revelatory) online journal writing that she imagines dominates much of the blog writing currently online. Mitra and Gajjala are interested in paying careful attention to how queer performativity as public gets separated from queer sexual practices as private. They are wary of the validation of the Person (as a Queer identity/Subject) over practices (of that queer person) and the promotion of the web as queer because it allows disembodied performances where no one knows who you are or what you do (401). They write:

In this article, we post this question implicitly while further examining the implications of the private and public separations that lead to the separating of sexual practice from queer practice so that particular queered speech and performativity are placed in the public space and expected to stand in for queer formations while specific situated queer practice is shifted to the invisible private space still not to be revealed for fear of consequence (411).

In considering this question, they want to attend to the specific ways that persons (particularly queer Indian bloggers) negotiate power online and offline. They devote the second half of their article to a discussion of three different ways that the dichotomy (public/private; Person/practice; online/offline) gets constructed and reinforced: 1. offline marginalization--can they be "out" and visible as queer? acceptance as Queer as long as queer acts are invisible (414-415), 2. online queer representation--issues of access to technology, to language, to proper queer behavior (415-417), 3. Being anonymous--confession and highly individualized construction of self and readership online (417-419).

Blogging and the Individual: This brings us to the individual and to Julie Rak's article, "The Digital Queer." In addition to giving a helpful overview of the history of blogging, Rak provides a detailed discussion of the rhetoric of queer blogging (this is something that Mitra and Gajjala take up explictly at the end of their article). Her main argument: blogging = some form of liberalism which = the Individual (their value and rights) + freedom of expression (172). In this equation, bloggers are individuals who are able, through technology, to freely express themselves and communicate to a wide range of others. They can do so anonymously (173), and while deliberately and carefully negotiating the public and private (173-174). Their blog posts are intended to honestly and accurately represent who they are; the blog allows them to be "real" (174-175). Their blog posts also enable them to connect with other, like-minded bloggers.

Rak sees two problems with this liberal ideology for queer blogging/bloggers. First, in representing themselves as a "real" individual who deliberately negotiates the web, bloggers are reinforcing their own (blog/queer) identity as essential and fixed. This identity gets further reified through the process of categorization and the classifying of specific blogs as "queer." Rak writes:

The act of classification is a social act in the blogger community that works to create recognizable subjects who do not shift. Therefore, queer blogging does not feature the kind of subjectivity described in queer theory or in cyberculture studies as these areas have been influenced by postmodernist ideas about identity (177).

Second, the reification of Queer (as an identity, as a category for blogs) flattens out the differences between those who identify as queer and engage in queer practices. And it focuses (almost exclusively) on the practices of one version of queer experience--living in the U.S., American, English-speaking, located in large urban area, left-wing or liberal in political beliefs. For Rak, it seems, queer blogging is a privileged activity (179-180, also cited in Mitra/Gajjala, 420). This particular queer experience also seems to be conservative in terms of sexual identity, sexual practice and writing style. None of the blogs that Rak read experimented with representation in a "postmodern" way (what does she exactly mean by this?) (179).

Rak concludes her essay by discussing how the technical process of categorizing/classifying blogs through keywords contributes to the lack of differences among/between queer bloggers.

Questions: What are the politics of keywords and tag clouds? Are they useful or problematic or both? How could we use tag clouds to organize our blog in ways that don't overemphasize similarities at the expense of differences?

How can blogger/bloggers experiment with the representation of themselves in a "postmodern" and/or queer way? What might a "queer" subject (not just in terms of content but in terms of subject formation/representation) look like?

How to Blog, a primer

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 03:39:34 +0000

Step 1: Getting Started or How to Log In and Set up my Alias

1. Go to http://blog.lib.umn.edu
This is the UThink main site for U of M blogs.

2. Log in by clicking on the link (login to UThink) located under About Uthink on the right hand side of the page.

3. If you are not already logged into the system, you will be required to submit your x500 and your password. If you are already logged in then clicking on login should take you directly to your Dashboard. Your dashboard will list any blogs for which you are an author (courses, personal blogs). To access our blog, click on "System Overview" at the top on the left hand side. I have added all of you to our blog as authors, so you should see our course, "Queering Theory: Fall 2009) on your list of blogs. Click on it.

4. Now you should be on the author page for our blog. This is where you can create entries, upload files, and insert images.

5. For those of you who haven't used UThink before: You can set up your own alias for posting. This means that when you post an entry or a make a comment, only your alias will show (not your email address or your name). As the blog administrator, I will be the only person who knows that it is you posting. If you are a little nervous about posting, this is a good way to stay somewhat anonymous.

Step 2: Creating a Basic Entry

6. Now that you are on the author (or, the behind-the-scenes) site for our blog and now that you have signed in and created your posting name/alias for our blog, you can create an entry. Click on create (located on the right hand side right above--or between--the course title) and scroll down to entry. Click on it.

7. You should now be on a page titled "Create Entry." You can create a title for your entry by typing in the box, "Title." Then, type your entry in the bigger box below.

8. A note about body vs. extended entry: Above the big box where you type your entry, there are two options: body and extended. If you are writing a particularly long entry, you could post the opening paragraph in the body section and then the rest of the entry in the extended section. When people look at your entry on the blog, they will only see the part you wrote in the body with a link at the bottom that says something like: "continue reading entry x." This can be helpful in making the blog visually more compact, but it not necessary.

9. When you are finished typing your entry, scroll down to the bottom of the screen and click on save (If you want to preview your entry first, click on preview. This can be helpful in making sure that you formatted everything correctly and that you put in the right address for your links). Once you have saved the entry, click on the view site button which is located at the end of the row that starts with the "create" button.

10. A note about tags: Right after the text box (where you type your entry) is a much smaller box labeled "tags." Tags work like key words and can be used to identify the key topics in your blog. So, if you are writing a blog about Roseanne as a queer character or the Twilight series as reinforcing heterosexual romance, you could tag your entry with the keywords: Roseanne, television shoes, working class, anti-capitalism or Mormonism, heteronormativity, vampires. Type the keywords in and separate them with commas. Put these keywords in before you save your entry. These tags will be reflected in our tag cloud which is located midway down on the right hand side.

Step 3: Creating links, inserting images and embedding youtube clips.*
*These should all be done before you hit save and post your entry.

11. Links: Okay, so now you have typed in your brilliant entry about the queer relationship between Harry Potter and his mentor, Albus Dumbledore, but the whole thing looks kind of...boring. One basic way to make it more interesting (not to mention interactive) is by adding in links to other sources (that you have referenced in your entry or that point to more information on the topic or that offer a different perspective). For the purpose of our blogs, your links should not merely be thrown into your text. Instead, you must address and explain them (but more on that later). Technically speaking, the way to add a link is to highlight the text that you want to create a link for (like David Halperin and his discussion of pederasty in ancient Greece). Then click on the image of the chain (you will find this image in the row of buttons above the text book). Enter the address for the link and then click on save.

12. Images: But, wait, you say. Links aren't enough. You want more things to add to your entry. You want images.

a. First, find the image you want. Probably the easiest way to do this is opening up a new tab, going on Google images and putting in a keyword to search. That's where I have found most of my images...like the one to my left. Because this is a basic primer, let's stick with google images. So, you have typed in "Desperate Housewives" and found a great image of Bree that you want to use. Click on the image. Then click on "see full size image". Drag the image onto your desktop. Now you are ready to upload the image into your entry.

b. Now, switch back to the entry you have been working on. Put your cursor at the place in your text that you want the image to appear (like where you are discussing Bree). Then click on the button (which is a few after the link button) that looks like an image and is called "insert image." Click on the "new upload image" link and then browse on your desktop for the image of the Bree that you just found on google images. Now that the new image is uploaded, you will be given a bunch of file options. It is up to you how you want the image to look, but here is what I usually do. I click on "display image in entry," "use thumbnail (manually adding in a width of 150 pixels)" and "Link image to full-size version in a popup window." In terms of alignment--left, right, or center--pick whichever works best for you.

13. Youtube clips: Now that you have started adding things, you can't stop. Links and images aren't enough. You want to embed cool youtube clips in your entry. Here's how:

a. First, find the youtube clip that you want. Open up another tab and go to youtube. I put in "Susan Stryker" as a keyword search and found these really cool book reviews for Trans/Queer related texts by the scholar, Reese Kelly.

I haven't had a chance to watch them yet, but maybe they could serve as a good model for an entry for our blog?

Now, you need to embed the clip. To do this, you need to find the embed box (located on the right hand side in the gray box under the URL), highlight the embed text and copy it.

Note: For a fancier version of the youtube clip you can now customize your embed clips. At the end of the embed box you will find a blue gear image. When you scroll over it it should say "customize." Click on it. Now you can pick a color scheme for the border of your clip (I recommend green to match our site) and a size (I would say 500 X 405). Now copy the embed text and follow the next step.

b. Now go back to your entry and put your cursor on the place that you want to insert the youtube clip. Before pasting it in, make sure that you have changed the format (located above the insert image button) to none (away from rich text or covert line breaks). The embed text will not work in rich text; it will just show up like a bunch of code. Once you have switched the format to none, paste in the embed text. You are done and ready to save!

Why Blog?

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 21:57:55 +0000

Welcome. This is the blog for GWSS 4403/GLBT 4403. Hopefully it will play a central role in our discussion of and engagement with the material. While only class members (the professor and the students enrolled in the course) can post new entries, the blog will be open to the larger public (for reading and commenting).

Having used blogs in my courses for over three years now (11 blogs total), I am slowing discovering how valuable they can be for:

Developing community between students
Enabling students to engage with the material and each other in different ways
Encouraging students to really think about and process the ideas
Helping all of us to organize our thoughts and ideas
Providing a central location for posting information and handouts
Allowing for a space outside of the classroom for engaging with the readings and each other

But blogs aren't just useful for creating connections between students (or teacher and students or students and other communities). I spent the summer writing in my own blog, Trouble, and I discovered that blog writing can make you (the writer) a better writer and thinker. This is especially true if you write in your blog on a regular basis. I wrote every couple of days this summer and I found that by the end of August my critical thinking skills were in much better shape then when I started in May. I also found that my understanding of my chosen term--trouble--had grown deeper and richer over the summer as I creatively explored different ways in which to engage with it.

Writing in a blog alleviated a lot of my anxiety about "serious" writing; somehow posting an entry didn't seem as intimidating as writing a formal manuscript. Writing in a blog also encouraged me to make new connections between ideas in unexpected ways. I found myself applying theoretical/political concepts like Michel Foucault's notion of curiosity or Judith Butler's notion of gender trouble to children's movies (Horton Hears a Who) and television shows (Hannah Montana). Not only did this experience allow me to reflect on these concepts but it also helped me to really understand them as I worked to translate them into more accessible language. For more on how/why I wrote in my blog, check out my about pages here and here.

It is my hope that the experience of writing in our course blog will enable you to develop your critical thinking skills and enhance your understanding of queer and queering theory. It is also my hope that writing in our blog will inspire you to keep writing and thinking and questioning and connecting.

Course Books

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 18:28:36 +0000

The following books are required for our course this semester. They are available at the U of M Bookstore in Coffman. In addition to these books, course readings will be available through our WebCT site. Occasionally, readings will be available on this blog (scroll down and look under "readings" on the right hand side).

Judith Butler's Gender Trouble. While we won't be reading all of this book, it will serve as a key starting point for many of our conversations about queering theory, Butler and important queering terms. Originally written in 1990, this book is considered by many to be a "founding" text for queer studies. Her notion of gender as performance, her reflection on drag as a practice of parody, and her critical engagement with feminism/feminist theory of the 1990s are all dealt with in this groundbreaking work.

Judith Butler's Undoing Gender. Written in 2004, this collection of essays serves as a continuation of some of the key issues concerning gender and sexuality that Butler first raised in Gender Trouble. Here is her description: "The essays included here represent some of my most recent work on gender and sexuality focusing on the question of what it might mean to undo restrictively normative conceptions of sexual and gendered life" (1). In these essays, Butler links her work with "new gender politics," which she describes as: "a combination of movements concerned with transgender, transsexuality, intersex, and their complex relations to feminist and queer theory" (4).

.

Mattilda's Nobody Passes. The subtitle of this book is "Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity." It is an edited collection that brings together a wide range of authors who all reflect, in very different ways, on their experiences of assimilation and not passing. In their introduction, Mattilda discusses the experience of creating such an anthology and the resistance they received from their editors because they refused to focus their book exclusively on gender and sexuality.

Note:The U just upgraded the blog system (to Movable Type 4) this summer and I am still becoming familiar with its new features. This has been my first attempt at uploading images.

Syllabus

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 17:55:28 +0000

Welcome to the blog for GWSS 4403/GLBT 4403. Here is the syllabus for class. And here is a brief description of the course:

In this upper level seminar we will use the work of Judith Butler as our focal point for tracing multiple practices of queering theory and mapping the shifting terrain of the term "queer" and its role within critical sexuality studies. After beginning with the investigation of some preliminary questions--What is queering theory? and Who is Judith Butler?--we will spend the rest of the course engaging in practices of queering through, beside and against Butler. Drawing upon readings by Butler and putting them into conversation with a wide range of important queer thinkers (Foucault, Halberstam, Sedgwick, Moraga, Edelman, Gopinath, Munoz, Anzaldua and more), we will explore some terms/concepts that are central to understanding and engaging in queering theory: 1. Gender, 2. Performativity, 3. the Abject, 4. Resistance, 5. Trouble (being in it, making it and staying in it), 6. Norms and 7. Queer Time.

Some questions that will come up this semester include:

Is queer theory a matter of doing or being? Can it be both?
How does Butler engage in queering theory?
Is Butler a "bad writer" or a difficult writer?
What (if anything) is important about distinguishing between bad and difficult writing?
How has Butler's understanding and promotion of queer(ing) theory changed since the writing of Gender Trouble in 1990?
What does it mean to trouble gender? Who can trouble gender? When is troubling gender subverting dominant norms and when is it merely reinforcing those norms?
What are the political and ethical possibilities of queering theory?
What can queer theory do with norms (besides rejecting them)?
Does queering theory have a future? If so, what kind?