More than anything, marking my students’ papers on queer issues makes me think we have really turned a corner, societally, on GLBT* rights. For them, it’s mundane, it’s status quo. My undergrad students these days had same sex marriage laws in Canada since they were about 11 or 12; they have had sitcoms with queer [...]
Category Archive — Posts
The Art of the Paragraph
Most students don’t get paragraphing. They are stuck within the faulty and damaging logic of the 5 Paragraph Essay. They can’t think beyond the structure of: Intro Second Strongest Argument Weakest Argument Strongest Argument Conclusion … with a paragraph to each one. If you set them a 10-page essay, they will deliver five 2-page paragraphs; [...]
Referral: Lauren Berlant on Politics, Writing and Checking-In
This morning’s inspiring reading comes from Lauren Berlant’s excellent blog Supervalent Thought. She’s writing about writing, politics, exhaustion and the process of checking-in, of consultation, of that thing-we-do-to-keep-ourselves-sane when the overwhelming grind of structural oppression just keeps dredging up more and more material evidence of how much work there still is to do and we [...]
Referral: Policing the Intimate Space of Nations
http://rabble.ca/news/2013/04/sexism-border-personal-account This morning’s referral is a truly terrifying personal account by writer Clay Nikiforuk on her treatment by American border security agents due to being a woman carrying condoms. The telling conflation in this piece of open non-monogamy, adultery and sex work and the clearly misogynist attitudes and practices that conflate border security with ideological [...]
The Surfacing of Sexual Subcultures
Pop culture is semiotically self-reflexive. Something making it into the mainstream visible recirculates due to that very visibility. It’s public sphere presence surfaces it and then—as surface culture—it continues to circulate. Either because writers draw from what is already out there, or because editors trim what might not be commonly known, the store of common [...]
Alchemy
Marking is alchemy not chemistry.
Possible Books
Sometimes writing a book is like staring into the abyss and trying to yank out threads of possibility. Possible words. Possible sentences.
Referral: Anti-racist Dos and Don’ts for Perverts
Excellent post by m’colleague Andrea Zanin over at her blog Sex Geek about how to avoid/confront racist play and scenes in BDSM subculture.
Liberalism and Privilege
The problem with the standard liberal line of argument on reformation’s preferability to revolution is its advocates’ failure to understand, or accept, or admit that social justice is not equally attractive for all parties specifically because some have much invested in continued relationships of unequal, unearned privilege, holding the world back from change.
Referral: What We Use to Write
Excellent ponder on Jonathan Sterne’s blog about what we, as academics or other writers, use to write with when the proliferation of new digital tools and systems (such as project management software, cloud storage, appware) is tempting us in new workflow directions. Writing: Tools of the Trade I’ve been thinking about this a lot as [...]
