disorientation is important. and this time, it’s about how disoriented i feel every day in my own home. It’s about physical space this time. I learned when putting the floor in my mom’s trailer that a trailer is never completely square. the construction is quite shotty, so when a trailer is hitched to a truck and moved, it loses its squareness. Mind you, it was square when it was built and warehoused. Everything about a trailer’s construction feels and looks unstable, unfinished, and temporary. (more…)
July 29, 2008
a place to start?
so, I keep looking at this old handout, something derived from The Meaning of Difference by Rosenblum and Travis. They lay out stages of identity development for both people in privileged statuses and people in stigmatized statuses. and I keep wondering where the hybrid of these two are – how it is that some LGBT people end up being a part of the mainstream in some way, even if not completely, while others are completely locked out. and how their identities differ because they are at least partly a part of the broader society… a place I’ve never been. And then while I’m reading Queer Phenomenology, I also think about Ahmed’s descriptions of the “straight” line being a family inheritance – heterosexuality as a family inheritance/expectation rather than an essential orientation, “straight” as a family/society-produced line people take. Then assimilationism and liberationism become lines, as well, and which families push their children toward one line over the other? and which people choose these different lines? and who has the resources to choose their lines and who doesn’t have the option?
issues of membership
So I must also deal with issues of membership – what makes it okay for me to belong. Forgive me for another spew-rant, but I need these right now, and I think they’re entertaining. One day, they’ll be called poetry… but not today. today, they’re just words in random order. More after the jump:
what makes me southern?
So, I’m editing Trailer Park Queer, that piece I posted earlier, and turning it into something longer with actual, you know, academic citations and stuff. But first, I needed to figure out what exactly makes my experience of TPQ southern. So, I did what I always do: I spewed what I was thinking/feeling/thinking-feeling/feeling-thinking onto paper in semi-words. It’s after the jump.
