A New TPQ Hairstyle

Ok, so this is the first official pic of TPQ to be posted here… but I had my hair did today – and it went from PINK to purple (partly on accident, because we made it a blue-black base)… then marc cut it in a fantastic way and styled it hallelujah-like…! He likes to make big hair sometimes… Anyway, these are the first official TPQ pics on the blog… now y’all know what my crazy-ass looks like… but not until after the jump.

I’m too young for back pain…

I keep thinking this since after cleaning and cooking all day (and not being nearly finished yet), my back hurts. Not real bad pain, just a dull ache every time I move. Starts in my lower back and just sits there. Yep. I’m 26. I’m way too young for back pain.

But the more I think about it, we’re never really too young for these things… we’re never really TOO young for anything. And then I start thinking about age-of-consent laws and how we’re obsessed with age in this country – and with de-sexualizing our children.

And re-reading these two paragraphs, I realize that my brain twists around in ways it probably shouldn’t.

But, my point is not that children shouldn’t be children. It is simply that age-of-consent laws are arbitrary. Someone somewhere (some straight, rich, old white dude) decided to draw a line somewhere. It’s like needing to be 16 to drive a car or 21 to drink alcohol – nothing about midnight on your 16th birthday clicks so that you suddenly know how to drive. And nothing in your body clicks at midnight on your 21st birthday so that you suddenly know how to drink responsibly. They should license drivers when they’re ready, not when they’re a particular age, and they should license people to drink – after much testing and the forcing of knowledge about what happens when you drink. But then again – that’s no fun. I haven’t had a drink in six months and i really want a beer. But no on these meds.

November 25th is a good day… for queers to become lesbians

So, I’m deciding I like November 25th. Today is two months since Lin’s 43rd birthday – she’s now 518 months old. I hope she doesn’t read this, because it won’t excite her. But it also means that she’s only 4 months from her half-birthday, which is one of those silly things we celebrated in undergrad because none of my friend group actually spent time together over the summer. We all went home and worked or played all summer, some of us traveled, others slept, but we didn’t really spend time together. So, those of us who had summer birthdays celebrated the halfsies because the halfsies fell during the school year. That way none of us felt like the kid who didn’t have cupcakes during the school year. Since I was born in July, I enjoyed the half birthday.

[semi] daily academia 11252008

Question of the day: How long did it take for someone to write the word “homonormativity”?

1995: “In a society whose institutions embody a presumption of heteronormativity and homo deviance, arguing that we are just like everyone else convinces no one. Further, the argument may not be true: we are just like heteros in the fact of our humanity, but I believe we differ markedly in our view of sexuality, gender, power, and moraity. The values around which we have built gay and lesbian relationships, made family, and formed communities are not identical with the values that we were raised to hold by our hetero parents – nor are they merely the gay and lesbian mirror images of those straight values. They are values that are uniquely our own, arising our of our experience as outsiders, built out of the experiencing of resisting sexual repression.” (Vaid 1995: 46). 

More random things today…

He looks like this

1. My dog (the boy one) has a pink polar shield coat. It looks like the one in the picture, but it’s neon pink…. and I do mean NEON. He, however, looks like the greyhound/boxer mix that he is – yea, he’s kinda queer-looking like his mommy.

It looks like this, but neon pink…

Sometimes we worry he’ll be gender confused… but not really. I don’t think dogs see color, and I don’t think pink is a girl thing – though it is my favorite color. His grandma bought it for him because she couldn’t find another color and she figured I would like it in pink – the wife’s mom, not mine.

2. My lil bro was here. He came with this other guy who stayed overnight. It was the straight brother, not the gay trucker one. the guy who came with him is a witness, jehovah’s, as in. They asked where straight bars were in town and we pointed them to one. They ended up there, and three other places – two of which were gay bars. I find this amusing since they both know what rainbow awnings mean.

11202008 [semi] daily academia

“In the case of gay marriage, the push for state-sanctioned kinship reconsolidates the exclusionary practices of the institution of marriage. This move recodes “good” forms of national kinship (monogamous, consumptive, privatized) while punishing those that fall outside of them, particularly those forms of racialized and classed kinship that continue to be the target of state violence and pathology.” (Agathangelou et al. 2008: 122).

Not much to say here, actually, so why not just a few quotations to think about today?

“By implication, we learn that disorientation is unevenly distributed: some bodies more than others have their involvement in the world called into crisis. This shows us how the world itself is more “involved” in some bodies than in others, as it takes such bodies as hte contours of ordinary experience. It is not just that bodies are directed in specific ways, but that the world is shaped by the directions taken by some bodies more than others.” (Ahmed 2006: 159). think about being fat here.

then check out femme {fat}ale…

On the subject of boycotts

My only real boycott.

BOYCOTT: A boycott is a form of consumer activism involving the act of voluntarily abstaining from using, buying, or dealing with someone or some other organization as an expression of protest, usually of political reasons. (according to the wiki).

A proposition from me: You must inform the target of your boycott that you are, indeed, engaging in some sort of consumer activism and inform them of your reasons and your goals – so that they understand that they are the target of a boycott. I may be wrong about this, but I think I’m pretty right, actually.

So, I had to define a boycott before I could really get to the heart of this matter – and let you all know what I think a boycott is, of course. A boycott, to me, is when you withhold money from a company until it meets your demands. Or, at least to show that you disagree with its politics or dissent from its opinion and majority opinion about that corporation/company/etc.

Random things from my day…

1. Quote of the day at the top of my gmail inbox: Henri Frederic Amiel – “Order is power.”

2. I switched committee chairs a few weeks, maybe months ago.

3. Old committee chair dropped out of my committee today. He thinks I’m boycotting his class.

4. I have more power than I think sometimes.

5. There are more important things in life than school and work – like socks with grippies on the bottom and play time with my doggies.

11192008 [semi]daily academia

“Queer theory recognizes the impossibility of moving outside current conceptions of sexuality. We cannot assert ourselves to be entirely outside heterosexuality, nor entirely inside, because each of these terms achieves its meaning in relation to the other.” (Namaste 1996: 199).

Well, there it is. We are who we are because of them. The good part? They are who they are because of us. This is the problem with dichotomous identity categories – especially where it comes to sex, gender, and sexual identity. If you’re not one of us, you’re one of them. It’s instant othering – just like a game of patty-cake – roll it up, roll it up, put it in the pan! Voila! Instant marginalized v. dominant identity categories. Would you buy it if someone offered it to you?

It’s like the way we categorize people by race – society as a whole doesn’t see a full color spectrum – it sees white and not white – two opposites, one side dominant and the other side submissive. It’s like white folks are the older brother and everyone else plays the role of little brother. Whatever the big brother does to the little brother is fine, but he’ll be damned if someone else is going to mess with his little brother.

Theoretical gem of the day: Race relations in the United States are like two-brother households with no parents.

[semi] daily academia

A new tradition on TPQ – I pick a random quotation from some random theorists/academic and twist it here to fit my own purposes – after all, that’s the academic experiment, right?

So, today on TPQ: “The ‘passing’ imperative, which begins from the moment a SRS-seeker enters a medical office and is sized up by a professional who will decide hir ‘realness’ and seriousness at least in part based on the success of the presentation of a gender norm, is an essential regulating aspect of the process of ‘transsexual’ (and ‘non-transsexual’) production.” (Spade 2006: 323). [a sidenote: check the queer as read page for the details of the reference - I'm too lazy to  put it here for you - plus, that'd be too easy].

How shall I twist this one? My procedure for choosing it was that I opened a box of notecards that are joyously not sorted yet for the penning of the thesis, and blindly chose one. Actually, not blindly… I kind of ignored two or three before picking up this one. But you wouldn’t have liked the others – they were quite boring. So, perhaps I should twist this piece to explain something completely non-trans-related?