karaj

(fromfromfrom)

“now i think the point may be to trail behind actually existing social possibilities: to be interested in the tail end of things, willing to be bathed in the fading light of whatever has been declared useless. for while queer antiformalism appeals to me on an intellectual level, i find myself emotionally compelled by the not-quite-queer-enough longing for form that turns us backward to prior moments, forward to embarrassing utopias, sideways to forms of being and belonging that seem, on the face of it, completely banal.”—elizabeth freeman, time binds: queer temporalities, queer histories

everything from the “not-quite-queer-enough” to the “prior” to the “embarrassing” to, most importantly, the “sideways” and next to and lateral and almost, which is what i spent last semester writing about.

relevant. (though most everything here is relevant.) 

“methodologically, their work involves something that might at first glance look rather rearguard or recalcitrant: close readings of the past for the odd detail, the unintelligible or resistant moment. reading closely means fixating on that which resists any easy translation into present-tense terms, any ‘progressive’ program for the turning of art into a cultural/historical magic bullet or toxin. to close read is to linger, to dally, to take pleasure in tarrying, and to hold out that these activities can allow us to look both hard and askance at the norm. but in the works i have gathered here, close reading is a way into history, not a way out of it, and itself a form of historiography and historical analysis. these artists see any sign as an amalgam of the incommensurate: of dominant uses in the present, of obsolete meanings sensible only as a kind of radiation from the past, of new potential, and, more simply, of different points in time as meanings accrue and shed…what id like to identify as perhaps the queerest commitment of my own book is also close reading: the decision to unfold, slowly, a small number of imaginative texts rather than amass a weighty archive of or around texts, and to treat these texts and their formal work as theories of their own, interventions upon both critical theory and historiography…my texts are…minor visual works by minor artists in a minor key…”

—elizabeth freeman in time binds: queer temporalities, queer histories, on her “commitment to overcloseness.” like lauren berlants intellectual loitering. (she doesnt call it that, but i once did.) between the two of them they outline not just my basic intellectual method, but my basic life method.  

The Performance Studies Lecture Series Presents:

Lauren Berlant, Structures of Unfeeling: Mysterious Skin

**THIS TALK IS OPEN TO PS STUDENTS ONLY**

Usually when we talk about emotions they appear to us in the mode of melodrama, with its inflated states of bodily performance. In contrast, Raymond Williams’ model of the structure of feeling places the historical and the affective present not in performance but in affective residues that constitute what’s shared among strangers beneath the surface of explicit life, saturating atmospheres of the unsaid, open secrets, inside knowledge, and shared enigmas. 

Structures of Unfeeling: Mysterious Skin reads with Heim’s and Araki’s work to think about a cultural style of underperformed emotion that’s post-melodramatic. It looks at contexts such as 20th century avant-gardes, trauma publics, punk/goth negativity, LGBT and working class sexual cultural styles, comic deadpan, and other modes in which affective activity appears as inexpressive form, providing a holding space of delayed response to the urgencies of the moment.

OMG. i cannot wait for this. #feministboredom etc. 

autostraddle:

see up there where you said “how do you make people”
i feel like that’s where you should sit for a second and think
about how you can’t make people do things they’re not ready to do.
i could tell you that opening up to that person and proving over time that you’re a safe place for them to drop off some feelings would help nudge them in that direction, but really, that only works if they’re looking for a place that’s safe. some people just aren’t.
and really, i don’t know where my feelings would end and hers would begin, as far as what’s valid to request or expect or feel. so i think it’s hard to know when you can ask someone to grow or change or try something. i don’t know.

Ask Laneia something brand new

i think laneia gives the best counsel, even or especially when she admits she doesnt know the answer. 

whateverjeanne:

Figuring out which things I’m #girlsuccessful at is much easier with a friend. I might just start posting my chat history with Kara. It’s an archive of hotness cr and critical boredom. So far I can report that we are winning at emotional overeating (9 thin mints, after 1.5 dinners) and over sharing on the internet (i.e. deconstructing the public-private dichotomy and its related binaries of nature-culture, man-woman). Also winning at feminism. That’s the main win. 

sadly, i am not emotional overeating, mostly because there is nothing to eat in this apartment except for yogurt. but i super-approve of emotional overeating, because there is no quality i find more despicable than miserliness and i generally approve of pleasurable abandon, interrogating cartesian dualism, and not being entirely rational. 

as for the feminist impulse behind a lack of boundaries: buying it (with some caveats). also, just, why not. 

(also: love you and our chat history, jeanne.)