October 2011
9 posts
2 tags
Gay Responsibility and Shame
Deborah Gould’s discussion of the gay responsibility in her book Moving Politics: Emotion and Act Up’s Fight Against AIDS brought to mind for me, perhaps in an incorrect reading of the text, a particular character relationship and theme in Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer-Pize winning play Angels in America.
I question the validity of the connection I have made because I feel as though...
Presumptive Homosexuality
This passage from Michael Warner’s Publics and Counterpublics immediately brought to mind a particular experience of mine:
Within a gay or queer counterpublic…no one is in the closet: the presumptive heterosexuality that constitutes that constitutes the closet for individuals in ordinary speech is suspended. But this circulatory space, freed from heteronormative speech protocols, is...
Alison Bechdel's Dykes To Watch Out For:...
In his book Publics and Counterpublics, Michael Warner explicitly lays out his descriptions of both the public and the counterpublic. On page 118 he cites Nancy Fraser’s principal of subaltern counterpublics as “the late twentieth-century U.S. feminist subaltern counterpublic, with its variegated array of journals, bookstores, publishing companies, film and video distribution...
Ceci n'est pas un livre.
Let me first say that I loved reading Kathleen Stewart’s Ordinary Affects. Her beautiful style and evocative vignettes pulled me away from my thanksgiving festivities in a way I haven’t experienced in a while in reading. Reading Ordinary Affects was a reading experience with many moments of “touching” for me, a phenomenon best described by this line from Alan...
Normal
One of the moments that struck me when reading Max Wolf Valerio’s memoir The Testosterone Files: My Hormonal and Social Transformation from Female to Male was when Valerio described an instance, basically, of ‘passing’ in the Chapter 34: Normal Guy.
He overhears some work colleagues stating that he “is the most normal guy here,” and his internal dialogue jumps to...
