Random Quick Notes

[rax]

• On the whole LJ autopost to Facebook and Twitter thing --- yeah I agree that the being able to crosspost content out from under a friendslock is lame, but I think it could be useful. As much as a lot of my core social group uses LJ (or Dreamwidth, but I think I have all of four friends with DW presence and no parallel LJ presence), there are a good number of people important to me --- including almost everyone in Bloomington --- who don't use the service at all. They use Facebook (which I hate), and Twitter (if I'm lucky). If I can find a way to get crossposts to Facebook and Twitter working that encourage commenting on LJ and not on Facebook, that would be really useful for me, and maybe my family wouldn't think I hate them all just because I don't comment on their Facebook posts.
• The transomatechnics class is encouraging me to "be creative in my mode of writing" and attempt things that bring in first-person narrative. ...should I take a stab at postfurry theory? I'm so tempted. It has nothing to do with where I see my dissertation going... OK that's a lie. The construction of authenticity of identities that didn't even exist fifty years ago [0] totally has something to do with one direction my dissertation could go. But, urgh. I have other stuff I want to write too. We will see! I should do more readings before I decide, probably.
• I think I finally grok abjection as described by Julia Kristeva --- I read her essay, and went whaaaaaaat, and then read it again, and then tried to explain it to people to see if I understood it, and then read a couple of summaries online (this one was my favorite) and I feel ready to dive in, and at least confident that I know what things I don't know about it. (Why are we reading this before Deleuze?) The David Wills Prosthesis piece I still don't really get; I talked it over some with chagrined  and I have a bit of a better sense, but I am still really looking forward to talking about it in class because ummm help. I'm also gonna read it one more time after I leave this coffeeshop (it's too loud to really get reading done in here right now) in the hope that having kicked around in my brain for a week will make it make more sense the third time. Here's hoping...
• Oh my god this is adorable.
• If I spewed notes on the papers and books I was reading into this journal, would you find that awesome, annoying, or other? It would be a lot of notes, and I can't promise my thoughts will be terribly baked. The alternative is making another journal just for notes on readings --- I want to archive them somewhere, and I'd like to have the option of making them public.
• My Pokédex is at 350 as of last night, when I played for a half hour to reward myself for finishing a book. (The book was Meatless Days, which is sadly not about veganism but is still an awesome memoir.)
• I deleted the word "actually" from this post four times. I might have missed one. I need to fix this tic.

[0] There were people with animal/animalistic identities five years ago and probably five thousand; I'm not familiar with people identifying as animalized constructions of inorganic material before I met Nick, Rik, and Peggy the last twenty years or so. If anyone has cites for earlier examples PLEASE SEND ME THEM. <3

Comments

[hebinekohime]

If I spewed notes on the papers and books I was reading into this journal, would you find that awesome, annoying, or other?

Go for it! Coherence is overrated.

[talia_et_alia]

I would appreciate hearing notes on stuff your reading in this journal, half-baked or otherwise. I am not laden with enough free time that I could follow along with your class readings (and if I did, I would pick classes closer to home first), but many of the topics sound interesting on a personal level, if not an academic one.

[chagrined]

I WOULD BE IN FAVOR OF NOTES, PREDICTABLY.

[rax]

Any chance I can cajole you into doing the same thing? ;)

[chagrined]

Heh, not in my DW (I don't think my readers would be into that kind of thing), but I will email them to you if you'd like!

[phi]

I would enjoy the fact that I could read your class notes if I wanted to, and probably only actually read less than a tenth of them, but still feel edified by the experience.

[damerell]

Won't LJ/DW posts in Twitter's 140-character limit be just as useless as Twitter posts on LJ?

[rax]

I would hope and assume that they would be links to LJ posts, rather than "the first 140 characters of the LJ post." I sometimes tweet when I post something already, so that the friends of mine who use twitter but not LJ can click the link if they decide the topic is interesting. Of course, LJ ruins everything, so that might not be how it happens. If I have free time I should test this all with dummy accounts and see what all actually happens; I probably won't, though. ;)

[marcmagus]

People elsewhere have reported that it's something like the first 100-ish characters plus a link. Possibly the title too. I haven't tested myself, but it's sounding like it's something like reserve space at the end for a link, put as much of the title as you can fit in, then as much of the text as you can fit, if any.

[weirdquark]

If I spewed notes on the papers and books I was reading into this journal, would you find that awesome, annoying, or other? It would be a lot of notes, and I can't promise my thoughts will be terribly baked. The alternative is making another journal just for notes on readings --- I want to archive them somewhere, and I'd like to have the option of making them public.

I feel that if you put your notes behind a cut-tag, those who do not want to read your notes will not find them annoying even if they're public.

[kelkyag]

I would be interested in notes on your readings. Would you object to underinformed questions and/or requests for context?

What is an "animalized construction of inorganic material"? Is that "I am a cyborg / mechanical fox / clockwork device"?

[rax.livejournal.com]

No objections to questions, and I'll even answer them if I have time. ;)

Yeah, that's what I'm getting at.

[cshiley.livejournal.com]

You want "people identifying as this" where "identify" is a loaded word? As distinct from "examples of this in fiction/etc"?

Have you sorted out how to tell if someone has such an identity before people understood identities the way we do now? (ie: people have been having gay sex forever, but "gay" is a new concept) I bet there's something like it in the late 19th century; there certainly was enough angst about mechanisms and so on.

[rax.livejournal.com]

No, that's a good point. Examples in fiction would be a starting point!

[gaudior.livejournal.com]

Definitely post notes! As weirdquark points out, a cut-tag may be useful, or people can always just scroll. But please do put them up!

<3

[eredien]

I would like to read things behind a cuttag.

Did I meet chagrined in Indiana?

If I can find a way to get crossposts to Facebook and Twitter working that encourage commenting on LJ and not on Facebook, that would be really useful for me, and maybe my family wouldn't think I hate them all just because I don't comment on their Facebook posts.

I am actually really excited about my ability to tweet all of my public journal entries, and I am fine with people posting their comments on my public entries to wherever--since those entries are already public, anyway. It's just that I don't want people who aren't me putting my non-publically-accessible material in a place where it's publically-accessible--otherwise what's the point of Friends-lock?

[rax.livejournal.com]

Did I meet chagrined in Indiana?

No, they're a student in my program.

[ab3nd.livejournal.com]

This is a technical issue I'm running into because I want facebook in an RSS feed and google feed reader can't deal with password protected feeds. That leaves me the option of having my facebook screen scraper post all my friends' posts, locked or not, to a public RSS feed, which is really not the play.

I considered doing the same thing to LJ, but had the exact same problem. I may have to roll my own online feed reader because three major corporations can't get simple stuff right.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Would so read those notes.

[sovay]

If I spewed notes on the papers and books I was reading into this journal, would you find that awesome, annoying, or other?

Definitely not annoying.

[ab3nd.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that would be pretty metal. I can't guarantee I'd read all of it, or grok it, but more data is more better.

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Absolutely not annoying.

Nine

[rainfae.livejournal.com]

I really enjoy your notes on literature. I don't read as much as I'd like to, so your notes have value for me.

[postrodent.livejournal.com]

I'll totally read those notes. And comment, if my own thoughts are sufficiently baked (hurr hurr).

[coffeekitty.livejournal.com]

if I spewed notes on the papers and books I was reading into this journal, would you find that awesome, annoying, or other?

i would find it to be beyond awesome, and am almost viscerally hoping that you do it, because it would be a window into an entire fascinating-looking intellectual world into which i have no other point of entry. it would mean so much more to me to read the notes in the context of the rest of your life, because i can't see intellectual development as tidily separated from life experience, at all.

the first big intellectual hurdle i perceive for me here, is how you can have theory at all in disciplines primarily centered around reading texts. i'm a scientist, and to me a "theory" is a model that generates hypotheses, which make predictions that can then be tested by doing an experiment, or running a simulation. theories that can't ultimately generate a testable hypothesis are nonsensical in the context of my field of study. but the nature of the evidence that you use in your discipline is not ultimately experimental data, and so then, in gender studies, or related disciplines, what is meant by the word "theory"?

[rax.livejournal.com]

Well, the theories in queer/gender theory are sort of tested by holding them up against texts and lived experience, but I think the word "theory" more means "as distinct from practice," that is, thought rather than action. The two inform each other --- certainly Marxist theory affects how various people have tried to structure their and others' lives, and the effectiveness of various activism has affected where people take their theory. If I wanted to be snarky I would say that in the gender studies context you could replace the word "theory" with the word "wanking" and it would work. :) I suspect some would say that we're "queering" your concept of theory by separating it out from testable hypotheses but I'm not sure that's a useful thing to say even if it's true.

[goddess32585.livejournal.com]

I might also suggest parsing 'theory' as 'model' or 'analytical framework'. (Or, you can say that the 'hypothesis' being generated by 'theory' is some statement or system of 'how to act' as a person in the place-time of interest.)

[rax.livejournal.com]

I really like "analytical framework" as a substitution, thank you.

[coffeekitty.livejournal.com]

the encouragement of first person narrative also fascinates me, again by contrast; in the reviewer comments to my first submitted paper, two of the reviewers objected to the (tiny) amount of first person narrative that i had injected to make the structure of the logic more clear. so i removed it. and in fact, i have chosen my field of study partially because it gets me away from thinking about myself. i'm even carefully staying away from neuroscience, because i would drive myself batshit crazy thinking about my life in context of what the neurons in my own head are up to.

[rax.livejournal.com]

I haven't been able to avoid thinking about myself no matter what I'm doing. So I figured I might as well go somewhere where I might be able to make that thinking about myself productive. :) I think often the sciences go too far in trying to strip the self out, to the point of being less clear or losing something about why people do what they do. In the past, some parts of feminism in particular have, I think, privileged individual experience regardless of what that experience said or suggested for anyone else, and that's a problem too. One of the things I hope we get at more in this class is how to do first-person work that's useful outside of the autobiographical. We read one paper, "The Homeland, Aztlán" by Anzaldua, that I found an excellent example. She tells her own story while also telling a historical story while also working with a bunch of theoretical ideas about borders and boundaries.

I guess... there's a lot of pressure from the outside world to understand what's going on in my head, since I'm marked as crazy/perverse in a bunch of ways whether I like it or not. So one of my responses to that is to say "OK, good question! I'll go find out."

[coffeekitty.livejournal.com]

I think often the sciences go too far in trying to strip the self out, to the point of being less clear or losing something about why people do what they do

i agree very strongly with this. one of the concepts that i think is most important for my students to understand is that while the scientific method is "objective" in that, at least in principle, two different people doing the exact same experiment in different places at different times should get the same result, science is anything but objective in terms of our value judgments about what scientific questions are important to pursue, and how to interpret the data in a larger context. The class I teach (intro biology lab) actually does an excellent job with trying to teach this in the context of the biology of sex and gender - we have a lab where we take the class through a (composited) case study of a woman athlete whose participation in a sporting event has been suspended pending an investigation of her biological gender. We go through the history of gender testing policies in sports and techniques in the 20th century, and then present the class with a series of physical exam and molecular lab test results for the athlete. The physical exam ends up showing that the athlete has primary and secondary sexual characteristics that most people would classify as "female" , but has musculature more typical of a male human. the lab tests reveal that the athlete has two X chromosomes, but a piece of a Y chromosome has been inserted into one of the X chromosomes. We ask the students to consider the data, and then have them imagine that they have been called in by an athletics governing body as an expert scientist to explain to the governing body what these results mean, and make a recommendation as to whether or not the athlete should be cleared to participate in women's athletic events.
it's fun to see the students' brains melt down when they realize that the science can't tell them what they should recommend, and then very gratifying to see them beginning to understand that a lab test can't tell you who you are. I generally get very cogent recommendations that are a mix of "yes," "no," and "given the nature of the athletic event (which they have information about), these further tests should be carried out."

i think that i am going to love seeing how the perspectives from your field and mine interact with each other. thank you so much again for being willing to share all this.

[identityfail.livejournal.com]

creepin'. it happens. was good meeting you yesterday! this is simon.

shiiiit, transomatechnics? is that with stryker, i assume? i read an article cowritten by her that was sorta about that stuff and it was super cool. i'm going to write a senior thesis with her but i don't really know what about yet, lol. was mostly just like, "HI YOU ARE AWESOME/BADASS BE MY ADVISOR" and she was like, um, kay, let me say some really smart things and recommend things to read. and i was like, cool. so we'll see where that goes i guess. hopefully good places.

anyway hi. and what does "postfurry" mean?

[rax.livejournal.com]

Hi! Stryker is also my advisor, for not entirely unrelated reasons. ;)

Hahahahaha postfurry! Oh, fiddlesticks, the explanation I usually link to is down. There's a couple of things going on when I say postfurry, one meaning a very specific group of three people, the other being a more general assortment of folks who like to mix animal/technological identities rather than (at surface level) animal/human. I think of postfurry as interrogating the boundaries of self and performance through taking on mutable/bizarre personae in performative spaces. Also, in general, hella kinked. I guess I identify as postfurry these days? I dunno. Identity is hard.

And hi! Mind if I friend you?

[identityfail.livejournal.com]

Hm, okay. And yeah, identities, man. Soooo hard to navigate. Hate.

And friend away, I guess! Usually I keep internet and IRL worlds discrete (the exception being facebook), but I'm the one who just consciously broke that barrier when commenting here in the first place so whatever. Although fair warning, I'm not that interesting and I use lj mostly to just be like "RAWR GENDER I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHO AM I ANGST ANGST ANGST" than anything...

[rax.livejournal.com]

I tend to use my real name ~everywhere (with a few things kept out that I specifically want to segregate from my coworkers and family) so it doesn't bother me if it doesn't bother you. :) I would say I'm not that interesting, I mostly just talk about gender, except maybe that is interesting for you!

[identityfail.livejournal.com]

Ha yeah. Well that's cool. I guess for me there's a set of increasing-in-size concentric circles, like "things my family knows about me" then around that "things most of my IRL friends know about me" and then around that "things the internet knows about me." Which is kind of funny because I think people a generation ago, and even a lot of people now, would rather have those things overlap in the reverse order? Maybe.