{ split subject }

i. this primary season has been painful (even though so far I've avoided voting, since I'm registered in Michigan). I've been at a loss for how to engage or respond or even articulate the crippling double-binds. so because fandom is my orientation and my native language:

deborah_judge and I (egged on by iamsab) are thrilled to present: majoritython, the women and people of color in politics challenge! we hope that this 'thon, for fanworks featuring fictional characters and real people who rule or govern or hold civil office, will redress in some small way the negativity and divisiveness, sexism and racism currently stirred up around people of color and women in power.

you can read all about Majority Rules here. this is right up the alley of plenty of folks on my flist (you know who you are), and I WANT YOU to participate. even if you aren't able to sign-up, you can contribute by trying your hand at some creative googling and inventing prompts. and by PIMPING, pretty please?! this has the potential to reach a vast number of fandoms, but only if we have help spreading the word (I've got chamalla_dreams, cj_fangrrl, and rpfs covered -- choc_fic or vidding, anyone?).

my condition for myself when committing to running this, time-management wise, was that I wasn't allowed to submit. but then I accidentally listened to a song. yeah, I may very well have signed up to make my 1st vid (though whether I'll actually finish it is another matter altogether). SHUT UP. it's a movie vid (of complete crack). I may very well have it story-boarded and meta-noted in my head. like my 0th vid, it may be something that nobody else is ever able to love a fraction as much as I do.

ii. in other news that's fit to print: I am creeping toward mental, emotional, and spiritual preparedness for the BSG premiere. inspiration has struck about my S4 project: for each episode, I plan to create some document or artifact (in keeping with the archival theme) that inserts the GIRLSLASH GOGGLES into the narrative. please send any ideas or requests by way of thearchive2.

iii. if you're feeling only a small fraction of the love I'm feeling for fandom right now (or, you know, the frustration with livejournal), consider making a small donation to become a member of the Organization for Transformative Works. OTW is building the next great home for fanworks, a not-for-profit archive with an infrastructure that supports and protects our values.

iv. the computer store gave Pythia back, all "your drive passed the hardware test." I figured my troubleshooting skills had gotten rusty. then I got her home and, yup, the hard drive is indeed still broken. so today it's back to the shop (I explained to them about writing zeros, and my poor baby made the crunching/clicking sound on cue). although rather lobotomized without it, I'm in good spirits, all things considered -- poojapooja saved what little sanity I have left by loaning me her old Vaio. and I get a new keyboard/top case out of the whole affair, and possibly Leopard, and the new memory I bought is installed, so in a few more days it will be practically like having a whole new lappy!

while I'm on the subject of technology: what platform would you recommend for an academic who needs to create a multimedia portfolio in a user-friendly fashion? blog architecture is not really flexible enough to create an archive that includes text, films, etc. there must be some social media site that offers CMS-style functionality in a web 2.0 front-end, while being more professionally-oriented than the likes of Vox or Nexo and shinier than ourmedia?

v. the photo meme (again): Ask me to take pictures of any aspect of my life that you're interested in/curious about -- it can be anything from my favourite shirt, to my cell phone [ED: it can't actually be my cell phone, because I use that to take the pictures].

I'm supposed to post about livejournal's current round of erratic account suspensions, in case any of you haven't already heard. short version: after apologizing for the strikethrough07 debacle, LJ went on to suspend several more HP fans for explicit content in what has been termed boldthrough07. LJ seemed at times to claim that the content was illegal under child porn laws (and may also have referenced copyright law), though these claims are questionable on either count. under LJ's TOS, however, they unquestionably do have the right to suspend a user at any time for content they deem inappropriate (legal or not). while there are legitimate objections to the way LJ has handled the situation (as reported by blogs and CNET), sending inconsistent messages to their customers, a lot of the problem may be endemic to the larger legal climate that LJ is stuck with, and we should do what we can to agitate for online civil liberties (on both fronts: obscenity and intellectual property). so I'm not inspired to migrate to an LJ clone, but if fandom_flies does manage to create a fan-run non-profit social network someday, I'll totally join.

I'm also supposed to post about racism, but wow am I uninterested in the wank. I really do want to be an ally on this issue, though, so I'll just thank _plasticity_ and poojapooja for calling me racist on a regular basis. eta: zvi_likes_tv just posted a newbieguide to being an anti-racist fan, and since I'm adding that I'll also add: choc_fic as a name for the characters-of-color comm? SRSLY??

mostly I just want to LOL @ BlogWarBot (via nerd_dog):

( if I acknowledge my privilege, do I get a cookie? )

i. the brain trust Quorum of Five made various advances in human knowledge at the Great Toaster Meetup 2006 (c.f. previous post). we have divined, for example, that the cylon god is a Starbuck/Roslin shipper (obviously, since those two are his chosen ones), and that, from the Jewish perspective, Jesus is totally a Mary Sue.

I become increasingly convinced that fannishness is akin to a sexual orientation, at least in terms of its powerful experience of subcultural community.

ii. I get emails like this from my friends: "I'm trying to find incestuous lesbian fan fiction/slash stuff on Lorelai Gilmore and her daughter Rory (from Gilmore Girls) for a paper I'm writing" -- so who can help?? thenewhope said she might have some leads...

iii. something I love: Sugar Rush -- basically South of Nowhere, but British and thus raunchier and grittier and with better acting, editing, and cinematography, and more black comedy than earnestness. but lacking, I hate to say, the narrative pleasure of an unfolding, angst-ridden OTP, since Sugar is a completely irredeemable bitch who Kim clearly has no hope of a meaningful relationship with. something I H8: automatic-flushing public toilets! I have been brewing a rant about this for so long. I don't know if it's the particular choreography of my bathroom habits or what, but they NEVER flush when I stand up, so I have to do it manually, and then invariably they finally flush again just as I'm leaving. also they tend to flush right when I sit down.

iv. friday's discussion consisted of the following theorywank:

• the Nike slogan "Just Do It" (alternately "I dunk, therefore I am") is the quintessential postmodern reconfiguration of the cogito ("I think, therefore I am"), with its emphasis on identity as performative and its refusal of any unified, interior subjectivity.

• debate about how my rubric for understanding my department, Team Modernism vs. Team Postmodernism, would map onto Ninjas vs. Pirates. I was arguing for Pirates = Modern and Ninjas = Pomo, because Pirates = colonialism, state apparatus, and the quest for material goods while Ninjas = globalization, information (spy practice), and stealth terror (one of my classmates helpfully added that Zombies = Realism). except that this site emphasizes Ninjas as highly trained, mass-produced, state-sponsored conformists who follow orders blindly, and Pirates as highly individualized, modular camp performers who have no moral code and care about "profit and profit only." which suggests that I have them reversed, or more plausibly that the whole Ninjas vs. Pirates nexus is so hopelessly postmodern that it can't be parsed in this way.

clearly grad school has permanently ruined me for polite society.

v. let's all read Roe v. Wade. I read it as research for my story, which is the sort of thing one does when writing fic about the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. but in this day and age it should be part of our basic political literacy, right? I had no idea how particular and provisional it was. there's a more detailed post brewing for cyborganize outlining my discomfort with the discourse of "privacy" -- you can see here how easily "liberty" (the Fourteenth Amendment) is transposed to something subtly different. the fact that the "right to privacy" is a cornerstone of the protection of civil liberties (c.f. Lawrence v. Texas, the decision striking down sodomy laws) doesn't make the route it uses to get there any less troubling to me.

this is a transcription of my notes from today's screening/discussion of Operation Atropos by/with Coco Fusco.

( BDSM, torture, consent )

Mark, bless his heart, asked Coco to comment on TV shows that have recently thematized torture -- Lost and 24, to which I'd emphatically add Battlestar Galactica. how much does this totally relate to BSG and my wingswing story?? [so now I'm departing from my actual transcribed notes] given that the torture scandals are primarily represented through television, it's reasonable to surmise that they aren't so far removed from fictional representations in TV dramas. across all of them, sex/pleasure, power, and violence are intertwined in deeply troubling but constitutive webs. what I found so productive about Coco's piece was the way it embodied that profound ambivalence, and also the ways that, in a mediascape that's saturated with it, the "real" continually recedes beyond layer upon layer of performance and spectacle.

and I also wanted to add that it lays bare the blurred boundaries of BDSM as well: on one hand, in order to gain social acceptance it's crucial to insist on the absolute opposition between consensual and non-consensual powerplay. but on the other hand, I think that part of the value of BDSM is that it provides a space to think/experience critically these ambivalent implications -- people who practice BDSM are perhaps more prepared than others to recognize that consent is complex and that military is also a fetish.

I can't believe this hasn't shown up on LJ, yo: The O'Reilly Factor snuck a reporter into Brown's queer SexPowerGod dance so that they could pontificate about the OMG GAY DEBAUCHERY.

here's a direct link to the video (let me know if you can figure out how to download it) // BDH response 1 // BDH response 2 // isgillhere_blog's letter

beyond the inaccuracies in the report and its generally obnoxious tone, the biggest problem is that they showed extensive footage of nearly-naked students without blocking out their faces. extremely disrespectful, and probably unethical.

that said, all the blame doesn't lie with O'Reilly. SexPowerGod is indubitably problematic. we used to throw a similar party at Swarthmore, and every semester there was much debate and frustration over the fact that it was more of a licensed outlet for a sort of carnivalesque homophobia than a safe and exciting party for queers. when the QA's most visible event is known as a place for straight people to get naked and fucked up (probably in the opposite order), it's not just FOX sending the message that what the gay community is all about is uninhibited sex. now, I'm not blaming the QA and the party organizers: I've been in their position, and I know how hard it is to struggle with that dynamic. this is the QA's fundraiser, so obviously it has to appeal to the mainstream of the campus. and the individual behavior of the party's attendees is also not under their control (a record number of students were treated for alcohol poisoning -- and no alcohol was served at the party). but the pattern is troubling. I remember what it felt like to ask myself: why are *we* doing all this work to plan an event for *them* to have fun? but then we really tried, you know, creatively. we moved it out of the big hall to a building with a number of smaller, more intimate rooms. we invited amazing drag performers. we organized a same-sex kissing booth (which, one memorable year, d/evolved into my first orgy).

also, though, if you're going to try to create a space for people to cut loose sexually, BAN CAMERAS! I mean, this reporter was walking around with a camcorder, and apparently he wasn't the only one -- I certainly wouldn't have been comfortable there, and you know what kind of parties I'm used to.

and this article, mostly for my reference: Surveillance Cameras on Campus Triple

the requisite check-in to say that Katrina is breaking my heart. all the more so because, from the perspective of a tourist, at least, New Orleans is my favorite city in the U.S. the NYT op-ed has been a godsend, especially Paul Krugman today.

on a totally inappropriately happy note, following that, the two most important things I found while cleaning out my room, things I feared may have been lost forever, were the comprehensive packet of song lyrics from french camp (I need to sing these with my children someday), and the negatives and doubles of photos from my semester in Morocco! if you recall, my irreplaceable, carefully organized and labeled album disappeared somewhere between college and grad school -- but at least now I have something, which eases my soul.

there are many things I'd like to tell you about growing up. about reminiscences (the 12 page letter loaned to me by Tanya, who I sent it to when I was 17 and trying to sort out my sexuality was the utter train wreck it can only be for an adolescent), about resolutions (elaborate plans for a new healthy diet and other conciliatory gestures toward my neglected body), about anticipation (the impending end of coursework = getting a doggie, or moving to boston, or or), about recuperation (somehow, writing doesn't seem so hard right now?!), about reflection (it's livejournal, in particular, that's helped me see myself through the eyes of others, to appreciate at least the external appearance of "coolness") -- but I don't have time to write that post. so more pictures of me in stratford, from tanya's cameraphone, will have to suffice:

( pure vanity )