This week’s reading digest, turned in today:
Habermas, Jürgen. “The Tasks of a Critical Theory of Society.“ Translated by Thomas McCarthy. in Critical Theory and Society: A Reader, edited by Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas MacKay Kellner, 292-312. New York: Routledge, 1989.
Marcuse, Herbert. “Liberation from the Affluent Society.“ in Critical Theory and Society: A Reader, edited by Stephen Eric Bronner and Douglas MacKay Kellner, 276-287. New York: Routledge, 1989.
I have been so excited to write this ever since class last Thursday because I find Marcuse’s work really exciting: we need to liberate bodies, change the way our bodies function. This seems really true to me because really so much of what goes on happens in our bodies, and this is something that I’ve just started to begin to realize. I mean, I always thought, when teaching, hey, I can help students be liberated by helping look at the truth of oppressive systems, but I never addressed the question of their desires: What do we want on a bodily level? Do we want to care? We have been colonized to not care, to be cynical, to not fantasize about a better world.
In class Orosco has asked us a few times where is the source of resistance now? If it was the hippies in the 1960s, where can we find it now? I’d like to quote from my personal blog from Saturday here:
Last night was the annual Rainbow Continuum drag competition. I think we were fairly successful at fucking shit up.
I competed as ‘Faris Hilton,’ and did a number decked out in punk to Joan Jett’s ‘Bad Reputation.’ My other number involved hot getting almost naked with Brittney, her dressed up as a boy scout who ripped off her shirt and revealed her boobs, and me stripping down to a corset, stockings, and a woman’s thong. I got compliments on my superb tucking job. In the end, Brittney pulled a dildo out of her pocket and pretended to stick it up my butt.
Amazing!
Other competitors did some pretty risque things. I think we made a pretty good collective “fuck gender” statement.
And Lucilla and Brock fucked up politics, coming out wearing shirts with statements, which Troy [on his livejournal] catalogued:
1.) Luke wearing a shirt that said Fuck Saxton (republican running for governor here)
2.) Joscelyne wearing a shirt that said Fuck Bush
3.) Luke wearing a shirt that said Vote for Dems
4.) Luke wearing a shirt that said Laura Bush has a strap on
5.) Joscelyne wearing a shirt that said and George takes it.Troy is concerned that the RC will get in trouble for the politics and sex-capades that went on. Ooops. I think we’ll be fine.
We’re fucking shit up.
In our Critical Social Philosophy course, Professor Orosco has asked us a few times, after noting that Herbert Marcuse thought the hippies of the 60s were the source of resistance, where that resistance comes from now. I keep wanting to say, “Queer communities,” but a fear of hubris prevents me.
Perhaps Orosco will give Luke, Jos, and I credit in our philosophy class for the drag show. He did tip me, after all.
I really think that the drag show was a way of enacting resistance, but I’d like to see that go further. Luke told me he thought it was great because the drag show provides a safe place where all gender expression is made okay. I said yes, but we need to do that everywhere. We need to take drag performances and do that everywhere. But to ensure that it’s not a spectacle that just provokes gawking (so, don’t do it on Halloween), but that it actually confronts people about their bodies. Hit on them.
Luke and I also talked about if George Bush came and talked to us. What would be the most effective thing to do to him? Hit on him. Heavy. Make him question and be disgusted and turned on by our queer male bodies.
Resistance via changing and confronting our bodies makes so much sense, since capitalism has so corrupted our bodies (why do we wear deodorant, by the way? Well, I haven’t in three years) and since our freedom should be grounded in our material existence. Where and how are we allowed to move? What are we allowed to look like? Who are we allowed to touch, feel, love, fuck?
I’m also in Mina Carson’s history of gay and lesbian movements course. We’re reading some work from the 1970s about gay liberation movements. Huey Newton, of the Black Panthers, wrote in 1970: “And what made them homosexual? Perhaps it’s a whole phenomena that I don’t understand entirely…. But whatever the case is, we know that homosexuality is a fact that exists, and we must understand it in its purest form: That is, a person should have freedom to use his body in whatever way he wants…. [T]here’s nothing to say that a homosexual cannot also be a revolutionary…. Quite on the contrary, maybe a homosexual could be the most revolutionary.“
I don’t necessarily agree that a homosexual him or her self is revolutionary. I think, though, that some of the queer movements are. In class I said gutter-punk queer polyamorous zinesters and graffiti artists in Chicago were a source of resistance. They’re doing things different: living differently, loving different, fucking differently, dressing differently, and making architecture different (by living in condemned houses, by marking up billboards to confront our sensibilities in ways that are so much more clever than AdBusters). They are undergoing transformations in their bodies: tattoos, piercings, scarring, and just looking flat out ugly to the mainstream.
After the drag show Friday night, I could feel the freedom in the air. I was dead tired — dead fucking tired, and yet I felt so much freer. There is something about freeing our bodies like that, about demanding that things can and should be different that can really make us feel liberated.
How to enact that more often? I have a friend who has a class on ethics that isn’t actually interrogating ethics very deeply, and I told him I should streak through his class. Perhaps I should, with something written on my body, like “Dead: [insert number]. You funded one research over another.“ Oh, that kind of gives it away that it’s a medical ethics class. But oh well. I said in class that we should be willing to give up our privileges, and I think we should. It’s hard to do that, really hard. But one has to do it in order to come out as queer; one has to do it in order to become liberated. What the hell right do we have to go to school? And if we don’t actually risk our privileges, that do we really believe that liberation is the goal?
This is all making me consider what I am doing becoming a professor. If resistance comes from the fringes, do I really want to entrench myself in a position where it is harder to resist? No that it’s impossible to resist — I see it from a few professors, but for the most part, those professors who claim to have high ideals don’t do anything that really resists that much.
Oh, so this is something that I’ve been considering. You might have heard about the gay sheep and the research that is meant to discover if they can prevent homosexuality in sheep. A few friends and I were discussing this, and I decided that we should all dress up as sheep and start having sex in public. It’d kind of fuck shit up. But of course, we should do more research and find out what exactly is going on (I’ll admit to being a little uneducated on this topic right now).
Well, this has been a somewhat rambly, disjointed reading digest. Eh. Oh, I was kidding about getting credit for the drag show. 🙂
