A BLOG

the greatest hits: year two, may 2010-april 2011

In honor of the third anniversary of this blog (this Saturday!), I’m looking back to some of my greatest hits and most memorable posts. Yesterday I posted about year one: May 2009-April 2010; today I’m posting about year two.

Greatest Hits

1. Being Beside Oneself with Grief, part 2/ May 26, 2010/ 697 hits
2. Sara Ahmed and The Promise of Happiness/ December 18. 2010/ 263 hits
3. Caring too much (or not enough)? The virtue and vices of caring/ July 7, 2010/ 230 hits
4. Playgrounds, kids and making trouble/ July 18, 2010/ 184 hits
5. Being Beside Oneself with Grief/ May 20, 2010/ 174 hits
6. Agonism, Criticism and the Trouble with Fault Finding/ June 16, 2010/ 154 hits

some favorite posts

1. The trouble with clowns/ May 16, 2010
I still want this book. Hmmm….Mother’s Day is coming up. 

2. My Trouble with Mother’s Day/ May 12, 2010
In this post, I document my process of writing an academic article about my mom’s death (that article was published later that year). Using the blog to write about the process and the article was an amazing experience. It allowed me to share my ideas and experiences with more people and to document my earliest efforts at trying to work through and make sense of my grief.

3. The Value of Failure: Versions 1, 2 and 3/ July 13. 2010
In this experimental blog post, I offered up my reflection on failure as they related to each of the three blogs that I was working on during the summer of 2010. In retrospect, it was a little crazy to try to do all of these blogs at once…but I sometimes go a little crazy in my experiments online. Anyway, here’s the description that I gave:

Right now I am attempting to juggle three different blogs. I really like how they highlight different aspects of my writing/thinking/feeling self. On trouble, I focus on giving critical (and serious, extended) attention to trouble in feminist and queer contexts. Frequently I write about Judith Butler and the ethical implications of her work. I also devote a lot of time to working through my own (hopefully) book project on trouble as a virtue. On Unchained, I experiment with developing/practicing virtue ethics (in relation to breaking, reworking, transforming consumption habits) through and in connection with blogging. I co-write this blog with my partner, STA, as we try to figure out ways to reduce consumption, make better (whatever that means) choices, and model “good” behavior for two crazy, yet wonderful kids, FWA and RJP. Finally on It’s Diablogical!, I diablogue with my writing partner and good friend, KCF, about blogging and feminist pedagogy. Our blog is part of a larger writing project on teaching with blogs and blogging while teaching.

Since writing this post, KCF and I have published a book chapter based on our writing project blog and STA and I have moved on from the Unchained blog (my last post there: November, 2010) to a more successful collaboration: the podcast, The Undisciplined Room.

4. The Trouble with Valentine’s Day/ February 13, 2011
I think this post was one of the first experiments in putting my lecture online for the class (or did I do this earlier?).  I don’t think this was that successful for the students. Partly, I think, because this was a huge class and partly because the students, most of whom were new to GWSS (gender, women, sexuality studies) classes, were resistant to troubling Valentine’s Day. While it didn’t work as part of an in-class lecture, I’m still happy with the post and the amount of questions I was able to pose and connections I was able to make. An added bonus for this post was that I used it to develop another version of who I am as a queer feminist troublemaker. Here’s what I wrote (which I recently added to my about me page):

My vision of feminist/queer thinking links MAKING TROUBLE FOR (questioning, unsettling, exposing, challenging, resisting, reframing) categories, ideas, practices, norms, institutions with the need for DEVELOPING AND PROMOTING A CRITICAL AWARENESS of how our everyday practices are shaped by and contribute to larger structures of oppression, power and privilege. While straight thinking encourages us to understand our everyday experiences from our particular social/cultural locations  as “natural” or “normal” and breaks them down into rigid binaries (male/female, heterosexual/homosexual, white/non-white) with one half of the binary privileged over the other, feminist/queer thinking encourages us to question, play with and “bust” these binaries. It also encourages us to make connections, to find patterns and to be curious about why things are they way they are and how they might be transformed. And it encourages us to ask who benefits from this “natural” order and at whose expense is it perpetuated.

While my version of feminist/queer thinking is inspired by lots of folks, here are three thinkers that are inspiring me right now as I work to articulate my vision of politics for my “politics of sex” class:

Cynthia Enloe and her emphasis, especially within her introduction to The Curious Feminist, on the value of having a feminist curiosity and of engaging in the difficult labor of questioning practices, institutions, ideologies that claim to be “natural,” “normal,” or just part of “tradition.” These acts of curiosity potentially enable us to expose the larger structures (of patriarchy, racism, heterosexism) that undergird those seemingly unquestionable claims to the natural or normal.

bell hooks and her discussion, especially in Feminism is for Everybody and Teaching to Transgress, of the importance of critical awareness and making connections between our everyday practices and larger structures of power, privilege and oppression.

Cathy Cohen and her discussion of the radical potential of queer politics in her essay, “Punks, Bulldaggers and Welfare Queens.” Challenging a narrow (and straight?) version of heteronormativity as one the reproduces the binary between straight and queerCohen argues that while heteronormativity might be a

“primary system of power structuring our lives, it [heteronormativity] interacts with institutional racism, patriarchy, and class exploitation to define us in numerous ways as marginal and oppressed subjects” (31).

So, moving beyond straight thinking requires that we also think about more than sexuality; we must put our discussions about sex/sexuality/sexual politics into conversation with discussions of race, gender and class. We need to move beyond the single oppression model that narrows our vision and limits our ability to make connections across differences.

 

The Greatest Hits: Year One, May 2009-April 2010

This Saturday, May 12th 2012, is the third anniversary of this blog. Can you tell I’m a little excited? This blog has been such a great space for me to write and reflect and process ideas, theories, and experiences and I’m really proud of it.  I don’t usually celebrate milestones (I didn’t go to either my masters or PhD graduations), but I’m enjoying taking the time and creating the virtual space to honor my accomplishment.

For the next three days, I’ll be looking back at some of the more memorable and popular posts from each of the three years that I’ve written in this blog. Today, I’m posting a list of the greatest hits (literally, the posts that got the highest number of hits/visits according to WordPress’ site stats) and some of my favorite posts from May 2009-April 2010.

Greatest Hits

1. GUEST POST by Kandace Creel Falcón. The Elf on the Shelf and other holiday panopticonisms/ December 22, 2009/ 8,575 hits
2. Little Miss Trouble / July 3, 2009/ 5,261 hits
3. Half-pint, the Troublemaker/ July 13, 2009/ 2,006 hits
4. Mike and Carol are the Worst Parents in the History of the World/ July 8, 2009/ 1,927 hits
5. Uh oh. Hannah Montana’s in (gender) Trouble/ June 20, 2009/ 1,672 hits
6. Does Troubling Virtue = Valuing Vice? And other questions about vice and virtue, part 1 /November 16, 2009/ 1,206 hits

Some Favorite Posts

1. A Fistful of Reasons, Part II: The Trouble with Bullies/ May 13, 2009
A favorite line, and perhaps one reason why I’m doing my Brady Bunch live-tweeting project:

Of course, the Brady Bunch is just a show from the 1970s. And, of course, the episode, “A Fistful of Reasons” must resolve the problem in 23 minutes. So, why should we look to it to address these issues of bullying? It seems to me that the Brady Bunch, for good or bad, does an effective job (sometimes frighteningly so) of reflecting and tapping into the values that many of us implicitly or explicitly live by. It does this in ways that don’t register to us as we sit passively in front of the television. Here is where troublemaking comes in again: Even as we watch and enjoy the glorious, retro-cheesiness that is the Brady Bunch, we should never stop thinking critically about the messages it is sending us or the guidance it is giving us.

2. The Book of Time outs, part II/ May 19, 2009
I’ve been wanting to write my own kids’ book for a while now.

When I think about a kid’s book on troublemaking, I imagine it as not always connecting troublemaking with bad behavior that needs to be punished. My kid’s book would not follow Lucke’s formula of bad behavior = well-deserved punishment = moral lesson. My kid’s book would invite children (and the adults who read to them) to think about how to distinguish between bad (harmful, selfish) and good (transformative, visionary) forms of troublemaking. Or maybe it would focus only on those examples of good troublemaking to demonstrate how many people throughout history have found ways to resist and transform the system. How they have learned to think for themselves and challenge rules that don’t work or are harmful. And, maybe it would argue that the most important result of their actions has not been a time out punishment, but the transformation of the world in ways that open up more possibilities to more people.

3. The Troublemaker as a feminist killjoy (or an unhappy queer)?/ December 18, 2009
A comment from the subject of the post, Sara Ahmed!

4. My 100th Post or the Winner of the Chewy Bagel Award for 2010/ March 18, 2010
This post is central to my linking Butler and Foucault with virtue, and it offers an origin story of the chewy bagel award!

What, you may ask, is the “chewy bagel award”? Many years ago my dad read my presentation on Judith Butler, radical democracy and identity politics that I wrote for the National Women’s Studies Association Conference. After finishing it, he remarked on how dense it was and what careful attention and concentration it demanded of the reader. On the top of the presentation he wrote, “Winner of the Chewy Bagel Award for 2004.” I think that this 100th post, which is all about Foucault, critique, Butler and virtue is worthy of the “Chewy Bagel Award for 2010″ for 2 reasons. First, this post is a chewy bagel because it is dense and requires that both the writer (me) and the reader (you) devote substantial time to thinking through the claims that Foucault, Butler and I are making about critique, disobedience, troublemaking and virtue. Second, this post is a chewy bagel because it is about promoting slow and careful rumination (chewing) on ideas, words, and claims. Here is what Butler says in “What is Critique: An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue” about the need for chewiness and how it enables us to patiently and persistently think and reflect:

“But here I would ask for your patience since it turns out that critique is a practice that requires a certain amount of patience in the same way that reading, according to Nietzsche, required that we act a bit more like cows than humans and learn the art of slow rumination” (307).

A dense, chewy bagel cannot easily be consumed. It requires effort to be eaten. A chewy bagel text is the same way. It is not meant to be easily understood or digested. It demands that we devote some serious time and effort to engaging and processing the ideas that it presents. I love the idea of cultivating patience and persistence; it resonates with one of my own visions of troublemaking, which I wrote about way back in May.

Trouble Role Model: Maurice Sendak’s Really Rosie

Sadly, Maurice Sendak died today. I would consider his character Really Rosie as a troublemaking role model for my daughter Rosie. In fact, she’s partly named after Sendak’s Rosie. In memory of Sendak, check out this blog post that I wrote last summer: Really Rosie! and Really, Rosie? When I have time, I’d like to think more about this quote from Sendak on the purpose of his work:

Children surviving childhood is my obsessive theme and my life’s concern.

a story in blog titles

May 12th is the third anniversary of this blog and I’m busy working on a digital video in which I offer a few stories about how and why the blog came to be and how my use of it has shifted over time. I’ve decided to (partly) use screen shots of blog titles to tell these stories. I’m pleasantly surprised at how useful the titles are for crafting my accounts.

As a teaser (and also as an easy reference for blog posts mentioned in the video), I thought I’d gather them all in this post. So, here you go. A story of this blog in titles:

Story One: An Introduction

Story Two: GRIEF/life

Story Three: LIFE/grief

Story Four: Troubled in and Troubling the Academy

Story Five: More Experimenting

I Don’t Want to Grow Up

This morning, while listening to the United States of Americana on The Current, I heard a song performed by Hayes Carll: I Don’t Want to Grow Up. The song was originally done by Tom Waits and, after watching both videos, I’ve decided that the Tom Waits one is more interesting and way more bizarre. Here it is:

I thought it was fitting to post this video on my troublemaking blog because I’ve written quite a bit about the queerness of kids (especially in relation to the work of Kathryn Bond Stockton and J Jack Halberstam) and I see a lot of value in resisting “growing up” and maturing when it comes at the expense of our curiosity, wonder and ability and willingness to make and stay in trouble.

Word Count: 129 words