So I woke up at 3:45 this morning, as sometimes happens, wide awake and ready to Do Something. I actually managed to use the energy semi-productively, in checking out the weekly archive for the transsexual theory yahoo group I've signed up for.
This semester I teach what is, at various schools, called freshman writing, freshman composition, or writing 101. At UVA it's called ENWR 110. This is, on the face of it, a fairly boring curriculum, so we get to think up "themes" for the writing and reading – sort of pretty facades to put on the scaffold of writing instruction. My theme, chosen in haste and wildness last spring, is "Between Genders," and it's going to be an exploration of the issues surrounding transgenderism, intersexuality, crossdressing/transvestism, hermaphroditism, etc., in both their most determined and most abstract varieties. The theory here is that, even more than a sort of "basic queer theory" course, such a set of issues can really get right to the heart of debates not only about gender or sexual identity, but of identity period – how much of it is determined by the body, how much by politics, how much by culture, and how does all that change in various situations?
In theory I still find this a good idea. In practice, though, as I select my readings, I'm already getting a little worn out – I'd forgotten how very earnest most academic writing on the subject is!
I shouldn't complain. Usually I'm all for a little earnestness in our lazily ironic atmosphere, and of course these issues are of absolutely vital importance who actually live with being TS or TG, and they would then be expected to be earnest about them! But what I object to actually seems a lot less like earned earnestness (I seem, for some reason, to be experiencing an outbreak of alliteration this morning) and a lot more like self-congratulatory over-seriousness, of the type of many second-wave feminists. And that I dislike! Strongly.
There is just something so easy about taking a group of people who are treated almost literally as monsters – who manifest in physical, often even genital difference a state that goes contrary to dominant ways of being – and embracing them, as if the only problem with Frankenstein's monster (and here I'm going into dangerous simile territory. I don't mean that transpeople are surgical monsters. I mean that the predominant analogy likens them that way, even if only to then decry the likeness). Anyway, as if the only problem with the monster is that nobody gives him a hug. But that isn't, of course, the only – or even – the primary problem in the novel, or in society. Discrimination, prejudice, and hatred are issues of vital importance, and to some extent the solution to them is of course the fostering of acceptance of difference and of taking people on their own terms. Those are good issues for public policy and for ground-level workshops on tolerance and diversity.
But they are not good issues for theory, or Theory. And they're not great issues for me. If my class devolves into "gosh. We should treat all people with respect, I guess," I won't have a very interesting semester, and my students won't learn to write very interesting, deep, or useful papers!
I suppose what I'm working around to, in the end, is that I see even more clearly the importance of fiction, of art to discussions like these! In Middlesex, or Hedwig and the Angry Inch (both of which I am going to get into the course, at least in part), one can approach questions related to identiy, the physical, the Between and the Determined, within the context of the speculative, rather than the urgently present, and that makes things so much more interesting! Fiction gives us a way to approach these issues outside of the constraints of need, and thus closer to outside of predetermined social or political reactions.
A fictional exploration gives you something that even a case study does not – it gives you freedom, and the powers of understand that come with creation and uncreation. Creation as you read/view and create in your own mind; uncreation as you examine, parse, and study. The other thing I'm reading this week is Paradise Lost, in preparation for oral exams, and I keep thinking about Milton's constant return to his epic purpose – why is it necessary that this poem be present? What does it mean to "justify the ways of God to man," and why is it in the power poem -- or the Holy Spirit or Light or Urania through the poem– to do that? After all, Milton believes totally that God's justification is already both in human life and experience, if viewed properly, in individual prayer, if prayed well, and in the Bible, though perfect translation and understanding of that book may always be elusive. I think, really, it's the invocation of or proem to Light that's at the heart of the matter. The blind poet, as he so heartbreakingly tells us, is unable to experience daybreak or sundown. He lives his life in twilight. This poem, then, must be, over and over, his sunrise. It is in only in poetic, even epic, sunrise that the real sunrise – prosaic, quotidian, at the base of human life and activity – can be really experienced. To "justify" is not exactly to explain, defend, or put right – it is to feel the justness of, the rightness of, essence of something. It is more powerful than any sermon or philosophical disquisition could be, though it does not discount those forms either.
Anyway, all this is by way of saying that I wish I could teach more fiction this upcoming semester, and I'll be happy when I get to do courses having to do more with imaginative forms of writing again. Which surprises me a little, but I suppose it shouldn't.
This semester I teach what is, at various schools, called freshman writing, freshman composition, or writing 101. At UVA it's called ENWR 110. This is, on the face of it, a fairly boring curriculum, so we get to think up "themes" for the writing and reading – sort of pretty facades to put on the scaffold of writing instruction. My theme, chosen in haste and wildness last spring, is "Between Genders," and it's going to be an exploration of the issues surrounding transgenderism, intersexuality, crossdressing/transvestism, hermaphroditism, etc., in both their most determined and most abstract varieties. The theory here is that, even more than a sort of "basic queer theory" course, such a set of issues can really get right to the heart of debates not only about gender or sexual identity, but of identity period – how much of it is determined by the body, how much by politics, how much by culture, and how does all that change in various situations?
In theory I still find this a good idea. In practice, though, as I select my readings, I'm already getting a little worn out – I'd forgotten how very earnest most academic writing on the subject is!
I shouldn't complain. Usually I'm all for a little earnestness in our lazily ironic atmosphere, and of course these issues are of absolutely vital importance who actually live with being TS or TG, and they would then be expected to be earnest about them! But what I object to actually seems a lot less like earned earnestness (I seem, for some reason, to be experiencing an outbreak of alliteration this morning) and a lot more like self-congratulatory over-seriousness, of the type of many second-wave feminists. And that I dislike! Strongly.
There is just something so easy about taking a group of people who are treated almost literally as monsters – who manifest in physical, often even genital difference a state that goes contrary to dominant ways of being – and embracing them, as if the only problem with Frankenstein's monster (and here I'm going into dangerous simile territory. I don't mean that transpeople are surgical monsters. I mean that the predominant analogy likens them that way, even if only to then decry the likeness). Anyway, as if the only problem with the monster is that nobody gives him a hug. But that isn't, of course, the only – or even – the primary problem in the novel, or in society. Discrimination, prejudice, and hatred are issues of vital importance, and to some extent the solution to them is of course the fostering of acceptance of difference and of taking people on their own terms. Those are good issues for public policy and for ground-level workshops on tolerance and diversity.
But they are not good issues for theory, or Theory. And they're not great issues for me. If my class devolves into "gosh. We should treat all people with respect, I guess," I won't have a very interesting semester, and my students won't learn to write very interesting, deep, or useful papers!
I suppose what I'm working around to, in the end, is that I see even more clearly the importance of fiction, of art to discussions like these! In Middlesex, or Hedwig and the Angry Inch (both of which I am going to get into the course, at least in part), one can approach questions related to identiy, the physical, the Between and the Determined, within the context of the speculative, rather than the urgently present, and that makes things so much more interesting! Fiction gives us a way to approach these issues outside of the constraints of need, and thus closer to outside of predetermined social or political reactions.
A fictional exploration gives you something that even a case study does not – it gives you freedom, and the powers of understand that come with creation and uncreation. Creation as you read/view and create in your own mind; uncreation as you examine, parse, and study. The other thing I'm reading this week is Paradise Lost, in preparation for oral exams, and I keep thinking about Milton's constant return to his epic purpose – why is it necessary that this poem be present? What does it mean to "justify the ways of God to man," and why is it in the power poem -- or the Holy Spirit or Light or Urania through the poem– to do that? After all, Milton believes totally that God's justification is already both in human life and experience, if viewed properly, in individual prayer, if prayed well, and in the Bible, though perfect translation and understanding of that book may always be elusive. I think, really, it's the invocation of or proem to Light that's at the heart of the matter. The blind poet, as he so heartbreakingly tells us, is unable to experience daybreak or sundown. He lives his life in twilight. This poem, then, must be, over and over, his sunrise. It is in only in poetic, even epic, sunrise that the real sunrise – prosaic, quotidian, at the base of human life and activity – can be really experienced. To "justify" is not exactly to explain, defend, or put right – it is to feel the justness of, the rightness of, essence of something. It is more powerful than any sermon or philosophical disquisition could be, though it does not discount those forms either.
Anyway, all this is by way of saying that I wish I could teach more fiction this upcoming semester, and I'll be happy when I get to do courses having to do more with imaginative forms of writing again. Which surprises me a little, but I suppose it shouldn't.
Labels: bodies, early modern, queer, transvestism
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