-----Original Message-----
From: Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu>
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>I really doubt that Dr. Butler was recommending gratuitous rudeness,
>narcissistic agression, plain old snobbery, etc. in the name of
playing
>with the Lesbian Phallus.
i doubt it too yoshie - that butler was recommending such stuff.... but, rudeness, narcissistic aggression and snobbery are pretty standard fare on lists. i will say that calling on kelley's outburst, when the guys who do this don't get pulled up is also standard. that you'd then designate this as 'the Lesbian Phallus', even granting that you may have used this to designate a performance, strikes me as somewhat - what can i say? - off. surely the phallus is the phallus: this being available to both lesbians, straight women, men, etc. you might want to think about the distinction you're making between 'the phallus' and 'the lesbian phallus', that this distinction presumes that those with a dick have an immediate access to phallic performance, which i don't think is actually true, in any case. what i guess i'm saying is that by making this distinction, by depicting the latter as prosthetic, you're assuming (or at least inferring) that only real men get to play with the phallus. is that what you want to say?
as for the debate over cop shows, i do think it is strange that the work of cop shows has been reduced to a debate over whether or not cops are really working class. this strikes me as an entirely separate discussion: cop shows aren't a depiction of the class location of cops as it really exists, the shows do various kinds of work at different levels and in different ways, some of which is about getting us to identify cops as belonging to the community, the average person, one of us. sometimes tho, cop shows do present cops as having a more complicated relationship to 'the community' - an index of this is whether you get the routinised 'bad apple in the barrel' or something more. more generally, cop shows are about the law and are an attempt to mediate our relationship to it. (and, i think that both you and kelley would agree here? frankly, i'm not entirely sure what all the fuss is about, unless it is that you're getting affronted at kelley's 'lesbian phallic' performances'? if so, why don't you just say so? i get panicked at kelley's effusiveness, but that's just my own hysteria probably...)
angela