-----Original Message----- From: Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu>
>Rude guys are easier to handle, don't you think?
i know what you mean: rudeness you can respond to rudely. it's up front, which is certainly a more tangible thing than the polite versions of this, something whihc is easier to point to and say: 'look, this is unacceptable, look at what they are trying to effect'. conversely, this also means that occassions of this that are enacted politely, or better: as a seemingly necessary component of political argument, are more often than not really hard to bring into opn discussion. instances of this are being accused of being impolite (of being the one making conflict, picking fights) when you notice the less-than-vulgar expressions.
They tend to express their
>rudeness in a very simple and simplistic manner. (They call you, on
some
>lists, when they really hate you or they feel like they are losing
their
>arguments, a 'cunt' if you are a woman, a 'cocksucker' if you are a
man, or
>some such thing.) That said, on this list the guys whose posts I read
don't
>seem to be rude. Maybe you are generous + curious enough to read a
wider
>range of guys.
i have seen rudeness and narcissism all in one recently. and, to be honest, i found it incredibly aggressive. interesting that for most fellas, it inspired respect rather than criticism. phallic performance it certainly was, replete with all the anxietites of castration. (now, you can all stop thinking i might mean you, or you, or even you - i can confidently say, i don't.) no one pulled them up in exactly these terms, becuase to do so would have been seen as impolite. some men get lauded for waving it about; to pull up a woman for doing this in terms that suggest she is 'faking it' can serve to affirm the former.
>I said the 'Lesbian Phallus' because we are supposed to be having (or
>supposed to have had?) the JudyFest, and in connection with Butler,
I've
>been thinking of how the concept of performance in particular (but
also
>post-structuralism in general) has become more and more
_voluntaristic_, as
>it has become more widely disseminated and (how shall I say)
Americanized
>(or Anglo-Americanized?).
i think it might be good oin what is mostly a yanqui list to actually discuss in more detail the transatlantic shuttling of postie stuff. (one more plug for rebecca comay's essay on the 'geopolitics of translation')
you think butler's notion of the phallus is voluntaristic? i don't see this. i do think the strategies she notes for resisitance lean toward idealism, but this is not necessarily voluntarism.
but again, i think this phrase 'lesbian phallus' infers that men have access to it, and women do not, or have access to something else. this needs to be unpacked a lot, since there are arguemtns to be made here, but that phrase sitting there all as is merely props up the inflection that men have the Real Thing. the direct implication (and you may not be thinking along these lines, but this is the implication, and esp for those guys who may be holding onto it for dear life) is that 'lesbians are fake men'.
>Closer to its putative beginnings, pomo had more of a pleasant
>anti-humanist flavor. 'Performance' didn't mean 'putting on an act'
or
>switching from one persona to another as an act of will or even whim;
it
>referred to the construction of sexed/gendered subjects (and their
>vicissitudes) that does not go through the realm of consciousness.
sure. i'm always surprised when people start justifying their sexualities in terms that they belive has been licenced by pomo, as if the phrase 'power is everywhere' means it's okay - radical even - to exert power/dominance/masochism in relationships, sex, etc. not simply trying to expalin, but actively justifying it, and more - as you imply - beliving that they have simply decided at will to do x, y, or z.
angela