Before the midterm on Thursday I attended the talk by David Harrison, “Anything You Ever Wanted to Ask a Transsexual”. David started with his youngest recollection of feeling like he was in the wrong body, and told his life story about being an actor, a transsexual, a psychic, and a professional dom. David’s talk left me with a lot of questions, which I unfortunately couldn’t work up the nerve to ask him. However, there is one question I can’t get over because it seems like it might open a floodgate of other questions. David’s story seems to resonate with a lot of feminist theory I’ve read in the last year, but at the same time, his life challenges important aspects of that theory.

One example I remember is David feeling more ‘flow’ with who he was, and yet feeling more stable as male. From a theoretical perspective, David’s life is full of contradictions and tensions that could be critically analyzed for ‘cracks and fissures’. Yet, from a material perspective, David is a walking ‘refunctioning’ of theory into practice; he IS being, not simply part of a class of beings. Sitting in that room, listening to his life story, I couldn’t help but think how absurd it is to think of the man in front of me as an application of a theoretical concept. The challenges of transitioning must be so incredible, and yet students and academics take liberty to theorize about (trans)identity. Don’t get me wrong, theory is important, as are considerations of its application. I just never want to forget that no matter how constructed our identities are/can be, there are challenges in life that can not be overcome with rationally applying theory to the lived world.

View David Harrison's web page

As Feminist Popular Culture students this term we are required to keep a weekly writing assignment schedule. We are to repeat the blog as practice throughout the term, and we are given a space where we all know our own place as students both in the public online and in the classroom. Additionally, we are punished or rewarded for our blogs in the form of grades that establish a normative dialectical discourse for the project throughout our term, and in the future of other Women’s Studies 320 classes. Indeed, the blogging assignment serves to regulate our student bodies so we will not resist, for to do so would cost us our grades. Does this all sound familiar? It should. This blogging assignment is a prime example of Foucault’s Science of Disciple.

Admitting ourselves as docile bodies allows for a reading of Adorno and Horkiemer’s theory of the Culture Industry, in which it would seem that we, as Feminist Popular culture students, are automatons alienated from our work because it can never truly be ours but only a representation of exchange value. Our blogs become false needs that are standardized and repeated, and through which we participate in our own oppression. That being said…I’m still going to do it.

“Of all the gin joints in all the world…”

Of course I would miss the last class based on our readings, and of course that class would be the one to tie everything together. It’s perfect. After all, I find if you make things harder on yourself, life is always interesting. Then again, according to Baudrillard, nothing really matters in the end of things anyway. Everything is a simulation, any attempt to attend to that simulation in ‘real time’ merely leaves you without meaning or purpose, and without meaning the future becomes unimportant and the concept of the past becomes incoherent.

The vanishing point is a concept I would like to hear more about though. Baudrillard talks about original concepts, essences, vanishing when it seems like they are altered from their natural state. But that doesn’t sound right, I have to have read this wrong. It seems obvious to me that an essence moving along a linear timeline would be constantly moving, and constantly adapting its essence in time; there is no original except that which is. Unless you are willing to posit a necessarily existent being at the beginning of all essences, don’t you have to admit an ever-evolving non-history? Maybe that is what Baudrillard meant by the Christian need to anticipate the end?

Last night I drove an hour and a half in a mostly east direction, and found myself standing at the base of a giant egg. I scaled the base of egg because, well, if one should find oneself at the base of an egg, the only sensible thing to do is climb it. Having conquered the giant egg, I turned my attention to the giant elk that was awaiting mounting not a block down the road. As you can see, I captured both of my conquests last night on film. Do my acts last night count as the politicization of art?

Benjamin argues that art can be revolutionary. Art, specifically sound film and photography, serves to distract and shock us in such a way as to hit and register on our bodies. Though my pictures may be somewhat shocking or distracting, I hardly think they have the tactile impact that Benjamin was talking about. John Fiske, however, argues that popular culture, as an act, is excessive. When considered as excessive then, popular culture becomes revolutionary in that it shines light on dominant ideolgical discourse, preventing it from being so sneaky. Which brings me back to my original question, do my acts last night count as the politicization of art? I think the obvious answer to that is no, my acts, individually, do not. But, further consideration of the images of last night's jackassery might be in order. Does using the pictures for a political end draw pop culture/revolutionary status?