Queer View Mirror

Apple Publicly Opposes California Proposition 8 (Ban on Same Sex Marriage)

2008-10-28T12:25:00.000-05:00

News from Apple:

http://www.macrumors.com/2008/10/24/apple-publicly-opposes-california-proposition-8-ban-on-same-sex-marriage/

Tim Wise on White Privilege

2008-10-11T15:24:00.002-05:00

Solid read: http://www.redroom.com/blog/tim-wise/this-your-nation-white-privilege-updated

CFP: Joystick Soldiers: The military/war video game reader

2008-08-23T19:51:00.000-05:00

CFP: Joystick Soldiers: The military/war video game reader
2007-07-20 02:54 | Posted by jpzagal | Permanent Link | Call for Papers

Edited by Nina B. Huntemann and Matthew Thomas Payne
The editors seek essays on military/war-themed video games which explore the multifaceted cultural, social, and economic linkages between video games and the military. The collection will feature scholarly work from a diversity of theoretical and methodological perspectives, including: close textual readings of military-themed video games; critical histories of game production processes and marketing practices; and reception studies of video war gamers, fandom, and politically resistant game interventions. As there is no other collection of its kind, Joystick Soldiers will make a significant contribution to the breadth of work shaping the burgeoning field of game studies, complementing analyses concerning the Military-Entertainment Complex, and offering diverse insights on how modern warfare has been represented and remediated in contemporary video games. The editors invite junior as well as established scholars to submit, and welcome cross-disciplinary work from sociology, cultural studies, anthropology, history, military studies, psychology, economics, media studies, visual communication, graphic arts and game design, education, and so forth.

We are looking for submissions that address a wide range of topics from diverse methodological approaches, including but not limited to:

--Use of games for training, recruitment, propaganda (serious games)

--Video games and military ideology (or Military-Entertainment Complex)

--Representing / playing soldiers, terrorists, & civilians

--Global reception of America’s Army and other “pro-US” war games

--Production of war video games

--War video games across genres (e.g., FPS, RTS, RPG)

--Playing war video games of past & near-future conflicts

--War game mods and other user-generated content

--Machinima as social commentary on war (e.g., Red vs. Blue)

--Games and resistance (non-combat games, in-game protests, diplomacy as alternative to force)

--Game for peace

--Networked war games in different spaces (LAN parties, on-line, mobile).

--War games and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)

We are interested in defining “military/war” video games widely, but not so widely as to be useless for critical analysis. The following is a partial list of war video games we hope to include, but submissions for scholarly work about other games are welcome, for example games based on past wars (Battlefield 1942; Call of Duty, etc) and non-US based games.

--Marine Doom

--Counter-Strike & its mods

--America’s Army & America’s Army: Rise of a Soldier

--Battlefield 2: Modern Combat

--Close Combat: First to Fight

--Conflict: Desert Storm II - Back to Baghdad

--FA-18 Operation Desert Storm

--Freedom Fighters

--Full Spectrum Warrior & Full Spectrum Warrior: Ten Hammers

--Kuma War

--Ghost Recon 3: Advanced Warfighter

--Operation Flashpoint: Resistance

--Rainbow Six 3: Raven Shield --Sniper Elite

--SOCOM

--Under Siege, Under Ash, and Special Force

Please submit a 500 word abstract and short bio (100 words max) by September 17, 2007 in Rich Text Format (RTF) to Nina Huntemann and Matthew Payne at joysticksoldiers@gmail.com. We expect final papers will not exceed 5000-7000 words and will be due December 10, 2007. Feel free to repost this CFP on relevant lists. Please contact us if you have questions about potential essays or the book project in general.

Orson Scott Card Anti-Gay Marriage

2008-08-13T10:03:00.001-05:00

http://www.cracked.com/blog/2008/08/11/orson-scott-card-wants-you-to-rise-up-against-the-government-but-in-the-worst-way-possible/

CFP: International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games

2008-08-08T11:04:00.000-05:00

FDG '09, the International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games is a focal point for academic efforts in all areas of research involving computer and console games, game technologies, game play and game design. Previously known as the Conference on Game Development and Computer Science Education (GDCSE), this year's conference broadens its scope to cover the breadth of game research and education. The conference is targeted at researchers making contributions that promote new game capabilities, designs, applications and modes of play.

http://www.foundationsofdigitalgames.org/downloads/fdgcfp.pdf

California ban on same-sex marriage struck down

2008-05-15T14:58:00.000-05:00

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/05/15/same.sex.marriage/index.html

Farewell, Aime

2008-04-22T11:59:00.001-05:00

France bids farewell to black pride poet Aime Cesaire
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5jdi7O0Jn6D2vpWgvG9-UkG_OYmlg

Hanes "Tag" Ads Controversy

2008-04-17T10:23:00.004-05:00

A controversial ad campaign by Hanes (developed for South Asia) featuring the words "faggot" and "nigger" and "paki" has drawn a lot of attention, criticism, and little actual theorization and critique. Much of the response has been purely "this is bad, bad, bad because using labels is bad, bad, bad because in this diverse, multicultural world we don't do things that are bad, bad, bad..." The campaign features the tagline "The world gives you enough tags." And the images are about the anthropomorphication of the discourse, stereotypes, and signifiers of the very labels themselves.

I think there is something going on here that might actually be disidentificatory, a way that unsettles the words (not completely) from their usage and that revivifies our relationship to them that might actually pull them out of the safe distance of history.

Granted these stereotypes are problematic and, well, stereotypical. But is there a way to not have a knee-jerk neoliberal reaction? And to find something productive out of the discomfort and eerieness produced by the ads? There is something posthuman going on here, too.

I'll have to think about it. Here's details: http://www.trendhunter.com/trends/controv-campaigns-hanes.

European Journal of Cultural Studies (May 2008) on Video Game Studies

2008-04-16T18:57:00.001-05:00

European Journal of Cultural Studies
1 May 2008; Vol. 11, No. 2
URL: http://ecs.sagepub.com/content/vol11/issue2/?etoc

What is game studies anyway?
David B. Nieborg and Joke Hermes
European Journal of Cultural Studies 2008;11 131-147
http://ecs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/11/2/131?etoc

Ruling the virtual world: Governance in massively multiplayer online games
Sal Humphreys
European Journal of Cultural Studies 2008;11 149-171
http://ecs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/11/2/149?etoc

The mod industries? The industrial logic of non-market game production
David B. Nieborg and Shenja van der Graaf
European Journal of Cultural Studies 2008;11 177-195
http://ecs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/11/2/177?etoc

Digital Arabs: Representation in video games
Vit Sisler
European Journal of Cultural Studies 2008;11 203-220
http://ecs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/11/2/203?etoc

Do you believe in magic? Computer games in everyday life
Daniel Pargman and Peter Jakobsson
European Journal of Cultural Studies 2008;11 225-244
http://ecs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/11/2/225?etoc

Open invitation: mapping global game cultures. Issues for a sociocultural
study of games and players
Frans Mayra
European Journal of Cultural Studies 2008;11 249-257
http://ecs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/11/2/249?etoc

In Memoriam: Lawrence King

2008-03-11T10:28:00.000-05:00

Student shot in Oxnard
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-oxnard13feb13,0,6745547.story?page=1

A deadly clash of emotions before Oxnard shooting
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-oxnard8mar08,0,5574063.story?page=1

E.O. Green School shooting
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.O._Green_School_shooting

Remembering Lawrence King
http://www.rememberinglawrence.org/

GROUNDSPARK CELEBRATES 10TH ANNIVERSARY OF RELEASE OF GROUNDBREAKING FILM "IT'S ELEMENTARY

2008-03-10T10:34:00.000-05:00

GROUNDSPARK CELEBRATES 10TH ANNIVERSARY OF RELEASE OF GROUNDBREAKING FILM "IT'S ELEMENTARY

San Francisco, CA, October 1, 2007-- GroundSpark - formerly Women's Educational Media - today announced events celebrating the 10th anniversary and upcoming re-release on DVD of "It's Elementary-- Talking About Gay Issues in School." The groundbreaking documentary was the first film to show how elementary and middle school teachers can facilitate age-appropriate classroom discussions that include awareness about gay and lesbian people.

The DVD re-released version of the film is accompanied by a new documentary, "It's STILL Elementary," that features follow-up interviews with some of the original participants, as well as with educators, activists and the film's production team who discuss the political and cultural reaction to and impact of the original release of the film. GroundSpark will hold screenings of "It's STILL Elementary" in New York on Thursday, October 18th, San Francisco on Thursday, October 25th, and Washington, DC, on November 28th, 2007.

"It's Elementary" has helped countless educators and parents think about their role in helping to prevent young people from growing up with prejudice toward lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. Rather than focusing on political differences on this issue among adults, the film takes the point of view of children and features them discussing the information and the misinformation that they have absorbed about what it means to be gay or lesbian.

Since its initial release, "It's Elementary" has won numerous awards, as well as widespread acclaim from parents, educators, policymakers, and religious leaders. It has been shown to faculty in thousands of schools across the country and around the world, from Alaska to Florida and from Tokyo to Warsaw. The film is widely credited for helping to ignite the national "safe schools" movement, contributing to the growth in the number of gay-straight alliance groups in schools and the increase in the number of K-12 schools with inclusive non-discrimination and anti-harassment policies.

The follow-up documentary, "It's STILL Elementary," presents fascinating "where are they now?" interviews with students from the original film, along with commentary from the filmmakers and other educators and leaders who look back at the political backlash the original film received and at the tremendous impact it has had on the American educational system.Paired with the DVD is a newly produced, comprehensive 80-page curriculum guide for educators, which includes lesson plans on how to incorporate LGBT curricula in classrooms.

"When the film was first released a decade ago, 'It's Elementary' helped spark a movement to make schools safer places for all children to discuss lesbian and gay people in age-appropriate ways," said GroundSpark Executive Director and Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Debra Chasnoff.

"Homophobia hurts all children: one only has to consider the consistently homophobic content of bullying in schools today to realize that this film is more relevant than ever. All of us at GroundSpark are excited to introduce 'It's Elementary' and its companion documentary, 'It's STILL Elementary,' to a new generation of educators," Chasnoff continued.

Earlier this year, GroundSpark found itself in the midst of controversy in Evesham Township, NJ. A group of highly vocal parents objected to another GroundSpark film, "That's a Family!," which features children talking about their diverse family structures, including families with divorced and single parents, multi-racial families, families whose children were adopted, and families with lesbian and gay parents. Despite a unanimous recommendation from its own review committee of professional educators, counselors and PTA representatives that the film remain part of the elementary school curriculum, the Evesham Township School Board voted to suspend the film's use in response to political pressure and intimidation by the minority opposition.

"Fear and ignorance about addressing diversity with children - especially related to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people - is alive and well," commented Chasnoff. "The films that are part of our Respect For All Project, such as 'That's a Family!,' were created in response to the extraordinary impact that 'It's Elementary' received after its initial release. The goal of GroundSpark's Respect For All Project is to help create schools and communities where all children feel welcome and safe. The unfortunate recent events in New Jersey demonstrate that our work is as relevant and necessary as ever," concluded Chasnoff.

GroundSpark creates visionary films and dynamic education campaigns that move individuals and communities to take action for a more just world.

The Respect For All Project, a program of GroundSpark, facilitates the development of inclusive schools and communities that are free from bias and prejudice by providing resources, support and training to educators and youth service providers.

For more information, please visit www.groundspark.org

From: http://www.ednews.org/articles/17867/1/GROUNDSPARK-CELEBRATES-10TH-ANNIVERSARY-OF-RELEASE-OF-GROUNDBREAKING-FILM-quotIT039S-ELEMENTARYquot/Page1.html

Happy. New. Year

2008-01-01T15:01:00.001-05:00

Happy New Year. Best in 2008!

On the age front...

2007-10-11T11:30:00.001-05:00

Aging and Gay, and Facing Prejudice in Twilight
James Estrin/The New York Times

Jalna Perry of Boston said her guard was always up in nursing homes.

The result of her outspokenness, Ms. Donadello said, was swift and merciless. “Everyone looked horrified,” she said. No longer included in conversation or welcome at meals, she plunged into depression. Medication did not help. With her emotional health deteriorating, Ms. Donadello moved into an adult community nearby that caters to gay men and lesbians.

“I felt like I was a pariah,” she said, settled in her new home. “For me, it was a choice between life and death.”

Elderly gay people like Ms. Donadello, living in nursing homes or assisted-living centers or receiving home care, increasingly report that they have been disrespected, shunned or mistreated in ways that range from hurtful to deadly, even leading some to commit suicide.

Some have seen their partners and friends insulted or isolated. Others live in fear of the day when they are dependent on strangers for the most personal care. That dread alone can be damaging, physically and emotionally, say geriatric doctors, psychiatrists and social workers.

More at: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/09/us/09aged.html?ex=1192593600&en=31488165b0295b95&ei=5070&emc=eta1

'Wrinkle in Time' author dies at 88

2007-09-08T10:27:00.000-05:00

http://www.cnn.com/2007/SHOWBIZ/books/09/07/obit.lengle.ap/index.html

'Wrinkle in Time' author dies at 88

HARTFORD, Connecticut (AP) -- Author Madeleine L'Engle, whose novel "A Wrinkle in Time" has been enjoyed by generations of schoolchildren and adults since the 1960s, has died, her publicist said Friday. She was 88.

L'Engle died Thursday at a nursing home in Litchfield of natural causes, according to Jennifer Doerr, publicity manager for publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

The Newbery Medal winner wrote more than 60 books, including fantasies, poetry and memoirs, often highlighting spiritual themes and her Christian faith.

Although L'Engle was often labeled a children's author, she disliked that classification. In a 1993 Associated Press interview, she said she did not write down to children.

"In my dreams, I never have an age," she said. "I never write for any age group in mind. When people do, they tend to be tolerant and condescending and they don't write as well as they can write.

"When you underestimate your audience, you're cutting yourself off from your best work."

"A Wrinkle in Time" -- which L'Engle said was rejected repeatedly before it found a publisher in 1962 -- won the American Library Association's 1963 Newbery Medal for best American children's book. Her "A Ring of Endless Light" was a Newbery Honor Book, or medal runner-up, in 1981.

In 2004, President Bush awarded her a National Humanities Medal.

"Wrinkle" tells the story of adolescent Meg Murry, her genius little brother Charles Wallace, and their battle against evil as they search across the universe for their missing father, a scientist.

L'Engle followed it up with further adventures of the Murry children, including "A Wind in the Door," 1973; "A Swiftly Tilting Planet," 1978, which won an American Book Award; and "Many Waters," 1986.

ZOMG

2007-09-01T10:35:00.000-05:00

I'm really fascinated by representations of cyberspace, of the Internet. I think one of the central ways to talk about our understanding of cyberspace and digital technology is through the cultural productions produced about them, for them, by them, around them. I taught a class last year called Imagining Cyberspace, which looked at literary and visual representations of cyberspace. It was interesting and even though students are often praised for being so technologically 'savvy', they still found new eyes and resistances to the very naturalised understanding of the Net and its concomitant technology. This is a long winded introduction to one of the scariest (and cheesiest) images I've found in a long, long, long time:

Samuel R. Delany Presented by the Clarion West Writer’s Workshop and EMP|SFM

2007-07-22T12:51:00.001-05:00

Six Summer Evenings of Science Fiction 2007 Reading Series - Samuel R. Delany Presented by the Clarion West Writer’s Workshop and EMPSFM

Tuesday, July 24

Samuel R. Delany is arguably the most daring, wide-ranging, word-drunk, idea-besotted writer of science fiction and fantasy that the United States has ever produced. In his 45-year professional career, he has extensively explored issues of language, gender, race, sexuality, power and otherness. Author of Dhalgren, Babel-17, and numerous novels, stories, and critical and philosophical works including his new novel Dark Reflections, he never fails to deliver a dynamic evening. Delany has won numerous national and international awards including the Hugo and Nebula, and was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2002. Delany is Clarion West's 2007 Susan C. Petrey Fellow.

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

7:30 PM

Free admission.

Seating is general admission and is limited.

JBL Theater

325 5th Ave N

Nooses and a legal lynching in Jena, Louisiana

2007-07-20T14:18:00.000-05:00

I cannot believe (and can believe) this is (still) going on in the world:

"Injustice in Jena as Nooses Hang From the ï¿½White Tree,'"
truthout, July 3, 2007
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/070307B.shtml
"Racial demons rear heads," Chicago Tribune, May 20, 2007
http://tinyurl.com/yvh7t5
"'Jena Six' defendant convicted," Town Talk, June 29, 2007
http://tinyurl.com/ysxtgg
NPR: Searching for Justice in Jena 6 Case (streaming audio)
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11756302
Democracy Now! - The case of the Jena Six ...
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/10/1413220
Too Sense: Free The Jena Six Now
http://halfricanrevolution.blogspot.com/2007/07/free-jena-six-now.html
While Seated: Jena Six
http://www.whileseated.org/photo/003244.shtml
Nooses, attacks and jail for black students in Jena Louisiana
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/6/28/144445/384
Justice In Jena, by Jordan Flaherty
http://www.zmag.org/content/print_article.cfm?itemID=12783§ionID=30
The Perpetrator becomes the Prosecutor (and other related entries)
http://friendsofjustice.wordpress.com/blog/
'Stealth racism' stalks deep South
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/this_world/6685441.stm

Cat Cam

2007-07-16T20:28:00.000-05:00

Cat with camera... embedded reporting? first-person pouncing? kitty reality tv?

http://mfrost.typepad.com/cute_overload/2007/07/mr-lee-cat-cam.html

Honey, You're the Bomb!

2007-06-13T12:53:00.000-05:00

This just is too hilarious: http://cbs5.com/topstories/local_story_159222541.html:

Jun 8, 2007 9:03 pm US/Pacific

Pentagon Confirms It Sought To Build A 'Gay Bomb'

Hank Plante
Reporting

(CBS 5) BERKELEY A Berkeley watchdog organization that tracks military spending said it uncovered a strange U.S. military proposal to create a hormone bomb that could purportedly turn enemy soldiers into homosexuals and make them more interested in sex than fighting.

Pentagon officials on Friday confirmed to CBS 5 that military leaders had considered, and then subsquently rejected, building the so-called "Gay Bomb."

Related Content:
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Edward Hammond, of Berkeley's Sunshine Project, had used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain a copy of the proposal from the Air Force's Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio.

As part of a military effort to develop non-lethal weapons, the proposal suggested, "One distasteful but completely non-lethal example would be strong aphrodisiacs, especially if the chemical also caused homosexual behavior."

The documents show the Air Force lab asked for $7.5 million to develop such a chemical weapon.

"The Ohio Air Force lab proposed that a bomb be developed that contained a chemical that would cause enemy soldiers to become gay, and to have their units break down because all their soldiers became irresistably attractive to one another," Hammond said after reviewing the documents.

"The notion was that a chemical that would probably be pleasant in the human body in low quantities could be identified, and by virtue of either breathing or having their skin exposed to this chemical, the notion was that soliders would become gay," explained Hammond.

The Pentagon told CBS 5 that the proposal was made by the Air Force in 1994.

"The Department of Defense is committed to identifying, researching and developing non-lethal weapons that will support our men and women in uniform," said a DOD spokesperson, who indicated that the "gay bomb" idea was quickly dismissed.

However, Hammond said the government records he obtained suggest the military gave the plan much stronger consideration than it has acknowledged.

"The truth of the matter is it would have never come to my attention if it was dismissed at the time it was proposed," he said. "In fact, the Pentagon has used it repeatedly and subsequently in an effort to promote non-lethal weapons, and in fact they submitted it to the highest scientific review body in the country for them to consider."

Military officials insisted Friday to CBS 5 that they are not currently working on any such idea and that the past plan was abandoned.

Gay community leaders in California said Friday that they found the notion of a "gay bomb" both offensive and almost laughable at the same time.

"Throughout history we have had so many brave men and women who are gay and lesbian serving the military with distinction," said Geoff Kors of Equality California. "So, it's just offensive that they think by turning people gay that the other military would be incapable of doing their job. And its absurd because there's so much medical data that shows that sexual orientation is immutable and cannot be changed."

Transcaninism?

2007-06-13T11:33:00.000-05:00

From the NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/12/science/12dog.html?ei=5087%0A&em=&en=cd6b2d01dc358c8b&ex=1181793600&pagewanted=all

June 12, 2007
The DNA Age
As Breeders Test DNA, Dogs Become Guinea Pigs
By AMY HARMON

FORT MOTT STATE PARK, N.J. — When mutant, muscle-bound puppies started showing up in litters of champion racing whippets, the breeders of the normally sleek dogs invited scientists to take DNA samples at race meets here and across the country. They hoped to find a genetic cause for the condition and a way to purge it from the breed.

It worked. “Bully whippets,” as the heavyset dogs are known, turn out to have a genetic mutation that enhances muscle development. And breeders may not want to eliminate the “bully” gene after all. The scientists found that the same mutation that pumps up some whippets makes others among the fastest dogs on the track.

With a DNA screening test on the way, “We’re going to keep the speed and lose the bullies,” Helena James, a whippet breeder in Vancouver, British Columbia, said.

Free of most of the ethical concerns — and practical difficulties — associated with the practice of eugenics in humans, dog breeders are seizing on new genetic research to exert dominion over the canine gene pool. Companies with names like Vetgen and Healthgene have begun offering dozens of DNA tests to tailor the way dogs look, improve their health and, perhaps soon, enhance their athletic performance.

But as dog breeders apply scientific precision to their age-old art, they find that the quest for genetic perfection comes with unforeseen consequences. And with DNA tests on their way for humans, the lessons of intervening in the nature of dogs may ultimately bear as much on us as on our best friends.

“We’re on the verge of a real radical shift in the way we apply genetics in our society,” said Mark Neff, associate director of the veterinary genetics laboratory at the University of California, Davis. “It’s better to be first confronted with some of these issues when they concern our pets than when they concern us.”

Some Labrador breeders are using DNA tests for coat color to guarantee exotic silver-coated retrievers. Mastiff breeders test for shaggy fur to avoid “fluffies,” the long-haired whelps occasionally born to short-haired parents.

Next up, geneticists say, could be tests for big dogs, small dogs, curly-tailed dogs, dogs with the keenest senses of smell and dogs that cock their heads endearingly when they look at you.

Scientists who recently completed the first map of a dog genome (of a boxer named Tasha) are now soliciting samples from dog owners across the world to uncover the genetic basis for a slew of other traits.

Some discoveries grow out of government-financed research aimed at improving human health. Others are paid for by breed clubs carrying out their mission to better their breeds. By screening their dogs’ DNA for desirable and undesirable traits that might appear in their offspring, breeders can make more informed decisions about which dogs to — or not to — mate.

But because genes are often tied to multiple traits, scientists warn, deliberate selection of certain ones can backfire. The gene responsible for those silver-coated Labradors, for example, is tied to skin problems.

With the genetic curtain lifted, breeders also take on a heavier burden for the consequences of their choices. Whippet breeders who continue to mate fast dogs with one another, for instance, now do so knowing they may have to destroy the unwelcome bullies such pairings often produce.

Moreover, the prospect of races being won by dogs intentionally bred to have a genetic advantage may bring new attention to the way that genes contribute to canine — and human — achievement, even when the genetic deck is not stacked. Inborn abilities once attributed to something rather mystical seem to lose a certain standing when connected to specific genes.

A mutation similar to the one that makes some whippets faster also exists in humans: a sliver of genetic code that regulates muscle development, is missing.

“It would be extremely interesting to do tests on the track finalists at the Olympics,” said Elaine Ostrander, the scientist at the National Institutes of Health who discovered that the fastest whippets had a single defective copy of the myostatin gene, while “bullies” had two.

“But we wouldn’t know what to do with the information,” Ms. Ostrander said. “Are we going to segregate the athletes who have the mutation to run separately?” For the moment, it is whippet owners who find themselves on the edge of that particular bioethical frontier.

It was not exactly news to breeders that speed is an inherited trait: whippets were developed in the late 1800s specifically for racing. But knowing that one of her dogs was sired by a carrier of the gene, said Jen Jensen, a whippet owner in Fair Oaks, Calif., makes its championships seem “less earned.” Ms. Jensen’s suggestion that a DNA test be required for all dogs and that the fastest ones without the mutation be judged and raced separately, however, has not gone over well.

At a recent race here in southern New Jersey, some whippet owners wanted the mutation eliminated altogether, even if that meant fewer fast dogs. But as the dogs pounded after a lure at 35 miles per hour, several owners allowed that they would prefer a whippet with the gene for speed.

“It’s more fun having fast dogs than slow dogs,” said Libby Kirchner, of Glassboro, N.J.

The headaches are enough to make some breeders long for the time when decisions about breeding were dominated by intuition and pedigree charts. Selecting a mate, they say, was meant to involve mystery — in any species.

“It makes it so there’s no creative expression,” said Cheryl Shomo, of Chesapeake, Va. “Now everyone’s just going to do the obvious thing.”

Even so, many veteran breeders welcome the transparency the tests confer. Because while like tends to beget like, it doesn’t always work that way.

Mary-Jo Winters, a poodle breeder, uses a DNA coat-color test to ensure there are no genes for brown fur lurking beneath her black-and-cream-colored dogs.

“I don’t want brown,” said Ms. Winters. “It’s not my thing.”

Judy Pritchard, a Doberman breeder in Toledo, Wash., screens dogs she is considering breeding for a gene responsible for von Willibrand disease, a bleeding disease like hemophilia that also affects humans.

DNA tests, Ms. Pritchard said, “are the greatest tools that have been offered to dog breeders since the beginning of dogs. You need to use them to improve the breed.”

Many breeders hope this new effort to corral nature will weed out the numerous recessive diseases that plague purebred dogs after generations of human-imposed inbreeding. But some question the wisdom of escalating intervention. Mark Derr, an author who has written about the history of dog breeding, urges everyone to reconsider the goal of genetic purity.

“I always use dogs as the example of why we don’t want to be mucking around with our own genome,” Mr. Derr said. “These people are trying to use DNA tests to solve problems of their own making.”

Still, some proponents of using the DNA palette are proposing to go even further. Dr. Neff, the University of California researcher, has proposed screening successive generations of dogs with DNA tests and breeding only those with genes for traits like stamina and scent detection to create a new breed of dogs to patrol subways and airports. , It could be done within a few years, he said, instead of the centuries it took shepherds to breed the sheepdogs that patrol their flocks.

Even those who want to exert more direct control over dog DNA, however, agree that no genetic test can predict the intangible qualities that make a dog great.

If a dog does not have the spirit to run a race, it is not going to win, said Betsy Browder, a whippet owner in College Station, Tex.

“ ‘Keenness’ is what we call it,” she said. “Just like you can have a human athlete who’s really lazy, and all the genes in the world aren’t going to help.”

FDA says gay men still can’t donate blood

2007-06-07T14:15:00.001-05:00

FDA wants to prevent HIV spread; Red Cross, others say it’s ‘unwarranted’

The Associated Press

Updated: 4:38 p.m. ET May 23, 2007

WASHINGTON - Gay men remain banned for life from donating blood, the
government said Wednesday, leaving in place — for now — a 1983
prohibition meant to prevent the spread of HIV through transfusions.

The Food and Drug Administration reiterated its long-standing policy on
its Web site Wednesday, more than a year after the Red Cross and two
other blood groups criticized the policy as “medically and scientifically
unwarranted.”

“I am disappointed, I must confess,” said Dr. Celso Bianco, executive
vice president of America’s Blood Centers, whose members provide nearly
half the nation’s blood supply.

Before giving blood, all men are asked if they have had sex, even once,
with another man since 1977. Those who say they have are permanently
banned from donating. The FDA said those men are at increased risk of
infection by HIV that can be transmitted to others by blood transfusion.

New, improved HIV tests
In March 2006, the Red Cross, the international blood association AABB
and America’s Blood Centers proposed replacing the lifetime ban with a
one-year deferral following male-to-male sexual contact. New and improved
tests, which can detect HIV-positive donors within just 10 to 21 days of
infection, make the lifetime ban unnecessary, the blood groups told the
FDA.

In a document posted Wednesday, the FDA said it would change its policy
if given data that show doing so wouldn’t pose a “significant and
preventable” risk to blood recipients.

“It is a way of saying, ‘Whatever was presented to us was not sufficient
to make us change our minds,”’ Bianco said.

The FDA said HIV tests currently in use are highly accurate, but still
cannot detect the virus 100 percent of the time. The estimated HIV risk
from a unit of blood is currently about one per 2 million in the United
States, according to the agency.

Critics of the exclusionary policy said it bars potential healthy donors,
despite the increasing need for donated blood, and discriminates against
gays. The FDA recognized the policy defers many healthy donors but
rejected the suggestion it’s discriminatory.

Anyone who’s used intravenous drugs or been paid for sex also is
permanently barred from donating blood.

© 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not
be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/18827137/

UCSD controversy/TA dismissal

2007-06-05T22:27:00.000-05:00

Dear Friends,

Last Wednesday 300+ students in the Dimensions of Culture Program (DOC) at UCSD's Thurgood Marshall College walked out in protest of the wrongful dismissal of two long-time DOC teaching assistants, Benjamin Balthaser and Scott Boehm. Students associated with the Lumumba-Zapata Coalition organized a march and a demonstration outside the Chancellor's Office, which was successful in drawing the Chancellor and other administrators outside to discuss the on-going controversy, including the university's unwillingness to grant student representation on the committee recently established to review academic programs at TMC, including DOC.

(FYI: DOC is an undergraduate writing program that has traditionally provided a systematic critique of structural inequality in U.S. society, paying particular attention to the intersections of race, class, gender and sexuality, while emphasizing social justice. In recent years, the program has drifted away from its original mission, and professors, lecturers and teaching assistants who have protested have been pushed out of the program.)

Here is a link to the video footage of the march and demonstration:

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=6898F44159F4D9C2

On the video you will notice that the Vice-Chancellor of Undergraduate Education Mark Appelbaum clearly states that Balthaser and Boehm were not rehired for next year not because of their political activities, implying that this decision was based upon their teaching performance. This is in sharp contradiction to what Balthaser and Boehm were told during their "interviews" with DOC Director Abe Shragge, who made it absolutely clear that his decision had nothing to do with their teaching performance—which was exemplary, and included teaching awards. This also contradicts what UCSD Human Resources stated during the first meeting between UCSD and the United Auto Workers, who filed a grievance with the university over the ousting of the two TAs. In that meeting, which took place two days after the student walkout, UCSD Human Resources stated that the teaching practices of Balthaser and Boehm were not the reason for their dismissal, but that it was their public critique of the DOC program that resulted in their ousting.

Also on the video you will see Chancellor Marye Anne Fox pledge to look into the matter and to make sure a just outcome in the case is reached. Yet, as of today—two months since the news first broke—the university has failed to right the wrong done to these two TAs. If free speech and academic freedom mean anything at UCSD this decision must be reversed. If the Chancellor really cares about justice, if she really cares about the concerns of students, if she really cares about campus equity and critical multicultural education, if she really cares about the quality of undergraduate education she should intervene to stop this on-going injustice and show that she means what she says.

We are running out of time, the academic year is almost over. PLEASE DO ONE LAST THING to help the Lumumba-Zapata Coalition's campaign before the quarter is over. After you watch the video footage, cut and paste the following message and send it to the Chancellor ASAP (please cc the LZC at lumumbazapata@gmail.com):

Chancellor Marye Anne Fox
chancellor@ucsd.edu
(858) 534-3135

Dear Chancellor Fox,

I have witnessed your pledge to look into the non-re-hiring of Benjamin Balthaser and Scott Boehm as teaching assistants in the Dimensions of Culture Program for the upcoming academic year. I have heard you vow to ensure a just outcome is reached in their case. Because UCSD Human Resources stated during their first grievance hearing that their dismissal from DOC has nothing to do with their job performance, but for their public critique of changes to the DOC program—which is exactly what DOC Director Abraham Shragge told Balthaser and Boehm during their "interviews" for re-hire—I call on you to reverse the decision to dismiss them from DOC on the basis of 1st amendment free speech rights, the AAUP-recognized academic freedom of graduate student teachers, and most of all, because UCSD should be a educational site
of critical inquiry and debate, not a place where drawing attention to a problem—which TMC Provost Havis himself has recognized by establishing a committee to review DOC—results in disciplinary actions. I believe UCSD should be a university that values critical thinking, principled dissent, and passion for providing the best education possible to students. Most of all, I believe UCSD should be a university that respects all of its workers, and I ask you to intervene on the behalf of Balthaser and Boehm immediately to prove that UCSD is such an institution, and that UCSD's "Principles of Community" are upheld, rather than exposed as empty rhetoric. You have the power to rescue UCSD's reputation, which has been degraded because of this situation. I strongly urge you to do so immediately.

Sincerely,

Working description for ENGL 200

2007-04-29T20:40:00.000-05:00

I'm slated to teach English 200: Reading Literature next year, in the fall. The course is a kind of overgrown "literature appreciation" class -- not even a survey course, per se. So, I have to figure out something fun to do, that hits a bunch of different things, and that focuses on reading for pleasure and for knowledge about the world. Or some such.

Here's my working course:

English 200: Literatures of the Fantastic

Ursula K. Leguin asks in a now famous speech and essay, “Why are Americans afraid of dragons?” Central to her question and her argument about the reading, enjoyment, understanding, and analysis of literature, particularly fantasy and science fiction, is an engagement with the imagination, with other worlds, with our own world, with recovering the value of these things, and with growing up but not outgrowing our desire for the fantastic. She says, “For fantasy is true, of course. It isn’t factual, but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it too, and that is precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy. They know that its truth challenges, even threatens, all that is false, all that is phony, unnecessary, and trivial in the life they have let themselves be forced into living. They are afraid of dragons, because they are afraid of freedom.” This class will take up Leguin’s fascinating and provocative question and explore a long yet often dismissed or narrowly defined tradition of “fantastic” literature (and other media) including in whole or in excerpt Homer, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, H.P. Lovecraft, J.R.R. Tolkien, Allen Ginsberg, Octavia Butler, William Gibson, Nisi Shawl, and J.K. Rowling.

Required Texts:
Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
English 200 Course Packet.

Fire!

2007-04-21T12:12:00.000-05:00

From http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/6297149.stm...

US military unveils heat-ray gun

The gun uses a large dish mounted on a Humvee vehicle The US military has given the first public display of what it says is a revolutionary heat-ray weapon to repel enemies or disperse hostile crowds.
Called the Active Denial System, it projects an invisible high energy beam that produces a sudden burning feeling.
Military officials, who say the gun is harmless, believe it could be used as a non-lethal way of making enemies surrender their weapons.
Officials said there was wide-ranging military interest in the technology.

How the heat-ray gun works
"This is a breakthrough technology that's going to give our forces a capability they don't now have," defence official Theodore Barna told Reuters news agency.
"We expect the services to add it to their tool kit. And that could happen as early as 2010."
'Blast from an oven'
The prototype weapon was demonstrated at the Moody Air Force Base in Georgia.
A beam was fired from a large rectangular dish mounted on a Humvee vehicle.
The beam has a reach of up to 500m (550 yds), much further than existing non-lethal weapons like rubber bullets.
It can penetrate clothes, suddenly heating up the skin of anyone in its path to 50C.
But it penetrates the skin only to a tiny depth - enough to cause discomfort but no lasting harm, according to the military.
A Reuters journalist who volunteered to be shot with the beam described the sensation as similar to a blast from a very hot oven - too painful to bear without diving for cover.
Crowd control
Military officials said the weapon was one of the key technologies of the future.
"Non-lethal weapons are important for the escalation of force, especially in the environments our forces are operating in," said Marine Col Kirk Hymes, director of the development programme.
The weapon could potentially be used for dispersing hostile crowds in conflict zones such as Iraq or Afghanistan.
It would mean that troops could take effective steps to move people along without resorting to measures such as rubber bullets - bridging the gap between "shouting and shooting", Col Hymes said.
A similar "non-lethal" weapon, Silent Guardian, is being developed by US company Raytheon.

HOW HEAT-RAY GUN WORKS

1 360-degree operation for maximum effect
Antenna, linked to transmitter unit, can be mounted on vehicle
Automatic target tracking
2 Antenna sealed against dust and can withstand bullet fire3 Invisible beam of millimetre-wave energy can travel over 500m4 Heat energy up to 54C (130F) penetrates less than 0.5mm of skin
Manufacturers say this avoids injury, although long-term effects are not known

Sharks with Lasers?

2007-04-13T15:43:00.000-05:00

From: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1110AP_Anti_Terror_Dolphins.html?source=mypi

Navy shows off anti-terror dolphins
By THOMAS WATKINSASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

SAN DIEGO -- In a world of high-tech sensors and underwater robotics, Koa the bottlenose dolphin and others like her may still be the Navy's best line of defense against terrorists in scuba gear.
"They are better than anything we have ever made," said Mike Rothe, head of science for the Navy's marine mammal program, which trains dolphins and sea lions to guard military installations.
About 75 dolphins and 25 sea lions are housed at Naval Base Point Loma in San Diego Harbor as part of a Navy program to teach them to detect terrorists and mines underwater.
The base briefly opened its doors to the media Thursday for the first time since the start of the war in Iraq. The display came a few weeks after the Navy announced plans to send up to 30 dolphins and sea lions to patrol the waters of Washington state's Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor, which is home to nuclear submarines, ships and laboratories.
Both species can find mines and spot swimmers in murky waters. Working in unison, the dolphins can drop a flashing light near a mine or a swimmer. The sea lions carry in their mouths a cable and a handcuff-like device that clamps onto a terrorist's leg. Sailors can then use the cable to reel in the terrorist.
The Navy's sea mammal program started in the late 1950s and grew to comprise 140 animals during the Cold War.
Dolphins helped protect a pier in the Vietnam War. The last time the marine mammals were deployed overseas was in 2003 in the Iraqi harbor of Umm Qasr, where they located underwater mines and cleared a path for Marines to land, officials say.
They also were used in San Diego in 1996, when they patrolled the bay during the Republican National Convention.
Swimmers planting bombs pose a real threat, said Cmdr. Jon Wood, who went to Iraq with the mammals. He said there were several cases of guerrillas laying charges on floating objects in Vietnam.
By the late 1990s, Navy officials began phasing out the program, expecting technology to take over. But that still has not happened, and dolphins and sea lions will be used until at least 2012.
Animal rights activists worry that the dolphins and sea lions sent to Washington state could be harmed by the cold water, and worry that the animals might transmit diseases to the area's killer whales.
Dr. Stephanie Wong, a military veterinarian, said the dolphins are closely monitored for any signs of disease.
---
On the Net:
Navy Marine Mammal Program:
http://www.spawar.navy.mil/sandiego/technology/mammals/

Race and World of Warcraft

2007-02-19T13:19:00.000-05:00

Here's my abstract for submission for the "Race and Video Games" conference at University of California, Riverside:

"Looking for Ophera Windfury: Imagining Race (and Sexuality) in World of Warcraft"

Given the incredible global popularity of Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft, with a playership now exceeding six million worldwide, there is still a dearth of scholarship on and cultural critique of the game, particularly looking at race and sexuality. This paper attempts to identify and interrogate the "racial logics" of WoW, beyond a close-reading of fantasy race as allusion or allegory for real world race, to begin to theorize how race is visualized, articulated, and cued. In other words, in a game of fantasy race, how and where and why might actual race and racism be deployed, negotiated, disguised, and taken for granted. Lisa Nakamura, author of Cybertypes, argues, "When users go online, race dwells in the mediating spaces between the virtual and the real, the visible and the invisible" (144). How then can we challenge and explore this mediating space? Furthermore, in the imagining (perhaps intrusion) of real world race into the game in ways that fix them or to borrow Nakamura's construction cybertype them, how might other categories, such as sexuality, be left unsettled or open? Looking at character creation, game play, and game narratives, this paper argues for a productive opportunity in the play of, with, and play in race and sexuality to discover "disruptive moments of recognization and misrecognition" (Nakamura 144) that can offer "subversive potential in regard to oppressive notions of racial [and sexual] identity" (146).

GLMA Urges FDA to Revise Blood Donation Policy

2007-02-03T15:40:00.000-05:00

Current FDA Guidelines Banning Donation by Gay Men Called “Dangerous, Outdated,
Unscientific”

SAN FRANCISCO – The Gay and Lesbian Medical Association today called for the
Food and Drug Administration to revise its blood donation policy regarding men
who have sex with men. Within the past year the American Red Cross and other
organizations that collect donated blood, including the American Association of
Blood Banks and America's Blood Centers, have encouraged the FDA to review a
policy in effect since the early 1980s that prohibits men who have sex with men
– regardless of sexual activity, safer-sex practices or HIV status – from
donating blood. The groups say that the likelihood of receiving a unit of
HIV-infected blood is one in two million and that blood banks use nucleic acid
testing, which detects HIV and hepatitis earlier and much more accurately than
older testing methods.

GLMA Executive Director Joel Ginsberg stated, “Two decades ago, when the agent
that causes AIDS was unknown, these guidelines might have made sense based on
the very limited data available at that time. Today, however, all donated units
of blood are tested, not just for antibodies to HIV, but for the presence of the
virus itself. These guidelines, which prohibit any man who has had sex with
another man since 1977, have the effect of excluding all gay men from donating
blood.” Ginsberg continued that the epidemiology of the HIV epidemic has changed
and that heterosexual women are now the fastest-growing demographic group to be
diagnosed with HIV infection.

“Rational blood donation guidelines need to be founded upon the best
evidence-based science and the behavior of individuals, not upon archaic data
and preconceptions about groups of people. The FDA’s current guidelines imply
that gay men are the primary agents for the spread of HIV, while giving
heterosexuals a false sense of security about their sexual behavior and
responsibility. These are two very dangerous messages for the FDA to be
reinforcing,” Ginsberg concluded. “We urge the FDA to revise these outdated
and unscientific blood donation guidelines immediately.”

– 30 –

The Gay and Lesbian Medical Association (GLMA) is the world's largest
association of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) healthcare
professionals. For 25 years, GLMA has been working to ensure equality in health
care for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals and healthcare
professionals through advocacy, education, research and referrals.

CFP: INTIMATE VISIONS:SEXUALITY, REPRESENTATION AND VISUAL CULTURE

2007-02-03T15:38:00.000-05:00

INTIMATE VISIONS:SEXUALITY, REPRESENTATION AND VISUAL CULTURE

Edited by Giovanni Porfido (Durham) and Róisín Ryan-Flood (Uni of Essex)Special issue call for papersPapers are invited for a special issue of the journal Sexualities on thetopic 'Intimate Visions: Sexuality, Representation and Visual Culture'.Recent decades have witnessed an increase in images of lesbian, gay,bisexual and transgendered people in popular culture. Groundbreakingshows such as Ellen and Queer as Folk led the way for the mainstreamingof hitherto excluded identities and intimacies. This special issue seeksto explore the implications of this expansion of visual regimes.Questions are raised regarding the politics of this cultural visibility.For example, what kinds of intimacies are created, assumed and curtailed?How do these images influence the formation of subjectivities? Do theyaffect heteronormative notions of the public and the private? Whatspatial dynamics do they suggest? Do such images reconfigure prevailingunderstandings of intimacy? What erasures do they signify? Finally, whatchallenges, achievements and dilemmas do they represent? Contributionsthat address the following topics are particularly welcome:'race'/ethnicity, butch lesbians, commodification, parenting, queerteens.

Papers should be submitted in the standard Sexualities format[http://sexualities.sagepub.com/] by March 31st 2007 to:
Dr. Róisín Ryan-Flood
Department of Sociology
University of Essex
Wivenhoe Park
Colchester C04 3SQ
Tel.: +44-(0)1206 873551
Email: rflood @ essex.ac.uk

CFP: Race and Video Games (2/16/07; (dis)junctions, 4/6/07-4/7/07)

2007-02-01T15:48:00.001-05:00

Race and Video Games

This call for papers is for a proposed panel to be held at =
(dis)junctions 2007: Malappropriation Nation, the University of =
California Riverside's 14th Annual Humanities Graduate Conference on =
April 6-7, 2007.=20

This panel will explore race and video games with the intention of =
mapping out some of the more pressing critical issues surrounding the =
inclusion or exclusion of race in games. The game industry and game =
studies are both interesting and exciting, but the discourse on race has =
been sparse and focused primarily on forms of reductive representation. =
Therefore, this panel is dedicated to critical works that push beyond a =
focus on representation. Panelists are sought that attempt to describe =
and analyze the visualization and political implications of race in =
games and game cultures.

Potential contributions may involve, but are not limited to, some of the =
following concepts:

1. Excessiveness
2. Invisibility/Visibility=20
3. Minstrelsy
4. Political economy of games
5. Racial performance/passing
6. Logics of race at the interface and beyond
7. Default whiteness
8. Token representation
9. Blackness, Asianness, etc.
10. Masculinity and race
11. Race and gender
12. Orientalism
13. Character creation
14. Race in game design
15. Language issues
16. Cultural borrowing
17. Commodification

Submissions are encouraged that deal with any game, platform, genre, =
theme, or era, as well as any aspect of game culture itself (fan =
networks, review sites, manuals, peripherals, and so on).

Additionally, submissions that deal with race from different global =
perspectives are of great interest.

Abstracts of 250-300 words should be e-mailed to Tanner Higgin at =
thigg001@ucr.edu by February 16, 2007 (text in the body of the message; =
please no attachments).=20

So Sayeth Stan Lee

2006-12-29T15:41:00.001-05:00

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6684820

New quarter's composition class...

2006-12-29T15:17:00.000-05:00

Against my better judgment, I have reinvented my composition class for this upcoming winter quarter. Well, to be fair, it's not a total reinvention of the wheel. I have cobbled together a bunch of things from various courses I've taught in the past. I have to write new assignments, but the rest is lifted from my comp classes at the University of Maryland and the classes I taught last year at UW.

I've changed up a few things: added more short assignments, cut one of the major papers, and scaled back the readings. I want to get back to a slew of 2-page response papers (claim precis type stuff) that help the students practice the one skill they always have trouble with: generating complex arguments. Then lead up to a slightly longer major paper (6-8 pages rather than 5-7) that requires a bit more outside research. It should be a rolling class, and I get to use many more examples from stories, advertising, television, websites, and film.

ENGL111M: Everyday Media: Reading, Writing, and Critiquing

A central requirement for this class is a well-developed curiosity about the world, about the culture we live in, and about the cultural productions we imagine, produce, and consume. Here the definition of literature is expanded to include more than just written texts. In addition to writing, photographs, advertising, television, websites, and film will be our artifacts, our texts of study and meditation and analysis. We are surrounded by, bombarded with, and often uncritical participants in “everyday media” and their concomitant technologies. This class, in broad strokes, will investigate and interrogate and make visible the ideological, material, and cultural manifestations of “everyday media,” primarily in the US, through the lenses of cultural studies, visual literacy, and writing. Lister and Wells, authors of “Seeing Beyond Belief,” argue for a curiosity, a methodology for unpacking cultural productions; they say, “Cultural Studies allows the analyst to attend to the many moments within the cycle of production, circulation and consumption of [a text] through which meanings accumulate, slip and shift.” They argue that our understandings of identities, meanings, and power, as well as the intersections of cultural and social locations like race, gender, class, and sexuality, can be excavated through the analysis of the texts we create and consume. This class will spend the quarter reading, thinking, writing about “everyday media” and how and what these texts argue, reveal, narrate, hide, perpetuate, and complicate the world we live in.

New Jersey Courts Support Gay Marriage

2006-10-26T11:23:00.000-05:00

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6083744.stm

www.darkjustgotfun.com

2006-10-20T13:53:00.000-05:00

This is really fun: M&M'S 50 DarkMovies Hidden in a Painting! To play, you'll navigate through the masterpiece and search for clues to 50 dark movie titles. It's as much fun as a bag of New M&M'S Dark Chocolate Candies! Play it now and see if you can find them all! Go to: www.darkjustgotfun.com

Studds, 1st openly gay congressman, dies

2006-10-14T13:00:00.000-05:00

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061014/ap_on_re_us/obit_studds

My new composition course debuts...

2006-09-25T01:10:00.000-05:00

ENGL111: Imagining Cyberspace: Representations of Cyberspace in Literature, Film, and Culture

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF WHEN YOU HEAR THE WORD CYBERSPACE? WHAT DO YOU SEE? WHAT DO YOU KNOW? Since the inception of the Internet and the World Wide Web and the discipline of ‘digital studies’, the notion and imagining of cyberspace has been deeply celebrated, contested, and colonized. Long before Keanu Reaves donned sunglasses and leather trenchcoat, William Gibson in the early 1980s coined the term ‘cyberspace’ and jacked the culture into the (many-layered) world of cyberpunk. From Burning Chrome, Gibson describes cyberspace, describes the matrix as “an abstract representation of the relationships between data system...bright geometries...Towers and fields of it ranged in the colorless nonspace...the electronic consensus-hallucination...” So what is cyberspace? Is it a place? Is it a space? Is it thought or body or machine or all of the above? Cyberspace has been touted as the ultimate frontier, the promise land where all ground is level for all people, the time and place where you can be anything you want. Cyberspace has been criticized for its lack of definition, its commercialization, its slipperiness when it comes to identity, community, and access. Cyberspace has even been demonized as the shadowy lair of thieves, perverts, sexual predators, terrorists, and subversives. Is cyberspace any of these things? All of these things and more?

This class, in broad strokes, will investigate and interrogate the idea, the material, and the manifestations of cyberspace, primarily in the US, through the lenses of literature and writing. This class will look at, explore, and tease apart what we believe to be a monolithic, all-powerful (and now completely naturalized) construction and convention and take into consideration historical context, commodification, technology, and the intersection of race, gender, class, and identity on- and off-line. We will spend the quarter reading, thinking, writing about (and surfing, mining, and clicking) cyberspace in literature, in film, in theory, and in everyday use. In other words, we will look at texts about cyberspace and cyberspace itself as text.

(The course is really ambitious. It's still a composition class with a literature component. I'm going to have my students reading a lot. It'll be a challenge for them and for me. This will be the first time I've taught a "digital studies" class. The course website is up as well: http://staff.washington.edu/changed -- it lists all the readings.)

2006-08-08T11:01:00.000-05:00

Awesome...

"Designer creates floating bed"
Mon Aug 7, 8:31 AM ET

A young Dutch architect has created a floating bed which hovers above the ground through magnetic force and comes with a price tag of 1.2 million euros ($1.54 million).

Janjaap Ruijssenaars took inspiration for the bed -- a sleek black platform, which took six years to develop and can double as a dining table or a plinth -- from the mysterious monolith in Stanley Kubrick's 1968 cult film "2001: A Space Odyssey."

"No matter where you live all architecture is dictated by gravity. I wondered whether you could make an object, a building or a piece of furniture where this is not the case -- where another power actually dictates the image," Ruijssenaars said.

Magnets built into the floor and into the bed itself repel each other, pushing the bed up into the air. Thin steel cables tether the bed in place.

"It is not comfortable at the moment," admits Ruijssenaars, adding it needs cushions and bedclothes before use.

Although people with piercings should have no problem sleeping on the bed, Ruijssenaars advises them against entering the magnetic field between the bed and the floor.

They could find their piercing suddenly tugged toward one of the magnets.

2006-04-28T18:04:00.000-05:00

THE LOS ANGELES QUEER STUDIES CONFERENCE 2006 CALL FOR PAPERS

The 2006 conference will be held Friday and Saturday, October 20-21, 2006 at UCLA's Royce Hall.

Participants will include:
Janet Jakobsen
David Roman
Jennifer Terry
Michelle Matlock will present the first westcoast performance of the “Mammy Project.”
The Williams Institute at UCLA Law School will sponsor a panel on recent sexual orientation law and public policy scholarship.

CALL FOR PAPERS

Since one of the principal goals of the conference is to encourage the exchange of ideas across academic generations, we invite participation of graduate students and faculty scholars. Please send your proposal (not more than 850 words) for a 20-minute presentation on any topic relating to the study of sexuality and gender and a cv (not more than 2 pages) to one of the addresses below. If you would like to organize a panel of three speakers, please feel free to do so.

DEADLINE FOR PROPOSALS: June 30, 2006

Submissions by US Postal Service:

UCLA Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies Program 1101 Hershey Hall Box 951384 Los Angeles, CA 90095-1384

Email submissions: lgbs@humnet.ucla.edu

For further information, please contact the UCLA LGBTS office at 310 206-0516 or lgbs@humnet.ucla.edu or www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/lgbts/

Organized by the UCLA Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies Program
Stacy Macias
LGBTS Program Assistant
********************
UCLA Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies
Office: 1101 Hershey Hall
Email: lgbs@humnet.ucla.edu
Phone: (310) 206-0516
Web: www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/lgbts/

Octavia Butler, 1947-2006

2006-02-27T19:42:00.000-05:00

Octavia Butler, one of the country's leading science fiction authors, died Friday after a fall outside her home in Lake Forest Park, Seattle, WA. The African American was the first science fiction author to receive a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant.

Read the full article at: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/books/260959_butlerobit26ww.html

Oh, to be tagged...

2006-02-23T12:57:00.000-05:00

LISTS OF 3

Three books I can read over and over:

1) The Lord of the Rings (Tolkien)
2) Harry Potter books (Rowling)
3) Shakespeare's plays

Three places I've lived:

1) Silver Spring, MD (hometown)
2) Mission District, San Francisco (my second hometown)
3) Capitol Hill, Seattle (my third and current home)

Three TV shows I love:

1) Buffy the Vampire Slayer
2) Smallville
3) Supernatural

Three highly regarded and recommended TV shows that I've never watched a single minute of:

1) Gray's Anatomy
2) Lost
3) Oz

Three places I've vacationed:

1) Taipei, Taiwan
2) Grand Junction, Colorado, US
3) Jacksonville, NC, US

Three of my favorite dishes:

1) most kinds of sushi
2) my mother's (and now my) world famous chinese dumplings
3) sauteed mussels and garlic

Three sites I visit daily:

1) myuw.washington.edu
2) www.livejournal.com/users/writerpunk
3) www.sluggy.com

Three places I would rather be right now:

1) San Francisco, CA
2) with my friends in Maryland
3) at home playing WoW

Three bloggers I am tagging:

1) Things As They Are (Marc Ruppel)
2) Sweet Machine (Laura P.)
3) High Yella (Sydney L.)

Uncyclopedia

2006-02-23T11:52:00.000-05:00

Given the recent critique and defense of www.wikipedia.org, I thought this was an amusing site: http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_%28Books%29. I know I use wikipedia all of the time (and do my students) with a grain of salt (which my students don't seem to take).

I-10 Witness Project (Digital Stories)

2006-02-23T11:48:00.000-05:00

A friend of mine, Patrick Strange, a New Orleanian, passed this project on to me months back in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. He writes, "For the last couple of moths, a few of friends and I have been recording the stories of people affected by Hurricane Katrina. We are recording audio in mp3 format and releasing it into the public domain. The project, called I-10 Witness Project, is a non-profit funded by donations and the particular generosity of the Center for Digital Story Telling in Berkeley: http://www.storycenter.org/. Basically, we feel as if the personal stories of the people who were in New Orleans before, during, and after the storm are not being told through conventional media and news sources. Like anyone who loves New Orleans, we believe that not only do these personal accounts deserve a platform, but that they are perhaps the most telling history of the storm and its effects. We are compiling audio clips, photographs, reports, and in-depth stories on the web. Once the recording process is completed, we will then deliver the audio files along with photographs to public archives so people will be able to access them for years to come."

Check it out: http://www.i10witness.com/

Digital Bubble Wrap

2006-02-23T11:46:00.000-05:00

http://www.ankylosaur.com/golf/bubblewrap.swf

Refrigerator Magnets

2006-02-23T11:45:00.000-05:00

http://web.okaygo.co.uk/apps/letters/flashcom/

Word of the Day: Digerati

2005-12-20T13:35:00.000-05:00

www.dictionary.com's word of the day is : digerati -- fun!

ENGL567: Theory and Practice of Composition Portfolio

2005-12-11T17:36:00.000-05:00

In a fit of HTML, I decided to put onlinethe short paper assignments that I wrote for my ENGL567: Theory and Practice of Composition class this past quarter at UW. I figure they show a little bit about what the class was about (which is similar to a pedagogy class I took years back at the University of Maryland called ENGL611) and what I was thinking about in my own teaching practice. Plus, I think it'll make my professor happy! Enjoy!

http://www.edmondchang.com/567a/portfolio.html

Baldwin's /Another Country/: Queering the Surface (a work in progress), Part III

2005-12-08T11:27:00.000-05:00

Continued from: http://queerviewmirror.blogspot.com/2005/12/baldwins-another-country-queering_07.html...

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Another Country is all about skins and full of touches from the very first page, from a destitute and half-asleep Rufus in a movie theatre feeling "caterpillar fingers between his thighs" (3) to the idyllic, tremulous moment when Yves touches Eric "lightly on the elbo, as a very young child might do" (185); from Eric's musing on ostensibly closeted men and their need for somewhere to love "them enough to caress them...in the light, with joy" (212) to the description of New York City with its "rough, gregarious surface" where the multitudes were "continually being jostled, yet longed, at the same time, for the sense of others, for a human touch" (230); from Vivaldo memories of a boy and "wanting to touch the boy, to make the boy laugh, to slap him across his behind" (315) to the very end of the novel, to Yves's arrival in America and the endorsement of his body, his love for Eric, his place for "his passport was eventually stamped and handed back to him" (435), a final touch between nation and subject.

Perhaps the queerest of touches (and the one most focused on) is between Vivaldo and Eric. The consummation of their lust, their love, and most importantly their desire functions as central axis in the novel; it materializes and navigates the terrain of physical, erotic, and identificatory possibilities for the characters as well as the readers and opens a space, a fold where desire can complicate and radicalize social categories. On the surface, the sex, the confessions, the touches between Vivaldo and Eric promise some sort of human and humane truth, liberation, and revelation. The three-page long paragraph sex scene told from Vivaldo's point of view is a many-stroked mix of internal and external confusion, connection, contradictions, and realizations: "This was in honor of Vivaldo, of Vivaldo's body and Vivaldo's need, and Vivaldo trembled as he had never trembled before. And this caress was not entirely pleasant. Vivaldo felt terribly ill at ease, not knowing what was expected of him, or what he could expect from Eric. He pulled Eric up and kissed him on the mouth, kneading Eric's buttocks and stroking his sex. How strange it felt, this violent muscle, stretching and throbbing, so like his own, but belonging to another!" (384). It is a moment of interface, of intersection, of "fluidity between bodies" that does not "take the boundary line of skin for granted" (Ahmed and Stacey 11).

Vivaldo is confronted not only by himself, his skin, his sex but the self, skin, and sex of Eric, of Ida, of Rufus, and of other partners, past and imagined, real and yet to come. As Cohen carefully explains, "Baldwin envisions this sexual climax as a coming-into-consciousness for Vivaldo" (10). Cohen continues, "This consciousness entails a crossing of more than the hetero/homo line, for in having sex with Eric, Vivaldo collapses a whole series of identifications...This sexual connection generates an orgasmic concatenation of identities, whereby Vivaldo conceives of himself as simultaneously gay and straight, male and female, white and black" (11). It is through sex, which for Baldwin is the fullest expression of desire, through erotic touch that Vivaldo finally understands his intercorporeality, his interconnectedness to the world around him; he has learned to "enter himself" (319), to realize the impossibility of giving up his skin, his color, and to finally understand what it might be like to live in another skin, another color--in Baldwin's sense, another country.

Cohen says, "[T]aking 'love' as the revolutionary act, this disordering sexual experience enables Vivaldo provisionally to escape limiting categories...Sex with another man does not function to categorize Vivaldo as 'gay' because such a sexual taxonomy, for Baldwin, is always limiting. Instead, as 'a great revelation,' this sexual act raises his consciousness in an ostensibly universal and 'human' way, emancipating him from the constraints of social classifications" (12). However, rather than read Vivaldo as shuttling between points of binaries or edges of categories, a less reductive reading imagines Vivaldo and the other characters of the novel traversing a web, a landscape, a skinscape of unfolding possibilities. Desire becomes the revolutionary act. Queer sex becomes the revolutionary act. Queer touch becomes the revolutionary act.

But Baldwin's desiring vision is not without risk, without warning. To be unable to recognize one's skin, to be unable to touch another, to be unable to queer sex, love, desire is to disavow interconnection, intercorporeality, and to disrupt the circuits of humanity. Another Country reveals the risk of turning away from desire, from touch through the down and out figure of Rufus. At the start of the novel, Rufus is all too aware of his embodiment, of his skin, of his disconnection from the world around him. He has turned inward, he has removed himself from the chain of desire, and he has been reduced to corporeal meanness, which manifests in both psychic and physical violence to himself and others. Rufus only knows pain:

Yet he was aware, perhaps for the first time in his life, that nothing would stop it, nothing: this was himself. Rufus was aware of every inch of Rufus. He was flesh: flesh, bone, muscle, fluid, orifices, hair, and skin. His body was controlled by laws he did not understand. Nor did he understand what force within his body had driven him into such a desolate place (54).

For Rufus, the city has become a prison, his body a cell, and his skin a boundary. Whatever "laws" or "force" pummeled and pressed him into such a state, Rufus has lost the ability to render complexity in himself and in his relationships; he has settled and sedimented into hard, edged, impenetrable categories, be it "black," "poor," "rapist," or "abject." When desperate with hunger, both for physical nourishment and emotional sustenance, and confronted by a would-be, white, same-sex john, Rufus retreats further into solitary saying, "I'm not the boy you want, mister...I don't have a thing to give you. I don't have nothing to give nobody" (44). Even though the moment prompts his memory to think of Eric, whom he did have something to give in the past, Rufus can only move away, hide in silence, and refuse any chance for exchange, warmth, rejuvenation. In fact, shortly before he commits suicide, Rufus recognizes the possibility for change, for return: "The most impenetrable of mysteries moved in this darkness for less than a second, hinting of reconciliation" (54). It would take less than a second to reach out, to be reached, to touch, to be touched.

Unfortunately, Rufus cannot make the leap of faith, the leap of desire in order to return to the circuit, to reconnect. It is this very reconciliation that Vivaldo realizes too late that might have rescued Rufus. In his very moving confession to Eric, Vivaldo recounts his last moments with Rufus:

I loved Rufus. I loved him, I didn't want him to die. But when he was dead, I thought about it, thought about it -- isn't it funny? I didn't know I'd thought about it as much as I have -- and I wondered, I guess I still wonder, what would have happened if I'd taken him into my arms, if I'd held him, if I hadn't been -- afraid. I was afraid that he wouldn't understand that it was -- only love. Only love. But, oh, Lord, when he died, I thought that maybe I could have saved him if I'd just reached out that quarter of an inch between us on that bed, and held him (342-343).

Touch is reconciliation. Touch is the key to reciprocity, to interface. Rufus's inability to touch or be touched, Vivaldo's confession, and his eventual consummation with Eric all point up the lesson in Another Country not of liberal, mythical, mystifying love but of open, tactile, transforming, transgressive desire. Touch and desire, skin and surface, bodies and identities can only be negotiated through contact, exploration, and reconstitution. In other words, as Probyn reminds us that we must "constantly place ourselves within relations of proximity of different forms of belonging. And at the edge of ourselves we mutate; we become other" (34).

The figure of Rufus is the fly in the ointment for many Baldwin scholars. The angst and decline and disturbing suicide of the novel's queer, black male character has been read as Baldwin's failure to fully embrace a disidentificatory project, a failure to imagine a fulfilled, individuated queer, black, male protagonist. Instead, the transgressive power and potential of the novel is displaced (some would argue misplaced) on a more palatable, bourgeois, white character, Eric. For Cohen, "Baldwin's fantasy of racial mixing and equality...was everywhere deflected onto sexual dynamics. To explore racial conflict as sexual was to bring it to the most private, individual terms Baldwin could imagine; it was to fantasize a relation between people nowhere impeded by an imbalance of power or inequality" (17). Critics of Baldwin recognize the limits placed on the narrative and the subject matter of Another Country by the social, cultural, and historical imperatives and ideologies of the time -- post-War anxiety, shifting gender roles, increased industrialization and capitalization, desegregation and civil rights, and black nationalism -- but offer little forgiveness for the killing off of Rufus. Cohen continues, "[T]he impossibility of representing a person simultaneously gay and black signals the crises of this structure: To be both, like Baldwin himself, was to find oneself impelled contradictorily by both individual volition and social forces. That Another Country cannot sustain a gay black subject...bespeaks the liability of remaining within a liberal humanist ideology" (17).

However, there is a more positive, more forgiving reading of the figure of Rufus. Rather than see lack or absence or failure in Baldwin's imagination, we can read the circumstances and collapse and denial of Rufus as a commentary on the sexual, social, and erotic economy of the novel and the world at large. And though Rufus dies early on in the novel, his skin, his sex, his ghost remains, lingers, touches everything and everyone. He and others participate in what Cohen describes as the "metonymic nature of desire in this text, which flows by transpositions and displacements through one character into another" (13). This metonymic chain of desire, from Rufus to Leona to Vivaldo to Ida to Cass to Richard to Eric to Yves, is webby and recursive allowing each of the characters to complicate and contrain one another in terms of their identities, sexualities, and embodiements. Though Rufus is not given the opportunity to play out in this exchange, as James Dievler says, "[H]is presence remains through the novel, reminding and offering hints to the other characters about the cost of socially constructed identity categories" (170).

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It is through these unsettled interpolations that Vivaldo matures, gains wisdom, and finally learns to love himself and love others. More importantly

Though Vivaldo muses on what it must be like for those who must be "condemned to women" or those "condemned to men" (585), it can be argued that the passage argues for a broader stroke and that Baldwin argues people must come to some terms of multiplicity, of those "condemned to another" or "others."

Baldwin's /Another Country/: Queering the Surface (a work in progress), Part II

2005-12-07T16:20:00.000-05:00

Continued from: http://queerviewmirror.blogspot.com/2005/12/baldwins-another-country-queering.html...

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Thinking through Another Country's character's skins -- through the skins of Rufus, Vivaldo, Ida, Cass, Eric, or Yves -- is a way to make queer desire and a queering body, subject, and identity legible. It also makes legible the way the touches in the novel queers the skins, the bodies, the identities, and the social categories that Baldwin imagines and touches with his words. For Ahmed and Stacey, thinking through the skin begins with Didier Anzieu's The Skin Ego, which is a rearticulation of Freud's notion of the bodily ego (which appears in The Id and the Ego), and with Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological notion of inter-corporeality or inter-embodiment.

First, Anzieu's skin ego refers to the "mental image of which the Ego of the child makes use during the early phases of its development to represent itself as an Ego containing psychic contents, on the basis of its experience of the surface of the body" (as qtd. in Ahmed and Stacey 7). William Cohen, in his essay "Deep Skin," explains that Anzieu's skin ego "develops the psychical topography Freud outlined in The Ego and the Id (1923), at whose center is the proposition that the ego is 'first and foremoest a bodily ego'--which is to say, precisely mapped onto the surface of the body" (73). Anzieu's skin ego possesses three functions: "as a containing, unifying envelope for the Self; as a protective barrier for the psyche; and as a filter of exchanges and a surface of inscription for the first traces, a function which makes representation possible" (as qtd. in Cohen 73). It is through the skin ego that theories of skin seek to conceptualize, problematize, and articulate bodily and identificatory differences and embodiments.

Second, Merleau-Ponty's inter-corporeality emphasizes "embodiment, not only as fleshy and material but also as 'worldly', as being in an intimate and living relationship to the world, which is a world made up of other bodies' (Ahmed and Stacey 5). Merleau-Ponty's model is all about experiences, about interconnected experiences. In othe words, as theorist Gail Weiss explains, "[T]o describe embodiment as intercorporeality is to emphasize that the experience of being embodied is never a private affair, but is always already mediated by our continual interactions with other human and non-human bodies" (as qtd. in Ahmed and Stacey 5). Here is the natural pick-up for theories of thinking through the skin and thinking through surfaces since the skin and body and world are mediated and made knowable through touch. Merleau-Ponty's inter-corporeality is predicated on the reversibility of touch, the skin-on-skinness of bodies: "The handshake too is reversible; I can feel myself touched as well and at the same time as touching" (as qtd. in Ahmed and Stacey 5).

Anzieu, Merleau-Ponty, and Probyn's points of view can be seen as allied, collaborative, and coalitional. They offer the lenses, the archaeological tools, and the curiosity to examine, excavate, and exfoliate the matter of skin, the surface of skin in knowing ourselves and knowing others. Jay Prosser, in his essay "Skin Memories," catches on Anzieu's expression that the surface of the body, the skin, is a sheet or interface saying, "The skin ego is the interface between psyche and body, self and others" (65). At the risk of collapsing Anzieu, Merleau-Ponty, and Probyn, the skin ego and inter-corporeality and surface come together, touch, and (possibly) explode at this notion of interface. A productive reading of Baldwin then would be to see the novel as all about the skin and most importantly about touch as inter-corporeal, as intervening, as queering. Another Country is all about the skin of its characters, all about the touches (or lack thereof) between characters.

Baldwin's /Another Country/: Queering the Surface (a work in progress)

2005-12-07T12:30:00.000-05:00

Ah, cyberspace! In the spirit of my past attempt to use the strange and oftimes "less rigorous" space of the internet as a way to work through a paper idea (see my livejournal posts on the cyberqueer -- http://www.livejournal.com/users/writerpunk/13220.html -- I will use this forum similarly. I am working on a short essay for my first grad seminar at the University of Washington called "Sexuality and National Belonging." I have decided (albeit foolishly since my professor cum graduate director is writing on the very same subject) to work on James Baldwin's novel /Another Country/ and to employ a smattering of theory from Elspeth Probyn and Ahmed & Stacey and Michael Warner to the novel's skins, touches, and relationships. What follows will be a mishmash of ideas and ramblings, but I hope to get a paper out of it. Enjoy.

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A reading of Baldwin's Another Country must be complex and complicated. Much of the body of Baldwin scholarship, particularly on his third novel, has attempted to read and parse the conflicts, disruptions, ambiguities, reflections, and differences in the text, particularly in terms of sex, race, gender, sexuality, class, national belonging, love, and violence. Much of the work on Another Country strive for "deep" readings and analyses and theorize the novel as a means to understand and articulate (or a failure to do so) social, political, and psychological categories. Other work, more recently, see these "deep" readings as counter to Baldwin's insistence on complicating and exploding categories and struggle rather to critique Another Country in terms of intersections, interweavings, interpolations of categories, histories, and contexts. For example, William Cohen's analysis focuses on the novel's "unfolding series of crises" that stages "conflicts among characters in terms of structural and power relations, principally along axes of gender, race, and sexuality" (1); more importantly, he says, "Another Country not only maps its characters against these social indices but, more remarkably, also explores the ways in which vectors of power relations themselves interact--crosscutting, supporting, contradiction, and displacing one another" (1). It is this idea of intersection and complication that needs to be further teased, further fleshed, and further embraced. It is this twisting and fraying, this pressing and pulling that Roderick Ferguson recognizes in Baldwin's work borrowing Zygmunt Bauman's notion of the "parvenu"--the understanding that meaning, categories, and "identity is always in flux, and that naming is a contradictory process emerging out of the interaction between the definitions that are imposed upon us and the identities that we make" (258).

In a move away from "deep" readings of Baldwin, which oftentimes are undercut by their desire to stabilise categories, to focus identities, to resolve contradictions even as they critique them, an alternative approach to Another Country embraces the fluxes and flotsam and frustrations of the text and engages the "surfaces," the sketches the novel creates and presents; it is a move to a methodology that Elspeth Probyn deploys to explore identities, relations, desires, and belongings saying, "[T]he attraction to the surface moves us away from 'depth accounts of social life, where more fundamental levels of social reality...are called upon to explain less fundamental ones'" (quoting Chris Philo, 34). A Probynian critique of Baldwin, then, recognizes, "[T]he surface is not another metaphor nor yet another fad within intellectual circles: it is a profound reordering of how we conceive of the social" (34). Probyn declares, "I am arguing against marking identities within a hierarchical mode" (34). In other words, a "surface" reading of Another Country offers an opportunity to step away from more negative critiques of Baldwin and to imagine, to render the play of identities, alliances, and antagonisms as overlapping slippages, temporary inhabitations, and criss-crossed chains of desires.

Probyn is a fitting lens because she recognizies the potential and critical richness of the everyday, the quotidian, the banal. She explains her life experiences are entrances into "[h]ow individuals make sense of their lives" and "how desires to become are played out in everyday circumstances" (5). Her project is about attending to the commonplace, the exploration of the surfaces of the world around her, and about attending to the value of rendering the banal remarkable. In a sense, Baldwin's novel is very much about the banal; its setting is recognizable, its plot plottable, and its characters go about daily life walking, talking, hungering, working, having sex, playing, doing dishes, drinking, dying. In another sense, the novel itself as a physical object is banal--its size and shape, its black and blue paperback cover, its pages yellowing, used, its Times Roman typeface, anonymous comments in the margins. Yet the text is remarkable in the very way its surface, ink on paper, interpolates experiences, evokes emotions, and creates meanings. The story is remarkable because its everydayness is figured and reconfigured in the juxtaposition of very different surfaces, very different bodies, very different lives. A surface read provides a way to interact and intercept specificities such race, sexuality, gender, class, or country without fixing and falling into hard-walled categories. Probyn agrees, "[T]he surface is not to be posed as ineluctable but rather a way of configuring lines of force that compose the social, lines of force that are by their very nature deeply material and historical" (12). In this way, reading Another Country or a photo montage or a cityscape can attend to differences and disparities, to "enumerate singularities in such a way that they may overpower any generalization, any simple adding up to a general statement of identity" (21); it is about a critique, in the words of Homi Bhabha, "that 'adds' without 'adding up'" (as qtd. in Probyn 21).

A surface reading of Another Country offers an opportunity for play, for temporary fixing rather than affixing, for conversational and coalitional analyses. A surface reading, as Probyn argues, is not a "shallow" one. Rather it is this playfulness, this attention to a constellation of specificities that do not reduce Baldwin's novel to a text just about race relations in the US or pre-Stonewall sexual and gender identity politics or heteronormative black nationalism or writing and writer as social critique. A surface reading acknowledges but does not fixate on negative critique, on the potential racism, heterosexism, or homophobia of the text, on trauma, repression, or vicitimization of its characters, or on Baldwin's failure to imagine same-sex female relations or a black, gay, partnered, living protagonist. Baldwin certainly could imagine and articulate these lacks, absences, and problems. Surface reading is not about seeing endpoints but rather pivots, intersections, and simultaneities. What is at stake here is the rendering of what is imagined in relation to what might be imagined, a positive service to self, author, and text. What is important here is how these surfaces, these webs of thought, heart and matter join, reflect, refract, and distract understandings of identities, belongings, and desires.

Probyn articulates, "Surface belongings and desiring identities refuse to stand still...they compel connections, producing themselves as other...[their] sheer perplexity and yearning bypasses the meanness of individualized identities...they rub up against each other" (35). One way to materialize surfaces in Another Country is through looking at, tracing along skins and touches in the text. The skin, in its taken-for-grantedness and its all-too-scopic significance, embodies Probyn's theories of surfaces; the skin of the page and the skin of Baldwin's characters, the touch of the paper and the touch between characters become the rub in the generation of relationships, subjectivities, belongings, and longings.

In Baldwin, the importance of the skin cannot be reduced to just a signifier of race or gender even sexuality or nationality. The skin and by extension the touch become vehicles for complexity and intersectionality in identities. The skins and touches of Another Country evoke the work of Sara Ahmed and Jackie Stacey's edited collection Thinking Through the Skin that calls for "a skin-tight politics, a politics that takes at its orientation not the body as such, but the fleshy interface between bodies and worlds. 'Thinking through the skin' is a thinking that reflects not on the body as the lost object of thought, but on inter-embodiement, on the mode of being-with and being-for, where one touches and is touched by others" (1). In other words, theories of the skin, like theories of the surface, look for connections across textures and topographies of being, for transformations and transportations among temporary sites of identity, and for a means to see desire, as Probyn argues, "not as an individual possession but rather as a relational force among individuals" (25). Ahmed and Stacey ask how skin can become meaningful and how the largest bodily organ, which is always apparent for scrutiny, can be read, mapped, and marked. Theories of skin strive to take all skin in its many manifestations--whole, scarred, baby soft, wrinkled, pierced, tattooed, sewn, dark, light--and discover how skin is "lived, read, written, narrated, seen, touched, managed, worked, cut, remembered, produced, and known" (2), how it is made intelligible or mystified, and how it is politicized, commodified, and desired.

Remembering Rosa Parks

2005-11-02T00:20:00.000-05:00

http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/10/31/rosa.parks.ap/index.html

Boldly going...

2005-10-28T16:02:00.000-05:00

http://www.cnn.com/2005/SHOWBIZ/TV/10/28/people.georgetakei.ap/index.html

Potter, Potter, Potter

2005-10-17T15:46:00.000-05:00

Potter, Potter, Potter, Potter, Potter, Potter... A Snape, A Snape, A Snape... (I very much like the sampling of the HP theme...)

But is it useful? And I quoteth myself from a short essay I wrote for my digital studies class: "To recall McGann, new media studies must embrace play to survive, to thrive. Digital studies is serious, but it cannot be too serious. Digital studies is about experimentation and entertainment, but it is also about evidence, history, technology, and education. It is no wonder that my graduate class on digital studies exhorted play and the investigation, close reading, earnest analysis, and further creation of “toys” -- both analog and digital, both scholarly and popular, both useful and playful. In a manner, then, even a seemingly frivolous site like www.badgerbadgerbadger.com can be illuminating, if not important. The badgers are algorithmic, rhythmic, iterative, illustrative, mathematical, communicative, evocative, narrative, and colorful; though linear (though the syncing of the sound and image does begin to slip creating a new text) and not playable, the badgers are definitely playful and intertextual and meaningful (badger as metaphor, folklore of the mushroom, and symbology of the snake). With a little time, the right technology, and imagination, the rolling loop and various pieces of the flash animation can be taken apart, reconfigured, exported, imported, and reassembled into a new digital text. In fact, the bouncing badgers have spawned a number of other texts. It is this transportability, this modularity, this encouraging borrowing and reimagining that is the heart and spirit of new media. It is the reason texts are made, made again, and studied. It is the heart and spirit of play."

Media Bias At Work

2005-09-01T16:01:00.000-05:00

Thanks to the notice of my friend Drew, here below is a startling example of media bias and the racist project of whiteness at work. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the anarchy of those areas hardest hit is shocking, poignant, and at times dystopic. It only goes to show how little it takes to reduce our "first" world to a "developing" world. Not the language used in the captions for each photo.

The first image, in a long "slideshow" of images, is of two people -- importantly caucasian -- who have managed to "find" supplies from a local mart http://news.yahoo.com/photo/050830/photos_ts_afp/050830071810_shxwaoma_photo1:

The second image is of a single black (or dark-skinned) male who has "looted" supplies from a local mart http://news.yahoo.com/photo/050830/480/ladm10208301530:

Two distinct verbs used to describe what tantamounts to the same action. However, one is characterized as positive, perhaps even noble, as the people shown in the image have the American pluck to survive. Whereas, the second is characterized as negative, perhaps dangerous, as the young black man is living up to the longstanding prejudice and stigma of criminality. It can be argued -- and critics like George Lipsitz have been arguing -- that whiteness continues to find ways and preserve means to shore up its power, its privilege. Here, the white people in the first photo have a right to the goods they have "found"; in a deep sense, whiteness must and should and by all means justly survive. On the other hand, the black young man in the second photo has won his survival by ill gotten means. This is the narrative that has been fed into the media, into the history, and into the dominant ideology for many, many years.

My Name in Books

2005-08-10T06:49:00.000-05:00

Amaztype: Representating Texts/Searches

2005-08-08T08:25:00.000-05:00

It is amazing how often I find something online by sheer happenstance. A click here leads me here, a click there lead me someplace else. Though not strictly a narrative experience (though some might argue that 'surfing' does in fact create story), my hypertexting through, across, in and out of various interconnected websites does lead me on a journey. Most recently, my journey to 'the most advanced digital clock ever' (see last post) led me to a web designer's site, which serves as a kind of online portfolio. One of the designer's works is a project for www.amazon.com called amaztype.

amaztype is a search engine that allows you to look for a word or phrase in the titles or authors of books, music, or videos. amaztype then begins to generate thumbnails (of varying size) of all the things that contain the keyword or keyphrase. All of the images are drawn from Amazon's website. The clever and fascinating thing is that the thumbnails begin to slowly pile-up one on top of another and eventually form the very word or phrase searched for. For example, I typed the keyword "laser" and all of the titles with that word came up to form the letters L-A-S-E-R.

The amazing thing (imagine that) is that all of the thumbnails can be clicked on. Clicking on a title zooms in the camera view. Then pertinent data about the item, such as full title (with keyword in red), author, price, sales rank, and user rating, come up. You can then choose to get more information and a new browser window opens to the item's www.amazon.com page. While zoomed in, you can click through the pile of items. It isn't a sorted search. It invites exploration, the turning over of stones. In a way, the experience is like looking through a bin of books or CDs or video tapes. (Again, a kind of unstructured journey and narrative -- like web surfing.)

The project is enticing, exciting as you watch more and more thumbnails pile up and pile up. amaztype reminds me of the work done at www.textarc.org, which the site describes as: "A TextArc is a visual represention of a text—the entire text (twice!) on a single page. A funny combination of an index, concordance, and summary; it uses the viewer's eye to help uncover meaning." In a way, amaztype allows the user to visualize their search, to understand the immensity of their search (literally showing a huge, overlapping pile of items), and to create a virtual (pseudo-virtual) experience much like browsing or rummaging.

Furthermore, the site provides a "new" feature called amaztype zeitgest, which generates the top ten keywords users have entered for the various search categories. There is definitely an emergent narrative in those lists.

I'm sure there's more to say about it (once I do a little follow-up reading and research). For now, it's still darn neat. Go play!

Time: Is it digital? Or is it analog?

2005-08-07T07:49:00.000-05:00

While making may way through my usual haunts online, I came across a LiveJournal entry touting "the most advanced digital clock ever!" I was intrigued and took a look at the link: http://www.lares.dti.ne.jp/%7Eyugo/storage/monocrafts_ver3/03/index.html, which takes to you a page designed by Yugo Nakamura. (Some of the web design and digital experiments are quite interesting, in particular Selection #5: Amaztype.)

The link above takes you to the "Industrious 2001" page with an animated real-time clock where the letters and numerals are images of handwritten letters and numerals in thick pencil. As the seconds, minutes, hours, and date (though I did not sit and wait to watch the day change) changes with an animation of the letter or number being hastily erased and the successive character written in its place. It is black-and-white and decidedly mesmerizing.

I'm not sure how to think through the project. It's definitely high on the 'neat' scale. But there is a curious comment here on the juxtaposition of the digital and the analog, the virtual and the physical. It's on the tip of my tongue, at the tips of my typing fingers. On a gut level, the clock is nostalgic for me. Very few of us now really work with pencil and paper anymore (much less an actual wooden pencil rather than a mechanical one). The scratch of the HB lead on paper is a happy sound for me. The clock reminds me of all of these things.

More soon.

Do You Yahoo!?

2005-07-15T13:57:00.000-05:00

It seems that Yahoo! has forgotten about the Abercrombie & Fitch scandal that broke about three years or so ago with their 'humorous' t-shirts that read, "Two Wongs Can Make It White," and featured slanty-eyed men doing laundry. See http://www.clta-gny.org/news-interest-7.htm.

As I was idly checking my email today, a flash animation ad on the Yahoo! mail site came up big and bold and red. In the animation, an obviously Asian woman (with her slim retro capri pants, black bobbed and barretted hair, little slippers, and slanted eyes; even the red color palette is vaguely Asian) groaning under the weight of freshly dry cleaned clothes walks out of a shop. She leaves the frame of the ad dropping a dress on the ground. Then the ad hocks Yahoo! HotJobs, where ostensibly this struggling woman can find a less strenuous and more fulfilling line of work. So, what do we do with this image? This stereotype? This covert racism?

Both the t-shirt and the Yahoo! ad remind of Dwight A. McBride's book Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch and his work on unpacking the strange bedfellows of capitalism, commercialism, whiteness, race, and sexuality. In a deep sense, looking at (really looking at) and critiquing and unknotting what may seem innocent or innocuous or humorous (but in startling actuality is fraught with prejudice) is necessary work. How does the Yahoo! ad talk about race or class or gender or citizenship as whole? McBride says, "While the dominant rhetoric of our national identity presents a color-blind, 'united we stand,' Horatio Alger narrative of upward mobility, in reality, citizenship is raced, gendered, and classed, and the original texts that define citizenship and national identity in the United States reflect this reality" (68).

So, what do we do with the above image? A quick Google search turns up no response or reaction to it. I have yet to see the advertisement again. Maybe it got pulled. Maybe I haven't been fortunate enough to witness it another time. However, I do think there is something going on, something nefarious in kitschy, cute, bubblegum pink, 'humorous' clothing. What made the advert makers choose an Asian woman? Dry cleaning? Red? Separately, these details seem arbitrary. But together they add up to years of stereotyping, assumptions, and racialized (even racist) representation of Asians.

The irony here, of course, is that Yahoo! is one of the major employers of the San Francisco Bay Area/Silicon Valley, which I would guess employs a great number of Asians. You would think they would be a little more aware of their own constituents (or maybe it's one big inside joke that just isn't funny).

An Exercise in Narcissism

2005-07-15T13:42:00.000-05:00

It seems that fashion (to be followed suit by form and function) demands that all 'serious' scholarship requires a space both on- and off-line for the exploration, publishing, or perusal of ideas, materials, questions, resources, and whatever bits and jots come to mind. As a starting PhD student in English at the University of Washington, I figure I better get with the fashion or be left on the side of the digital highway. Queer View Mirror is my attempt at a scholarly web log where I will wax (and wane) about the things that interest me, that go bump in the night in my brain and heart, that stop me and make me go "hmm." QVM is place where my indisciplinariness can shine and where I can natter on about digital studies, gender studies, race studies, pop culture, film, teaching, writing, reading, and all things intersecting and intertextual.