Thursday, December 6, 2007

To Debra Journet (Jonathan)

Hi Debra!

I'm really looking forward to the Watson conference next year...twill be fun :-)

I've been talking with my dear friend Jackie Rhodes (CSU, San Bernardino) about proposing that we do an installation on (roughly) gender, sexuality, literacy, and new media for the conference. Can we talk--you and I--about parameters, equipment, possibilities? We've just been brainstorming, but I'd love to get a sense from you of the possibilities here...

Looking forward to chatting...

...and, in the meantime, please accept my best wishes for a safe and happy holiday!


j.

Saturday, October 20, 2007

Choo-choo blues


At the Riverside-Downtown Metrolink station, Jonathan finds out how helpful the "Passenger Info" phone is.

Thursday, September 27, 2007

thinking out loud here...


Just as new media texts and practices prompt us to reconsider what “literacy” means, so too do they enable us to reconsider what sexuality and sexual identity (always already discursive) mean. Our installation attempts to understand the multiple layerings of sex, text, and technology as sites from which to perform queer identities--and maybe just to perform queer. Specifically, we explore the radical, disruptive invocation of body, gender, desire, fear, and sensation that is the (new-)mediated queer self. We make use of our converging alienations, our mesh of desire and want, in order to position ourselves to be—if only for a particular, rhetorical moment—and, more to the point of this particular work, to be sexual. Through the constant exchange/deferral of need, this self-positioning increases and sustains itself through its desire, serving as the engine of its own perpetual visibility. It is thus a generative, multimodal techne of self, with both somatic and representational consequence.


Our view of techne—a sort of generative lived knowledge—points less to the prescriptive how-to sense of the term and more to its ethical, civic dimension. Our view demands that we embrace the incommensurability of bodily self and representation at the same time as we acknowledge the importance of lived experience to the formation of an ethical stance. It’s important to clarify, however, that our sense of sexuality and ethics does not cover “appropriate” sexual behavior or sexual manners, but instead draws from a close examination of the discourses surrounding the sexual self. What behaviors, what subjectivities, what possibilities, and what impossibilities are created through the intersections of sex and text? It is with this view in mind that we attempt to perform in our installation our own encounters—as sexed and sexual beings—with a variety of texts.


We contend that what is most attractive about queerness—theoretically, personally, and politically—is its potential illegibility, its inability to be reductively represented, its disruptive potential—in a word, its impossibility. At many different moments, queerness appears (or emerges or erupts) to trouble normalcy, legitimacy, signification. It’s what doesn’t fit. It’s what skews, bends, or queers the realities we construct around ourselves, and that have been constructed for us to induce a hetero-normative sense of stability and progress through the replication of particular kinds of people in particular kinds of families.


Queerness disrupts such stability, such progress. And as a movement of disruption, it is often difficult to track, to catch, to identify. Gays and lesbians are often positioned in relation to the normative, often as those seeking a place at the table—and many gays and lesbians are seeking that place. But in our lives as a gay man and as a lesbian, we have encountered numerous instances in which our queerness most certainly does not fit in, where it marks us as separate, as possessing and possessed by a subjectivity that is often incommensurably other.


Those are often our most delicious moments. And the most critically insightful and revealing, for that moment of instantiation—of the flesh made real—seems ripe for rhetorical and embodied action, one that encourages an attention to the moments of uncertainty between desire and hope, bodily self and representation, lived experience and ethical stance.

Thursday, September 13, 2007

Mediated

Friday, August 24, 2007

CFP: Thomas R. Watson conference


THE SEVENTH BIENNIAL
THOMAS R. WATSON CONFERENCE

University of Louisville

October 16-18, 2008

THE NEW WORK OF COMPOSING

What is the new work of composing in the midst of the rapidly changing technologies and communicative forms that characterize contemporary life? We invite proposals for any topic related to the conference theme, including:

  • How do new technologies change the ways we understand the work of composing?
  • How do issues of access, materiality, or economics affect composing within and outside the university?
  • what is the relation between new and old media? between textual, visual, and aural modes?
  • what happens to writing in contexts of new media composing?
  • how do we define our responsibilities as teachers, scholars, and practitioners?
  • where do we now locate disciplinary identity?

We welcome scholarly papers and new forms of scholarship, including videos, sound essays, installations. We encourage you to think creatively about the new work of composing.

Deadline for Submissions: MARCH 3, 2008

Submission Guidelines