not the motorcycle diaries

An eminent ABC journalist has written a biography of Alan Jones, the multi-millionaire shock-jock who likes gay bashing, white male privilege, and corporate whoring. The ABC’s enterprise department has refused to publish the book on the grounds that such a book would not be commercially viable for the ABC. The decision came following an ABC Board meeting.

Items:

1. Said journalist has worked for the national independent broadcaster for forty years. It’s likely that his book is a measuredly unsympathetic commentary on a man who wields influence over scores of swingspirational voters.

2. The Government is reliant on said voters in order to remain in office.

3. A book about such a popular and controversial fellow is bound to sell pretty well.

4. Since when has the national independent broadcaster made decisions on the basis of commercial viability?

5. Donald McDonald (personal friend of John Howard), Keith Windschuttle (ideological ally of John Howard) and Janet Albrechtson (ideological ally of John Howard) are on the ABC Board.

Intellectual resistance, Victor Pelevin apparently said once, is like sex in two condoms - i.e. a pleasurable experience that is completely risk free. The use of the sexual metaphor here is no accident for me, I must say. Notwithstanding the personal insecurity I suffer viz. the figure of The Sexy Intellectual Woman (she writes essays with titles like the erotics and aesthetics of subjugated subcultures andrupturing the libidinal economies of feminine desire, wears rimmed glasses and thigh-high boots, can quote Breton in the original French and never has a headache), I am growingly conscious of the thread in my artsy-academic field of research that explores particular hetero women’s sexual aesthetic practices as though they are inherently radical slash revolutionary, and are in fact examples of feminist disruption of patriarchal power relations.

I’m as partial as the next first-world-feminist to a rousing celebration of the clitoris. However there’s a few understandings that I am not quite satisfied are shared with many artsy-academic ladies. They are:

1. Academic discourse on sex and ladydesire by conventionally attractive, clever young women is, generally,entirely palatable to conventional mandesire.

2. All sexual/aesthetic practices by women and men in western societies take place within a patriarchal system of power relationships. The patriarchal gaze, and the potential for approval or rejection against the patriarchal standard, will define to some extent what women do.Like capitalism, patriarchy is a dominating force in our post slash modern world. People who recognise this do radicalism much better than people who don’t. It doesn’t mean they are dupes of The System.

3.Women’s sexual radicalism is defined as: being knowledgeable and assertive about sexual desire (masturbating, orgasms), flouting conventions about women being passive, unsexual or undesirous; having sex with women, enjoying any variation on traditional missionary position sex, having fulfilling affairs outside of loveless bourgeois marriages. I am all for women’s sexual independence, which I think is basically what accounts of these historical and contemporary ‘behaviours’ are all about. However, without a certain level of detail re patriarchal context,accounts of such sexual radicalism just play into conventional patriarchal hetero mandesire and subjugates those many women who haven’t had the opportunity to explore their sexuality or who wouldn’t mind a few days without trying a new sex position/partner or who are really quite disposed to the idea of monogamy and long-term commitment.

4.Is radicalism really to be located in who does what sexually with whom? All the accounts of the double standards and emotional danger of ‘radical’ sex between men and women seem to be written by women. Where is this reflectiveness and vulnerability from ‘radical’ men? Where is the evidence of their emotional labour in attempting to come to a position of freedom and equal exchange with the loved/lusted after opposite sex? Emotional growth (and dare I say maturity), while not conventionally sexy and generally relegated to the ‘life and spirit’ pages of the middle-aged media weeklies, is also a source of radicalism in how men and women have relationships with each other.

For fuck’s.

1. Parliament passes electoral law changes which include closing the electoral roll earlier, banning prisoners from voting and increasing the threshold for disclosing donations. This will disenfranchise thousands of citizens (such as prisoners, young people, people living in rural and remote areas) and loses Australia the definition of a democratic government.

2. The Government also changes the Senate committee system, which is one of the key checks and balances in a democratic parliamentary state. Not only are the number of committees reduced but they are all now to be headed by a member of the Government. We edge closer to dictatorship.

3. Howard refuses to shift on his draconian proposals to disallow all refugees in Australia who come by boat, whilst Amanda Vanstone spouts some sickening hypocrisy on World Refugee Day, and backbenchers remind the Government that they owed their seats to the racism, fearmongering and other such lying behind the Government’s ‘tough’ stance on people coming to Australia in the hope of being able to live without daily fear of persecution, violence and death.

4. Keith Windschuttle has been appointed to the ABC Board.

On a slightly funnier note:

5. On Neighbours last night, Lou asks Mishka not to confess her fake passport to the authorities. Mishka is Russian and living in Australia on fake documents. When I flipped over last night she was tearfully telling Lou that ‘immigration department in this country has a reputation for being so strict … they will send me to prison on that island ….’

6. In Parliament Question Time, John Howard says that “wages will always be higher under a Labor Government”.

This, dear gazer, is the inimitable Michael J Gratton.  His geek prowess knows no bounds.

Thanks for the new look NTMD, mang!

1. Sleeping in during the week, consequently being compelled to catch up on work of a Sunday.

2. Not being able to sleep on Saturday night due to thinking about All The Things I Should Have Done this week.

3. Computer at home not starting on said Sunday morning, meaning I must spend the day at uni in the airless Postgrad Resource Dungeon.

4. Nearly being eaten by ibises (ibii?!) because they get even bolder when there’s fewer people around uni and mistake me for a half consumed hot dog on top of an overflowing bin.

4. Having to buy coffee from the coffee cart because Ralphs isn’t open of a Sunday.

I tell you, it is goddamn hard being me.

Wendy Brown, who wrote such genius as Politics out of History.

and

Judith Butler, who wrote such genius as Gender Trouble.

I discovered yesterday (now that I am a cultural stud, doing a PhDiche I hope that this is the standard of gossip I can continue to expect) that THEY ARE PARTNERS.

SO GOOD. Hopefully more the intellectual equivalent of Yulia and Elena (hot) than, say, Ike and Tina Turner (not).

If you were depressed and needed a pick me up, which of the following cards would you most like to recieve?

This carnivorous wood puppet one?

This bestial one?

Not recommended for post-abortion depression?

Or this one which concretely confirms any depressive’s fear of being a shit person who can’t give to others?

Or perhaps this one which doesn’t remind me at all of the psychiatrist’s office.

Actually … I feel better already.

In case any of you were wondering, the person who signs comments on my weblog ‘Mo D 2 The Max’, ‘Mo D’ or ‘Rock Goddess’ is in fact Mrs NTMD, that’s right, my very own mother. She is supercool. Here are some examples of her demonstrated coolness over the years:

DEMONSTRATED COOLNESS INCIDENT NUMBER ONE:

Mum (to me (comparatively uncool) and my very cool brother, as we get in the car after seeing some very cool suburban cover band gig or somesuch): So how was the gig?

Me and my very cool brother: * mumble mumble teenage mumble *

Mum: Yeah right. So did you go in the doss pit?

Me: THE WHAT?

Mum: You know, the doss pit, where you go and ….

My very cool brother: * dissolves into laughter *

Me (disgusted): The mosh pit. You mean the mosh pit.

NB: I never went in the doss/mosh pit. Wasn’t cool/tall/skimpy enough. But my very cool brother did. He is so cool that he got suspended from school for having green hair while I was busy with the other übernerds running for school captain and such.

DEMONSTRATED COOLNESS INCIDENT NUMBER TWO:

Me: So do you like this CD?

Mum: Yeah it’s cool. What’s on the other side? Shall I turn it over for you?

Me: IT’S A CD MUM YOU CAN’T TURN IT OVER.

Dad: * hums I’m Livin’ in the Seventies *

Very cool brother: * dissolves into laughter *

DEMONSTRATED COOLNESS INCIDENT NUMBER THREE

Mum: So I’ve always wanted to start a band called Penis Envy.

Me: !

So, you get the picture. SHE IS COOL. I don’t know how I managed not to inherit the coolness. There must have been a very uncool milkman lurking around the suburbs of Adelaide circa 1979.

Transferring from Sociology & Social Policy to Gender Studies has proven to be worse than resigning from a job. Whenever I’ve resigned from a job I’ve always been either going to another job on a completely different site or returning to full time study, meaning it is a clean break made for clean break reasons that are not necessarily construed as a snub to the organisation. However this is a more subtle shift where it seems I can’t help but cause some sort of offence.

I’ve been particularly anxious to communicate that my supervision has not been problematic, that it is the discipline of sociology that I want to shift my relationship to (read: I am not wanting to communicate that I think it is all bollocks, in fact moving departments will probably enhance/restore my respect for sociology). In fact, I want the supervisor I have had in sociology to remain as an Associate Supervisor. He’s supportive, and interesting, and provides a rigour that my work really needs. He is into the idea of being my AS, but I will have to be mindful of not making him the ‘bad cop’. I guess efforts to bring ideas and people together can have as much of a compartmentalising effect as an expansive effect, and I guess that’s what is meant by ‘disciplinism’. I haven’t had much exposure to the animosity that sometimes exists within universities about whose ideas and methods are the best for getting to the truth. And no doubt there is an historical antagonism between cultural studies and the ‘old’ disciplines of sociology and anthropology? I suppose this is also part of why the growing competitiveness of the current funding framework is such a problem - it has a ‘divide and conquer’ tactic which plays into existing personal and institutional insecurities (item: there is a transfer of money with a transfer of departments). Disciplines are, of course, made up of people …

The worst part is that I feel somewhat unable to properly explain why it is that I am transferring. Still, I like the challenge of this - it’s been a while since I’ve had to state my position on something in clear terms. I think it’s the personal nature of it that makes it so hard to articulate? It seems a bit inadequate to say that “I just have a feeling”…

Basically, the discipline of sociology is bounded by particular notions of empiricism and science, and I want to question these two notions in my thesis beyond the space that is allowed within the discipline (this has always been a problem for me. The external examiner of my Honours thesis was very concerned about my ‘pessimism’ towards sociology and my use of discourse analysis as a sociological methodology). I feel that these notions are inadequate for looking at the activist subject position, which is what my research comes down to, particularly after the experience I had with the MST in Brazil. I have been able to confront this sort of resistance within the discipline (e.g. in my Hons examiners meeting, at departmental seminars and conferences), but I find it quite wearying now. Cultural studies, at least in some of its forms, does not demand this kind of justification and in fact encourages questioning disciplines and disciplinism. I’m not suggesting that cultural studies is some kind of utopia or that none of this questioning is possible or desired in sociology, just that it currently provides a field more useful to my line of inquiry for the time being.

Perhaps I am opting for the radical chic easy street fence sitting deconstructionist path … but really … I don’t think I care. I don’t know if I want a career in academia, I only know that I want to use the space offered by a candidature and a scholarship to ask some philosophical questions that emerged for me in activist social policy work. And cultural studies seems to have a better fit. Gosh, it’s hard to hold onto your personal convictions sometimes!

Something I’ve noticed since my foray into full time aspirational academia is that part of holding any position of privelege is that you don’t have to reflect on your position. It’s very hard sometimes to find spaces within academia that are committed to such reflection. It’s also hard to go looking for them, when you don’t have to, and knowing that you will encounter challenges to your personal position.

In view of this, I really dig what this lady has to say in this article - not only about bloggers and blogging, but also about scholarship and the burgeoning professionalisation of intellectuals and intellectual work, including that of ‘intellectual radicalism’.

My departmental transfer should occur within the next fortnight, and well, how could I not want to ‘belong’ to an interdiscipline described in the above mentioned article as an avowedly “anti-elitist and reflexive epistemological project”, which pays overt attention to the speaking position of the academic, and spawns articles on topics like ‘counter-heroics’ and ‘counter-professionalism’? Yes please!