Oh Lauren Berlant, you dreamy dream woman. On Sex & the City The Movie:
“It’s a good thing that they have each other … as they are incapable of talking about sex with their lovers. If any of these women had ever even walked by feminism on the sidewalk they would have learned that one of the points of sexual liberation was to put your mouth where your mouth is. Sex talk was to be part of sex, part of sex pedagogy, part of allowing fantasy and desire to produce creativity and improvisation in the now of the event. Sexual liberation culture gave skills and permission for not just resorting to reenacting the default expectation out of fear that sex talk would make sex disappear.(…). These women are so frightened of what’s uncontrollable and uncomfortable about sex that, rather than to talk well about it to lovers, they prefer to laugh and complain to each other about it.” (more…)
1519: map of Brazil issued by Portuguese explorers.
30 May 2008: “Members of an unknown Amazon Basin tribe and their dwellings are seen during a flight over the Brazilian state of Acre along the border with Peru.” (Sydney Morning Herald).*
* (29 May 2008: “Funai fotografa índios isolados na fronteira do Brasil com o Peru” (National Indigenous Peoples Foundation, the government agency for “protection and education of indigenous peoples”).)
I received the email below today which is funny for all sorts of reasons, not least that I had intended to go here today to protest the Mexican Government’s recent attacks on Zapatista territory; this also being the day that these protests were held.
Fri, 20 Jun 2008 16:49:52 -0600
From: Australian_Embassy_Mexico_City@dfat.gov.au
To: Undisclosed Recipients
Reply-to: embaustmex@yahoo.com.mx
Subject: AUSTRALIAN FEDERAL ELECTION - 24 NOVEMBER 2007 [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED] (more…)
Images on the front cover of Managing the Border: Immigration Compliance, DIMIA 2004-5:
1. Part of Harvey’s Isles, Queensland, 1802
2. Cape Jervis looking from Kangaroo Island, South Australia, 1802
3. Entrance of Port Phillip Bay, Victoria, 1802
4. North side of Cape Bowen, Queensland, 1802
5. Cape Schanck, Victoria, 1802
“William Westall was born in Hertford, England on 20 October 1781. In 1801 he was chosen by Sir Joseph Banks as the artist aboard Matthew Flinders’ Investigator expedition to explore the coastline of New Holland. His works chart the progress of Flinders’ circumnavigation of Australia from King George’s Sound in Western Australia, across the Great Australian Bight and on to Port Jackson and the Gulf of Carpentaria. He is best remembered as the first professional artist to depict the Australian landscape as well as Aboriginal Art. His works, 160 of which are held by the National Library of Australia, are considered of a very high standard. William Westall died in 1850, aged 68, while working on a painting of his shipwreck experience on the Porpoise.”
This man is the architect of the Intervention.
It just writes itself sometimes.
Some current containers for unfocussed loathing that has very focussed results.
1. Little Children are Sacred, the report which justified the Intervention.
2. “Sexualised” teenagers in a series of images by Bill Henson; seized by the police in the war on child pornography.
3. Islamic school children; apparently intended for taking over the town of Camden (“My kids can’t read Islamic … how are they going to go to that school?”)
* Kevin Rudd.
My ongoing fascination with the unfolding of Stuff White People Like led me here today; which in turn led me to Black People Love Us!, from 2002. I think it probably does similar work on white identities (i.e. reconfirming them through self-reflexivity), but as a deliberately political strategy it perhaps directs the debate with more precision. Compare the media that it got with that of SWPL.
When I google my surname in a fit of idle introspection I find it imprinted on a town in Haiti, a slave revolt in Louisiana, church registers in the Channel Islands, various papers in France and Canada, and a colonial governor’s family in Angola (which perhaps accounts for the Haiti connection). The indexing that the internets does is odd like that: a chain of random connections showing up the circularity of history as the-named, its shaping in and by violence, its traces of resistance and liberation, its surprising affects. A series of patented, popular links scream at me: FindYourPast.com and so on.
We don’t want to bear certain histories or historicities, we don’t want to make space for it in suspensions or sorries. But we will fight for our names (my good name, not in my name). Our misplaced names reflect the displacement of history onto us. It’s bigger than us, like our names. We wear it, we wear them.
As you can see from my reading list, I’m a fan of the blog Stuff White People Like. I’m also White (proof: I like all of the things listed here, with the exception of Manhattan, which I haven’t got around to visiting. I ‘did’ South America before Europe, you see.). So, apparently, are most of the folks who dig the site, to the point where the (white) author is soon to release a book with Random House. To some extent the whole trajectory of this blog takes on an outline of ressentiment; configured by Fiona Probyn as a “giving that is always already a taking”. The self-reflexive white subject (self-reflexivity being, undoubtedly, something else that White People Like) recognises themselves with some shame, laughs at themselves (such is their white humility), generates a similarly motivated following of white compadrés. The blog author gets a book deal. The white readers buy the book. And at the end of the day, it’s hard to say whether power, or at least capital, has shifted any; although I guess that’s the edge of irony, and humour …