Expenditure

To be an adjunct right now is to be exhorted to expend ever greater efforts while one’s efforts are treated as ever more expendable.

The Car People

I know I'm a grumpy old man now, but I cannot resist the anecdotal report that drivers seem to me to be getting altogether more reckless lately, at least around here. I am seeing near collisions with pedestrians almost daily now, and my own vigilance is ramping up considerably lately... Is it that people are relying on all this faux-smart vaporware "navigation" software now? Is it that everybody's on their phones now and letting things slide? Is it that general norms about waiting for lights, watching for pedestrians, and so on are evaporating or just changing in ways I haven't picked up on yet? There is a quality of reckless impatience I am discerning in drivers lately. I could easily be wrong, I cannot entirely trust my impressions because I have disdained car culture all my life and am always happy to assume the worst of people (after half a century of knowing them), but it's starting to feel sometimes like the ones with the cars sometimes act like getting where they want in their big cars matters more than the lives of the little people without cars, it's starting to feel sometimes like people without cars aren't quite as real to people in cars as we should...

Feed Me To The Trees

We're all going to die -- sooner than necessary to all appearances -- but I'm glad to see my own preference for eventual disposal is getting closer and closer to being a legal as well as practical reality here in the state of California, as it already recently has done in Washington, via The Los Angeles Times:

A Los Angeles lawmaker wants California to allow for human composting, an eco-friendly alternative to traditional burial or cremation in which the dead are turned into soil. The state of Washington became the first state to allow human composting when Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee signed a law last year permitting the practice. “I would love to be a tree one day,” said Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia (D-Bell Gardens), who introduced Assembly Bill 2592 to allow for human composting, or “natural organic reduction” as the upstart industry calls the process. “I think this is about giving people another option.” Washington’s law goes into effect on May 1, with a Seattle business called Recompose preparing to open a funeral home that offers the service in early 2021. Recompose’s process involves placing a body into a vessel with wood chips, alfalfa and straw, allowing it to be decomposed by microbes and reduced to a nutrient-dense soil in about a month. The end result is about a cubic yard of soil per person, which is then returned to families or donated to conservation land for use. Supporters of the practice say it’s an end-of-life option that will have a positive impact on the environment. Alternatively, cremation is an energy-intense process that produces carbon dioxide emissions, while traditional burial uses chemicals to embalm bodies and a non-biodegradable coffin to store them... The newly introduced California bill has not yet been scheduled for a hearing in the state Capitol... The process recreates what happens to animals on the forest floor without chemicals or emissions while allowing the soil produced to be used to plant trees that help the environment. Recompose plans to charge $5,500, which is less than the average burial with a casket but more than the average cremation. “When I started this several years ago I was shocked at how many people find this not only palatable but comforting and meaningful,” said Katrina Spade, the chief executive of Recompose. “People who recognize that soil is the basis for all life on Earth and also are aware of the climate implications of sequestering carbon through the creation of soil find this attractive.” People in California have expressed an interest in the process and have been contacting the company. “I knew the moment I heard about this, it was what I wanted to do,” said Nikolaus Kraemer of Los Angeles. “I’m 55 and healthy, but I would put this in my will or advanced directive that when I’m dead I don’t want to be pushed into a crematory or buried six feet under. I think this is a peaceful way to go back to where we came from.”

I couldn't agree more.

Syllabus for This Spring's Undergraduate Patriarchy in Antiquity Course at SFAI

HUMN-220E-01 (3534) Patriarchy in Greek and Roman Antiquity

Spring 2020, San Francisco Art Institute

Thursdays, 4.15-7pm, Chestnut Room 18

Course Blog: https://patriarchyingreekandromanantiquity.blogspot.com

Instructor: Dale Carrico, dcarrico@sfai.edu

Office Hours: Before class and by appointment.

Course Description:

The societies of Greek, Roman, and Christian antiquity were conspicuously patriarchal. Homeric heroes made history and conquered death with great words and deeds in an aspirational fantasy of masculine agency. The Roman paterfamilias, perhaps patriarchy's most quintessential expression, centered around the authoritarian male head of the household who held an unquestionable power of life and death over his children, female relatives, and household slaves. But in philosophy and in poetry, in Greek tragedies and in Roman comedies, we find glimpses of a considerably richer and more complicated world of gendered relations, erotic imagination, and human possibility, we encounter profound anxieties, ambivalences, and resistances to patriarchal practices and prejudices. This course will examine these tensions. We will be reading from Sappho, Homer, Gorgias, Plato, Aristophanes, Euripides, Cicero, Terence, Juvenal, Petronius, and many others.

Course Requirements:  Attendance/Participation (15%), Reading Notebook (15%), Midterm Paper, 2-3pp. (15%), Presentation 2pp. (15%), Final Paper 5-6pp. (40%)

Attendance Policy:  Attendance and punctuality are expected. Necessary absences should be discussed in advance whenever possible.

Provisional Schedule of Meetings

Week One | January 23 | Introductions

Week Two | January 30 | Poems of Sappho
Presentation: Portrait of a Girl {"Sappho"}; Portrait of Terentius Neo (two works)

Week Three | February 6 | Homer First and Last Chapters of the Iliad and an excerpt from Chapter IX posted on the blog.

Presentation: Apollo Belvedere

Week Four | February 13 | Gorgias -- Encomium of Helen; Thucydides -- Melian Dialogue and Pericles' Funeral Oration
Presentation: From the House of Jason ("House of Fatal Love"), three works: Medea; Phaedra; Paris and Helen

Week Five | February 20 | Euripides -- Hecuba

Presentation: Athena Parthenos (Tennessee Reconstruction)

Week Six | February 27 | Plato -- Symposium

Presentation: The Old Drunkard {or Drunken Old Woman}

Week Seven | March 5 | Plato -- Apology and "Allegory of the Cave" from the Republic; Aristotle on Women

Presentation: Venus de Milo; Venus de' Medici (two works)

Week Eight | March 12 | Aristophanes -- Wasps

Presentation: Venus Kallipygos; Michelangelo Pistoletto: Golden Venus of Rags (1967-71) (two works)

Week Nine | Spring Break

Week Ten | March 23 | Terence -- Eunuchus

Presentation: From the House of the Vettii: Priapus

Week Eleven | Cicero, Against Cataline, Philippics (Against Antony), Suetonius -- Caligula

Presentation: Trajan's Column

Week Twelve | 6 Hortensia in the Forum (posted to the blog), Marcus Cicero -- Commentariolum Petitionis

Presentation:  Aphrodite, Pan, and Eros (one work)

Week Thirteen | 13 Juvenal -- Satires I, II, and III

Presentation: Sleeping Hermaphroditus [sic]

Week Fourteen | 20  Petronius -- Trimalchio's Feast from Satyricon (The link takes you to Chapter Six -- keep reading through Chapter Ten.)

Presentation: The "Dionysiac Frieze" from the Villa of the Mysteries

Week Fifteen | 27 Workshop for the Final Paper

Week Sixteen | 4 Concluding Remarks, Augustine from City of God | Final Papers Due

Syllabus For This Spring's Graduate Introduction to Critical Theory at SFAI

At this point, after teaching variations of this course at UC Berkeley and SFAI for nearly a quarter century, I only just tinker with this syllabus around the edges. There are times when I could cheerfully jettison most of the first half of this syllabus altogether, honestly.

CS-500A-01: An Introduction to Critical Theory

Spring, 2020, San Francisco Art Institute

Instructor: Dale Carrico, dcarrico@sfai.edu; ndaleca@gmail.com

Course Blog: https://introcritsfai.blogspot.com/2020/01/our-syllabus.html
Wednesdays, 4.15-7pm, Fort Mason Lounge, 1/22/20-5/10/20
Rough Basis for Grade: Att/Part, 20%; Reading Notebook, 15%; Presentation, 15%; Final Paper, 15-20pp., 50%.

Course Description:

"The philosophers hitherto have only interpreted the world, but the point is to change it." -- Karl Marx

"Feminists are no more aware of different things than other people; they are aware of the same things differently. Feminist consciousness, it might be ventured, turns a 'fact' into a 'contradiction.'" -- Sandra Lee Bartky

"Artists inhabit the magical universe." -- William Burroughs

This course is a chronological and thematic survey of key texts in critical and cultural theory. A skirmish in the long rivalry of philosophy and rhetoric yielded a turn in Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud into the post-philosophical discourse of critical theory. In the aftermath of world war, critical theory took a biopolitical turn in Arendt, Fanon, and Foucault -- a turn still reverberating in work on socially legible bodies by writers like Haraway, Spivak, Butler, and Puar. And with the rise of the global precariat and climate catastrophe, critical theory is now turning again in STS (science and technology studies) and EJC (environmental justice critique) to articulate the problems and promises of an emerging planetarity. Theories of the fetish define the turn of the three threshold figures of critical theory -- Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud (commodity, sexuality, and ressentimentality) -- and fetishisms ramify thereafter in critical accounts from Benjamin (aura), Adorno (culture industry), Barthes (myth), Debord (spectacle), Klein (logo), and Harvey ("tech") to Mulvey and Mercer (the sexed and raced gaze). We think of facts as found not made, but facts are made to be found and, once found, made to be foundational. Let us pursue the propositions that fetishes are figures we take to yield false facts, while facts are figures we have fetishized to yield paradoxical truths.

                Provisional Schedule of Meetings

                Week One | January 22 | Fact, Figure, Fetish
Maps, Stories, Warnings by Way of Introduction

                Week Two | January 23 -- Ancients and Moderns, Margins and Centers

Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, Digression on the Ancients and the Moderns 
Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View  
W.E.B. DuBois, Of Our Spiritual Strivings  

Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism

                Week Three | February 5 | Nietzsche and the Fetishism of ressentiment

Nietzsche, On Truth and the Lie in an Extramoral Sense
Nietzsche, Ecce Homo: Preface -- Why I Am So Wise -- Why I Am So Clever -- Why I Am a Destiny
--supplemental Selections from The Gay Science

   

                Week Four | February 12 | Marx and the Fetishism of Commodities
Marx on The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof from Capital 

--supplemental Marx and Engels, Theses on Feuerbach and Marx on Idealism and Materialism

                Week Five | February 19 | Freud and Sexual Fetishism
Sigmund Freud, Fetishism
Excerpts from Freud's Case Study of Dr. Schreber: 1, Psychoanalysis and Scientificity; 2,  Storytelling;  
3, Psychoanalysis and Patriarchy (Homosociality and Homosexuality); 4. Psychoanalysis Brought to Crisis. 

                Week Six | February 26 | Commodity, Aura, and Culture Industry

Walter Benjamin, Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility  
Adorno and Horkheimer, The Culture Industry 

--supplemental Benjamin, A Short History of Photography and Adorno, The Culture Industry Reconsidered

                Week Seven | March 4 | Nature As The Fetish; Or, Ideology Is Structured Like A Language
Roland Barthes, Mythologies 

--supplemental Daniel Harris, The Futuristic

                Week Eight | March 11 | Being to Having, Having to Appearing, Appearing to Branding

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle
Naomi Klein, Taking On the Brand Bullies from No Logo  

--supplemental Naomi Klein, Patriarchy Gets Funky

                Week Nine | Spring Break

 

                Week Ten | March 25 | "I Knew It Had To Be Something Like This"
Screening, Carpenter (dir.) They Live 

                Week Eleven | April 1 | Out With The Old, In With The New
William Burroughs, Immortality 
Hannah Arendt, Reflections on Violence

--supplemental William Burroughs, On Coincidence 
Hannah Arendt, The Miracle of Forgiveness and Must Eichmann Hang? (handouts)

                 Week Twelve | April 8 | Racial Fetishism and the Gaze

Frantz Fanon, Selections from Black Skin, White Masks
Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema  
Kobena Mercer On Mapplethorpe 
--supplemental Fanon, "Concerning Violence" 

                Week Thirteen | April 15 | MFA Reviews

               Week Fourteen | April 22 | The Carceral Archipelago and Abolition Democracy

Michel Foucault, from Discipline and Punish, the Body of the Condemned (pp. 3-31) Docile Bodies (pg. 135 +), Panoptism (pg. 195 +)
Angela Davis, selections from Are Prisons Obsolete? (read Chapters, 1, 2, 6 of the pamphlet at least if you can)

--supplemental Foucault, from History of Sexuality: We Other Victorians, Right of Death and Power Over Life

               Week Fifteen | April 29 | Intersections and Performances

Audre Lorde, Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference  
The Combahee River Collective Statement 
Donna Haraway, A Manifesto for Cyborgs 
Judith Butler, Introduction and Chapter One from Undoing Gender
--supplemental Carol Adams, Preface from Neither Man Nor Beast and Manifesto

                Week Sixteen | May 6 | Fact, Figure, Fetish in Planetary Assembly 
Aldo Leopold, The Land Ethic
Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
Bruno Latour, To Modernise Or Ecologise?
Gayatri Spivak, Theses on Planetarity

--supplemental David Harvey Fetishism of Technology


Course Objectives:
 
I. Contextualizing Contemporary Critical Theory: The inaugural Platonic repudiation of rhetoric and poetry, Vita Activa/Vita Contemplativa, Marx's last Thesis on Feuerbach, Kantian Critique, the Frankfurt School, Exegetical and Hermeneutic Traditions, Literary and Cultural Theory from the Restoration period through New Criticism, from Philosophy to Post-Philosophy: Marx, Nietzsche, Freud; the postwar biopolitical turn in Arendt, Fanon, and Foucault; and the emerging post-colonial, post-international, post-global planetarity of theory in an epoch of digital networked media formations, anthropogenic climate catastrophe, and intersectional associations.
 
II. Survey of Key Themes in Critical Theory: Agency, Alienation, Aura, Cisheteronormativity, Critique, Culture Industry, Discourse, Equity-in-Diversity, Facticity, Fetish, Figurality, Humanism/Post-Humanism, Ideology, Intersectionality, Judgment, Normativity, Performance, Planetarity, Post-Colonialism, Queerness, Race, Recognition, Resistance, Scientificity, Sociality, Spectacle, Textuality, White Supremacy.
 
III. Survey of Key Critical Methodologies: Critique of Ideology, Marxism/Post-Marxism, Psychoanalysis, Foucauldian Discourse Analysis, Critical Race Theory, Gender Theory, Science and Technology Studies, Environmental Justice.
 
IV. Connecting theoria and poiesis: thinking and acting, theory and practice, creative expressivity as aesthetic judgment and critical theory as poetic refiguration, etc.

The Season of Losses

A bit over three years ago I had a nose bleed that turned into a life threatening loss of liters of blood and weeks in the hospital, and I have never entirely recovered my bearings in the aftermath of that event. I was diagnosed with a blood condition about which there is little understanding (the tell-tale "ideopathic" term was part of the diagnosis from the beginning and remains to this day) and for which there is little in the way of treatment (I don't drink alcohol anymore or take blood-thinning painkillers, which means all the painkillers, and I do yoga and take long walks with Eric and so on, which means I lost about a hundred twenty pounds over the last couple years and Eric and I are closer than ever after eighteen years, all of which has been great, but to this day I get my blood-tests and the doctors look at the results and do their double-takes and say something on the order of, well, my, my, your blood platelet count sure likes to run low, now, doesn't it? which inspires enormous confidence). To this day, I have panic attacks when the subway stalls and I start to imagine bleeding again confined in a train car in the tunnel beneath the waters of the Bay surrounded by panicky commuters as I bleed from the eyes, as happened in the emergency room that night. The 2016 primary fights were taking place at the time of my bleeding incident, and as I lay in my hospital bed, getting poked with needles for test after test hour after hour, I saw the rise of Trump and the idiotic undermining of the already-vulnerable HRC by fauxvolutionary fanboys as a clear preview of the hell we have been living through for the last few years. Those nights in the hospital bed were the first of the long insomnia nights that have plagued me ever since from time to time. You know, the US has always been a disgusting racist conformist money-grubbing anti-intellectual shithole, but I wanted to believe the experience of George W. Bush's idiocies and crimes had inspired a diverse ascendant Obama coalition ready to assume responsibility for the governing of the nation, push the Democratic party in more sustainable and equitable directions, and force a GOP ever more beholden to a diminishing straight white Christianist-authoritarian Base to abandon its post-Nixonian rush into authoritarianism and reactionary conspiracism. That's not at all what happened as we all know by now and the loss of hope for an embrace of nonviolent progressive change in the face of a diversifying population, climate catastrophe, and the palpable failure of market ideological pieties felt a lot like my loss of blood: the loss of the force that keeps me going. In the years since, I've lost a lot of my joy and passion for teaching as I wonder whether teaching theory really contributes to clarity about historical change when so many privileged students seem to spout theory to rationalize their complacency or provide their cynical opportunism a self-promotional self-congratulatory gloss and also as I observe so many of my best students struggling under conditions of extreme psychological distress and economic precarity... does anybody really need to be reading the lovely but esoteric Walter Benjamin or that scumbag Sigmund Freud to understand the threat posed by fossil fuel companies or Trump's Education Secretary or gun-toting bigots in this historical moment we are struggling through here and now? I have adapted my syllabi to reflect these lived urgencies (teaching theory surveys usually means at least half a term of a parade that is relentlessly stale, pale, and male as Rebecca Solnit once put it), but I am forever bedeviled by discouragement and anxiety where before teaching was a real consolation and fuel for me. During this difficult season I also lost first my beloved cat of sixteen years Sarah, then I lost my long-estranged father to early-onset Alzheimer's, then just yesterday my Mother also died, after a completely unexpected heart attack and period of nonresponsive nightmarishness on a ventilator over the last week. So much loss, of connections, of support, of standards, of hope. Mariame Kaba reminds me that "Hope Is A Discipline." I have a few weeks of winter break ahead of me in which to rest and recharge my batteries, read escapist entertainments and prepare for Spring's renewed efforts. I am reminded, as ever, of Donna Haraway's admonition that nobody knows all that is happening in the world, even the most knowledgeable, and that this means none of us knows enough to be fully justified in despair. I am despairing a bit right now, but I know that I don't know many things that would answer my despair if only I connect with them and I know the space of teaching is a space in which those connections are as well fostered as any. The art world remains a place of frivolous predation but actual artists and their actual art can be a far different story. After so much loss, I await a season of gains by rising generations in a world educated by intersectional feminism, environmental justice, and abolition democracy. We can only do our best. I wish you all the best for the coming struggles. And, you know, happy holidays.

Here Is the Syllabus For My Upcoming Fall Queer Theory Survey Course, "Queer Manifestations"

Queer Manifestations

Wednesdays, 4.15-7 FM130, August 30-December 6, 2017

Dale Carrico; e-mail: dcarrico@sfai.edu Wednesdays, 1-3.45pm Room: FM SR2; August 30-December 6, 2017

Course Blog: https://queermanifestations.blogspot.com/

Office Hours: Before and after class, and by appointment. (I will also be available on Chestnut Street on Thursdays)

Required Texts: David J. Getsy, ed., Queer (On reserve in the library. Recommended purchase: Documents in Contemporary Art, MIT/Whitechapel Gallery, 2016 ISBN: 9780262528672.) All other texts are available online or will be made available as handouts.

Course Requirements: Attendance/Participation, 15%; Co-Facilitation, 15%; In-Class Report (10-15 mins.), 15%, Symposium Presentation, 15%; Seminar Paper, 10 pp., 40% (subject to contingencies)

Attendance Policy:  Attendance and punctuality are expected. Necessary absences should be discussed in advance whenever possible.

Course Description: There is something queer about the manifesto form as such, in its bringing to voice and vision a derangement in our sense of what is politically possible and important. In the deadening epoch of the closet the queer manifesto is an interruption of silence, but like every manifesto it is above all an unembarrassed and emancipatory eruption of desire into the collective work of historical and political worldmaking. Into the prosaic efforts of partisan organization and legislative reform, the ranting and raving of the manifesto is an invigorating and interfering infusion of political poetry. We will read radical manifestos flung from the scrum of insurrection and frustration across continents and through generations of lgbtiq civil rights and liberation struggles and we will contemplate hallucinations of promise and formulations of protest from visionaries in the belly of the beast, from Plato's Symposium to Solanas's SCUM.

Provisional Schedule of Classes

Week One | Wednesday, August 28

Introductions

Week Two | Wednesday, September 6
Plato, Symposium

Co-facilitations:

Selections from "Queer": 1. Natalie Clifford Barney, The Unknown Woman -- 2. Jean Cocteau, The White Book

3. Richard Bruce Nugent, You See, I Am A Homosexual -- 4. Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers
In-Class Report:

Week Three | Wednesday, September 13 
Oscar Wilde The Soul of Man Under Socialism
Co-Facilitation:
1. Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young -- 2. Preface for The Picture of Dorian Gray -- 3.Wilde on Trial

Also, from "Queer": 4. Jack Smith, Statements, Ravings and Epigrams

In Class Report: 

Week Four | Wednesday, September 20 
Susan Sontag, Notes On Camp / Bruce La Bruce, Anti-Camp

Co-Facilitation:

Selections from "Queer": 1. Helio Oiticica, Mario Montez, tropicamp -- 2. Amy Sillman, AbEx and Disco Balls: In Defense of Abstract Expressionism -- 3. Charles Ludlam, Manifesto: Ridiculous Theater, Scourge of Human Folly -- 4. Gregg Bordowitz, The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous
In Class Reports:

Week Five | Wednesday, September 27 
Harry Hay, Mattachine, Radical Fairies (handout)
Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic -- Poetry Is Not A Luxury
Co-Facilitation:

Selections from "Queer": 1. Derek Jarman, At Your Own Risk -- 2. Tee Corinne, On Sexual Art -- 3. Harmony Hammond, Class Notes -- 4. Elmgreen & Dragset, Performative Constructions: In Conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist

In Class Reports:

Week Six | Wednesday, October 4 
Valarie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto / The Combahee River Collective Statement

Co-Facilitation:

Selections from "Queer": 1. Hudson, Sex Pot -- 2. Catherine Lord, Their Memory Is Playing Tricks on Her: Toward A Calligraphy of Rage -- 3. Hanh Thi Pham, Statement -- 4. Zanele Muholi, Isilumo siyaluma (Period Pains)

In Class Reports:

Week Seven | Wednesday, October 11 
Sandy Stone, The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttransexual Manifesto

Co-Facilitation:

Selections from "Queer": 1. Susan Stryker, Transgender History, Heteronormativity, and Disciplinarity -- 2. Renate Lorenz, Drag: Radical, Transtemporal, Abstract -- 3. Paul B. Preciado, Videopenetration -- 4. Ma Liuming, Fen-Ma Liuming

In Class Report:

Week Eight | Wednesday, October 18 
Eve Sedgwick, Axiomatic

Co-Facilitation:

Selections from "Queer": 1. Zoe Leonard, I Want A Dyke for President -- 2. Ulrike Muller, Bulletin -- 3. Marlon T. Riggs, Black Macho Revisited: Confessions of a Snap! Queen -- 4. Allyson Mitchell, Deep Lez
In Class Report:

Week Nine | Wednesday, October 25 

Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (This link brings up an entire book -- for our discussion you need read only the "Introduction: Acting in Concert" and Chapter One: "Beside Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy," pp. 1-39.)

Co-Facilitations:

Selections from "Queer": 1. Toxic Titties, The Mamaist Manifesto -- 2. Holly Hughes, Breaking the Fourth Wall -- 3. Wu Tsang, In Order To Fall Apart As Complex Beings, We Need First To Be Able To Live -- 4. Carlos Motta, We Who Feel Differently: A Manifesto

In Class Reports:

Week Ten | Wednesday, November 1
Jaspir Puar, Homonationalism and Biopolitics (Introduction to the book Terrorist Assemblages)
(supplemental) Jaspir Puar, I'd Rather Be A Cyborg Than A Goddess

Co-Facilitation:

Selections from "Queer": 1. K8 Hardy, amifesto -- 2. Emily Roysdon, Queer Love -- 3. Richard Fung, Beyond Domestication -- Prem Sahib, To Make Queer Art Now
In Class Report:

Week Eleven | Wednesday, November 6
Alison Kafer, Feminist Queer Crip

Co-Facilitation:

Selections from "Queer": 1. Malik Gaines, A defence of marriage act: Notes on the social performance of queer ambivalence -- 2. Vaginal Davis, Twee & sympathy: A manifesto -- 3. Alexandro Segade, On Queer Reenactment -- 4. Gordon Hall, New Space Education

In Class Reports:

Week Twelve | Wednesday, November 13

Workshopping Final Paper

Week Thirteen | Wednesday, November 20

Our Symposium (first panels)

Week Fourteen | Wednesday, November 27

Our Symposium (second panels)

Week Fifteen | Wednesday, December 4 
Sara Ahmed, Feminist Killjoy and Concluding Remarks.

In Class Reports (Last Call)

YES! Warren Proposes A Public Option for the Internet

Along with her plan to provide reliable low-cost non-predatory financial services via the post office, this is another long-cherished pet policy proposal I always wanted but never expected to see an actually-viable candidate proposing in a Presidential campaign. I've got quibbles, but the more often "public option for the internet" circulates as a phrase in public the better off we are all likely to be, the more likely breaking up Amazon, Google, facebook, Apple, and media giants gets. Follow the link for a whole article, here's an excerpt:

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) announced a plan Wednesday to create a public option for the internet, aiming to ensure universal broadband access... To enact her plan, Warren hopes to first pass a federal law preventing state-level restrictions that have hampered municipalities that want to pursue a public internet system. She would then create an $85-billion federal grant program to shoulder 90% of the costs for utility cooperatives, nonprofits, cities, counties and Native American tribes interested in laying the fiber needed to bring broadband -- contemporary high-speed internet -- to the mostly rural regions that do not currently have it. The entities applying for the money -- for-profit utilities are notably ineligible -- would have to agree to serve as internet service providers for residents they serve, offering at least one high-speed plan and one plan affordable for low-income people. [Whether this actually qualifies as a fully public option on my undersanding depends on the details, whatever they are this is likely a great improvement on the status quo and nudges this regulatory/governance discourse in socially democratizing directions --d] “I will make sure every home in America has a fiber broadband connection at a price families can afford,” Warren writes in a Medium post introducing her rural investment plan. “That means publicly-owned and operated networks -- and no giant {internet service providers) running away with taxpayer dollars.” ... About one-quarter of the population living in rural areas and one-third of the population living in Native American tribal lands lack broadband access, according to the FCC. Warren also hopes major cities will take advantage of her plan, noting that even in urban areas where infrastructure is robust, the cost of high-speed internet keeps it out of reach for many low-income families...

Let Them Eat Disruption

After a generation of Reagan Republican neo-feudalist Randroidal asshole "Idea Guys" dismantled the New Deal and Great Society for short term-cash, the next generation of neo-feudalist techbro VC "thought leader" hustlers dismantled what was left of society for short-term cash again. We praise and coddle them to this day, as they kill us day after day after day after day. It isn't exactly a mystery how we got here or where this is all going.

Wilde on Impeachment

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.