speaking in fragments

this morning i walked around with a cup of tea, mumbling nonsense, repeating random (maybe not so random) words like "bad," "bitches," "bad,", etc. you get the picture. there's a nanci griffith song that mentions a "worried mind" (though she uses this to refer to jealousy, or at least i think she does) but i felt it aptly described my morning state of being. i was jacked up on the last of a pg tips tea bag, speaking in fragments, hoping to heal a rather wounded ego from the previous day's battering by an anonymous reviewer. by mid-afternoon, i pulled it together, trudged to the office, printed off two essays, brought home three books, and plowed through the first 50 pages of a textual analysis of sexuality, love, and desire. since my latest effort was characterized as "stubbornly unreflective," by some anonymous turd with a little bit of power, i spent the afternoon reflecting on how every feminist text i read these days feels like it was hooked up to foucault's (or derrida's, or lacan's, or lyotard's, or whatever the name of your favorite postructuralist is) brain by ethernet and transferred to the hard drive of contemporary feminist criticism. it's this type of reflection that gets me into trouble and it's more than likely why i typically generate the most unpleasant outside reviews. though this latest one stung, it also reminded me of my very first paper rejection i received in grad school . . . i was described as creating a "demonic postcolonialism". imagine that. me. demonic. postcolonialism. i should title my fucking book that for all my anonymous fans.

to continue with yesterday's post: i'm out of the mainstream with my discipline. i'm out of step with most people writing on similar things. i don't want to treat my work like a mad lib and plug in "agency" "power" "constitutive" "resistance" in random spots to illustrate how well i've absorbed the good teachings of postmodernity. instead, i use terms like "exploitation" "prostituted" "liberation" and, god forbid, "nationalism" only to be treated like a relic from another planet. and, don't bother talking about imperialism, cause that shit aint cool these days. it's all about representation baby . . . and, isn't it a shame that feminist crit. seems to have drifted further and further away from reality/material conditions (at least in the U.S.) at the precise moment things are worsening around the world? when another foreclosure sign gets posted in front of a house sending shady and unscrupulous investors hiding under their hedge fund, or 500 people are blown to bits by suicide bombers, or the petraus report is really the bush report, or any number of things that are bound to happen to us in this fucked up situation of satellites and domestic spying, theorists are going to have to come to grips that this aint no simulacra . . . no imagined community. this shit is real with enormous consequences. i remain stubbornly convinced that we should theorize these things to make sense of our world, and as the old saying goes, to change it. damn. is that so hard?