Author: Cait

Feminist Computing #2: Eileen Myles’ “Old Computer”

Therapy by Eileen Myles

I like therapy because I don’t need my glasses
I can sit there naked like the animal I am
a beautiful honest animal
a landscape of rolling reasons.
So amazing that an artist would use a cup
for a prayer; and no less amazing
that another animal would choose to be one
I considered being a cup
somewhere in my journey
between stars and thinking changing fonts was a revolution
standing in my green kitchen
Four years I’ve been to sea
so much is left on the old computer
things written in that place
one night getting rimmed
and then she fell asleep
spending hours mopping up the next day
in place of doing work
missing a party after all
I say always go to the party
which doesn’t mean I do
some friends left early
I stayed and the sea spoke next

“Swimming is just an extension of breathing; this is how I keep my head and heart well”

Last week I read Ann Cvetkovich’s new book Depression: A Public Feeling (2012), half of which is a memoir of the two years during which she finished her dissertation and started her first job. I loved it for many reasons, some of which are intellectual engagements. But I think what will stick with me most from this book are the parts about swimming.

Cvetkovich writes about swimming as a “utopia of everyday habit”: a repetitive, physically engaged practice through which we build new worlds that show us ways out of political depression, via ordinary, everyday routines. The full text of Cvetokovich’s mini-essay on swimming is here (PDF).

Swimming is something I’ve always loved and have always done, but swimming lengths became a regular practice a few years ago when I was getting over a running injury. I think a lot about why I swim, and, unlike the other activities I do, it has very little to do with “getting exercise.”

For me, the pleasure in swimming comes from having to move in and out of the world. Underwater there is a singularity and a solitude that is utterly unlike the aloneness I experience at my desk, facing a word document like this one. I’m so physically engaged in moving through the water well, and with rhythm, that I let my mind wander. The nagging voices of imposter syndrome, an overdue article, a stack of marking, or a proposal I’m nervous about are quieted by the ways in which my body has to be completely engaged. And then I come up for air, in the world and aware of others in the pool for just long enough before I’m back with the quiet. In this way, swimming is a repetitive break with the pressures of capital and the thousand tiny anxieties that can make this kind of job hard to bear.

This oscillation is one of the meditative aspects of swimming that Cvetkovich expresses so well:

“Swimming is just an extension of breathing. I can keep moving without really thinking about it or exerting a lot of effort. Moving lets me off the hook a little bit. I can space out and let my mind continue with its obsessions because my body is carrying on, and carrying on without me. Exercise becomes an opportunity for sanctioned dissociation, and swimming is such a graceful way of moving that it seems okay to let my brain do whatever it wants. I’m sealed off from the rest of the world in the womb-like space of the pool.”

My friend cheyanne, who I’ve had the joy of swimming with in lakes, pools, and quarries, has written of swimming in a similar way. Hers is also a love story, charming because it’s so simple—sort of like swimming:

“I once fell in love with a person from Hawaii, a child born into water and who, to this day, is happiest there. In an attempt to conjure their love for me, I taught myself to swim, experimenting with how to orchestrate my breath and my body in tandem. It has been a while now since then, and I am still in love, and these days we swim together. Something beautiful happens in the space between taking breath in and bubbling it out underwater. It’s simple and yet it requires all my attention. In that precise focus, my mind is still. This is how I keep my head and heart well.”

Totally hypothetical fantasy scenarios about feminism and the internet

One of the things I want to work on for 2013 is to make time each day for finding ways of thinking differently and tangentially about work that I’m doing. I want to imagine scenarios and ask questions that have no clear instrumental relationship to my research but that send my thoughts in other directions because they’re funny, or weird, or even utopian. I want to see what this might add to my process of thinking/writing/reading/researching. There is maybe some connection between this practice and the reading I’ve been doing about feminism and humour but that’s a post for another day.

This is the first one:

 

Queer Belongings, Timing

“Most of the audience came every week. They came because they loved Jeff [Weiss] and they loved Hot Keys but they also came because something was happening in the room that exceeded all of us but that also depended on all of us — the us in the audience and the us on the stage. I’m not sure I can fully find language to describe the experience of that show. It has stayed with me for a very very long time. It’s not unlike other experience I had, experiences at some demonstrations or at some political actions. Moments where I am taken out of myself, where I am seized by something that moves me, not emotionally — although emotions are certainly a part of this experience — but rather something that compels me to an even more extended set of actions or commitments. It’s this very specific experience of suddenly finding yourself wanting to be a part of an event or a group or a world that you recognize that you are just then in that very moment a part of it. It’s an experience, I think, of realizing that you’ve somehow managed to bring yourself to just the right place. It’s a kind of ecstatic pleasure in belonging, not forever necessarily, but at least in that exact moment in which you realize you want to belong.”

– Sharon Hayes (2009) Keynote Lecture, The Creative Time Summit: Revolutions in Public Practice. In Coming After: Queer Time, Arriving Too Late and the Spectre of the Recent Past (2012), Ed. Jon Davies.

Writing in Progress, on jokes and feminist archives

This week I’ve learned not to leave writing deadlines for the Christmas holiday because it’s a real nerdy bahumbug. The article I’m working on right now is more generally about artist projects that use humour as a mode of encounter in feminist archives.

Working in archives of any kind is always hard, hunched over boxes, sorting through file after file, never sure whether you’ve found the right thing. When Derrida wrote of “archive fever” he wasn’t describing how your eyes and neck quite literally start to ache, but these haptic memories might be familiar to anyone who does research for a living. Much writing about working in feminist archives emphasizes these states of being and feeling, dwelling on the emotional reactions of artists and researchers: encounters with records of feminist activism can inspire optimism, or leave you depressed, worn-out by the sad forms feminist struggle can take. Feminist histories are often told against the backdrop of all kinds of traumas and injustices, from racism, to sexual assault, to domestic abuse, to the everyday exhaustion of trying to get by when the cards are stacked against you. Working in archives that house, in part, the insidious traumas of feminist burnout (Cvetkovich 2003), it helps to have a sense of humour; when the archive overwhelms, sometimes all you can do is find a way to laugh.

Hot Tub Methodology

Over the last month I’ve been doing a lot of reading on feminist research methods for my dissertation proposal, working in that way where you’re gathering yourself for something but aren’t really sure yet about the practical steps you’re going to take to accomplish that thing. Patti Lather’s Getting Lost (2007) has been especially important. I’m always grateful when a book of theory comes into my life at just the right time to offer not just an intellectual engagement but a kind of self-help. Lather is so good on theorizing how to turn the vulnerabilities and imposter feelings that come along with social research into ethically engaged research design.

Dissertation Proposal Step #1: start writing group that meets in change room at Y.

From “Plateau 8: Naked Methodology”

My interest in nakedness comes from the very material practice of time in hot tubs that has characterized Chris [Lather’s co-researcher] and my methodological wrestling in our study of women living with HIV/AIDS. Grounded in the hours spent in my co-researcher’s hot tub where we discussed the project, my interest in nakedness also comes out of a small research retreat in Wisconsin when this project was at its beginning. There, structured around each of seven women having two hours of “exquisite attention” for her work in any way she wanted, I stripped and sat in a jacuzzi in a bathroom surrounded by six dressed women who fired questions at me about the ethics and politics of what I was undertaking.

As was evident at that session, such work pushed a lot of buttons for those invested in the politics of knowing and being known. This is as it should be. While naked methodology became a situated practice toward an ethical encounter with the women in our study, it is not about presenting myself as transparent, vulnerable, and absolutely frank. Based on Nietzsche’s strong thesis that every word is also a hiding place, an apparent nakedness is but a mask that conceals a will to power. Any illusion of presence unmasked is interrupted by the difficult task Nietzsche invites us to: not to unmask and demystify but, rather, to multiply perspectives toward an affirmation of life as a means to knowledge without guaranteed. This is a rigor of staging and watching oneself subvert and revalue the naked truth in order to learn to live without absolute knowledge, within indeterminacy.

 

 

The objects we won’t put down

Casio Guts.

Yesterday I read Anna McCarthy’s (very short) essay in the current issue of Social Text (subscription required). It’s called “Casio” and it’s a personal essay about a Casio calculator she bought at a garage sale when she was twenty-three. McCarthy doesn’t use the calculator but can’t bear to part with it and the essay is a really beautiful reflection on the objects we attach to and what they mean to us across a great span of time. It’s also about moving, and the all the reckoning with objects and our attachments that this upheaval brings. This is the aspect of the essay that I attached to.

McCarthy describes an argument with her husband over the calculator during “what was a particularly grueling apartment move”:

“It was three in the morning, and he walked into my study with a look of desperation and a trash bag. I was sitting amid piles of books, assembling boxes. Can I pitch this, he asked, gesturing to the Casio on the desk. No, I said, growing shrill. No way. Absolutely not. He looked at me and suggested I take an Ativan.

But a talisman is better than an Ativan, especially when it works through the preemptive properties of forethought. By letting me fantasize about a disaster, the Casio reduced the probability that a real one would actually happen. The coincidence would be too great. Over the years, this fetish value has proven far greater than the thing’s value as a calculator.”

There are those who hold on to objects when they move in case they want to feel something for those objects again one day. This holding on happens under the guise of “I might need this later.” Then there are those who use a move to purge, often with abandon for future attachments, wanting to lighten their life in whatever way they can.

The weight of attachment is a bit different when it comes to the objects we share. When you end a relationship and divide your things in preparation to move, practically, and symbolically, away from the other, there are all kinds of half-truths you tell each other through objects. “You can have it, I never liked it anyway” can be a way of refusing to continue to share the same attachments to a thing; a gesture that wards off more hurt. “I have nice memories of that and I’d really like to keep it” marks a shared history that you won’t begin to deny. And then once you move and you’re still sorting through the detritus, the choices made about what to keep and what to throw away are always loaded with dead or far-too-present thoughts about what your attachment to an object meant in the past, and what it means right now, balanced with the suspicion that you might feel differently about it in the future.