Terms of interest, or: fear of The Text (part I).

These come to me in no particular order:

perversion         ethics         interdependence         dialectic         feminism         queer         love         narrative

sadomasochism          masochism         power exchange         phenomenology         materiality        desire

representation         erotics         play         discourse         rhetoric         fantasy         imagination         aesthetics

imaginaries

Again, these have no real meaning without texts, or complete sentences. And the list is always in progress.

This might also be called a fear of commitment.

Weird sex.

Today my mother — in discussing her new neighbors and their need for privacy — reminded me yet again (and indirectly, of course) of why I hold the interests I do. Or, more specifically, why I think writing about sex practices, or writing about different kinds of eroticisms, or writing about alternate pleasures, pleasures in the unexpected, pleasures where we disallow pleasure, not to mention my interest in practicing such pleasures, and in writing about representations and rhetoric of promiscuous pleasures – anyway, today my mother reminded me why it’s important to think, read, and write about sex.

We’re driving up Shenandoah Lane, headed out of the neighborhood in which I was raised, headed out of the Bluegrass state, to visit my grandmother, who is in the hospital (according to her doctor, she died eight times this weekend, but that’s another post). We’re discussing those neighbors, who are already cursed because they’re nothing like the last husband and wife duo – lots of fun, lots of nosiness, and lots of chatting, all of which my mother exemplifies and demands, bless her southern soul. Mom remarks on their odd work schedules, “Sometimes he’s there, and she’s not, sometimes they’re both home,” meaning, I assume, home during the day when most folks are working. I suggest that perhaps the folks next door might be academics. I am thinking of my own arbitrary schedule, which often has me home in the middle of the day, or starting later than most of my neighborhood, including the Catholic schoolkids and nuns next door. Mom states in that tone of voice that brings to mind compressed lips and narrowness, always a shutting down, ”Well I don’t know what they do. I don’t talk to them.”

Is this jealousy? Is this hurt? Certainly it’s a nostalgia for her dwindling group of friends. And certainly it’s dislike. No — distaste. I try to shift the subject to a lighter note.

“Maybe they just stay home and have a lot of sex.” I’m thinking, again, of the decadence that often arises from midday free time. But I’m also expecting that Mom will laugh at this, or dismiss it by referring back to her earlier piece of knowledge: that the neighbors have a bi-weekly meeting, ”all their friends show up carrying their Bibles,” and some of them block up the entire cul-de-sac with their automobiles.

So I am surprised by her answer. “Yeah. Weird sex.”

“Weird sex?” I am already tense and now ready to do battle, but trying to tame this out of my voice, as I’m not sure what my mother knows of my own weird sex practices. (My Daddy insists she peeked in our wardrobe when visiting over Thanksgiving. Well, I deserve it, because I did enough snooping in my mother’s room when I was young.)

“Weird sex? What does that mean?”

“Just weird stuff. Kinky. I don’t know, there’s just something funny about them. They put up that privacy fence and I don’t know anything about them.”

“Just because they want privacy doesn’t mean they’re in to kinky sex . . . “

“I know, but one day I was looking around –”

“What were you doing over there?”

“Well, they had just re-done their back yard, before the privacy fence, and I wanted to see what it looked like, I thought they were gone.” Typical of my mother, who once broke into the house behind us right after they finished building it, just because she wanted to see what it looked like. “And the woman came out and said ‘Can I help you with something?’” Mom narrates the rest, the woman’s not-so-subtle hints of putting up a privacy fence, and I begin to tune out. I want to push the “weird sex” idea, I want to have the discussion where I explain that kinky sex, weird sex, is not necessarily a bad thing. But as sexual as I’ve always believed my mother to be, something about “weird sex” unsettles her, and reminds me of the first time she saw my hairy armpits (incidentally over Thanksgiving, when she also might have looked into the wardrobe and seen various utensils) and proceeded to make faces and “bleh” sounds, shaking her head and saying “It’s nasty. Nasty!” My ears rang with an undercurrent of meaning: “It’s unnatural. Not right!” I was flooded, and am now flooded, with the palpable tone of her voice: disapproval, and again: distaste. Like there was something in her mouth she needed to spit out. And therefore shut down.

Not that I need to explain all of this to my mother. But she gets that distaste of “weird sex” from somewhere, which most certainly means that she’s not alone in her feelings. Can we name these sources? All the CSI and SVU shows that depict serial killers and pedophiles in ways that align them with “weird sex,” usually with certain objects and instruments, in certain dark and dank locations. The BTK killer who has likely created an enduring association between words such as “bondage” and “binding” and “torture” and consensual bondage and torture images. I remember vividly the scene from the film Seven, where the crime associated with the sin of Lust is traced to the store that made the tool for the crime: in my mind it is a dark place, with cluttered and dusty shelves, all sorts of gear hanging on the walls, and a greasy, pasty, overweight man confirming his manufacture of the tool in question, a strap-on with a sharp curved knife in place of a dildo. Everything associated with the store reeked of a distaste, a shudder, a revulsion. And I could continue to list examples from popular culture that showcase the alignment between “weird sex” and “threat” or “harm.” An alignment which supports the unnaturalness. Which leads to that bad taste coating the tongue . . .

Of course there are bad people out there doing bad things with the very tools and toys used within the BDSM community. There are also bad people doing bad things with very natural parts of their bodies. A lot of harm can be done without even touching someone.

There are many threads that remain to be connected in this post. More threads emerge as I watch the actual clip from Seven (see my note below). But the threat of privacy, the distaste, these are terms I would like to return to in my next post, which will elaborate on the subject of my brother and perversion.

Addendum: YouTube, marvel or marvels, has the “Lust” clip from Seven http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvAUfm8KieM  As you’ll see, my mind has grafted it’s own images of “weird sex” on to the actual film . . .

Another promiscuous definition.

1. Pretty much another word for “easy“ 2. Song by Nelly Furtado featuring Timbaland

The Promiscuous Writer.

from the OED:

1. a. Consisting of members or elements of different kinds grouped or massed together without order; of mixed and disorderly composition or character; also, with pl. n., of various kinds mixed together.

b. Rarely of a single thing.

2. a. That is without discrimination or method; done or applied without respect for kind, order, number, etc.; confusedly mingled, indiscriminate.

b. Of an agent or agency: Making no distinctions; undiscriminating. Now esp.: indiscriminate in sexual relations

~ * ~ * ~

It’s time that I start writing as if I mean to be a writer. Start writing like the writer I already am.

This, arguably, is the main purpose of initiating “Little Red Goes to School”: to get me writing more in my everyday life, rather than only writing in order to meet requirements and deadlines. If what one learns in graduate school is, as Karen Tongson says, to be auto-didactic, then it’s time that I embrace my own learning and writing, via my own paths and methods (and with the generous, thoughtful, rigorous, and loving critique of my professors, peers, friends, lovers, family, cats). The fact is, I love to learn and love to write, and I’m good at both of these things — yet rather sick of these activities in the context of coursework.

As I write, more trends emerge in this blog, trends that we might elevate to the status of intentionality, of goals: let me list them (for the benefit of us both, dear Lurker):

• to explore how a personal and even confessional kind of writing might sheer to more rigorous critique; in essence to explore how I might blend the personal with the critical, literally, on the page. I’ve tended to resist this generic divide, anyway, so I might as well make it official.
• to explore what kind of dissertation I’d like to produce, in terms of key terms and themes, theories, and texts.
• to connect more with other writers (not just academic!) and, in the process, get over the trouble I have in discussing my projects while they are in process. More importantly, perhaps, I wish to resist the pressure of graduate school, as well as the academy as a whole, to isolate oneself in work.
• to play.

And, again, the fulfillment of all these goals demands, in my mind, promiscuous writing. To this day I remain a promiscuous reader, and I have finally accepted this fact as the primary reason I have followed a schooling in “English Literature” for so long. Now that other ways to talk about writing and reading are open to me — through studies of (pop) culture, genders, queernesses, theories, interdisciplinary work, etc. — the possibilities for studying language are limitless. I could keep reading and reading and reading, but at some point I need to write about what I read. And the possibilities for what I might write about are endless, and often as empty and hollow as the glaring-white word doc page. That very boundlessness is what frightens me (I’m remembering a lecture by Fred Moten on Kant and the terror of boundlessness). There is a kind of comfort in boundaries, and here, in this blog, I find the post-format to be a good and bound way to explore those endless possibilities. I did always like to bend the rules, anyway.

The title of this post revises the title of the introduction to Jennifer Doyle’s Sex Objects, which is “The Promiscuous Reader.” On her way to positioning her work as an exploration of “art that tells us how sex matters” (xvi), she notes a sort of dis-ease, a “nervousness about the different kinds of reading [she] was doing at the time” (xv). While I would like to spend more time with Doyle’s text, for the moment I’ll unabashedly steal her move, and embrace that discomfiting promiscuity. Here’s to differences, blurred boundaries, and reading and writing that rarely deals with a single thing.

Settling in.

The default wordpress.com title for first post is “Hello world!”

I can be okay with that greeting, in this first, sleep-deprived blog of my brand-spankin-new site. Hello, to the world, hello to myself, hello to the kind of schooling I’m finally getting to embark upon.

And hello enigmatic beginnings . . . more soon . . .