Lovely little drawing, lovely little muddler.
This little drawing doesn’t nearly capture what’s been going through my head during this month + of silence in the blogosphere.
But more and more I’ve been considering the pairing of pleasure and pain, which more and more seems so completely infused into every component of daily life, in so many different forms.
Of course, I’m only speaking from one kind of life . . . my little life. And if I’m going to write about sadomasochism, I’m going to have to encounter and incorporate at least one of the critiques from Against Sadomasochism: A Radical Feminist Analysis — that s/m is the problem of white women . . .
Which brings us directly to questions of leisure and privilege, time and money, and how those factors affect the kind of sex people have. Because I am more and more interested in the intersection between sex and knowledge, knowledge in the form of imagination or facts or narratives, the fact that certain sexual practices are associated with a form of “taboo” knowledge. I have never known a kind of sex more book-oriented than BDSM.
But still I am fearful of The Text, and making that choice, the choice of a text with which to test and qualify these ideas. See how long it has taken me to come back to the page, when I’ve been working up to this post for some time.
I remember David Lloyd once saying, in one of the faculty panels put together by last year’s brilliant Association of English Graduate Students committee at USC: “Let the object change you.” He was referring to the choices we have, or seem to have, on the texts we write on for our Diss. He was referring to following what you love, no matter what anyone tells you, and letting that object change the way you think. Fear of change, encore?
Somehow I feel I’ve gone about it in reverse. Where is my passion-generating text? How is one located, after the fact? After all these preliminary ideas?
Amazing what an encounter with a random drawing on google’s image search can engender . . .
All you lurkers with any advice, please chime in.
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There needs to be a point soon when we talk! As a first-year whose slowly growing archives are full of… untraditional “objects,” I’m constantly confronted with the fear (usually when people talk about screening exams or eventual dissertations) that I’m going to get some suspiciously raised eyebrows and a good talking to. But when I read the word “sadomasochism” I get eeeeeenterested. So again, we should totally talk soon.
Yes, we should talk! What about the fear of “traditional” objects? Or doing untraditional things with those traditional objects? Or combining traditional and untraditional objects in one sweeping, brilliant, but not generalizing, study?
I think I’d better write a post on these things.
I am constantly transformed by objects and hope I am constantly transforming them in return. I think I’ve decided there’s no other way to “do” this job. And if it means I’ll be fucked over for tenure, well…
I think fear is too often the motivating emotion in graduate study, and the academy in general. There’s a way to recapture some pleasure in discipline (kinda like the endorphin rush some folks get from working out, or so I’ve heard), so I’m not simply saying to eschew “training” altogether. Instead, I think we have to approach each text, each intellectual object with some willigness to flirt–with disaster, love or both.