The Days When Birds Come Back

I'm back, folks, after a long bout of the flu that has left me looking rather like Kate Moss. This week has been sort of nuts, as the week before spring break often is, and I hope you have all been riding out the chaos well enough. Despite all the craziness and anxiety about impending graduation and my less than lucrative career goals, there are some mornings, when I have time to get up and do some writing and purchase a new book, with springtime-appropriate weather streaming in through the windows. These are mornings of optimism for me, that leave me feeling as though maybe we can all plug onward. To paraphrase E.D, these are the [mornings] when skies resume/The old-old sophistries of June-/A blue and gold mistake.

I want to take a blog moment to examine both the project I have set forth in this blog and my own commitment to that project. As you may be realizing, two things are occuring with regards to my writing habits: 1) I am not updating as frequently as I'd like and 2) I have made some blog promises on which I have not followed through, mainly in the form of promised follow-ups. I imagine these writerly habits are quite frustrating for you, as readers. All I can really say on this front is that I will try to play a better host to the handful of you who visit this cozy pocket of the internet.

Onward and upward, though. All the hubub which has been taking place at and around this queer turtle's university (Anna Deavere Smith, Selly Thiam, the recent marriage debacle, the many documentaries I spent my sick days watching) have left me wondering about the political and cultural weight of testimony. On the one hand, I think lots of scholarship out there (with some notable exceptions) teaches us that personal testimony is to be avoided. It is purely affective and therefore has very little critical appeal. And yet, with the recent MD marriage disappointment, we cannot discount the political importance of testimony, even if it seems a strange data source, in a number of ways. How do we read a partially affective data source? Do we attempt to draw any sort of objective conclusion from such a subjective construction? Finally, why do we find personal testimony so compelling?


Of particular interest to me is the ex-gay presence at the hearing (Its use of the word "homosexual" should gesture toward my feelings about that particular post, however I find its videos and commentary to be useful). In the spirit of the archive, I'll try to offer this evidence sans commentary, and let you readers draw your own conclusions. However, I can't pass up the opportunity to ask about the myth of the "Homosexual Lifestyle." This seems to sort of undercut the diversity of the gay community. Implicit in such phrasing is the idea that, though there are many different kinds of straight people, the gay doctor. lawyer, and blogger are all the same, which is a pretty silly idea. Returning to the evidence at hand though, why do people find ex-gay testimony so effective? Is it the narrative of redemption that attracts them?

To round out some of the last posting I play to make about marriage for a good, long while, Gender and Sexuality in Law has some great postings on marriage stuff. Check it out and tell me how hard you laughed at this video. Because srsly folks. It's good.

Things to think about:  Why didn't the marriage bill go to vote? What do we make of politicians who are willing to make such a political maneuver? What does this mean for future ventures in the realm of marriage equality and gay rights, more broadly? And, as always, where do we go from here?

Finally, we all need to get our kumbaya-yas out in one form or another:

I'm surprised it's taken Buffy this long to surface 'round these parts.


 (Dickinson image thieved via)