It's amazing what you can pick up at Starbuck's these days.

It's here!

Volume 2.2 has launched.

Now on to 3.1.

Meat-y Things to Do

FEELING AMERICAN STUDIES
Saturday November 10, 2007
9AM-5:30PM
Submission Deadline: Aug. 1, 2007
Sponsored by the New York Metro American Studies Association (NYMASA) and the Columbia Journal of American Studies (CJAS).

Feeling, emotion, affect, sensation, passion: the pervasiveness of these terms in current American Studies suggests that feeling is no longer taken as the opposite of thinking and that, indeed, emotions provoke, produce, and even embody knowledge. Although feelings are simultaneously part of our daily lives yet abstract, broadly understood and intensely personal, the knowledge that feeling provokes has often been limited within specific disciplines. Notwithstanding important explorations of sentiment and its connections to race and gender, American Studies has come late to the scholarly conversation on feeling, despite the fact that the inquiries that shape American Studies as a field—including identity, aesthetics, history, empire, narrative, media, and public culture—can and have been fruitfully pursued through the critical lens of emotion by scholars in other disciplines.

The purpose of this one-day conference is to invite dialogue on the place of feeling in American Studies. What might attention to feelings add to the field? What might it compromise? What kinds of feelings does American Studies—or, more broadly America—provoke? We particularly encourage submissions that discuss emotion before the 20th century, and presentations that cross historic and disciplinary borders.

Papers presented at the conference will be considered for publication in a special issue of the Columbia Journal of American Studies. Please send abstracts of 200-300 words to nymasa07@gmail.com by AUGUST 1ST. For information, contact Sarah E. Chinn, English Department, Hunter College, CUNY, 695 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10021

Same song, new group

We are told the body does not matter. If we believe R. Lee Emery’s character from Full Metal Jacket, the body is merely a connection to a larger tradition, something that individually has no value beyond the achievement of a larger goal. If we believe posthumanists, the body is something that will be overcome; consciousness will be transferred into other physical forms that will not deteriorate, age, or die. If we believe Orthodox Christianity, the body is merely a vessel to serve out God’s plan; the body will automatically fail at the predestined time and the soul will leave to exist in paradise.

In this long tradition, the body is nothing. It is the mortal coil that allows us the fulfillment of a role or an evolutionary stage. And yet, if we look at this article entitled "MMO Addiction" from the July 2007 issue of PC Gamer, the gamers who vacate their bodies for digital avatars are ridiculed and medicalized for their participation in the denying of their meat selves.


The interesting (and simple) question is: why?


We are told to repress our sensuality, to believe the body is nothing more than a commodity. The foregrounding of the body is usually left to the queer community, and this (along with other, stupid reasons) is why queer people are often vilified. Yet when leaving the body is met with such organized vehemence, how can this tradition of vilifying the sensual not be seen as hypocritical? How does the act of vacating the physical body become something negative—is it not the directive of mainstream discourse? Does it point to the supremacy of phenomenology within our system of knowledge making? Is the body much more important than we are taught to believe?

2.2 is almost here!

Okay, only about a day left. I've been working on graphics/formatting (and swearing at a slow load time for a flash movie). Check it out here.

Brian! I know you have a post! Don't let your leaving-for-the-east-coast hangover interfere!

An Adventure with Brian

I figure I'll just recount Brian adventures until he takes off for parts east.

A question of writing and materiality: It's long been my contention (and not only mine) that we can't talk "honestly" about writing and self without taking into account the materiality of the self. If writing ties together language and identity, it isn't just scribbled words on a page that constructs us, but events like this....

Brian and I were getting 5-shot Americanos at the campus Starbucks, and as I came out of the shop, I heard "somebody should erase that faggot s***." The provocateur (let's call him Spunky) was addressing two young men who were reading a whiteboard advertising the Pride Center.

"You shouldn't say faggot," said one of the young men (let's call him Cap'n Crunch).

"F*** you, FAGGOT," said Spunky, going into the convenience store next to Starbucks. I went over to Cap'n Crunch and his pal just as Spunky came back out. He called Cap'n Crunch a "faggot" again, and left the building.

These experiences, too, must be part of queer theory. A related post, from Jonathan.