amphioptical

If you're following this blog, know that it is a completed project I wrote for a graduate performance studies class. Join me here if you'd like to follow my active blog, or visit the whole tumblr site to see some stuff in this project that won't show up on your dashboard. 

coined by dan savage, in relationships with a large age disparity, at the end of the relationship, the elder partner should leave the younger in "b...

When I go for a drive I like to pull off to the side Of the road, turn out the lights, get out, and look up at the sky And I do this to remind me that I'm really really tiny In the grand scheme of things and sometimes this terrifies me But it's only really scary 'cause it makes me feel serene In a way I never thought I'd be because I've never been So grounded and so humbled and so one with everything I am grounded, I am humbled, I am one with everything  Rock and roll is fun but if you ever hear someone Say you are huge look at the moon, look at the stars, look at the sun Look at the ocean and the desert and the mountains and the sky Say I am just a speck of dust inside a giant's eye I am just a speck of dust inside a giant's eye  When I saw genevieve I really liked it when she said What she said about the giant and the lemmings on the cliff She said "i like giants- especially girl giants. 'cause all girls feel Too big sometimes, regardless of their size"  When I go for a drive I like to pull off to the side Of the road and run and jump into the ocean in my clothes And I'm smaller than a poppyseed inside a great big bowl And the ocean is a giant that can swallow me whole So I swim for all salvation and I swim to save my soul But my soul is just a whisper trapped inside a tornado So I flip to my back and I float and I sing I am grounded, I am humbled, I am one with everything I am grounded, I am humbled, I am one with everything  So I talked to genevieve and almost cried when she said That the giant on the cliff wished that she was dead And the lemmings on the cliff wished that they were dead So the giant told the lemmings why they ought to live instead And when she thought up all those reasons that they ought to live instead It made her reconsider all the sad thoughts in her head So thank you genevieve, 'cause you take what is in your head And you make things that are so beautiful and share them with your friends  We all become important when we realize our goal Should be to figure out our role within the context of the whole And yeah, rock and roll is fun but if you ever hear someone Say you are huge look at the moon, look at the stars, look at the sun Look at the ocean and the desert and the mountains and the sky And say I am just a speck of dust inside a giant's eye I am just a speck of dust inside a giant's eye I am just a speck of dust inside a giant's eye And I don't wanna make her cry  'cause I like giants.

Literary critics broke texts into isolated passages and phrases to find hidden meanings. Advocates of feminism, gay rights, and third-world causes embraced the method as an instrument to reveal the prejudices and inconsistencies of Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Freud and other "dead white male" icons of Western culture. Architects and designers could claim to take a "deconstructionist" approach to buildings by abandoning traditional symmetry and creating zigzaggy, sometimes disquieting spaces. The filmmaker Woody Allen titled one of his movies "Deconstructing Harry," to suggest that his protagonist could best be understood by breaking down and analyzing his neurotic contradictions."

In the ninth chapter of Black Looks, bell hooks takes critics and Paris Is Burning filmmaker Jennie Livingston, a white lesbian, to task for the problematic ways that white supremacy and patriarchy are ignored and replicated in the film. This critique acts as a necessary corrective for the simplistically celebratory, colorblind, and voyeuristic viewings of the films audience, mostly comprised of straight, white, middle-class Americans. Reading Livingston's own responses to these kinds of critiques in the context of this essay is profoundly disappointing. Yet, hooks also too quickly ignores the productive power of queerness to produce different genealogies, temporalities, spaces, and radically altered structures of commerce, objectification, identity, and family. José Muñoz's configuration of "disidentification," alongside Judith Butler's critical response to bell's own review, might enable different viewings of Paris Is Burning that neither ignore its underlying racism nor its progressive queerness, but instead treat these as co-constitutive forces. 

The Fine Arts Center at UMass simply does not look like this. 

Every week (except for the weeks I forgot), I joined the Student Writing Anthology (SWA) Committee to read student essays submitted by UMass Amherst College Writing instructors for inclusion in next year's SWA, a required test for all ENGL WRIT 112 students. As a result, I now have a much better sense of what constitutes a "good" SWA essay, which doesn't overlap deterministically with what constitutes a "good" College Writing essay or a "good" essay in general.  Note to self: make sure to discuss this the next time you teach College Writing and attempt to get across issues of audience. 

Saussure theorized a dyadic model of language. The "sign" is a system of both the "signifier" (the sign's linguistic form) and the "signified" (the concept of the thing). The sign is a whole system in that the signified and the signifier cannot ever be extricated from each other. While later models would treat the signifier and the signified as the "word for the thing" and "the thing," this isn't really what Saussure was saying. I'd need to study this more to understand how, let alone type about it with the kind of authority a tumblr post requires. 

My mother called him Bobby.  I really have no idea what he was like. 

This project was inspired by a writing exercise in Daniel Sack's graduate course Introduction to Performance Theory at UMass Amherst. Dan asked us to read a selection from Roland Barthes' A Lover's Discourse and then make a list of "figures" of the topic of our final paper. Finally, he asked us to produce some sustained writing on a handful of these figures and share them in class.  My original paper topic was an attempt to bring together theories of performance and queer archives to discuss the performance art of Sharon Hayes. The project has morphed a bit since then. 

In The Archive and the Repertoire, Diana Taylor argues that embodied performances play "a central role in conserving memory and consolidating identities,” especially in cultural arenas where these identities and memories have not been committed to the written historical record (xviii). She calls this set of embodied performers the "repertoire" in comparison to the "archive" of objectified artifacts. An insistence on archival research that ignores the knowledge-producing and meaning-making practices of the repertoire is one that relies on, and reproduces, hegemonic world-views to the exclusion of certain people and bodies. The stakes for Taylor are clear: "If performance does not transmit knowledge, only the literate and powerful could claim social memory and identity” (xvii).

Benjamin Zender

I'm using full names to put all the folks I cite on the same level in this "glossary," but I'm anxious about this decision for the first time when typing my sister's name. 

Angie Xtravaganza, still from Paris Is Burning (1990)