“We would walk into environments that were very straight white male dominated and felt very unwelcoming to anybody that wasn’t a straight white male and we would say we want to transform this space and we want to make this a space where women feel not only welcome but that they can enjoy themselves–which was a radical concept actually in the underground punk scene in the ’90s.”

–Kathleen Hanna

i went to grad school in order to think about what pleasure and desire have to do with each other. i knew this was ultimately what i wanted to write about, but i needed to read more. i wanted to figure out my place in the argument, and learn how to give my work a shape that understood itself. i was interested in how and why both desire and pleasure can be so incredibly disruptive.  Do other people’s bodies teach us something that, say, talking, doesn’t? What do we lose when we stop attending to libidinal desires, often in order to execute more normative, generally financial, comfort-based ones?  How/does sex hurt–not only in cases of violence, but perhaps when it violates ideas of trust and ownership? How can one build an academic career that, by its very definition involves the study of literature, on an interest in sex? How can reading be doing? How can doing be reading? Thank you Feminism, thank you Karl Marx, thank you Audre Lorde, queer theory, Goerings Book Store, Amitava Kumar, Kathleen Hanna, Judith Butler, poetry, teaching, Foucault, ACT UP, Judy Chicago, Riot grrl, Community Action Center, Wild Iris Books, Nishant Shahani, David Wojnarowicz, and Deconstruction for showing me a world in which these questions are valued and possible.

Then there are my ingredients: memories that haunt me–the things, often guilty pleasures, that made me obsessive and desiring in the first place. Osaka, the Baader-Meinhof Gang, Gone With the Wind, drugs, libraries, flea markets, house parties, house fires, thrifting, love hotels, passing notes, the Rolling Stones, Barthes, kabuki, my parents’ wedding album, Morrissey, professor-love, the pool, drinks after work, Stevie Nicks, marriage, restaurant jobs, floating down the Ichetucknee in an inner tube, Denis Johnson, and lots of problematic, fun, shit-stirring, sweet, unadvisable, dirty, necessary sex.

So far i have failed in my efforts to make these worlds coincide. The things i live by in one sphere often can’t stand what i can’t live without in the other one. i spend years investing in one side, then drop out for a while and give the other one everything i have.  A gesture or a vocabulary word that is de rigueur on heads is met with eye roles or blank stares by tails.  i don’t need, or even want, to be in Gainesville–or the 90s–anymore, but i sure am happy they both happened to me and gave me a peek at how the coexistence of these concerns might actually unfold. The non-dualism of queer theoretical work and the suggestion that sex is gender, teaching and writing, the possibility of rethinking community–these are the hopes that remain.