It's an 'end of the rainbow' sort of deal

• Comment on this entry saying Rhubarb!, and I'll pick three things from your profile interests or tags.
• Write about the words/phrases I picked in your journal and make this same offer. Sharing is caring.

I commented on cosmolinguist's entry and they picked the following from my interest list;
These selections have tickled me no end and I'm especially grateful for the book recommendation which came with the first pick. Let's dive in (a phrase which I've been using all year in my lectures for some reason, odd how you end up hooked on a particular phrase sometimes...)

Alphabetising the world:
I love order. There's little else that gives me such mundane, immediate satisifaction. Back in the days when I worked in my office and could actually print materials off to read instead of having to spend all day and night looking at a screen, I generated a lot of paper that needed filing. The afternoons when nothing was going right and I looked around and realised my office looked like a paper factory had exploded, I would stop and file everything. I have immaculate folders full of essential articles, sub divided by theme or teaching module. My CDs and DVDs (possibly the only person still buying those formats and I have zero regret about that) are beautifully alphabetised. Indeed, one thing I'm especially looking forward to if my house purchase comes off (building surveyor goes in next week, fingers crossed nothing significant is falling down...) is being able to reunite my entire CD collection and have the whole sodding thing ordered.

This is in some ways, something which is symptomatic of my anxiety-spiral-OCD-tendencies. Because it probably shouldn't make me feel quite as squicky to have things out of order - or as I think of it "in chaos". But the key thing is, being able to put things in order - specifically alphabetical order - is something which is immediately calming, and something I can offer to other people without much discussion about how it might be helpful to tidy, because it's so comprehensible. If everything got ordered like this (when there is not otherwise a suitable or better system of organisation) the world would be beautifully ordered and then there would be more space for creativity and joy and spontaneity.

Overcoming decadence and nihilism:
This one makes me laugh. It's on the list because years ago, when I was a terrible English Literature undergraduate, and an enormous Manics fan (this one still true, it's just morphed slightly) I would spend hours in one of the college common rooms, smoking cigarettes and talking nonsense about philosophy with a friend. We definitely fancied ourselves as the next great thinkers. I shudder to imagine time travelling to overhear that conversation. At some point I realised that the nihilism I had interpreted to mean that, without meaning, there was also no value to life fuelled a kind of miserable decadence in what I imbibed. Curiously, there's something typically backwards about how I came to link these ideas given Nietzsche looks to nihilism as the response to decadence but perhaps I'm not so terribly out of sync in that those things produce each other. A few years living like there's no tomorrow and drinking like you don't need a liver, oddly (not oddly), produces a self fulfilling prophecy of nothingness.

Somewhere along the line, my grasp of nihilism shifted. I moved away from anomic despair to a more principled embrace of the impossibility of meaning and subjectivity of knowledge which doesn't require me to reject the fundamental underpinings of those big philosopical thoughts, but does point me towards the essential need to continue to operate within the conditions of nothingness, and ultimately, to direct my study toward epistemological positions which are founded on the impossibility of knowledge but the richness of what can be understood by looking at the stiving for meaning - towards deconstructionism, really.

Queer Theory - practice and content: 
Queer theory was a revelation to me. And now I get to introduce students to it as well and for some of them it will be a revelation too and I can't think of a better gift. 

I encountered queer theory towards the end of my final year as an undergrad - barely half a week of content, I think. But it was enough to give me a way to understand there was a world of theory there to do something really - to me - radical. I picked my Masters course on the basis it was the only course in the country built around queer theory and had my mind delightfully bent (pun very much intended) for 9 months and wrote the best piece of academic writing I had produced to date for my dissertation.

Queer theory prompts us to ask why the things that get called normal have ever got to that position. It directs us to the value of knowledge, practice and existence which is not just outside of normal, but which also pressures normal. How does normal try and shore itself up against the destabilising force of the queer other? In what ways does queerness exist? It thinks of queer not as something which is 'gay' in a binary with 'straight', but as something which explodes binaries and exists across, between, against, within, and everywhere. 

This kind of conceptualisation allows us to explore every part of culture and society. To queer - to turn on its side, inside out, to make something new but familiar and different. And in the process, discover something new about the things which feel ordinary or natural.

There are problems with queer theory. My PhD thesis was about confronting, and attempting to explode the implications of the anti-social thesis in queer theory. The anti-social thesis is set of theorising and work which stabilises definitions of queer in ways which start to label people as "queer" or "not queer enough" according to a set of classifications established primarily by people working in an archive of cis gay male activism and theory. It's problematic on a number of levels, but for me one of the most significant failures is that it produces value judgements on people's lives which begin in abstract theorisations but do not acknowledge either the material realities of people's lives and choices, or the material impact such pronouncements have on queer people's lives and relationships with the self which are then possible.

Self, politics, theory and lived experience cannot be disentangled. Queer theory - broadly - acknowledges this and works at what it means when we both acknowledge this and draw on what we can learn and do from these integrated positions. Queer theory also, beautifully, refuses the possibility of an integrated position. Within queer theory we are always becoming, always in process, and always positioned through and in relation to others.

This key idea provides a direction for both researching and producing knowledge; all knowledge is partial, all subjects of research are incomplete and inconsistent. What we can work at picking up and identifying, are the webs of power which structure experience, knowledge, choice, action, and relationships. And that is also what we can feed back; what happens at those junctures between normal and other? How do boundaries move? How are binaries constructed? What does it mean to live against and across instead of with and in line? 

Ellen K. Feder, 'Imperatives of Normality: From "Intersex" to "Disorders of Sex Development"' in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 15 (2009) 225-247

Summary:
This article examines the reasons behind the conflation of intersex identity with homosexual identity and the inherent inaccuracies of the same.  It considers the possibilities allowed for by the endocrinological societies decision to abandon the use of the term hermaphrodite and intersex in favour of 'disorders of sexual development' or DSDs.

Feder argues that whilst both intersex and homosexual identities were 'an invention' of the medical establishment; essentially sharing an origin, their current position has been mistakenly conflated.  Their difference is, to Feder, clear: intersex has an underlying medical condition which can and does require medical intervention in order for the individual to flourish whilst homosexuality as an identity is an entirely cultural construction.

Intersex has, of recent years, become something of a cause célèbre of the Queer liberation movement.  The acts of medical normalisation practiced on intersex bodies epitomises the psychological and social normalisation of queer persons.

However, the nuance which Feder expounds her theory upon is that intersex should not be considered an identity.  Rather it is a word which signifies a range of physical, hormonal abnormalities which frequently require medical intervention.  The change of terminology to reclassify intersex bodies as having a disorder rather than inserting the individual into an identity based on physical markers is, Feder argues, an important step forward; by disentangling genital presentation from identity it is hoped that doctors will increasingly view the individual only in terms of conditions which need medical intervention in order for the patient to live a long and healthy life.  Doctors will no longer see a person who is intrinsically part of a group who need to be normalised in order to be reinserted to society

Feder identifies an essential anachronism of the current treatment of intersex/DSDs: "originally surgical correction of genitals to conform to sex assignment was thought to be essential to the development of a healthy gender identity", while this rationale was challenged and discarded, there has been  no change in treatment.  Doctors continue to 'correct' genital 'ambiguity' which can be understood as an act of 'punishing' abnormality as expounded by Foucault; conformity to social norms is so well imprinted in the brains of citizens that the only acceptable action to take in the face of difference is to enforce conformity; to exercise the same methods of normalisation on another as have been exercised on you.

By redefining intersex as a disorder the terminology no longer encourages the medical profession to view the indivdual as a non-conformist whose actions and body needs to be normalised - a patient suffering a condition like no other which justifies procedures and treatments which would be considered beyond the ethical scope of a doctor's position for any other condition - but a person whose genitalia and hormonal balance is incidental unless it is causing physical discomfort or threat to their wellbeing.  In short, encouraging them only to treat those aspects of physical health which are disordered, rather than any and every aspect of the body/identity which needs normalising,

Response:
The co-opting of intersex by queer activism as being the utopian body of a queer, gender delimited future is an interesting one, and the argument that Feder makes against this ellision of aims is certainly compelling but the arguments made through the example of the medical treatment of intersex persons are important ones.  The medical treatment of the intersex person is the physical expression of the exercise of normalising power of heteronormativity over sexuality, gender and the acts one chooses to engage in with one's own body.  Queer activism gains a nice, neat, clear demonstration of its arguments against the power structures of society although it certainly appears that in so doing they are erasing the individual experience of what it is to be the person subjected to necessary and unnecessary medical procedures in the name of 'curing intersexuality'.  The places where this merging of experience is accurate is how it reveals the way in which power works and can alter an individual's interaction with the world so completely:Feder seems to conclude that the notion of intersex as an identtiy should and will evaporate with the change of terminology in the medical establishment but then goes on to describe how the invented identity of 'homosexual' (a term, if you don't know, that came into usage 11 years before 'heterosexual' and was created exclusively to pathologise a sexual practice) has become a positive rallying point which has created powerful organisations which have a positive influence on the lives of those who fall under the umbrella identity 'queer'.  I wonder, and have no answers at all to the question, whether there is anything lost by those who have conditions associated with intersexuality by not having a shared identity anymore.  The Intersex Society of North America has shut its doors and reopened a few houses down as the Accord Alliance, maintaining the notion of a shared experience through 'Alliance' but abandoning a convenient umbrella term which people can gather beneath. Queer groups provide shelter and support from the prejudices invitied to queer folks by that 'invented identity', Persons with DSDs will doubtless suffer similar prejudice at their non-conforming bodily sex appearance and in some cases the disparity between gender identity and gender presentation.

In many ways the effect of these changes to terminology on the individual, social (not medical, I fully agree with the positive potential of the change there) level is likely to be slow to take effect, medical conditions associated with DSDs will affect gender presentation of affected individuals and whilst gender and sexuality are policed by the structures of normalising power of society variations in any individual will always be subject to negative attentions which can hinder the development of an integrated and confident identity so it seems the intersex/DSD fight is far from won although certainly the shift in the arrogant assurance of doctors forcing cosmetic surgeries on DSD cases is a great leap forward.