as in every relationship you have in your lifetime

... you should always fight to be the one that gets to be enigmatic.

Maybe I'm reading too much of Mimi Thi Nguyen nowadays, her thoughtful prose-like, pun-ny writing style cutting into my heart. I really want to meet this woman because she has said everything I've wanted to say (and then some) for the past three years. Feeling pretty academically womped right now, in a good way though. I'm reading one of her old essays in Punk Planet right now, and they're all really hard to sum up because they kinda run on stream of consciousnesses with broad overarching themes that will probably not tell you that much about the depth of the content. She writes a lot about anger, disturbances, memory... all that jazz which two years with Una will surely familiarize you with the necessary jargon.

She brought up the issue of drawing solidarity with movements through the recognition of similar identities (the example she gave was "working class"), and how easily we can fall back on safe terms like "community" which obscure self-reflective, self-critical potential in organizing. I think back on a certain professor of mine this semester who notably told students that she didn't believe in identity politics... which comes as a shocker to folks (myself included) whose whole SLC career has been based on critical race theory, feminist discourses, queer studies, etc. What do you mean you don't have any identity politics?! We chalked it up to her privileges as such and such and such...

But maybe she had a point there. Identity politics for the majority of its discourses, does focus a lot of its energies towards representation, and talking about representation in itself is inherently problematic because what does a "positive" representation connote? Does it remedy the last couple of centuries' oh-so-fun-times of eugenics, colonialism, systematized violence? This is not to dismiss identity politics entirely, but I want to know what else is there?

Because if you take an identity like "Asian American," you can peel it apart from the edges, and what will you have at its core? As a politicized label, it does make things easier on the surface organizing scale. To be able to have a club on campus for example, that has Asian American written into its mission statement is easy. To allow it to be an in-and-out flow within your life is the difficult part. I mean, for one thing, "Asian American" has so much fragmentation within it from ethnic, cultural, multiracial, status breakdowns and more. If identity connotes "community" and community connotes shared experience in the broadest sense, where do you assign yourself if the pool of experiences begins at a river, which opens up into other rivers, and so on? Okay that metaphor didn't make sense. I'm not as good as this as others, but the general idea is that the idea of community is one which is intentionally fought for, is declared in some way, and continuously defining itself. Not some romantic notion that a group can declare for some time with the privilege not to consider the consequences of what will happen to it if left alone. I think we're realizing that the term isn't working out too hotly for us anymore.

I'm thinking a lot about this because I'm trying to condense this knowledge into an accessible format for the curriculum I'm putting together for the fellowship. I have a problem with academic jargon, always have, so I take great care in writing everything out beforehand. I don't want to heap crises upon crises on participants and say "go home now, play crash bandicoot" nor do I want to impose sterile ideas about identity upon others for the sake of fixed definition. I've learned from past workshop writing experiences that the issues of time and authority are always things to consider--the workshop itself being only approximately seven sessions, and not to let my own sense of self-importance get in the way of developing a problematic savior complex over the sessions. As such, the best thing to do is to always provide enough material for participants to ask themselves (and each other) these questions afterward.

Anyway, I felt compelled to write all this out in the spirit of purging since I'm finally free of this semester's class demands and am free to invent my own syllabus for self-education (for a month or so anyway). Not that I have anything else to do now that I'm snowed in except read, do fellowship work, watch Buffy. Rinse. Repeat.