watch your mouth

I feel like I need to clarify some thing from the last post. Often, when I go on late night writing rampages, my grammar begins to regress into an unflattering state and I don't produce coherent thoughts (coherent to public; my thoughts may always make sense to me).

I don't mean to dismiss the idea of "community" entirely. I think by the end of that paragraph I started getting to the point--that a community should never be assumed or too readily assigned without critique. One runs the risk of devaluing what makes a community special, particularly communities which work towards resistance to dominant social structures. Readily assigned communities lack self-critique which in turn reproduces the very structures they are organized against. There has to be dynamism, some sorta flow.

In terms of the discussion of identity politics, I'm thinking specifically of Judith Butler when she says this of the use of the term "queer": "The term will be revised, dispelled, rendered obsolete to the extent that it yields to the demands which resist the term precisely because of the exclusions by which it is mobilized." Terminology when it comes to identity politics do run the danger of becoming the very monster it opposes sometimes, and Butler foresees that for "queer" precisely because of the politics of representation embedded in identity politics. There's so much struggle for terminology, the assignment of names to a singular or set of identities that it produces a stasis in ways we conceive of who we are. We spend so much time trying to encapsulate ourselves, that we forget how to be flexible, and the greatest paradox being that even when we try to find terms to match that flexibility ("Queer" being an example), we also fall into the trap of encapsulating ourselves, corralling our bodies into one corner, one period in time.

Basically, I should've just deleted the last post and written this one instead. It should stay though, as a reminder to spend time on revision. I'm taking this blogging thing more seriously now for the sake of practicing accountability for what I say, even in informal, virtual spaces. I mean, and also, I'm really bored.