Until We Learn That Other Lives Are

The United States Are Such A Large Place. And There Are Some States And Some Cities Where The Questions Of Gender Or Sexuality Would Not Be Asked, Or Where Scholars Or Academics Are Working In Small Little Corners Of The Universities Trying To Raise These Questions And Being Told That Either That They're Strange Or Not Appropriate Or Being Actively Opposed. There Are Other Places Where There Is Very Active Scholarship Going On. Certainly On Gender.

We Have To Find A Way Of Understanding How One Category Of Sex Can Be "assigned" From Both And Another Sense Of Sex Can Lead Us To Resist And Reject That Sex Assignment. How Do We Understand That Second Sense Of Sex? It Is Not The Same As The First - It Is Not An Assignment That Others Give Us. But Maybe It Is An Assignment We Give Ourselves? If So, Do We Not Need A World Of Others, Linguistic Practices, Social Institutions, And Political Imaginaries In Order To Move Forward To Claim Precisely Those Categories We Require, And To Reject Those That Work Against Us?

I'm Trying To Think Of What Happens If We Take Expulsion Off The Table For Everyone, And Instead Think About The Rights Of Those Who Have Been Expelled Already, Which Would Include The Various Rights Of Refugees Who Came To Israel In The Aftermath Of Wwii, But Also Those From Other Countries, And What Rights The Palestinians Have Who Have Been Dispossessed Of Their Lands And Homes.

A Different Kind Of Pleasure Surfaced In The Aftermath, The Pleasure Of Seeing The Towers Fall Time And Again, The Experience Of Being Entranced By The Visual Spectacle, And Then Also The Very Graphic Forms Of Public Mourning For Exemplary Citizens (taking Place At The Same Time As The Refusal To Mourn The Undocumented, The Foreign, Gay And Lesbian Lives Lost There, For Example). I Am Not Sure That The Guilt Over The Pleasure Re-installed The Good Citizen.

I Think Something Happens Only When People Find That They Are Moved With Others, Find Themselves Linked Or Allied In New Ways, Showing Up Or Speaking Out In Ways That Resonate With One Another. That Resonating Can Be Very Compelling And Lead To Moving And Speaking More Emphatically And With Sharper Focus.