Tweeting, Barebacking, and More

• Thanks to William Bradley for the link to an article about a man who tweeted the argument he was forced to overhear at a Burger King in Boston.  The article's author argues that the argument should not have been made public on Twitter, and many of those who left comments agree.  I disagree, though there are too many reasons to get into why.  I just don't get why people are shocked when things done in public are made public.  Since the Rodney King beating, we know that cameras and recoding devices are everywhere, and that was before we were even talking about social media.  It's funny that so many are upset that this was made public on Twitter, but if this fight had led to the murder or assault of one member of the couple by the other, he'd be a hero for documenting what led to the crime.  We can't have it both ways.
• I love how the last paragraph of this article about some of the problems that have occurred at various occupy sites puts sexual assaults at the same level as peeing in a bottle.  We were in the middle of the power outage when a women's only tent was created at Occupy Wall Street because some women felt the park wasn't safe, so I don't know if anyone has been talking about that or if it has been kept quiet so representation of the movement stays entirely positive.
• John Hodgins tweeted a link to this great article on happiness.  It's a lot of common sense, but it's also concise, clear, and something I think I should read daily.
• I was really happy to see such an extensive article about sex parties and barebacking in SF Weekly, but I did feel compelled to leave this comment at the site: "As someone who has been around and having sex since the 80s, who lost my first husband to AIDS as well as numerous friends, I really can't believe we're still having this discussion. People were having sex without condoms way before any porn company had videos showing it, way before barebacking was a word, and way before we had even a tenth of the drugs we have now to combat HIV. If you condemn the practice, it will not disappear. It will just go further underground. Shaming people about their sexual practices (when it's consenting adults with consenting adults) will lead to nothing but more pain, death, and conflict. Lots and lots of people have sex with condoms. Lots of lots of people do not. I'd rather have conversations than point fingers and say the government should step in and do something to 'those people.'"  I've left other comments, too, in response to what some people have said to me, but it's all the same kind of conversation we all usually have on this subject, and that's sad, really.

I have an article that should be out this summer where I talk about the role that shame has played in my teaching. It's basically about why I did not choose to come out to my classes. Though it would have exploded my argument, I wish I'd read Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity before I sent that article out. Sedgwick writes a pretty compelling argument for why shame is not always a negative thing. In fact, it's pretty integral to shaping our sense of self, which in turn means it's integral in how we relate to others. Here are some quotations of hers that are pushing me to rethink shame.

"In fact, shame and identity remain in very dynamic relation to one another, at once deconstituting and foundational, because shame is both peculiarly contagious and peculiarly individuating" (Sedgwick 36).

"That's the double movement shame makes: toward painful individuation, toward uncontrollable relationality" (Sedgwick 37). 

"The conventional way of distinguishing shame from guilt is that shame attaches to and sharpens the sense of what one is, whereas guilt attaches to what one does" (Sedgwick 37).

"The forms taken by shame are not distinct 'toxic' parts of a group or individual identity that can be excised; they are instead integral to and residual in the processes by which identity itself is formed" (Sedgwick 63).

"If the structuration of shame differs strongly between cultures, between periods, and between different forms of politics, however, it differs also simply from one person to another within a given culture and time" (Sedgwick 63).

"Shame interests me politically, then, because it generates and legitimates the place of identity--the question of identity--at the origin of the impulse to the performative, but does so without giving that identity space the standing of an essence. It constitutes it as to-be-constituted, which is also to say, as already there for the (necessary, productive) misconstrual and misrecognition. Shame--living, as it does, on and in the muscles and capillaries of the face--seems to be uniquely contagious from one person to another" (Sedgwick 64).

"Survivors' guilt and, more generally, the politics of guilt will be better understood when we can see them in some relation to the slippery dynamics of shame" (Sedgwick 64).

Yes, I'm posting a lot of quotations lately. I'm spending this first part of the summer doing a lot of notetaking, which is why I'm finding a lot of amazing quotations and presenting a few here now and then. If they inspire you, I'd love to hear how in the comments.  Oh, I have written about this book before on my personal blog.