Paper Topics of the Moment

* Faggish Womyn Seldom Make Herstory: Philosophical Implications of Linguistic Queering * If You Were to Attend a Literary Criticism Costume Party, What Would You Dress up as and Why?: Naked Queer Theorists and Guys with Wood * 15-20 Page Engagement of Something I Don't Yet Appreciate - Topic Undisclosed

The Future Anterior

The past that will have been. - Lynda Hart . . . the future anterior is a locution in which one finds the future retroactively, "a memory curious about its own future . . . which refuses simply to repeat the old saw 'once upon a time' over and over again . . . as if nothing had happened, the future anterior alters history; it is the miraculous tense, the tense of healing. - Catherine Clement You are talking to a close friend, preferably someone you will know for a very long time (say, a partner to someone to whom you owe money). You start to hypothesize about how you will reflect upon the present when you are 80 years old, or 10 years from now, or whenever. The point is that space in time - - that location in time - - is the future anterior: that place you are able to imagine yourself in sometime in the future. My example might be this: When I am 45 years old, I will look back on this moment and giggle at how little I really knew. When Clement says that the future anterior alters history, what she means is this: If I saw my future anterior as one where I would look back and wish I were 20 again when I was rich, carefree, and out of control, I am predicting for myself a future in which I am worse off than I was at 20. If, though, I say "My example" from above, I predict a future for myself where I know more then than I know now... I also assume that my future will contain at least one happy moment--the moment I take aside to think back, reflect and giggle. My future anterior vision also shows that I see my future self alive, functioning, and able to remember my life. I do not have amnesia, and I am at the very least still in some sort of dialogue with reality. In reality, I see my future anterior as more than this. Ever have those moments when you think to yourself, "I will look back on this moment in 15 years and regret that I did not _______________________ . . .” In essence, you are using your own voice as a weapon against your future. You are creating in that moment of future anterior imagining a self-fulfilling prophesy. First, the sentence is a declarative one. It does not ask if you will look back and regret; it says that you for sure will. And the future you're casting for yourself is one where you consciously walked toward a mistake knowing that you would not be happy with it... you recognized before you get ready to make a choice that the option you are about to pick does not put you on a path toward happiness, but a path toward regret. That is why Clement calls the future anterior a healing one - In the present, by considering our own almost-subconscious thoughts about our future anterior (i.e. how we phrase our future anterior prophesies, where we are in those visions, who we are with in those visions, how old we are), we are able to see the pattern we are currently enabling and stop it before we are in the moment we are describing. That is why Clement calls the future anterior a miraculous one - Where else are you allowed to see what your future self will likely do/think/feel/worry about/regret/enjoy/remember/believe, and have the power in that moment to affect it? The future anterior holds the key to our own well-being and happiness. - me

The Lies We Tell Ourselves

Certain members of society would rather choose to ignore the reality of child molestation and incest; they live in a reality where—by their own choice and in order to maintain the illusion of humanism—incest does not exist. Sociologists and anthropologists have traditionally regarded incest as disruptive of the family and therefore disruptive of the social order. By contrast, feminism has suggested that, paradoxical as it may seem, incest is actually produced and maintained by social order: the order of a male-dominated society. The patriarchial social order generally sides with those certain members of society in accepting the reality wherein incest does not occur. But if there is no such thing as incest, what happens to the incest victim? If she knows that she was violated, and yet all those around her demand that incest is not real, where does she turn for help? [T]his feeling of “unreality” is not merely the effect of the incest survivor’s history. That is, it is not the “return of the repressed”; rather, it is also an artful reconstruction of the survivor’s present, a set of coping mechanisms or survival strategies however “psychotic” they may appear and however self-destructive they may seem, which are actually clever ways of surviving within a dominant order that produces the incest survivor as an impossibility. If, then, there is no such thing as incest and incest victims, there is no room in reality for incest survivors. Not only is incest marked as a founding taboo and therefore presumed not to happen if the culture is to retain its illusion of coherency, but also, then, the survivor is not meant to survive. The fact that she does is due to her ability to create her own system, her own symbolic if you will, that is necessarily discordant with the dominant order’s symbolic. In other words, the incest survivor knows that reality is a ruse that masks the Real, but she is forced to articulate this knowledge through a conceptual system that cannot be interpreted by dominant codes as other than pathological.[. . . .] For of course this sharply divided reality for the survivor is generated and maintained by its reference to an ideological system that insists upon choosing between the two [i.e. two seemingly mutually exclusive ideas, like how could “he” both love me and hurt me?]: whereas the person who inhabits both spaces simultaneously—or worse yet perhaps—balances perpetually on the border between them, is rendered psychotic. In the end, for me, my family renders the following communities of people unreal. To say it another way, my family believes the following groups of people are lying about the thing that they all have in common (which makes them all psychotic) or they are all psychotic: non-believers (that is, people who don’t believe that belief in Jesus is the only way to Heaven), homosexuals, incest victims, and incest survivors. When I speak, my parents are thus four times removed from anything I might say. They see me through veils of their own design; veils they created out of dire need to believe in a world that does not exist. If, in their minds, I am pathological four times through from different angles, how can anything I say be real for them? We do not exist on the same planet. We do not speak the same language. Hart, Lynda. “Bearing (to) Witness: The Erotics of Power in Bastard Out of Carolina.” Between the Body and the Flesh: Performing Sadomasochism. New York: Columbia UP, 1998. 166-203.