It's certainly not my reading -- I finished the Sedgwick and the Cixous (the latter delightful, as always) yesterday, so today I'm on to Jan Mohamed and Lloyd's The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse, which so far I'm finding pretty darn annoying for their hammering emphasis on a discourse of damage. They want to reorient all of humanistic discussion in the university to this history of domination -- they see it as pervading everything. And sure, it pervades everything, but so do plenty of other aspects of life. It's just one aspect, one element, and when you reduce me and my writing to just being part of this history of domination, this examination of supposed damage -- well, you lose a lot, is what I think. I don't know how they can't see that.
Anyway. Despite being cranky with them, I'm feeling cheerful, even complacent. It's a nice feeling, one I haven't felt in a while. Maybe it was just a good night's sleep (thank you, NyQuil) -- whatever the reason, I just hope it lasts.
Somehow, reducing the world to one of its elements–it’s all about sex! No, it’s all about class! No, it’s *really* all about race!–is what “sells,” literally and figuratively. I don’t have a problem with such books *if* they’re prefaced with a qualifier like “OK the world isn’t so simple, but if you look at it through this lens, you might think about some things in ways you hadn’t thought about them before.” An idea generator. I can *almost* even tolerate sociobiology if I think about it as just an idea generator. Well, maybe not sociobiology, but most other things.