Dissed: What’s Necessary

Dissed are excerpts from the dissertation that have been cut, killed, excised, burned on the altar of common sense and distance before being left here to not die…


This one hurt to cut. 
I remember thinking how clever I was and how it
"Explained Everything. Duh." 
And, certainly, in looking back I can see the early versions of 
what I was just really starting to grasp. I did bring 
a good chunk of this up in the epilogue, but it took some reshaping. 
I like having an original (albeit excerpted) version of it here 
as part of this archive.  

After all, Sally and this comic were integral parts of the dissertation,
 critical actants that sat in my eye-line (tacked above the computer) 
the entire time I wrote and reminded me

--without a word, with just a glance, without even really realizing it, 
in fact I'm only really realizing it right now as I type these very words--

why I was still sitting in my office chair, still looking for answers. 
Touchstone is too mild a word for that level of presence and pull in the
 overall phenomenon.  

But my true love didn't make it into the final draft:
 the incomplete tracing of the other actants at the end. 
I read that list and that timespace snaps into place around me. 
I'm-back-there-again-here. 
Sally_LookingForTheAnswers
Fig. 1.1: In this Peanuts comic strip by Charles M. Schulz, Sally Brown (Charlie Brown’s little sister), attends her elementary school. Originally published March 29, 1971 by United Feature Syndicate, Inc.  Reprinted on page 84 in Peanuts: A Golden Celebration (Larkin 1999).
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All Too / Not At All

alienclassroom

 “And yet when essays draw on the work of Barad or Haraway but do not attend to nonhuman life, environments and material agencies, the lack is notable. Feminist materialisms, especially in their posthuman forms, are worlds apart from the conventional classroom, an all too-human place cordoned off from more-than-human liveliness. The chasm between the two suggests how intrepid and inventive we must be to teach with a (posthumanist) feminist materialism”

–Stacy Alaimo / “Book Review: Teaching with Feminist Materialisms” (179)

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Dissed: That Self-Congratulatory Anecdote from MLA

Dissed are excerpts from the dissertation that have been cut, killed, excised, burned on the altar of common sense and distance before being left here to not die…

At the 2017 MLA conference I was set to talk about this very project in a roundtable called ‘Teaching as Theoretical Practice.”* There were four papers on the panel—the first and second papers were co-authored and, therefore, got a few extra minutes. I went last and had been, along with the other single author, allotted a shorter-than-usual twelve minutes. I admitted defeat before I even got up to the mic. You saw the length of the last chapter. You’re looking at the length of this one. It wasn’t going to happen. But a funny thing happened while I was listening to my fellow panelists go before me and scribbling notes on their talks in my ever-present journal. Another talk emerged. And tapped me on the shoulder. And said, “Hey, do you mind sharing me with the group?”

So I did.

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