More flaming hula hoops, dancing trolls, and tightrope-walking minature ponies

As the U.S. economy implodes, potentially portending hard years to come, I am entering the final round in this circus-like process of getting a PhD in history.

This is the part where you "file" your dissertation. You defended it, the committee signed off on it. Then you have to file to meet the deadline to graduate (which for me to get an October, '08 dated degree is Oct. 3). So I did the defense--my committee signed off in April. I've supposedly been "revising per their comments" over the past months. A few weeks ago, I sent it to my committee again, so that they could pretend to re-read it to make sure I made their revisions, which is unusual and due to the break-neck pace in my case of writing and defending, as well as to my committee fighting within itself. But since they signed off in April, they can no longer stop me from filing, not that any actually seem to have read it the second time. In short, as far as the faculty are concerned, I've jumped through all the flaming hula hoops.

When you file, you have to hand the diss over to your university's library and to the online database of dissertations. This makes the diss publicly available. You can't work on it anymore or make any more changes. You have to do this to get a diploma.

This filing stuff ushers in a new set of dancing ponies and hula hoops, supervised by a new cast of authority figures: the very nice people at the Grad School. They are in charge of making sure you filled out many forms, paid large fees, and submitted the dissertation in a format that accords with the university library's standards.

You might think that after many, many rounds of hula-hoop jumping, miniature pony riding, alligator wrangling, etc., this would be a piece of cake.

But no. At the moment, I am consulting with three other grad students in an attempt to figure out how to have one PDF file with two kinds of page numbers (Roman numerals for the first few pages, Arabic for the rest of the text.) But don't worry. I think I figured it out.

The silver lining: I've been so broke from age 25 to 30, while in grad school, that I have zero dollars invested in the stock market.

Teaching again

So I moved to a strange city again and am teaching and missing CC and all of you guys. Like usual. Ugh. But anyway...

I spent all this time working on this PhD that qualifies me to teach the history of sexuality, and during a lot of this time my work was about explaining to funding institutions (and maybe to myself, it turns out) that the history of sexuality isn't actually about sex, it's about power relations, social constructions of identity, imperialism, race, etc. And it is.


(Photo from the Magnus-Hirschfeld_Gesellschaft)

But also, it's about sex. That came as sort of a shock. Like, I am teaching this class (which I've been running around frantically getting ready for) called "State and Sexuality," thinking all the while that I'd talk a lot about The State. But I'm three class sessions in and I don't think I've said the word "penis" so many times in front of so many people since I was 10 years old. And what's worse is that when I say the word "penis" it is in a sentence like: "They thought the vagina was an inverted penis."

And if I'm shocked by what comes out of my mouth, try getting my students to take part in class discussion!

There we all were on the first day of class at what CC tells me is the stodgiest university in Canada, and I show them a giant slide of the picture above.

I am like, "What's going on in this picture? Who are these people?" We talked about what time period they appear to be in, that they are women and men socializing together, that some of the men appear to be close, perhaps lovers...Then a student is like, "They are wearing costumes."

I was like, "OK, how can you tell those are costumes?"

We talked about 'what is a costume?' for a while. Someone pointed out that a few people seem to be in 1700s garb, way out of time period for the 1920s when the photo was taken.

Finally I was like: "Isn't that a guy wearing a dress? I think that's a guy wearing a dress!"

I look out at my class, and all students are silently and very seriously nodding. They'd noticed that, of course. But they were apparently too shy to say it!

Register to Vote Obama!

This website will help you register to vote if you want. It is easy. You just fill out the form online, print it, and mail it to the address from the list they will give you.



Uh, but it will only help you if you want to vote for Obama. If you are voting for the Wack-a-Doodle Crew it will not help you and you will have to find another website, sorry.

Huge DY Congrats!

Big, humungeous congrats to JAH, cohabitant of witchcraft-capable cat and future--holy shit--mother!

And what I meant by that was

I am writing a syllabus for this class that I foolishly claimed to want to teach, it is called "State and Sexuality in Modern Europe." (Try telling that to your parents.)

So it is called that, but when you look at the syllabus you see that what I meant by that was "Male Homosexuality in Germany, With Occasional Foray Into British Feminism, 1860-1933."