At long last: victory over funding agency

CC found a run-on sentence in the instructions of a funder to whom you have probably applied for money more than once, and if you are like me, have been rejected multiple times, despite spending hours of your and your loved one's time ensuring that your proposal contains no run-on sentences.

People/women, I am mentoring. (Part IV)

People, I am mentoring me some women and girls. I say: Women!/fellow women! I am mentoring. Mentoring, mentoring, mentoring!

But I am essentially mentoring for free, when I should be doing something else. You know?

Why won't you send me some cash?

You know, this makes me think about: it was all about mentoring in Germany during the Weimar Republic. Women were mentoring the heck--the heck, I say--out of other women and girls. They were mentoring them so much that some of them got the creeps! But then what. The Nazis, that's what. And you know why? 'Cause they didn't get that cash. They mentored, but they had no cash.

Think about that, fellow women.

Rejection letter

@#%#$%^ University
Faculty of Arts and Sciences
Department of !@##$%$
!@@## Street, New York, NY

April 23, 2008


Dear Don,

After careful consideration of the many qualified rejection letters received, I regret to inform you that the committee has decided that it cannot accept your rejection letter at this time.

I realize that this will be disappointing news for you, but that you understand that this decision in no way reflects on the quality of your rejection, and that not all rejection letters meet the needs and parameters of the Program in question. On behalf of the committee, I would like to thank you for giving us an opportunity to learn about your rejection and to consider it.

Yours Sincerely,

Your Small American, BPhD*

*(Begrudging Doctorate in Philosophy)

Hey grant foundation ladies, bring on that cash!

YSA: Would you read my personal statement for this !#@#$$# grant application?
Tom: Sure.
YSA: oh, i should have sent this before. it's the specifications for the personal statement:

”...please state career goals...please describe your helping of other women, as well as how you have worked as a teacher and mentor.”
*************************************************
Personal Statement
I am deeply pleased to apply for the #!@$%$ of ##$%%^* Women Dissertation Completion Fellowship, a fellowship just for women PhD graduate students who need money to finish their dissertations, and especially targeted to help women who have a deep commitment to mentor other women, not only because I myself am a woman, but also because of my own deep and abiding interest in women. All my life I have supported and mentored other women, even going so far as to sleep with them. Indeed, I am still sleeping with them. One is here with me right now, as I write this.

My dissertation, “Women during the Weimar Republic, 1918-1933,” is about women during the Weimar Republic, in Germany. It is about how they mentored one another, for example by creating women-only work spaces (except for the male clients who came by, but they were not there all the time) and making money to support their (female) children, especially when they were working class. Some people who read about my dissertation might say, “Why do I want to read a whole dissertation about prostitution, venereal disease, pornography and sterilization?” But although my dissertation discusses all these things, it is really about women. Women mentoring other women. Mentoring them to run away when the police raided their bordellos, and to avoid venereal disease. Mentoring them to produce postcards of their naked nun cabaret act and not to get those postcards seized by the pornography police.

All of these things, women mentored each other, together. Women together. That is what the Weimar Republic (in Germany) was really all about. The tragic rise of the Nazis put an end to this mass mentoring by German women, but my own commitment to mentor women and girls lives on. As I taught an all-women class twice that was required and that students really resented having to take (and had no clear point), I learned the value of single-sex education and of all-women spaces in which to mentor, mentor, mentor. My commitment to mentoring women has shaped my personal, professional (dissertation) and professional (teaching) lives.

*************************************************
Tom: you should make your personal statement:
"I have achieved all my goals. Now, I am just f-cking around. Send me
some cash, suckas!"
YSA: stay low, bi-atches, and keep the cash comin.
Tom: That should be your motto. Or at least, the motto of your women-only university.

Another application

Your Small American
Application to the 2007-2008 ____________

Communities, Research, Action, and Community Research/Action in Berlin, 1918-1933

My project for the 2007-2008 X$#%* seminar will investigate the seminar’s theme of “Communities: Research and Action” through the lens of my dissertation project, which is an analysis of communities of sexually unorthodox people, their research, their action, and what I argue was their “research/action” in Berlin during the Weimar Republic. My dissertation asks, “What is community?” and answers that question by examining two key components of community: research and action. For example, members of Berlin’s lesbian, gay and transvestite communities engaged in research that led to action. This, I argue, was “research/action.” Activists such as Magnus Hirschfeld, German homosexual celebrity, renowned in Europe and North American(1) as a sex scientist, founder of his own research institute in the Tiergarten and swingin’ transvestite, researched the sexuality of other people and then took action by dressing up as women. The police thought Hirschfeld was running a brothel(2) but he was actually running a research institute. My dissertation asks “and why is that so often the case??” and you will too, when you read my seminar project, “Communities, Research, Action, and Community Research-Action.”

I would be an upstanding member of this seminar because I have participated in many seminars, as well as in communities, in research, and naturally also in action. My deep interest in receiving the $5,000 stipend for participating in this seminar will allow me to bring to the seminar an interdisciplinary perspective on communities, research and action, and also to buy milk frother. My new milk frother will, indeed, bring to the seminar its interdisciplinary perspective on the actions of milk frothing and coffee drinking in the formation of communities of lesbians, gay men and transvestites in Berlin and elsewhere. I am sincerely committed to the concept of receiving $5,000, thereby putting my research into the action of buying clothing, food and, indeed, a milk frother, and look forward to participating in the important work of the seminar, which will contribute a new perspective to scholarship on communities, their research and their action.

1 By which I mean, North American except for Mexico and probably not most of Canada, but maybe Toronto.
2 Really!

Pseudo grant application--Ha ha, but I still will not get outside money

Below is the pseudo grant application I wrote after total exhaustion and project disgruntlment finishing the season of writing actual grant applications last fall. This fake project statement acheived brief internet fame when Could Be A Model e-mailed it to two of her friends.

[Note: Actual dissertation project not a joke. (Damnit!)]

Your Small American
Project Statement

My dissertation project, tentatively entitled “Berlin 2003-2007: Lesbian Capital of Europe,” will probe the conceptual difficulties in establishing and even in thinking fulfilling lesbian relationships across linguistic and national divides and in the face of rampant vegetarianism. Judith Butler has noted that it may be easy to get a date given that gender is performative and the subject has always already invested in the temporal quickening of a dyke presentation.[1] Yet Butler’s notion conflicts with everyday lived experiences, where lesbianism and asking out German girls is complicated by inabilities to speak German, inabilities to figure out who is whose ex girlfriend, one’s perceived national identity as an imperialist American just looking to slut around then return to the states and not call; and the resulting complexities imbricated in these conflicts. What chances does the subject have to get laid, when the subject always already does not exist, and doesn’t even speak German?

My preparation for this project began with my undergraduate coursework in History and Political Science, as well as many failed attempts to date, or even to meet, Barnard students, which led me to examine problems of lesbianism, agency and subjectivity in a senior thesis entitled: “Dreaming the Lesbian Subject: Post-Structuralist Reality or It’s Not My Fault That She Has A Girlfriend.” Two summers spent conducting preliminary research in Berlin have afforded me the opportunity to make important trials of local paradigms that organize dating, making out completely drunk in bushes in parks, and the production of life-altering, soul-crushing, endless drama. In addition, this project will be aided by an offer of sponsorship from C-----, renowned international lesbian, who has invited me to visit her part-lesbian WG (communal house) where I will be able to refine my project while participating in such activities as L-Word watching, vegetarian cooking, and beer drinking. In addition, top scholar N----, international lesbian of mystery, who speaks no German yet has a German girlfriend, has agreed to advise this project.

Despite these auspicious initial supports, this innovative project depends on funding from your organization to support up to three years of deep emersion in Berlin lesbianism. With support from your funding organization, this project will re-shape the conceptual frameworks that have directed research into lesbianism, nationalism, commercialism, post-structuralism, temporality, affect, embodiment, and dating cute central Europeans.


[1] “Linguist/Temporal/Corporeal Performativety: Stop Whining About How You Can’t Get a Date, You Are Not Even A Subject, It Does Not Matter, Do You Know What I Am Saying?” Social Text 54:1 (Fall 2004).