Not incredibly related to the reading, but perhaps somewhat . . . I just got off the phone with my best friend who graduated from Tufts last spring. Our standard meandering conversation took us a great deal of places, but one I wasn't expecting was to the topic of favorite professors who have made big impacts in our intellectual/identity formation . . . her most memorable prof is Lee Edelman of the Tufts English Department, a.k.a. Lee Edelman of this week's reading.

This sort of a collective response to ideas brought up by Bumpkins, CA92075, morefuntocompute, and snaggle regarding identity of the female, appropriation of negation, and the role of the avant-garde therein.

There were two points that struck me kinda hard, both on page 159 of the Haraway reading:

1. Feminism practice is the construction of this form of consciousness; that is, the self-knowledge of a self-who-is-not.

2a. To be constituted by another's desire is not the same thing as to be alienated in the violent separation of the labourer from his product.

2b. ... Feminists' consciousness of the non-existence of women, except as products of men's desires.

I accidentally put this up as a reply to Anon's related post, but it was intended to be an independent post. Anyway, here it is again.

I am very interested in Haraway's call for a reconstitution of the ways in which we organize ourselves as an act of political transgression - and moreover, recentering of the marginalized in postmodern space. Haraway encourages us to name the fictionalization of the 'identities' to which we currently cling as our social markers, then to move past these constructed delineations. In calling for an oppositional unity constituted by "affinity, not identity" (p. 154), she is asking us to reposition ourselves against history, to bring forward that which has been systemically neglected.

Well, as usual, I take objection to about half of the claims that the author makes. In this instance, the subject of *admiration* is Harvey. I don't know if it is a function of the time this particular piece was written in, but his ideas seem oddly out of place. I guess I just don't have an issue with society and these authors, being social critics, do. So here goes my critic of the critic: