Theory Is Fun

Originally Posted Tuesday, September 2, 2014

Our lives are the things we pretend we are living.  No, it is otherwise.  The things we pretend are our lives are the things that keep us from living.  I don't know.  It is complicated.  Nobody knows for sure. 

My ex-girlfriend has gone back to school to work on her Ph.D.  I asked her what she was reading.  She is in a language theory course.  She wasn't sure.  She had much reading to do that night, she said.  She was reciting some gobbledygook that she was memorizing more than understanding.  Sure, that's the first part.  I am realizing, though, that Ph.D. programs are just a way of keeping some Ph.D.s barely employed so that they may further the field's research.  Most of them don't so much.  Not really.  Very few change the intellectual landscape of any given discipline.  But it takes a lot to find the few, I guess. And so Ph.D. programs proliferate, though nothing like the vile and evil Ed.D. degrees which have been the blight of education. 

Many fields now are much the same and based on theory.  There is a certain smugness in those who are theorists, I find.  But this could be my own bias and perception.  Don't get me wrong--theory is fun, and there are plenty of them.  Most "theorists" in any field, though, follow the latest few.  Once they have mastered one or two, they ride that horse. 

Gender and race identity are good ones for me.  They are slippery and confusing and try to upset the old apple cart.  Transgender/transexual/intersexual arguments are often interesting and confusing.  "Trannies" are sometimes lumped in with homosexuals as in LGBT groups.  But they have different issues, different agendas.  They group together, of course, for the power they gain in numbers, but it is much like going to a Democratic Convention, or as it is sometimes referred to, "Safety in Numbers."  I have a theorist friend who is a self-proclaimed champion of the LGBT.  He refers to me as a privileged straight white male.  Jesus, I say, how do you come to that?  Oh, he says, that is how the privileged stay in power, by denying their privilege.  Who are you to define me as "straight" I say?  Or white?  Or even male?  Just like the old guard that he fights against, he wants the privilege of naming, of categorizing.  Can I not self-proclaim, I ask?  Am I not allowed to be what I think I am? 

I've decided that my sexual orientation is transgressive.  I am a self-declared transgressive.  Transgressives have been marginalized for too long.  I am calling for Recognition and Unity!

O.K.  I do not mean to minimize the struggles of oppressed people.  That is not my gig.  I'll fight with my fists for them, truly.  Just don't tell me who I am.  I'm tired of hiding. 

Which brings me to Ed Wood.  I guess it was the Johnny Depp movie of that name that brought Wood's work so much attention.  His later work is getting much attention.  Much of the work was considered pornographic, but Wood was a groundbreaker in the transgender/transexual world.  He was no theorist.  He just liked to dress in women's clothing.  He was not a homosexual and was married to a woman who understood his love of angora sweaters.  He felt, he said, that he was a woman trapped in a man's body.  He made movies about it.  Here is an article I read yesterday in the Times (link). 

The life Wood pretended. . . no. . . he pretended to live. . . .  I am still not certain.  Who can tell what are lives are and what they would be?  When I was younger, living a monks life seemed something awfully difficult.  More and more it seems to be the simplest of things to do.