I haven't read this, but I'm thinking it will help me understand some friends who are just not feeling that the current election choices matter very much in their lives.  I am sure there is much more to be read and said on the topic, but this sure looks promising.  (More from me below this paste-in.)


http://www.dukeupress.edu/cgibin/forwardsql/search.cgi?template0=nomatch.htm&template2=books/book_detail_page.htm&user_id=814155025678&Bmain.Btitle_option=1&Bmain.Btitle=An+Archive+of+Feelings&Bmain.Subtitle=%3A+Trauma%2C+Sexuality%2C+and+Lesbian+Public+Cultures

Here's what it has, new from Duke University Press:

		An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures Ann Cvetkovich 368 pages (February 2003) 41 illus.   Cloth - $84.95 ISBN 0-8223-3076-8 [ISBN13 978-0-8223-3076-9] Paperback - $23.95 ISBN 0-8223-3088-1 [ISBN13 978-0-8223-3088-2] In this bold new work of cultural criticism, Ann Cvetkovich develops a queer approach to trauma. She argues for the importance of recognizing—and archiving—accounts of trauma that belong as much to the ordinary and everyday as to the domain of catastrophe. An Archive of Feelings contends that the field of trauma studies, limited by too strict a division between the public and the private, has overlooked the experiences of women and queers. Rejecting the pathologizing understandings of trauma that permeate medical and clinical discourses on the subject, Cvetkovich develops instead a sex-positive approach missing even from most feminist work on trauma. She challenges the field to engage more fully with sexual trauma and the wide range of feelings in its vicinity, including those associated with butch-femme sex and aids activism and caretaking.  An Archive of Feelings brings together oral histories from lesbian activists involved in act up/New York; readings of literature by Dorothy Allison, Leslie Feinberg, Cherríe Moraga, and Shani Mootoo; videos by Jean Carlomusto and Pratibha Parmar; and performances by Lisa Kron, Carmelita Tropicana, and the bands Le Tigre and Tribe 8. Cvetkovich reveals how activism, performance, and literature give rise to public cultures that work through trauma and transform the conditions producing it. By looking closely at connections between sexuality, trauma, and the creation of lesbian public cultures, Cvetkovich makes those experiences that have been pushed to the peripheries of trauma culture the defining principles of a new construction of sexual trauma—one in which trauma catalyzes the creation of cultural archives and political communities. ”Avoiding bullshit moralism and sentimentality, Ann Cvetkovich breathes new life into the study of trauma. This is the book I looked for in so many libraries and bookstores and never found. It is not only brilliant but totally necessary.”—Kathleen Hanna of the band Le Tigre   “An Archive of Feelings makes an extremely important contribution to queer and feminist cultural studies by insisting upon the public, and indeed national, dimensions of sexual trauma. Ann Cvetkovich's book argues for the productive rather than repressive power of trauma and accounts for its role in the production of queer identities and queer counter publics. This is queer cultural studies at its finest!”—Judith Halberstam, author of Female Masculinity     Ann Cvetkovich is Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism.

Was Gertrude Bell a lesbian?  It's a fair question: she never married and clearly her love of work cloaked a secret heartbreak.  And a manly mind in a woman might well indicate a shared appreciation for women's beauties.

But Bell's secret hearbreak was that she fell in love with married men with whom she shared her professional and sporting interests.  It looks as if a key to her suicide was the mundane tragedy of failing in her attempt to marry a man who enjoyed her companionship but refused her anything more after he was divorced.  He was seventeen years her junior, but enjoyed her company well enough until it was romanticized.

The second element of her sadness was the end of her work as a liaison between the British and the Arabs of Iraq.  Once the latter could speak for themselves to the former and to the world (as the first Arab nation seated in the League of Nations, the role she had championed for them), her go-between function was ended.

And her relations with women bespoke the opposite of desire.  She despised most Englishwomen and they returned the sentiment.  She found them frivolous; they found her arrogant and cold.   She did not support their right to vote in national elections, as she thought they cared nothing for world events.

When it comes to Arab women, however, she took at least an abstract interest.  She spent time promoting public measures for their health and education; for the few she was allowed to know, she endeavored to provide European-style clothing ttrying to mao replace their veils, and guidance by which they might learn to speak in mixed or open company.  She surveyed harems with concern, but there is no record that her eye singled out any individual as an object of desire.

Despite her conventional and unsuccessful love life, Bell's accomplishments were  sufficiently inspiring to women and men of whatever sexual orientation that the reprint of one of her books is by Beacon Press.

I picked up Janet Wallach's Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell: Adventurer, Advisor to King's, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia for something fun to read while journeying home to New England from my family in Ohio.  Of course, "journeying" is hardly the word to use in comparison to her!  Tiring of her affluent English home, and having failed to find a husband in the requisite three years, Ms Bell headed to the Middle East and took to riding camels out into the middle of it.  

She was the person who, possibly more than any other, contradicted the myth about the desert that "there is no there there" (Gertrude Stein's description of her own childhood home in California, which she also quit for more interesting older worlds).  What began for Bell as a search for protectors during her wanderings (she had archeological aspirations) became the most sophisticated knowledge that possibly anyone has ever had about the different cultures, leaders, histories, peoples and lifestyles of "The Orient."  Having "gone local" somewhere in the process, she started importuning the British governors on behalf of the realities of her friends, hosts and even enemies.  What had begun as social connections from her wealthy family background and Oxford college education evolved into a job in political intelligence and role in political intelligence.

Okay, those are the facts.

But what makes Wallach's book so fascinating is her exploration of Bell's sense of a personal gender.  There were ways she was very feminine;  She loved dressing in the softest, latest, most extravagantly fashionable clothes -- even in the middle of the desert!  She was a connaisseuse of good food in several cultures, and lover of beautiful gardens.  Unable to hold her tongue long enough to attract a conventional husband, she fell passionately in love with two of the very few men who shared her spirit and interests.  She enjoyed flirting and being flirted with both Arabs and English, no matter her age or theirs.  Her journals and published professional writings linger lovingly over details made vivid by delicate, extensive English vocabulary, reflecting the reading material she carried and regularly renewed by packet ship, along with new fashions.

Yet she was known primarily as a man in the wrong kind of body.  Her intellect was not only keen, it was military, handling strategy, tactics and supplies with comprehensive scope and efficient focus.  Her body thrilled not only to fine clothing and her portable canvas bathtub, but also to mountain-climbing, camel-riding and brisk morning forays on horseback.  Not for her the side-saddle canters of her peer group -- along with her silks and flowery hats, she owned split skirts for galloping astride.  And along with her detailed writings she drew accurate maps that laid out countries over which we are fighting today.

Wallach first published this book in 1995, before the Bush War in Iraq.  That this war would come, Wallach seemed certain, primarily because Gertrude Bell anticipated it.   And I am just now reading the portion in which Bell and one or two colleagues, Arab and English, predicted exactly the divisive complications that would entwine in it.  

1995 was also before the current curiousity about Asperger's Syndrome.  Yet over and over, Gertrude's journal conveys exactly the kind of confusion, especially over gender identity, that is the female Aspergerian life.  Her easiest and longest friendships were with men, smoothed by her adventureous altheticism.  She only developed a respect for women's lives late in the game, as a refinement of her special interest in Arab culture and a safe niche in colonial expatriot culture.  Children appear to have played no role in her imagination, except when pondering whether she should have consummated her love affair with a married man who was killed in World War I, leaving her with nothing of himself.  She whipped through domestic improvements when setting up camps or homes, but always put them in the hands of servants.  Not for her the joy of daily creation in creature comfort: she wanted only to partake of others' labors at the end of days immersed in her special interest.  She did indeed write that what she wished she could have was "a wife."

Wallach, apparently quoting Bell, says that her overarching goal was to be known as a Person.  Not a man, not a woman, not a social construct, but a creature of her own life, mind and body.

One way Gertrude challenges what I had been thinking about Asperger's is that she was a good extrovert in any realm.  Whatever she did or did not feel, she managed to convey conventional manners sufficiently to make herself welcome.   Her driving ambitions appear to have been 1) never to sit still, and, 2) never to be alone.  These combined in doing social improvements with women friends when she was in England, but moved more readily into mountaineering and then desert explorations as the Englishwomen settled into (or died of) childhrearing.  

Ever the general, never the servant, Bell stocked and supplied guns for her entourage, but apparently did not fire them for herself.  Indeed, it was her commandeering style which most contradicted the image of womanhood that prevailed then as still is common today.  She delivered herself of definitive information and uncontrovertible instructions with a confidence that was described as arrogance but sought out as a national asset.  In the end, it was her excellence in her special interest which overrode the social limitations of her gender.  

Yet it was the gender frustration of Asperger's which killed her.  After the death of her almost-lover at Gallipoli, Gertrude's private hours lost all joy.  She committed suicide in the week before her 58th birthday: with no waiting at home when she was done creating Iraq, retirement held no temptations.  Too late, she had realized that the manners on which she relied for so many intellectual joys had smothered the love that had been offered in her prime years.  Atheist though she was, her upbringing had led her to respect conventional dictates against adultery -- even as the stable world based on hypocritical fidelities self-destructed.   

In that sense, she was not only history's maker, but also its victim: had she and her lover met ten years later, they might have managed a go in the new, role-bursting internationalism of Gerald and Sara Murphy, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Pablo Picasso and Henry Miller.  Indeed, it was the traditional midwestern romantic, Scott Fitzgerald, who could not manage his soul amidst Persons such as Gertrude Bell had taught the new dis-order to respect.

My nephew has lived with me for over a month, and his approach to being on the spectrum is really excellent: "I don't care what you call it, I know what I have to do."

Good point, especially at this stage of the science in autism.  So here's what I have to do, starting Sunday, when he leaves.  It's already been percolating inside me, so I think it's really got merit.  

Having spent quite a bit of time this spring getting a handle on this aspies thing, it's now time to put it in its place!  Yes, indeed, I now understand the need to fight my extroverted curiousity by relentlessly narrowing my focus in ministry.  No more parishes!  When they're good, they exhaust with the attempt to drink in every experience.  When they're bad, they send me flying off into every unhealthy distraction I can get my hands on.  This reflects the fact that I have a learning disability around processing feelings, but I still have lots of feelings trying to be processed.

So here it is: the time at last to focus my ministry on two foci only: serving historians and honoring wedding couples.  When I guest preach, these are my topics.  When I advertise or enter collegial meetings, these are my reports.  When I sit in my study, these are my foci.

But more than that, when I advertise, these are what I advertise.  So it's time to invest the level of work in history ministry that I did last year in wedding ministry.  I am not done yet with wedding ministry -- it was a slow year, and thus, I didn't know which frustrations were mine and which were the moment's.  Now, thanks to colleagues, I have a clearer picture.  I also have done it enough to understand how much time it will take to screen couples, that this will be the weekly activity most often, that the ceremonies and even the P/E will come much more rarely, and much more as celebrations.

As for history, I can't wait to tear into those old plans for writing the grant proposal to do the congregational survey!  And I (and my mother) have shelled out some money for professional summer clothes to wear while I start the book at First UU.   I am full of hope about doing a CENTER proposal, too, although I'm not sure what it will be.

And part of what this means is that at long last, being collegial will be less about parish ministers, and their endless feelings work -- as much as I enjoy it -- and more about the discipline of chatting with other historians about their work.

That said, my heart has recovered its adolescent love of poetry as a way to speak.  There will be a quarter every week of  immersing myself there, in what was once its most rooted meadow of flowers, weeds and bare spots.  Indeed, I can't help noticing that I've been learning to see things at root level, toning down the eye-chasing of every blossom in every field. 

It can't be a coincidence that this is the spring I finally got back to gardening and neighborhood onnections.

Over the last few months, I've been working hard at discovering, developing, disciplining -- something -- a circadian rhythm.  This is a pattern of waking and sleeping energy as the earth makes it circuit around the sun.  It is a foundation for healthiness and productivity -- for meals eaten regularly in stable amounts, for work done consistently with anticipatable and graspable energy, for sleep obtained in doses the doctors recommend.

Not happening here, though.

Yes, there are some fixed points.  Left to my own devices, my energy tends to peak around the time other people are winding down.  This has been hell with my early-rising nephew under the roof, even though it makes me a great Macy's closer.  I have trouble getting to morning meetings, and shine when everyone else is staggering into the church for those evening ones.

But the glory of even this falls apart when I schedule things too close together.  I seem to need downtime in between major events.  Time to hide back in my head for a recalibation away from the previous feelings... or, conversely, to let the feelings of the previous event become articulate.  Time to rest from giving of my own feeling self until nothing is left and I really need a moment of intellectual refill.  Time to be alone with the self I experience in a way I cannot explain,  but which after all these years feels somewhat familiar.

And there seems to be no circadian rhythm involved.  If the downtime works, I'm back into energy.  If the downtime doesn't, the day is over -- even at 11 a.m.  

So what I've come up with is more like a learning disability schedule.  A dyslexic will be given extra time to take a test.  Someone who has trouble with basic math calculations will be given more time, or maybe a calculator, in order to work through the tougher problems that build on the arithmetic their brain cannot do.

So it is with me.  I read faces greedily, because I'm maximizing my interpersonal databank.  Yet my brain has an inferior storage function for that type of data, so only after repeated sessions will I be able to interpret somebody readily, based not on vocabulary I have retained, but from narrative we've accumulated together over time.

And that's part of the delay.  I need time to prepare for meetings by retrieving that data and slowly, painfully reviewing it.  How did we do last time?  What is their particular way of expressing?  What seems to matter most to this person?

It doesn't necessarily result in bad pastoring, but it sure slows down the ready exchanges and affirmations for which people come to religion gatherings, especially humanist ones.

And I desperately yearn for a stable of accessible tasks that rejuvenate me.  Administering the schedule?  Making certain phone calls?  Right now it's just logging into a tiny list of websites -- incredibly inferior to what I've had before.  Not as useful as what other folks get from meeting in the break room or at the water cooler.  I've done better before... what will it be as my new life takes shape?

And how do I explain all this as life moves forward?  I'm trying to figure that out.   The information about myself is not sophisticated.   Now it's not even mysterious -- it has a name and a forest of websites.

So all that's left is working up the courage.

This is rad-- the first time I've posted twice sequentially, one right after the other.  But so it needs to be.

All my life, I have been heavily criticized for begging others for positive feedback.  "Fishing for compliments" was the nicest term for it.  Others would talk about finding my self-esteem and "just do what you have to do and move on."

But I can see now that this was a desperate attempt to achieve the woman's sense of connection without the usual woman's tools of empathy/sympathy/intuition.  Whatever it is that powers "f"s in this world.

My newhew is the opposite: he just plain doesn't care.  His self-esteem is something to behold.  He's a regular Popeye -- "I yam what I yam."  If somebody else doesn't like it, he's not going to change just for them.  He's not going to spend his life like I did, currying favor that never comes.

This is a good thing.

He has been lonely, of course, and now, up here away from his family, he is developing the geography thst fosters his first relationships.  He loves his Aikido dojo and participates in whatever support activity it needs.  He's exploring his religious heritage from the perspective of other congregations and leaders than the one in which he grew up.  He's not falling far from tree, but he's blossoming in his own little bits of sun.  And he seems inclined to carry on his mother's admirable career path when she has found her last little clearing beside that road.

Would it have helped if I had grown up with all the praise he has enjoyed?  My parents thought the thing to get me going was criticism, and they were relentless.  To this day, I consider fear of harsh graders a key reason I procrastinate with completion of tough projects.  

Would it have been different if I had been healthier?  To this day, I believe the event that changed my life was the major illness in tenth grade which sentenced me to average track classes in high school, away from my better friends in AP.  I will always believe that academic affirmation at that age would have changed my life.

But God did not have that in mind for me.  He didn't tell me what he did have in mind anywhere near as early as I wish he would have done.  All I ever wanted was to be a historian and constitutional scholar.  Academia was closed to my generation, and ministry of history turned out to be as well.  

No wonder I have wandered through the world like the little bird in "Are You My Mommy?" 

"How did I do?"  

"Was that what you wanted?"

"Is this okay?"

"I could do this a little differently..."

All of these add up to the same thing.

And now, thank God, it's over!