Graduation day...

Este video de Glee resume parte de lo que fue mi graduation day y la cara de Guillermo durante el acto...

Yihhhhaaaaa!!!!

Último examen y fiesta de graduación en la misma tarde. Cómo es posible? Pues porque asistes a la fiesta aunque realmente no te hayas graduado. Hacen el paripé con que te dan un diploma pero cuando abres la carpeta de cuero donde se encuentra el diploma encuentras un folio en el que te dicen cuándo has de pasar a recoger tu diploma (siempre que hayas aprobado todas las asignaturas). Total, que hoy he acabado los exámenes, en 15 días me darán las notas y en 6 - 8 semanas el diploma. Es decir, que hasta el 15 de julio, tal como estaba planeado, no sobrevolaremos el océano camino de la "próspera" Spain. #spanishrevolution, here we go!!!

El acto de graduación ha sido bastante gracioso. Protocolariamente no me enteraba de nada y para colmo estaba situada en la primera fila con lo que imitar al resto resultaba difícil porque no tenía a nadie delante. Pero hacer el ridículo en el extranjero no estigma tanto como en casa así que me lo he tomado con gracia. Tras un montón de discursos de un montón de honorarios personajes del lugar, un concierto a lo "Glee" en el que todos los graduados hemos movido el esqueleto (vergonzoso), un discurso de Robert R. Reich, Secretario de Trabajo durante la presidencia de Clinton (graciosillo Robert), y música muy solemne, un paseo por el escenario saludando a todo el mundo, muchas fotos, y un pasillo donde todo el mundo te toca la espalda... el acto se ha acabado y me he encontrado con Guillermo que se había animado a acompañarme.

Y fotos del acto... aquí os dejo con las 5 fotos que ha hecho Guillermo (5!!). No voy a decir nada porque luego él se enfada pero.... Z·"$%&%&6·""&09=()!!!!

Esperando para entrar en Zellerback Hall (UC Berkeley).

Intentando pronunciar mi nombre y apellido (le ha costado un poco).

Una vez pronuncian tu nombre y tu área (Women's Studies),

el público aplaude y tú te diriges a saludar al resto de honorarios.

Saludando al personal.

Aún no sé quién es esta señora pero todo el mundo se hacía una foto con ella.

En la mano llevo la carpeta con mi vale para un diploma.

Así somos...

Este es un anuncio que me ha parecido bastante gracioso y que retrata muy bien ese ansia por tener lo más nuevo...

Manifestándome

Aina me ha pasado esta foto que me parece muy divertida, además que refleja el ambiente festivo que vivimos el pasado sábado los expatriados concentrados en el consulado español en San Francisco. Viva la Revolución!!!

This is Indian land

Earthquake (again)

Éste ha sido sólo de 3.6, pero se ha notado durante unos 5 segundos, del tipo que provoca el acto reflejo de agarrarte a la mesa. Seguiré informando....

Video de la #spanishrevolution @ San Francisco

Spanish Revolution / San Francisco

Imágenes de la concentración de hoy sábado en el consulado español en San Francisco...

Foto del grupo

... aquí sigo...

4 de la mañana y aún trabajando. Esto me está costando bastantes horas de sueño. A todos aquellos a los que debo un email, sabed que os tengo en mis pensamientos y en cuanto pueda os envío email de vuelta.

Mientras tanto, muchos ánimos a todos con la Spanish Revolution!!!!!

[Foto tomada en la República Independiente de Lavapiés (Madrid), Diciembre 2009]

Judith/Jack Halberstam

MD: You write in your latest book In a Queer Time and Place (2005) about the intellectual responsibility in America today...

JH: ...yes, to speak up!

MD: This responsibility seems related to something you discussed in your lecture Notes on Failure, where you talked about stupidity as a mode of domination. You used George W. Bush as an example of what you called “politics of not-knowing”. Can you elaborate on your thoughts on stupidity?

JH: There are a couple of different references here. One is Eve Sedgwick, who has this great anecdote in the introduction to The Epistemology of the Closet(1990) where she tries to show that knowing and unknowing are not in obvious relationships to power. It seems as if knowledge and power are linked, and not knowing and not having power are linked, and in many regimes they are, okay, but she gives the example of President Reagan meeting François Mitterrand in France. Mitterrand is the politician who speaks several languages; Reagan is the politician who is monolingual. So one politician is in more command of knowledge than the other, but because Reagan does not know French, they speak in English. Therefore, the people who are less educated, who have less range, dominate the discourse. Now, that is a pretty interesting analogy for what I am calling domination through the mode of stupidity. You can dominate by not knowing as easily as you can dominate from the position of knowledge. It depends completely on the context. It also depends on how the intellectual has been figured in any given community, and it depends upon class politics and suspicion of intellectual activity, sometimes from working-class people. Bush was able to mobilize this image of himself as a regular guy, despite the fact that he is far from a blue-collar person in the US. In fact, he is Yale educated and blue blood - a political dynasty brat. But through a certain kind of stupidity, he is able to represent himself in fact as “one of the people”. So stupidity, in many many different forms, works against people who are smart. I think that for academics that is just a really good lesson. It is also a different way of reading how stupidity functions in the US: Stupidity does not only function to blot out knowledge; it functions to produce knowledge in a different way. And then the final reference for that would be Avital Ronell, who is a deconstructive philosopher, who has a book called Stupidity (2002), in which she argues that stupidity is not what stands in the way of wisdom, it actually is another way of having wisdom"

MD: Today we see a cultural return to the eighties, not only fashion and music, but also in Hollywood, where macho-heroes such as Rambo, Rocky, and John McClain from Die Hard are back. Richard Goldstein has termed this figure the“neo-macho-man”, and linked it to Bush's war in Iraq. What are your thoughts on this change in masculinity in the US public sphere after 9/11? And what effects do you think this has had on the American society?

JH: I think it is a very real account. It is not just in the imagery. We can go back to the sort of stupid masculinity of Bush. A world event like the bombing of the World Trade Center on September 11 happens, and this world leader's response is this sort of cowboy rhetoric about “we're gonna root them out”, “we're gonna hunt them down”, you know. I will never forget that imagery, and sort of thinking: oh my god, this is the beginning of the end. This is unfortunately the price that we do pay for a particular kind of anti-intellectualism. This is where it does come home to roost, because in the place of a sort of reasoned and considered account asking: my goodness, what is this political situation that we have gotten ourselves into? How can we understand it? What could we do about it? How should we respond to it as a people, as a nation, or actually as a collapse of a nation? Instead you get that macho rhetoric.

In the five or six years since then, not only have we seen the return of the macho-man in films, we have seen a return of all kinds of bad political behavior in general. Many people have talked about a sort of carte blanche being given to homophobes, sexists, and bigots, because the political culture of the moment is not careful, basically. So some of these school shootings you see in the US, like the Virginia Tech shootings, the media latched on to the fact that the guy was Korean-American, which may have some significance, but more importantly, this is a return to the 1980s shootings. There was a whole series of schoolboys shooting particularly girls, in Midwestern states - in these red states, Republican states. What that signals to me is that we are living in a culture where men believe they are entitled to something, and when that something does not materialize, they think someone has to pay. It is like going to the 1980s with those horrible films like Falling Down, with Michael Douglas, where the white guy looks around him and says: “Hey, where did all these immigrants come from, what happened to my Californian, Arian, sun worshiping, white people's culture”, and takes a Uzi and walks around in these neighborhoods of color blowing people away. We have returned ... no, it is not even a return; it is a new version of male entitlement that comes with an extreme expression of male violence at every outlet of the political culture. So I would go way beyond the films, and be like ... wow!

[From trikster.net]

15M California

Trabajando duro porque mañana toca manifestarse... en California. Un grupo de expatriados españoles en el área de San Francisco (relevante papel el de Aina y Oriol) han montado un grupo en Facebook de apoyo al movimiento 15-M, han elaborado un manifiesto y convocado una concentración ante el consulado español en San Francisco.

[Foto tomada en México DF, Julio 2009]

Será mañana a las 6 de la tarde. Y como habréis adivinado: allí estaré. Estoy hasta arriba de trabajo pero por estar allí hoy me quedaré sin dormir. Ya tengo un cargamento de Diet Cokes en la nevera. Todo por la lucha.

Y de paso, a ver si sacamos una república con todo este movimiento, no?

Artículo del New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/20/world/europe/20iht-spain20.html?scp=2&sq=spain&st=cse

Aquí, la Puerta del Sol en directo. Pena, penita, pena no estar allí...

Free live streaming by Ustream

PS.- Mañana abordaré el tema DSK, que me está poniendo de los nervios todo el debate sobre si Europa-Francia es super liberal y Estados Unidos super puritana.... A ver, quién no se ha enterado aún que de lo que se acusa a este señor no es de "picha floja" sino de intento de violación, de intentar forzar a otra persona (forzar, contra su voluntad) a tener relaciones con él???? Vamos a ver, centrémonos un poquito. Una cosa es que la gente se acueste con quien le plazca y unos le hagan la ola y otros se lo reprochen, y otra muy distinta abusar de otro ser humano.

PS.- Y en otro momento también abordaré la cuestión palestina. Qué lástima y qué rabia.

Final exams

Un examen menos!!! Qué alegría!! 2 horas y media de Feminist Philosophy. Intenso. Y sin escribir en ningún momento la palabra patriarchy!! Todo un reto. Esta asignatura ha sido super interesante. Me he comprado tropecientos libros de algunas de las autoras que he descubierto. I love Judith Butler y estoy encantada de haberme encontrado con Andrea Dworkin y Judith / Jack Halberstam. Ha valido la pena.... Ahora a esperar las notas. Hummm.....

Mañana es fiesta, Malcom X's birthday. Lo dedicaré todo el día a trabajar. El viernes he de entregar un paper y además he quedado con la directora del programa para tomar un té. Trabajo, trabajo, trabajo... cuánta adrenalina en el cuerpo!!!! Yihhhaaaaa!!!!!

Estudiando Feminist Philosophy

Un resumen...

"To be conscious that you are still a slave still living under oppression is the first step on the road to emancipation. We the women in Arab countries realize that we are still slaves, still oppressed, not because we belong to the East, not because we are Arab, or members of Islamic societies, but as a result of the patriarchal class system that has dominated the world since thousands of years"

Nawal El Saadawi

"The experience of oppressed people is that the living of one's life is confined and shaped by forces and barriers which are not accidental or occasional and hence avoidable, but are systematically related to each other in such a way as to catch one between and among them and restrict or penalize motion in any direction. It is the experience of being caged in: all avenues, in every direction, are blocked or booby trapped"

"The door-opening pretends to be a helpful service, but the helpfulness is false. This can be seen by nothing that it will be done whether or not it makes any practical sense (...) Furthermore, these were numerous acts of unneeded or even noisome 'help' occur in counterpoint to a pattern of men not being helpful in many practical ways in which women might welcome help (...) The gallant gestures have no practical meaning. Their meaning is symbolic. The door-opening and similar services provided are services which really are needed by people who are for one reason or another incapacitated - unwell, burdened with parcels, etc. So the message is that women are incapable"

"Women are oppressed, as women. Members of certain racial and/or economic groups and classes, both the males and the females, are oppressed as members of those races and/or classes. But men are not oppressed as men... and isn't it strange that any of us should have been confused and mystified about such a simple thing?"

Marilyn Frye

"Sexism, racism, and class exploitaton constitute interlocking systems of domination - that sex, race, and class, and not sex alone, determine the nature of any female's identity, status, and circumstance, the degree to which she will or will not be dominated, te extent to which she will have the power to dominate"

bell hooks

"The commodification of reproductive technologies, and, in particular, the labor services of pregnant surrogate mothers, means that money is being made and that, therefore, someone is being exploited"

Angela Davis

"..in Jerusalem, Orthodox men throw stones at women who don't have their arms covered. Palestinian boys who throw stones at Israeli soldiers are shot with bullets, rubber-coated or not. Stone throwing at women by Orthodox men is considered trivial, not real assault. Somehow, it's their right. Well, what isn't?"

Andrea Dworkin

"Oppression refers to the vast and deep injustices some groups suffer as a consequence of often unconscious assumptions and reactions of well-meaning people in ordinary interactions, media and cultural stereotypes, and structural features of bureaucratic hierarchies and market mechanisms - in short, the normal processes of everyday life"

Iris Young

".... like it or not, your body positions you within a social hierarchy"

"Although identifying someone as a member of a social group invokes a set of appropriate norms, what these norms are is not fixed. What it means to be a woman, or to be White, or to be Latino, in this sense, is unstable and always open to contest. The instability across time is necessary to maintain the basic structure of gender and race relations through other social changes: as social roles changes the contents of normative race and gender identities adjust"

Sally Haslanger

"... gender is a performance with clearly punitive consequences. Discrete genders are part of what 'humanizes' individuals within contemporary culture; indeed, those who fail to do their gender right are regularly punished. Because there is neither an 'essence' that ender expresses or externalizes nor an objective ideal to which gender aspires; because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender creates the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all. Gender is, thus, a construction that regularly conceals its genesis. The tacit collective agreement to perform, produce, and sustain discrete and polar genders as cultural fictions is obscured by the credibility of its own production. The authors of gender become entranced by their own fictions whereby the construction compels one's belief in its necessity and naturalness. The historical possibilities materialized through various corporeal styles are nothing other than those punitively regulated cultural fictions that are alternately embodied and disguised under duress"

Judith Butler

"If we use the paradigm of the bathroom as a limit of gender identification, we can measure the distance between binary gender schema and lived multiple gendered experiences (...) single-gender bathrooms are only for those who fit clearly into none category (male) or the other (female). Either we need open-access bathrooms or multigendered bathrooms, or we need wider parameters for gender identification"

Judith / Jack Halberstam

Inside Job

Qué ganas tenía de revelar mi carrete Lomo!!! Revelar un carrete tiene un punto de excitación que no sientes con las cámaras digitales, esa incertidumbre de saber si las fotos saldrán bien o no. Más el tener que esperar a acabar el carrete para ver una foto de pura actualidad en su momento, como la que aquí os adjunto. La foto la tomé el día 2 de mayo, el día posterior al asesinato de Osama bin Laden. Esto es Berkeley....

En el lavabo, really????

PS.- Por fin he terminado mi carrete de la cámara Lomo!!! Mañana lo llevaré a revelar y dedicaré la próxima semana a colgar fotos... Yihhhaaaa!!!

Minifundios made in USA

Immigrants for Sale

Lavapiés is different (I miss you, my barrio)

La crispación se expande... pero entre los ciudadanos.

Como un testigo local becomes viral

(y todo viene por los hits de Mourinho en internet... ¿por qué?, ¿por qué? )

Noticia que aparece en una cadena local de Alabama.

A posteriori...

Parece que Dodson y su familia ya se han mudado lejos de los "projects".

World War III

37th Annual Stanford Powwow

Encuentro de nativos americanos en Stanford (Palo Alto)

Paseando por Mission (y 6)

... es que da para mucho un paseo por Mission...

Detalles cotidianos de Mission

Mural (otro más).

Bailando en la calle un sábado por la mañana.

La foto blasfema...

Pulsar sobre la foto para AMPLIAR y leer el anuncio.

Paseando por Mission (5)