Bitch Fight

A version of the paper I presented at Critical Animals has been published online today.

With Decorum

For my birthday I asked my sisters for a totem tennis. It sits in our garden and gets a beating when Z has a friend over or when I am feeling angry. 

Sometimes I feel very very angry. Are you surprised? Why is it that anger is not something we talk about easily? And why is that I don't know many people who are very good at being angry? (Does that say more about the people I hang out with or more about people in general?)

While we were in Newcastle, we went to hear a panel on which there was a woman whose paper absolutely and utterly infuriated me. Still when I think about it now, I feel my cheeks darken. And during question time I told her, then challenged her with a question she answered with indifference.

Afterwards I felt terrible. Even though I had acted according to my own integrity, I felt as though my anger was not in the spirit of the day. And then I was angry at myself for not knowing how to be angry.

PJ is the first boyfriend I have had where I have not felt as though a squabble will culminate in a break up. And as a result, I feel more competent with my anger. But fighting with a sibling or a lover is easier than expressing anger towards a stranger with decorum.

Behind Me

About Yesterday

All morning I had a line from my paper in my head: "The French Government doesn't think so." It was the one sentence in my whole presentation I wasn't sure how to intone.

My talk was about violence on YouTube and in it, I discuss how last year the French Government passed legislation that outlawed the filming of violent acts by any citizen who is not a professional journalist. Bloggers, amateur documentary filmmakers or those filming to collect evidence of a crime are not exempt.

In the end when it was time for my paper, that line found its own place and my ideas waved in the breeze of the day, like a flag.

Critical Animals

At the beginning of October, PJ and I and our wonderful friend O are heading up to Newcastle for This is Not Art. We have just booked our flights and I am very excited. 

One component of the festival is Critical Animals, a creative research symposium where we three Victorians will be presenting papers - PJ's is about how the corporatised State abuses our landbase, O is presenting a series of poems on the correlation between suffering and joy in the everyday, and mine is a paper on gender ethics and violence on YouTube. 

Our panel is called Pathologies of Civilisation, and for anyone who's going to be in that neck of the woods on Thursday, 2nd of October, come on down to the Hunter Room, Newcastle City Hall at 11.30am.

Yesterday the event organisers sent through this image for participants to include on their, "website, blog, myspace, facebook, email signature, t-shirt, full-sleeve tatt, etc, etc."