DAY 6: Reading group

Today WITHOUT actually felt like a lived project for the first time. It’s not like I’m asking people to pose for ‘process’ photographs (well apart from this gorgeous shot of Solate and Marcus in their helmets) or asking them to do anything they’re not comfortable doing – it’s just that I wasn’t being the usual anxious host and that the reading group’s familiarity with the space, activity and dynamic was instilling a sense of ownership over the proceedings. There was the usual paranoid ‘did my utterances make any sense’ reflection at the end but I’m beginning to think that these discussions are (or should be) a space where we practice verbalising those uncharted thoughts that are filed neatly away. Some sentences will invariably make no sense – but I think that’s ok – not in a pedagogical “we only learn from our mistakes’ kind of way but in an active pursuit of experimenting with verbal language in its potential to communicate in these garbled and fraught states. The reading group met in the afternoon and this time we concentrated on two texts: Judith Butler’s “Against Proper Objects “ in Differences – A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies (Feminism meets Queer Theory), Volume 6 Summer – Fall 1994, Volume 6, Numbers 2+ 3 and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “Epistemology of the Closet” that was sourced from the Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (Edited by Abelove, Barale abd Halperin). It was originally printed in a book by the same name, p 67 –90, University Of California Press, 1990. I am really running out of steam at the moment – so here is the second day that I put off an extended reflection.