"Liminal" and "Liminality"

I had to delete a FB post earlier. For some reason I expressed my annoyance with the (over) use of the word liminal in discussions I've had lately. I wrote that it had become an academic buzz word and in the same way I get tired of a Beyonce hook I liked the first 30-zilllion times I heard it - buzzwords start to get on ones nerves. This week alone I feel like I've heard the word at least 1-zillion times and for some reason, I just decided that I've had enough. But why was I so vehement about this at 10:00pm when nobody around me had used the word all day? Why was I even thinking about the word in the first place?

I deleted the rant on Facebook once I realized that I was really trying to express my own frustration about my existence in a liminal space. There I said it. I am not where I was, and not where I will be. But I have been in this space for way too long it seems. Liminal spaces are not supposed to be "places" we stay. In fact its supposed to be impossible really because in some ways a liminal space is not its own enough to even exist. Liminal spaces are supposed to be the transition to a real space from a real space but not a space that can contain or keep any substance. So why and how is it possible for me to be here? Somebody stretched out the definition on wikipedia in a way that makes me feel better. But I totally disagree with much of what they said.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liminality

Once a person or thing has the ability to "stay" in a liminal space, it is no longer liminal by definition. Maybe that's what scares me... the possibility that my "transition" is has become a stopping point and that this space - not where I will be or want to be - has become the place where I am, instead of the space I am moving through.

This has to change. Perhaps I just got too comfortable with liminality, like whoever wrote the wikipedia etry - and I've tried to define it as a real place. Not so. I gotta shake this off. I need to rediscover my binary instinct.... Either it is, or it isn't.... ones and zeros.... "Do or do not there is no try".... Poop or get off the pot...

Bump Liminality...

1010100011010010101111010110111100111

Female South African Medalist Accused of being a Man

Okay.. so... I'm not usually this interested in gender politics... Maybe because I have often benefited from social systems that promote stereo typical perceptions of femininity. But this story just got to me for some reason. Perhaps because RACE seems to be woven into the fabric of her opposition without anyone directly acknowledging its presence. - Anndretta
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Controversy unavoidable in sensitive case of Caster Semenya - Times Online

(John Giles/PA) Caster Semenya took gold in the women's 800m, leaving her rivals trailing as she won in a time of one minute, 55.45 seconds

Okay... so she looks a little... umm.... well... HARD. When I first analyzed this photo I immediately noticed her breasts... or rather.... lack thereof... but *THEN* I started browsing photos of her last race.

!!! NONE OF THOSE RUNNERS HAVE BREASTS!!!!

So why is she being singled out????

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Controversy unavoidable in sensitive case of Caster Semenya - Times Online

The playing-out of the Caster Semenya story last night was sad and almost unavoidable. The handling of the news of Semenya's issue was one that the IAAF had hoped and intended to manage as sensitively as possible.

It is fair to say that the gossip had been building all week. It had begun on athletics website chatrooms but the story started to gather momentum when it was suggested that this might be more than plain bitchiness. The situation became particularly tough for Nick Davies, the spokesman for the IAAF.

The IAAF's initial hope was that the South African federation leave Semenya out of their team. That would, of course, have been harsh, but it would have avoided the circus that we witnessed yesterday at the Olympic stadium. She is only 18, so a talent that good would most likely have plenty of opportunities to stake her claim to greatness once the gender verification process had been completed. If, of course, it cleared her.

Until yesterday morning, Davies had fielded a few calls from the media, asking if there was anything more to the rumours beyond mere bitchy gossip, and his approach had been to stonewall the enquiries.

Yesterday morning, though, the first story appeared on an Australian website declaring that Semenya had been asked to undergo gender verification. Naturally, the internet being what it is, the story spread like wild fire.

By 4.30pm, when Davies was due to give his daily press briefing, there was absolutely no hope of keeping a lid on the truth. Only around 20 journalists actually pitched up, but there was only one subject anyone had in mind.

But this was just a trifling display of media hunger. The moment that Davies confirmed in that press conference that Semenya had been asked to verify her gender, she became that biggest story of the day. There was almost nothing else on the agenda. That evening, Semenya's medal-winning press conference was packed. Only Usain Bolt has drawn an audience like that. And, of course, Semenya didn't show up. She had been advised, sensitively and correctly, to stay away.

The trouble is that there is no protecting her once the news had been confirmed. Davies asked the media to handle to story sensitively and delicately, but the Brisbane Times website was already running with the headline "Gender Bender on IAAF Agenda". Also Paddy Power, the bookies, was already giving prices on whether Semenya would be proven to be man, woman or hermaphrodite.

I would guess the 95 per cent of the media yesterday felt extremely awkward about this story. Old hacks who had thought they had seen it all shook the heads in astonishment; they had never seen anything like this. But once it had started, there was no stopping it. That is how news works now. The moment that the tap has been turned, no one can turn it off.

Michael Johnson, the former athlete and BBC commentator, was apoplectic that Semenya should find herself exposed this way. But there were only two ways to protect her: either the South Africans to have left her behind, or for the IAAF to lie.

The Semenya story has grabbed the public’s attention as well as the media’s and Times Online has been inundated with comments and opinions from readers that touch on wider issues of gender as well as the athlete’s personal situation.

Julian Foxall criticised the IAAF’s handling of the news: “Due to mismanagement of the pre-event details, Semenya's gender is now being questioned in front of millions of viewers and discussed in forums. Her gender should have been verified long before she was allowed to compete. Poor girl.”

Jenny Skidalski agreed: “It is truly shocking that the IAAF is able to act so irresponsibly. Creating a public spectacle whereby an athlete is 'shamed' and invalidated in such a way jeopardises the psychological well-being of Semenya as well as bringing the whole sport into disrepute. Furthermore, 'gender' is largely performative. People are not so easily divided in two convenient sex binaries.”

Jesee Itotian felt the case raises some large questions: “How should society define a woman? It seems that having female genitalia is no longer enough. Should we test every woman and man to a subjective test to see that their body fits into a set criteria? Should Bolt be tested to see that he is not producing too many hormones? Should we have special games for men and women who don't fit into the category that we define? When a child is born, should doctors test them first and then classify them into boy, girl and unknown gender or half boy or half girl?”

Was it the Color of His Skin????? Harvard Professor accused of breaking into his own home...

http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2009/07/harvard.html

Police say they were investigating a possible break-in... but they arrested this Black man in front of his own home for disorderly conduct in the middle of the afternoon.... what???

Please visit the link above to see the comments people have made. Not everyone believes that racial profiling or racism in any form still exists simply because we have a Black president....

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Harvard professor Gates arrested at Cambridge home

July 20, 2009 12:16 PM Email| Comments (39)| Text size – +

By Tracy Jan, Globe Staff

Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., one of the nation's pre-eminent African-American scholars, was arrested Thursday afternoon at his home by Cambridge police investigating a possible break-in. The incident raised concerns among some Harvard faculty that Gates was a victim of racial profiling.

Gates

Police arrived at Gates’s Ware Street home near Harvard Square at 12:44 p.m. to question him. Gates, director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard, had locked himself out of his house and was trying to get inside.

He was booked for disorderly conduct after “exhibiting loud and tumultuous behavior,” according to the Cambridge police log.

Friends of Gates said he was already in his home when police arrived. He showed his driver’s license and Harvard identification card, but was handcuffed and taken into police custody for several hours last Thursday, they said.

Gates, 58, did not return calls for comment today.

The arrest of such a prominent scholar under what some described as dubious circumstances shook some members of the black Harvard community.

“He and I both raised the question of if he had been a white professor, whether this kind of thing would have happened to him, that they arrested him without any corroborating evidence,” said S. Allen Counter, a Harvard Medical School professor who spoke with Gates about the incident Friday. “I am deeply concerned about the way he was treated, and called him to express my deepest sadness and sympathy.”

Counter, who had called Gates from the Nobel Institute in Sweden, where Counter is on sabbatical, said that Gates was “shaken” and “horrified” by his arrest.

Counter has faced a similar situation himself. The well-known neuroscience professor, who is also black, was stopped by two Harvard police officers in 2004 after being mistaken for a robbery suspect as he crossed Harvard Yard. They threatened to arrest him when he could not produce identification.

“This is very disturbing that this could happen to anyone, and not just to a person of such distinction,” Counter said. “He was just shocked that this had happened, at 12:44 in the afternoon, in broad daylight. It brings up the question of whether black males are being targeted by Cambridge police for harassment.”

Cambridge police would not comment on the arrest, citing an investigation into the incident by Middlesex District Attorney Gerard T. Leone Jr. A spokesman for Leone said Gates is scheduled to be arraigned on Aug. 26 and said the office could not provide details on the arrest until that time.

Friends said Gates is being represented by Harvard Law School professor Charles Ogletree, who has taken on previous cases with racial implications.

Stanford U. / Former Inmates / Humanities

I was back at Stanford in 2007 and 2008 and had no idea that this program exists. How could I not know that Stanford was already doing some of the work I want to focus on???

The actual talk picks up about 10 minutes into the video...

copy and paste this link into your browser:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uJCdJJEirM

Where the heck is the National Slavery Memorial???

Okay so.... why do we not have a national memorial surrounding slavery in Washington DC??? How is it that we can have a national holocaust memorial since 1993 with federal funding but the Slavery Memorial bill was shut down in 2003???

Below is a 2003 article from Capitalism Magazine...... tell me what you think....

An Appalling Idiocy: A Slave Memorial
www.CapitalismMagazine.com ^ | May 28, 2003 | Thomas Sowell

Posted on Wed May 28 19:35:01 2003 by Tailgunner Joe

With the passing years, it becomes ever more painful for me to read the preambles of legislation. Time and time again, the wonderful and inspiring words in those preambles have turned out to have no relationship whatsoever to the actual consequences that followed. The real issue is not what pious words you can come up with, but what incentives are you creating and what are the likely consequences of those incentives.

It is especially painful to read a proposal to create a "National Slave Memorial" on the Washington Mall. Supposedly this memorial will promote "reconciliation" and "healing," according to both the Republican and Democratic supporters of this proposal.

It is hard to imagine that any sane adult actually believes those words. You know and I know that a slave memorial will not reconcile anybody to anybody nor heal any racial divisions. Just the opposite.

A slave memorial is guaranteed to become a magnet for every race hustler from Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton down to any local demagogue who can scare up a crowd to go stand in front of the slave memorial and spew venom at American society on TV. Some reconciliation, some healing!

As for whites, when a proposal was made some years ago by Congressman Tony Hall for a Congressional apology for slavery, so much hostile mail came in that the idea was killed. If a slave memorial is going to inflame both blacks and whites, who is going to be "healed" or "reconciled"?

Anyone whose IQ is not in single digits must know that, once a slave memorial is put on the Washington Mall, it will be politically impossible to remove it. Expediency-minded politicians of both parties may think of a slavery memorial as a cheap way to "throw a bone" to the black community, as someone put it, but it is in fact just a down payment on racial polarization that can cost this country dearly for years to come.

This proposal has bipartisan support in Congress -- as so many other disastrous policies have had. If the Democrats were to propose that all Americans leap off a thousand-foot cliff, moderate Republicans would come up with a compromise proposal that three-quarters of us leap off a 500-foot cliff. The slave memorial is apparently that kind of compromise proposal -- "reparations light," as it were.

None of this is affected in the slightest by whether the sponsors of this legislation are honest and earnest, or by whether their intentions are good or they write an inspiring preamble to the legislation. We all know what road is paved with good intentions. We don't need to have it proven one more time.

This is the kind of low-budget time bomb that can easily sneak into legislation in the last days before Congress adjourns, when everyone is too busy preparing to go home to read all the provisions of the bills they vote on.

The only way to prevent this from happening, either this year or in future years, is for the voting public to inform their Senators and Representatives loud and clear that they do not want any such memorial created by the federal government, whether on the Washington Mall or anywhere else.

Among the pious cant that we are being fed by those pushing this proposal is that a memorial will serve to remind future Americans that slavery was cruel and evil. Most Americans understood that in the 19th century!

What a memorial would do is perpetuate the fraud that slavery was something peculiar to the United States, when in fact it was one of the oldest and most widespread of all human institutions, existing for thousands of years on every inhabited continent, involving people of every race and color as both slaves and slaveowners. Even in the United States, there were thousands of black slaveowners, and in Africa many more.

The United States was one of many Western nations which turned against slavery in the 19th century -- while non-Western nations bitterly resisted efforts by the West to get them to abolish slavery. Only the fact that Western imperialists had more firepower enabled their revulsion against slavery to prevail.

Maybe we should have a monument to historical truth somewhere, though Washington hardly seems the place for it.
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Hopefully the current administration will revisit this issue and correct this blatant disrespect for the memory of Black Slaves and contributions my ancestors made to this country.

- Anndretta

Amusement

Okay so... I went to a theme park over the weekend. Pure joy. The first few rides were like a shock to my system... its been a long time. But by the end I was having so much fun! There's nothing like being up in the air. I love it :) On the very last ride I ended up like six stories high... suspended... above the trees... and then finally swirled down and around an upside down at high speed smiling and shrieking the entire time!

gone too soon

So... like a million other people everywhere I watched the memorial service. I cried several times.

I am still coming to terms with everything I watched because the limitations of mortality are so clear when a life is lost. Another reason to get busy. Starting now.