Weekend

Dayton's Department Store in the 1970s, Carol and other men back then could go here "dressed." Thanks to Livemall

Once again, the meager fruits of a weekend: a little reading, a little writing.

I got through chapter 3 of Lao She's "Under the Red Banner" 正红旗之下. My notes, which I try my best to type soon after I read, are a valuable way to brainstorm and to increase Chinese vocabulary at the same time. This is really a great book, and perhaps the first not by Yang Jiang that I will read cover-to-cover in Chinese.

Responding to my reading of Literary Theory: A Brief Insight, I drafted a new overall outline of my PhD dissertation. It's organized as a series of readings that are calculated to move from poetics to hermeneutics, from literary criticism to cultural studies, and as a kind of tour, or game play, through the various types of critical approaches. I plan to write something mimicking Culler on the need to examine texts from different angles.

On Sunday, while A. was at an interview I read some excerpts from oral histories of GLBT people in the Twin Cities. These were three:

1. Carol, a trans woman who describes "dressing" and discovering others like herself in her childhood and adulthood in Minnesota and Wisconsin. This was such a great narrative, it easily convinces us of the unique resonance that trans people have with the queerest and most old-fashioned parts of town.

2. Robert, a gay man who lived with several guys during the 1960s before briefly considering suicide, and then deciding to come out to his family. This was a touching success story.

3. Judy, a lesbian who came out in Minneapolis only after marriage and a child. She was early to realize that lesbians needed to make more room for men and children, but they couldn't because of a certain rigidity in their culture.

This was my first reading in oral history, and I really don't know what I might do about it yet. But for one thing, I am more motivated now to go on with the Tretter "Framing GLBT Lives."