i wanted to write a blog post about my body
and how being around my mother makes me so hyperconscious of my body and
stare at myself in the mirror all the time
because all the time she is commenting on my body,
praising things,
expressing dissatisfaction with things,
like i am hers,
like i am her face, her face that she’s looking at in her own mirror —

i wanted to write the phrase, “I just want to forget my body but no one will ever let me.”

i wanted to quote bhanu kapil saying something like, “I feel like my desires as a writer have outpaced my body.”

i wanted to write a blog post about queer called STRAIGHT IS A WHITE WORD AND WHEN YOU WANT TO MAP THE WHITE BINARY QUEER/STRAIGHT ONTO MY EXPERIENCES YOU ARE PERFORMING A COLONIALIST OPERATION BUT I WAS THE ONE WHO DID IT I DID IT TO MYSELF BUT I but then i didn’t know my history and “colonialist” felt like a dramatic word to use and it felt like i would never get the root of that thought

i wanted to write a blog post about feeling dispossessed, like mainstream theory is ok for anyone to use, no one will ever accuse you of appropriating derrida, but also it’s for white people and i feel alienated when i try to read it or use it, but identity theory is tied to identity, or identifying-as rather than identifying-with — eve sedgwick points out that the two can be really tied together or really distinct —

so why is it okay for me to have ownership of feminist theory?

because the way critical theory is written and taught and spread is by negating the straightwhitemiddleclassman: so you get

feminism is for/about straight white women 

[but clumsily includes women of color and queer women (and trans*folk? I need to educate myself more about their struggle, the magnitude of it, the dimensions of it.)]

queer theory is for/about gay white males

[but clumsily includes queer women and queer people of color and trans*folk]

[but not straight women of color]

capitalist theory is for/about straight white working class males (but probably i’d be scared to blog that for some reason)

and race theory is for straight colored males oh actually none of us are colored actually none of us think about race because we’re not racists so we don’t have to think any more about race la la la

and “race” gets to be a nonspecific catch-all term because it negates “white” even though “Asian” / Chicano/@ / Black / so many more and I’m sorry if you feel like I am putting you in the etc. right now, I’m sorry I’m bad at talking about this I hate the language that I’ve been given to talk about this

i wanted to blog all of that by way of apology for reblogging saidiya hartman and then straight up using it to identify with my own personal problems. no one has said anything but i’ve just been thinking about it. 

but obviously blogging it that way would be another #imsorry_imnotsorry. because i’m trying to use my race-/gender-based alienation or exclusion from all theory to, like, justify appropriating any theory. so agh. it’s not important to spill my emotions over everything. i went back and deleted my commentary.

maybe this is a matter of comportment or manners more than a matter of morality.

i wanted to blog about how, during a fit of hysterial laughing, my mom responded to something i said by saying, “you just need to learn to make yourself less sensitive to everything! that’s what I did!”

and i stared at her because of course that’s what you do when you’re a woman. of course that’s what you do when you’re a person of color. of course that’s what you do when you’re an immigrant.

my mom said that she lived in the United States for twenty years and always felt like a guest

i wanted to blog about citizenship

i’m working on a small book of poems and so far it’s just about Baby but i think that i want to overlay all of the insane resonances of citizenship over it, over the text i’ve already written

i want my mom to feel like a citizen

citizens can be angry and demand change and take matters into their own hands

(who said, “Americans are at home everywhere?”

how about, “Americans feel like citizens of the world; they are the ones who feel like they can meddle with everybody’s affairs, even before their own fucked-up shit is dealt with, with their fucking Human Rights Watch”)

do citizens have to be citizens of one nation in particular?

do fights get ugly on the internet because people feel like citizens of the internet?

do fights get ugly on the internet because people feel like citizens on the internet?

what’s the relationship between citizenship and sensitization? being sensitive to things that happen because it feels like they’re disturbing a body that you’re part of.

(like i am part of my mother’s body)

what’s the relationship between assimilation and desensitization?

stop taking it personally.

learn to see it from the other person’s point of view.

learn to see it from the citizen’s point of view.

i wanted to make a blog post about my family’s house in shanghai

but the government won’t let me upload the pictures, the government is throttling my internet because they’re spying on me la la la

i wanted to make a blog post about those television shows, I Love the ’70s, I Love the ’80s, I Love the ’90s. we took them so casually.

but how many countries can make television shows about loving those decades?

in the seventies in china people were starving. i tried to look up how many but then i was like oh jk sry big brother.

i guess i should read more so i know stuff like this off the top of my head. i just know that it was a lot, like genocidal amounts of people, because china has so many people, imagine if mass starvation was part of your recent national history.

for some people the very idea of a past is traumatic

and i was always jealous when in the schools every white person knew their whole family history and saw the way it tied up with US national history

but so many chinese-american kids i know, they know NOTHING about their family history, nothing about chinese history

but they’re never made to feel like they have roots in american history, either

these are all thoughts about dispossession

is the opposite of citizenship dispossession?

but actually nations are a construct

you don’t have to be a citizen: you can just build things —

Andrea Smith: “There will be Ethnic Studies wherever and whenever we go.”

can I believe that?

i really want to believe that

i can’t end on that

in my blog post i wouldn’t end on that