still sick, still bitter

But at least I'm bitter about being sick (and not about grad school, for once).

I got to have one of those my-head-is-in-a-sudafed-induced-highly-caffineated-fishbowl teaching experiences today. The adrenaline from teaching collided with the caffeine from my cold meds and wooooooooo! I hope I made some sense.

I'm having a difficult time getting my sections rolling this year. People talk (probably about 1/2 of them), but I'm seeing more blank stares, doodling, or laying down on the desk than I have in the past. I don't know if it's because I don't have as strong of a handle on this material, or that because this class is an underdivision it's just going to be like this.

I have two brief weigh-ins on recent posts by kungfuramone and crapademia. Gender: the problem is that we're stuck in the materiality of the history and never bother questioning the meaning or structure behind the categorization. We're still at the "how does it manifest" rather than "what does it mean that it manifests in this way"?

I think part of this feeds into the fetishization of archives: when you do material or social history, you are doing a materialist type of history. It's a lot about people and things and how people and things interact, rather than looking at the cultural framework, or the expression of the cultural or intellectual framework, and delving into how that structures the way people and things interact.

I use archival research/material to flush out context, but as someone who considers themselves to be a cultural/intellectual historian, it's not where I put the brunt of my focus. Unless you're counting things like archived copies of 1930s and 1940s playbills and political flyers, but I use those to reconstruct or flush out a visual and performative culture that by its very nature has been lost.

In random news, I've decided that my grammer needs work. I think I'm going to pick up "East, shoots, and leaves."

In my bedside "light reading list" - Foucault on Foucault. Maybe it'll be easier with the cold meds :)