What I have come to like about exciting contemporary published academics is their ability to elucidate fine upstanding paragraphs from other authors and/or each other. And with the immediacy of blogging, and a reluctance to enter into the archiving ahead of me this afternoon at work, I am going to share with you a couple of paragraph quoted by Jean Bobby Noble in Sons of the Movement: FtMs risking incoherence on a post-queer cultural landscape, women’s press, toronto, 2006.

Peggy Phelan on nostalgia, or “the wound of wishing to return”:

…even at the seemingly simple level of the linguistic sign it is impossible for writers to convey the complete context in which a[n]… act occurs. To report it back, to record and repeat it, is at once to transform it and to fuel the desire for its mimetic return … Much of the writing [about performatives] is a record of a living relation between the writer and the artists she sees. This seeing is, necessarily, a distortion, a dream, a hallucination; writing rights it back towards reason by creating enabling fictions … The effort to “cite” the performance that interests us even as it disappears is much like the effort to find the word to say what we mean. It cannot be done. (Phelan 1993a:19-22) (ie from Noble 2006:59)

And Bahktin on words:

“When one finds a word, one finds it already inhabited … there is no access to one’s own personal ultimate word … every thought, feeling, experience must be refracted through the medium of someone else’s discourse, someone else’s style, someone elses’s manner … almost no word is without its intense sideward glance at someone else’s.” (Bahktin 1981:91) (ie from Noble 2006:71)

And finally a stellar bit from Noble himself:

“…Whiteness is marked and articulated - that is, made to work by revealing itself. If you think about the verb to articulate, it means to devide into words, to pronounce or utter. But it also means to connect or mark with joints - thatis, to be connected with sections. Thus, to articulate is to express fluently and to manipulate a site where component parts join (as in a knee or hip), to bring segmented parts together to enable functionality. These kings dissemble White masculinity, break it into parts, and then reassemble those parts to make them work differently, to render them dysfunctional. If White supremacy works best when it’s hypervisible and invisible, it cannot work in quite the same way when it is denaturalised, rearticulated, and most importantly, de-cloaked.” (Noble 2006:65)