Urgh--I just wrote a terrific post and lost it; urgh.

Wee recap: how write--sing!--woman (eeky singular, I agree) without singing heterosexism.  Can one?  No, not one; can we; will that we always be a wee one?

Homo-hetero divide as (and in terms of need for critical recognition, more) important as male-female divide.

I, personally, think of heterosexual women as totally like men (and vice-versa) because of the heterosexual common denominator.

The male female divide is a great way to divert attention from the hetero-homo one, and to downplay feminism's frequent complictity in heterosexual hegemony.  It is also a great fit with capitalism, and may be more geniunly the naturalization of marketing/Maddison avenue as much as anything else.

For straight I propose strayt!  A touch didactic, a touch homosexist?: yes, that cld very well be, and the being not very well.

Straight is not neutral, it is judgmental; it is insidious because it masquerades as neutral; it is used by feminists all the time (should I give a list of examples or wld that look like cruel intention?) and I assume this is habitual/non-critical language use; and that, dear world, strikes me as utterly unfeminist.

I wonder if literary feminism--that articulated by poetry and fiction writers and hybrid aesthetics etc--is likelier to use straight than heterosexual.  I'm not positive but I have a hard time imagining M Nussbaum not using heterosexual.

From Claudia Keelan (via Christina Mengert's review of Missing Her at Constant Critic):

 “…the insistence of self being other—it was the only word for the moment and continues to be, I believe, no matter what polarity you describe: man-woman, citizen-nation, nation-world. Any definition that does not take the Whole into consideration is an incomplete one. Radical freedom is the only whole measure—that’s what I hope to teach, to reach.”

I believe the words above (the quoted ones) are really beautifully true/ambitious/humane.

From Mani Rao:

"Hard after a hunt Diana
Flirts water at Actaeon"

I like this (from Terrance Hayes' Ploughshares intro to the volume he's edited):

You will find this stupendous Plath sentence: “They are panes of ice, // A vice of knives, / A piranha / Religion, drinking // Its first communion out of my live toes.” That’s hot, right? That’s what this place is all about.

A Poem I wrote Like 5 Minutes Ago

I a brogue, I a
Motif
Mirrors
Votive
Candles

And you, you are
Grammatically
Correct
Cracks me up.

Katydid lungs
Keep measure
Metastasizing
Thousands of flowers
Till marigolds
Taxonomically
Belong
To collar-bones.

I a logarithm, I
An emaciated
Saturation
Summering

In the vasts
Spanning
Twixt minus
Seven and
Sixty degrees
Where marrow-numbing
Blizzardbows are brighter
Than the insides of candystripe beets.

Serbian Ballerinas Dance with Machine Guns

I admire the passage below, from Jackie Wang's blog:

Some people have asked me what my opinion is on Lady Gaga and my reply has been mostly one of indifference. My criticism of Lady Gaga isn’t that she’s a “bad” feminist—it’s that she’s a capitalist hack who collects artists of color to increase her cred (gah). But I get the sense that most people who celebrate Lady Gaga for her performance artist schtick aren’t critical of capitalism. Counter-critics assert that Lady Gaga is not glorifying commodity culture but parodying it by offering herself as a “figurative mirroring or projection of consumer culture.” The problem with such an argument is that ironic derision, risk, spectacles, subversion, and transgression are all thoroughly integrated into the polymorphous techniques of capitalism and are indeed representative of its flexibility, its ever-expanding markets and its ability to appeal even to intellectuals, queers, feminists, and politicos of varying sorts. The “transgressive” tactics employed by Gaga produce what Michel Foucault might call an “incitement to discourse”—igniting blog posts, cultural criticism, theory which effectively produces the image of Gaga and generates value, meaning, and interest in her project while transgression-as-capitalist tactic remains obscured. 

Tusculum Review

     I have a poem posted at the Tusculum Review website; please take a look: http://www2.tusculum.edu/tusculumreview/2011/01/17/adam-strauss-2/

I hope all's well!