curate

We were talking earlier about role models and how behavior can be modeled - I don’t know how to describe the process - but it just happens. If you’re not paying attention to your behavior you may not know how you may be influencing somebody else. And coming out into clubs where I was watching a lot of kids my age drinking too much, doing all kinds of drugs and there’s this whole generation of women who were substance abusers and they were at various stages of recovery or total damage. And that created this unfortunate narrative that this is what it meant to be a lesbian.

I rejected assimilation at that point, which is something that’s really hard and it’s something that trips me out. I don’t feel like I rejected my intellect, but in rejecting a certain mode of assimilation, I didn’t leave myself any choices because I didn’t have a sense of what education could be for me. The educational process was all caught up in a kind of assimilation, period. … I just wasn’t very sophisticated. I didn’t know how to think about it and I didn’t have much help in thinking about “Well, look, don’t worry about anybody who will make you feel…”. There was a small clutch of black kids in the school – education and whiteness went hand in hand – it was just a really crazy thing having moved to Plymouth from Boston, which was an ongoing trauma because I had been bussed in the 70s.

And getting bussed definitely had a huge impact on who I am. That whole prolonged experience of assimilation and education and understanding. I’m still trying to figure out how it is I understood what it was that was going on, what was expected of me without anybody explicitly…but they did explicitly spell it out. I was told how I needed to speak. I was told how I needed to walk. I was told how I needed to modulate my voice, not just speak in grammatically correct sentences. Not to swing so much when I walked. All that kind of stuff.

He coined the term “heterologies” to describe disciplines in which we examine ourselves in relation to otherness; history and ethnography, for instance, could be “sciences of the other” if they confront the often disfiguring assumptions we bring to our understanding of different times and places.