I am delighted to announce that in fall 2012 I will be joining the English Department faculty at Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP) as a tenure-track Assistant Professor of 20th-century US fiction with their Doctoral Program in Literature and Criticism. I’m particularly pleased that my new colleagues were excited about my interdisciplinary approach to literary studies, and I’m looking forward to developing graduate and undergraduate courses that incorporate speculative fiction and media, cultural studies, queer and feminist theory, digital media, and multimodal scholarly production (if not all at once…) as well as getting involved with IUP’s nascent Center for Digital Humanities and Culture.

I will be living in Pittsburgh, and have been hearing from all directions what a wonderful place that is; I can’t wait to discover a new part of the US along with new students and colleagues. Pittsburgh also feels tantalizingly close to all the places in the eastern half of the US (ETA: and Canada!) that I haven’t visited enough, so I’m hoping I will find the time to make some weekend trips once I’ve settled in.

Marked Bodies, Transformative Scholarship, and the Question of Theory in Digital Humanities

This was not ‘Theory’ as a vague revolutionary concept all too easily written off by the image of turtlenecked graduate students sitting around talking about Foucault that it conjures. We were talking about theory as making, about making objects that critique, that are critique, that are transformative reimaginings of the world.

I also highly recommend Natalia Cecire’s introduction, Theory and the Virtues of Digital Humnaities

One way of reading this special section might be as a soothing narrative in which the “provocation” of theory is raised, only to be shut down with the reassurance, in the end, that digital humanities is already “doing” theory, that no transformation is necessary, and that liberal “niceness” is already conducing to liberal equality. But I hope that readers of this special section will take it another way, as a serious questioning of the reluctance to “transform” despite our characteristic eagerness to “hack,”

And Moya Bailey’s All the Digital Humanists are White, All the Nerds are Men, but Some of us are Brave.

There is still a need to challenge the “add and stir” model of diversity, a practice of sprinkling in more women, people of color, disabled folks and assuming that is enough to change current paradigms. This identity based mixing does little to address the structural parameters that are set up when a homogeneous group has been at the center and don’t automatically engender understanding across forms of difference. It elides the scholarship already in production that may not be readily apparent when looking from a singular perspective.

I appreciated Benjamin M. Schmidt’s Theory First very much, too.

The evidence and the tools at the disposal of digital humanists are not neutral. Research in the humanities has always been perilous, since our sources are so frequently shaped by those with power; digital proposes to do the same things to our tools.

And I have yet to dig into the other fascinating elements of the journal, including reviews of digital scholarly projects.

Natalia Cecire has just written a blog post about the process of editing the special section, in which she discusses both the oddness of editing “post-publication,” suggesting revisions to scholars who know their piece will be accepted regardless of whether they choose to make them, and the limitations of the quantitative metrics that have been used to decide which posted pieces will make it into the Journal of DH. The former issue is one I’m quite familiar with, having worked with writers to edit formerly posted blog entries into more permanent publications for the Symposium section of Transformative Works and Cultures and for the forthcoming WisCon Chronicles volume I’ve edited. I think it’s a format we’ll be seeing more and more as more writing and thinking takes place in public. The latter is something that worries me. There are so many reasons why pageviews, retweets, and all the rest can’t stand in for the time and attention of a knowledgeable, thoughtful, and accountable editor who is aware and critical of dominant structures’ tendency to reproduce themselves when we don’t work specifically to avoid that. I’m glad that this is being recognized from the beginnings of the new, exciting Journal of DH.

I hope to have more news to share here soon. In the meantime, I’d like to link you to the latest Transformative Works and Cultures special issue, which is a magisterial collection on Fan/Remix video. There are articles about fannish vidding, political remix, and everything in between, from a variety of perspectives both in and out of the academy. Julie Levin Russ even created a beautiful example of scholarly remix as a frame for the collection, one that’s also a commentary about online culture and our affective investments in it. She talks about it at her blog.

I’ll be attending the Cultural Studies Association conference in San Diego this weekend, where I will be part of a seminar on Speculation: Fiction, Finance, and Futurity. The political economy of speculation is one of the areas I hope to develop further as I revise my dissertation for publication as a book, so I will be excited to get started there.

At least for me, as I’ve worked my way through and picked up many new projects and collaborations while continuing to write, it has shifted from a source of anxiety into various other roles; it has become a backbone and a background for all the work and thinking that I do. By the time you arrive at these big milestones, they never seem as large as they did when you were looking at them from a distance. There are new ones in sight: shaping the dissertation into my first book, thinking about the second book and/or multimodal project that I am already beginning to craft from my digital and fan studies work that didn’t fit into the dissertation. And all the other aspects of my future career, whose details are yet to be mapped out.

Still, it felt very good to print out this final draft yesterday, in preparation for my defense. I’m not much of a fan of hardcopy, in general. But some things do need to be physical.

Glitter Tongue

It’s much more wonderful than a card; check it out.

***

Transformative critical fan creation is a kind of queer love that has nourished me both intellectually and in other ways. I’ll be presenting some of the ways I’ve incorporated queer fannish love into my theories of new media and temporality at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on February 25, as graduate student keynote at the Midwestern Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference on “Interdisciplinarity for the Future”.

There’s information about my talk (and a vid to watch, which the organizers added to my abstract––making me feel a lot of queer scholarly love) at the UWM website here: “Futures Without Closure: Queer Fandom and the Reconfiguration of Media Time”

Here’s part of our description of the theme and its relevance, from our introduction:

In our dystopian present, the term speculation is associated with an epistemology of greed, a sanctioned terrorism, and a neo-imperialism organized around the capture of abstract futures and the subjugation of transnational labor forces. Financial speculators gamble with everyone’s lives, and our times would seem to foreclose on any future at all for many.

But speculation means something else for those who refuse to give its logic over to power and profit. To speculate, the act of speculation, is also to play, to invent, to engage in the practice of imagining. And, as Ernst Bloch said, it may be in our imaginative worlds that we catch glimpses of utopian possibility beyond our present paradigm. At a moment when so many have been struggling to enact alternatives to the depressing world produced by Wall Street’s speculative failures, we need to practice imagining now more than ever.

And here are the wonderful, provocative essays.

Introduction: Speculative Life, by Jayna Brown and Alexis Lothian

A Wilder Sort of Empiricism: Madness, Visions and Speculative Life, by Jayna Brown

Vampires and Cyborgs: Transhuman Ability and Ableism in the work of Octavia Butler and Janelle Monáe, by Moya Bailey

Larissa Lai’s “New Cultural Politics of Intimacy”: Animal. Asian. Cyborg. by Tamara Ho

Speculating Queerer Worlds by Alexis Lothian

Socialist Irrealism: an interview with China Miéville, by Jayna Brown and Alexis Lothian

Race For Life, by Alex Weheliye

So Say We All, by Tavia Nyong’o

The Water Keeps Flowing, by Elizabeth Turgeon

Disappearing Natives: Notes for Future SF&F Stories, by Andrea Hairston

I’m developing a strong love and appreciation for the kind of accessible yet incisive intellectual work we can do in just-over-blog-length, carefully edited and thoughtfully presented crossover scholarly publications like these. I encourage you to read them, teach them, pass them on.

I certainly don’t deny his experience. But, to me at least, it feels tangential to what #transformDH has actually been setting out to do.

The Tumblr linked above was started, not after MLA, but after our American Studies Association roundtable titled “Transformative Mediations? Queer and Ethnic Studies and the Politics of the Digital.” Since then, the six of us who were on the panel have been gathering other collaborators to think about these concerns, organizing under the hashtag #transformDH. At the ASA panel, we agonized over our hashtag. #criticalintersectionalqueerandethnicstudiesDH is, to say the least, a bit too long; but #queerDH erases race. #criticalDH implies that most DH is not critical, which seems a bit unfair to a discipline so rooted in textual analysis. We settled on #transformDH because it seemed memorable and provocative, and because it linked to the title of our panel.

I think the title “Transformative Mediations” was mine originally, though it’s difficult to remember who wrote what in our collaboratively created panel description. The phrase comes from my situatedness at the intersection of critical media studies and queer studies; I am interested in how our various engagements with media can be transformative, shaping identities and communities and politics and worlds. (I’m also interested in the production and consumption of transformative works of media, art, and fiction, and I liked the terminological resonance.) ‘The politics of the digital’ has tended to be a more important idea to me than ‘the digital humanities,’ but as I’ve spent more time with my HASTAC and #transformDH collaborators, I’ve come to believe there is a place in DH for the kind of critical work of simultaneous production and critique that I am interested in making.

As the phrase #transformDH proliferated, it began to be seen more as an imperative than as a description of present creations and future possibilities. It has become a site for critique of what Natalia Cecire has acutely diagnosed, in her Defense of Transforming DH, as the endemic liberalism of DH: the common, though far from ubiquitous, presumption that racialized and gendered experiences in and out of the academy won’t affect people’s experiences in the big welcoming tent. I agree with Natalia: I think such antagonisms have their uses. Though I am unsettled that the presence of queer and ethnic studies theories and critiques has become an interpretive claim that she makes about #transformDH; from where I’m standing, that has always been the central, crucial point.

I’m also happy to say that I’ve had many great experiences, at MLA and other conferences, since I started talking with the DH community and stopped assuming that my orientation toward critical cultural studies would exclude me from participation. I think that most of the #transformDH group have felt similarly welcomed. I think that most of us also felt that the majority of DH projects did not speak to our areas of queer, feminist, critical race studies, cultural studies (within which we study a wide range of literature, theory, media and culture between us). We started #transformDH to think about how those interests might intersect with DH–how, most importantly, they might already be intersecting. We were not, I think, trying to take away from the good experiences others have had in the DH community: just to add to them, in the specific ways that mattered to us, transformatively.

I’m writing this from a wi-fi-enabled AmTrak train on my way from Portland to Seattle for the MLA Convention.

I will be one of the many harried job candidates at MLA this year, and so my schedule for actual conference events is fairly light. However, I will be attending the Digital Humanities Commons workshop tomorrow (Thursday 5) morning bright and early. I will also be trying not to miss the following panels:

135A. The Future of Learning
Thursday, 5 January, 7:00–8:15 p.m., Grand C, Sheraton
A linked session arranged in conjunction with the forum The Future of Higher Education
Presiding: Tara McPherson, Univ. of Southern California
Speakers: Cathy N. Davidson, Duke Univ.; Curtis Wong, Microsoft Research

170. Queering Value
Friday, 6 January, 8:30–9:45 a.m., 619, WSCC
A special session
Presiding: Aren Aizura, Indiana Univ., Bloomington
1. “Queer Economies and Speculative Limits ,” Angela Mitropoulos, Univ. of Western Sydney, Penrith South
2. “Sovereign Debt, Queer Remainders,” Travis Sands, Univ. of Washington, Bothell
3. “Family Value(s),” Craig Willse, Coll. of Wooster
4. “Necrocapital: AIDS, Affective Accumulation, and Viral Labor,” Eric Stanley, Univ. of California, Santa Cruz

378. Old Labor and New Media
Friday, 6 January, 5:15–6:30 p.m., 608, WSCC
A special session
Presiding: Alison Shonkwiler, Rhode Island Coll.
1. “America Needs Indians: Representations of Native Americans in Counterculture Narrative and the Roots of Digital Utopianism,” Lisa Nakamura, Univ of Illinois, Urbana
2. “The Eyes of Real Labor and the Illusions of Virtual Reality,” Matt Goodwin, Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst
3. “Digital Voices: Representations of Migrant Workers in Dubai and Los Angeles,” Anne Cong-Huyen, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara
Responding: Seth Perlow, Cornell Univ.

467. The Future of Teaching
Saturday, 7 January, 12:00 noon–1:15 p.m., Grand C, Sheraton
A linked session arranged in conjunction with the forum The Future of Higher Education
Presiding: Priscilla B. Wald, Duke Univ.
1. “Gaming the Humanities Classroom,” Patrick Jagoda, Univ. of Chicago
2. “Intimacy in Three Acts,” Margaret Rhee, Univ. of California, Berkeley
3. “One Course, One Project,” Jentery Sayers, Univ. of Victoria
4. “The Meta Teacher,” Bulbul Tiwari, Stanford Univ.

581. Digital Humanities versus New Media
Saturday, 7 January, 5:15–6:30 p.m., 611, WSCC
A special session
1. ” Everything Old Is New Again: The Digital Past and the Humanistic Future,” Alison Byerly, Middlebury Coll.
2. “As Study or as Paradigm? Humanities and the Uptake of Emerging Technologies,” Andrew Pilsch, Penn State Univ., University Park
3. “Digital Tunnel Vision: Defining a Rhetorical Situation,” David Robert Gruber, North Carolina State Univ.
4. “Digital Humanities Authorship as the Object of New Media Studies,” Victoria E. Szabo, Duke Univ.
For abstracts, visit www.duke.edu/~ves4/mla2012.

635. Queer Anachronisms and the Question of History
Sunday, 8 January, 8:30–9:45 a.m., 303, WSCC
A special session
Presiding: Kathryn Bond Stockton, Univ. of Utah
1. “Anachronizing the Penitentiary, Queering History,” Kadji Amin, Columbia Coll., IL
2. “Spinster Time (‘U Can’t Touch This’),” Heather K. Love, Univ. of Pennsylvania
3. “Anachronicles; or, Steampunking Queer Theory,” Elizabeth Freeman, Univ. of California, Davis

Finally, I thought I’d share some moments from my year’s auspicious start: a holiday in beautiful coastal Oregon, where two close friends are staying at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. I alternated working on various academic projects with climbing up into hills filled with roaming elk and soaring hawks. The landscape is much like the west coast of Scotland, where I went often as a child, so it felt in many ways as if I were making the trip back home I didn’t manage this year. Although Scotland has fewer elk.

When I first joined HASTAC, I wasn’t too sure what it was for, even after the excellent Queer and Feminist New Media Spaces online panel; attending the conference made me realize just how central the network’s intellectual community has become since I started to take a much more active part in it. Cathy Davidson has written a great summary of HASTAC’s history, if you’d like some larger context.

The conference was a real culmination of the excitement I’ve felt at being part of HASTAC in the past year. It felt so great to be surrounded by other scholarly geeks: to be sharing ideas on twitter and scarcely be able to tell who was following the conference in person and who was elsewhere. Karen Petruska did a great job of liveblogging the keynotes, which are also available to watch online. Fiona Barnett links her blogs and many others at her roundup post here.

I tweeted fervently from the conference––as I tend to do––and made a couple of liveblogs. One was from the opening workshop on “alternative academic” careers. I wasn’t wholly the expected audience for that, since I am a candidate on the non-’alternative’ academic job market and quite passionately in love with my life of research and teaching and writing––but I also think it’s incredibly important not to get tracked into a single path, to keep our options open. One of the advantages of living in a different culture than the one you were raised to is always having slightly more open eyes; the idea that a PhD opens only the door to a life lived in academia and closes all others is, in my experience, much more widely believed here in the US than the UK.

I learned a lot from the workshop, but felt that something was missing from its tone of purely professional advice. I tweeted it:

The missing piece in this conversation for me is the content of intellectual work; the excess to academe as industry.

In other words: what if people choose to pursue scholarly work not because they think it’s a good living, but because they are seeking a way to pursue an intellectual project they believe matters––and not just to themselves? I know I’ve linked to it many times, but Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The University and the Undercommons never stops being relevant. Critical content, radical content, is an excess in the university that we hope will slip the bounds of its commodified form.

#alt-ac in the workshop was largely about how to use your skills to become part of the machinery that shapes the university’s logistics and frames for delivering knowledge; there are plenty of creative and radical ways to do that work, but they didn’t come up a great deal. I don’t talk too much about subverting the neoliberal academy in my job market workshop either; but (largely because my job market workshop is led by one of its major critics) it comes up. As Micha Cárdenas said in her post #occupyHASTAC, the ailing tenure track job market is just one minor symptom of neoliberal education and shouldn’t be considered alone. If we think about #alt-ac in these terms, it seems to me, we ought to include not just the technological and organizational jobs in the structure of the university but also the category of the public intellectual, and how to do intellectual work that matters on the borders of the academic industrial complex or outside it.

In fact, the rest of the conference offered plenty of scope for thinking about public and politicized intellectual work in the context of the digital humanities. I am beginning to develop a sense that #transformDH is growing into a critical mass. I had so many conversations with scholars who’ve felt frustrated about the relative absence of discussions of race and other forms of critical structural analysis within the digital humanities, and met people who had felt––as I used to––that ‘digital humanities’ simply didn’t apply to them, until they realized they weren’t the only ones who felt that surely there must be a place within that big tent for critical cultural analysis in and of various digital forms, for work whose stakes are infinitely higher than tenure and promotion, for the possibilities of changing the ways we think about education and knowledge production altogether.

The second panel I liveblogged, From the Center: Facilitating Feminist Digital Theory and Praxis in a Digital Environment with Margaret Rhee, Isela Gonzalez and Alysse Gray, was exemplary of what that could be. They were talking about work they had done with the San Francisco-based Forensic AIDS Project and the Center for Digital Storytelling, working with incarcerated women in San Francisco; they screened some of the stories the women had created and they were moving, powerful, complex works. My blog is rough, but I want to share some fragments from Margaret’s talk that resonated powerfully for me, when she spoke about working simultaneously in the academy and outsde it.

Praxis, pedagogy, technology: meanings can be transformed. Utilizing your degree to bring resources back outside academy is one of the most fulfilling experiences you can have.

Approach the work humbly. There is much you cannot learn from a textbook; seeing and experiencing are very different from reading.

The academy fosters individuality, Collaboration is hard, but you can learn to support social change, Collaboration teaches us to imagine otherwise. Being reflexive and mindful is key.

The heart of this work is counterintuitive to the logics and rewards of the academy.

This is a very different perspective from the one suggested by the #alt-ac workshop, but it’s what we’ve been trying to emphasize with #transformDH; it’s the work that queer and ethnic and feminist and marxist-materialist studies can and must bring to the emergent ubiquity of the digital, and it ought to transform us and those we encounter.

I didn’t have the laptop battery to liveblog it, but there was another talk that also inspired me as an example of #transformDH in action. This was Maria Cotana’s Chicana por mi Raza archive of Chicana feminist documents; I tweeted the talk from my phone and gathered the tweets on Storify; the embed won’t work and I’m too tired to troubleshoot, so I’ve pasted them––in all their ephemeral glory––below. Some more information is here.

#hastac2011 laptop battery gone, tweeting from phone. Maria Cotera talking about Chicana por mi Raza project in process. cc @anneperez!

#hastac2011 Cotera’s mother Marthe P Cotera was Chicana activist; helped her digitize 70s histories of intersectional critique #transformDH

#hastac2011 Cotera collaborating with feminist filmmaker also daughter of activist. Creating online project w wiki for public collaboration

#hastac2011 I love the combination of activism, archive, pedagogy, personal in Cotera’s project #transformDH

#hastac2011 Cotera material lost bc not recognized by archivists. Democratizing the archive; open access vital for communities of color

#hastac2011 Cotera: goal is to reunify what was once a vibrant counterpublic; connecting regional narratives

#hastac2011 Cotera showing a scanned to do list from young woman involved in campaign: making histories of labor visible

#hastac2011 Cotera showing queer women of color anthology 2 years before Bridge Called My Back

#hastac2011 Cotera pedagogy: taking undergrad students on research trips, they meet agents in the histories they are learning

#hastac2011 2 of Cotera’s students got tattoos of images from archive material. Histories marking bodies, political commitments reactivated

It’s worth remarking that neither of these projects are well represented online; no shiny and easy-to-find websites. From The Center, run by overworked and underpaid activists, is working on getting their materials online, and I think Chicana por mi Raza is in the process of doing so –– but it does make me think that one common factor among #transformDH projects is that they are not easy to fund.

The last HASTAC keynote was from Chairman Jim Leach of the National Endowment for the Humanities and, like Micha, I was fairly taken aback by his discussion of the humanities as a “civilizing project” that would spread from a “new digital class” based in the US out to the rest of the world. Comments on twitter and to Micha’s post suggest that this unabashedly imperial notion of civilization is what we must accept if we want to be funded for our digital projects, and discussions I had informally at the conference reminded me that anything that seems overtly ‘political’ will (after so many years of the culture wars) be unlikely to appeal to US government bodies.

The hallmark of both the projects I described above is that they are absolutely *not* “civilizing projects.” They are committed to creating knowledge without creating hierarchies: to teaching as something that changes the teacher as well as the student, to the possibility that digital tools can let people in the worst situations narrate their lives and engage differently with the world by doing so; to not losing sight of radical, revolutionary activities from the past just because the transformations they produced were not large enough for them to be written into official history. They work with technology to create knowledge from below.

I don’t know enough about either project to really discuss them in depth, nor do I want to presume that they will never receive government funding. Anything is possible, after all. But I do think they offer us a possible throughline to consider the implications of #transformDH at an institutional level, and some reminders that we must continually look out for the ways our institutional locations get under our skin.

THATCamp Theory is a fascinating idea, and I am excited to be involved with it. I do have a difficult time imagining how it will look, but I think that connecting the ethic of making that is central to the digital humanities with a self-consciousness about the way everything is structured and its cultural politics can only be good.

However, I am unsettled by some of the ways that the term “theory” is trafficking in the conversations that Natalia’s post sparked. Ted Underwood critiques the idea of an intransitive theory; Jean Bauer asks “who are you calling untheoretical?”; Roger Whitson summarizes some of the conversations in “THATCamp Theory Bunnies”. I feel a little awkward about it, but I’m moved to make this post because of what those ones don’t mention. There are, I think, two sets (at least) of conversations intersecting here, and I’m not sure we’re hearing each other.

Genealogies of conversations don’t always matter much, of course; but Natalia’s inspirational THATCamp Theory post came, indirectly (um, via my blog) out of Micha Cardenas’s provocative “Digital Humanities: Hot Sellable Commodity or Place of Counter-Hegemonic Critique?”, in response to the Los Angeles Queer Studies conference, particularly the panel that Micha and I did there with Margaret Rhee and Amanda Phillips. It continued in person and on twitter around several panels at ASA, where the digital humanities were put into conversation with critical race studies, ethnic studies, queer critique, and feminism in a conversation we dubbed #TransformDH.

We weren’t using theory intransitively; we were talking about queer, trans, butch, femme, critical race, women of color, Asian American, Puerto Rican theory (with a slightly different group of scholars in the room, those adjectives would have changed). We were talking about marked bodies, systemic social hierarchies, and transformations in a very specific and material sense, not some vague revolutionary concept that can be written off with an image of graduate students sitting around talking about Foucault. We were talking about theory as making, about making objects that critique, that *are* critique, that are transformative reimaginings of the world. Micha’s art is a pretty fantastic example of this. Several of us who have been talking #transformDH, including me, are interested in where and how theory of this kind gets made outside the academy: what conversations and artforms and databases and archives do the work of a transformative digital humanities but don’t have the institutional status to be named as such.

When I look at the discussions now about theory and DH, I keep asking myself: where did we go? Where did our politics and our specificity go? Do we need, as Jentery Sayers suggested on Twitter yesterday, a different term? Radical critique, social justice, or––following Alan Liu––cultural criticism? That does make some sense.

But, as the title of this blog makes fairly clear, I’m attached to “theory” and to the possibility that it can be democratized. I want all these forms of critical making and the analysis that accompanies it to be part of the “theory” conversation, if there’s a “theory” conversation to be had. And I don’t want their specificities to be dismissed as irrelevant identity politics either, because they aren’t. They’re the heart of things, the center from which our digital work radiates. And these concerns are not exclusive to the digital. These are, as Natalia Cecire pointed out in the THATCamp Theory google doc yesterday, also questions that scholars of art and performance––even literature and film, I would argue, especially in the zones where scholarship and practice overlap, which are especially common in queer and ethnic studies––constantly confront.

Part of the conversation about how we make theory has to be a conversation about which forms of theory-rich making are recognized and institutionally supported and which are not; about whether there are clear cut lines between digital humanities scholarship, digital media art, and digital media everyday practice, other than the question of where the funding comes from. I think this question is closely connected to the issues of labor Miriam Posner has brought up: there are unstated hierarchies of labor in who does the work of making versus who conceptualizes or “theorizes” a project, just as there are in what counts as a “project” deserving of labor other than basic conceptualization. Marta S. Rivera Monclova’s struggles in making the necessary theory for her planned project on multilingual Puerto Rican poetry visible––how what she’s talking about isn’t ‘just’ translation––may be a case that connects the two.

The comments, made by many different people, about the effect of one’s experience of “theory” or “Theory” and one’s graduate-school training in academic knowledge production and knowledge-sharing, are crucial here. Theory can, as the rather delightful Twitter conversation linked by Roger Whitson demonstrates, be held like a weapon or like a bunny; it can lurk under the surface of everything or be something we constantly look for but never find, like the Loch Ness Monster. My conception of theory, which comes both from a graduate school experience in which theory was rarely weaponized and from a range of nonacademic locations, is probably somewhere in between: an awkwardly handcrafted pet monster, perhaps, but more efficient and dangerous than it looks. Nessie’s got teeth.