{"id":1663,"date":"2013-03-11T20:31:00","date_gmt":"2013-03-12T04:31:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/libidot.org\/blog\/?p=1663"},"modified":"2016-03-08T06:12:01","modified_gmt":"2016-03-08T06:12:01","slug":"i-believe-in-low-theory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/libidot.org\/wp\/wordpress\/?p=1663","title":{"rendered":"I believe in low theory"},"content":{"rendered":"

What I am doing these days:<\/p>\n

I am a believer in low theory, as stated by Jack Halberstam: “I believe in low theory in popular places, in the small, inconsequential, the antimonumental, the micro, the irrelevant. I believe in making differences by\u00a0thinking little thoughts\u00a0and by sharing them widely. I seek to provoke, annoy, bother, irritate, and amuse; I am chasing small projects, micropolitics, hunches, whims, fancies.”(p.21, The Queer Art of Failure)<\/p>\n

I had a hunch about something when visiting these little jizobosatusu<\/em> statues at the\u00a0side of Zojoji Shrine, Tokyo, devoted to stillborn babies, but I did not know what was ahead of me.\u00a0I admired the finely crocheted red hats made by mourning mothers. These scullptures were the most memorable\u00a0trivia of my trip and I had just stumbled upon them. They\u00a0punctured\u00a0me with\u00a0feelings of love and loss, all these dead babies and their immaculate outfits left behind by mothers and families, sometimes baby toys and objects.<\/p>\n

Nobody noticed it too much, except for my sister Mieke, a legal consultant in the Flemish parliament on children’s rights, \u00a0who\u00a0always looked at my\u00a0snaps of travels and who happened to comment on these statues.\u00a0They punctured her a little bit as well.\u00a0Our eyes fell upon them and we\u00a0probably sensed\u00a0amazement and pain.<\/p>\n

When she fell\u00a0ill several months\u00a0ago and\u00a0finally died of cancer on january 19, 2013, I\u00a0knew how\u00a0special her support for me had been. She liked my whimsical intellectual nature. With her departure, my world\u00a0has gone\u00a0haywire, I fight my counter-attacks to hegemonic academia,\u00a0l stay afloat and follow my whims and fancies and I chase small projects. I believe in my own micro-niche university but I am still\u00a0 not quite recovered from her absence.<\/p>\n

.\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What I am doing these days: I am a believer in low theory, as stated by Jack Halberstam: “I believe in low theory in popular places, in the small, inconsequential, the antimonumental, the micro, the irrelevant. I believe in making differences by\u00a0thinking little thoughts\u00a0and by sharing them widely. I seek to provoke, annoy, bother, irritate,… Continue reading I believe in low theory<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1663","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research-proceedings","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/libidot.org\/wp\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1663","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/libidot.org\/wp\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/libidot.org\/wp\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libidot.org\/wp\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libidot.org\/wp\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1663"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/libidot.org\/wp\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1663\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2568,"href":"https:\/\/libidot.org\/wp\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1663\/revisions\/2568"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/libidot.org\/wp\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1663"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libidot.org\/wp\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1663"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libidot.org\/wp\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1663"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}