Too Many Ph.D's? Maybe.

I had a really great day today.  I feel really great about the path my life is on.  Thinking back to myself a year ago, it's surprising that today I'm happy about my decision to pursue a Ph.D.

I have two stimulants for these thoughts.  One was a surprise.  An article reposted by a friend:  "Are we giving away too many Ph.D's?"  The answer in the case of this article, which deals with the dearth of science Ph.D.'s with nowhere to work, is no.  We simply don't value knowledge.  I'm not prepared to defend the cult of the expert -- to place myself on a pedestal and beg all you non-soon-to-be-doctors to bow down to my great wealth of brain wrinkles.  No, but we do need to value resourcefulness, passion for knowledge, and a zeal for critical thinking, especially when they are paired with humility and compassion.  Not everyone with a Ph.D. is worth employing, no (I see those who are so far removed from "the real world" all too often); however, the life track exists for a noble reason.  It's base reason for existence is one worth supporting. 

My other stimulant for thinking about all this is more persistent.  On Friday, I'll receive my questions for my qualifying exams: a formality through which my committee of advisors will certify me as sufficiently expert in the fields of "marriage and the politics of sexuality" and "media and resistance in the information age."  I've been busily reading (sometimes skimming) through the lists I've deemed worthwhile to my studies.

My blog is a silly thing.  When I'm writing in it actively, I live for the self-discipline of writing for myself and a small audience of friends and strangers who happen upon an entry through a relevant search.  There's a thrill in knowing that my inner thoughts (I try to be as frank as I can...how very livejournal of me) may be slightly useful to others, but I don't have the energy for the hubris to think I should try to cull a large audience.  My inner thoughts are too lame for most.

I realized today that I stopped writing on my blog partially because I was devoting too much of my time to "gathering my thoughts."  I have avoided getting in touch with people who have a great wealth of knowledge on my dissertation topic because I fear my own thoughts on the matter are not "solidified" enough.  "Gathering my thoughts" has suffered by not daring to make bold claims on subjects that interest me and airing them in public.  It's why I have my blog.  I want people to disagree with me.  Along with reading, interacting with and reacting to those who disagree with me is the only way I'll think better.

And so I've resolved to write more, here and elsewhere.  It's part of the process of gathering my thoughts.  I nearly lost myself in the trap of thinking that simply following the infrastructural tracks of the Ph.D. would inherently make me a more critical thinker and better citizen.  That was wrong.  I need to (gather and) air my thoughts. 

As I prepare to embark on my qualifying exams, feel free to browse the reading list I've subjected myself to, with the help of my advisors:

Major List:  Marriage and the Politics of Sexuality

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City

Leo Bersani, Homos

Leo Bersani & Adam Phillips, Intimacies

bell hooks, “Feminism:  A Transformational Politic”

Bikini Kill, “Riot Grrrl Philosophy”

Sasha Cagen, quirkyalone

Pat Califia, Public Sex

Ryan Conrad, ed., Against Equality

Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, a History

Nancy Cott, Public Vows

Angela Y. Davis, “Outcast Mothers and Surrogates: Racism and Reproductive Politics in the Nineties”

Samuel Delaney, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue

David Eng, The Feeling of Kinship (Intro & Chapter 1)

John D’Emilio & Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters

John D’Emilio, “Capitalism & Gay Identity”

Lisa Duggan & Nan Hunter (Editors), Sex Wars

Lisa Duggan, Twilight of Equality

Dossie Easton & Catherine A. Liszt, The Ethical Slut

Friedrich Engels, Origins of Family, Private Property, and the State

Lee Edelman, “Tearooms and Sympathy”

Susan Faludi, Backlash

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol. 1

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3

Betty Freidan, The Feminine Mystique

Jaclyn Geller, Here Comes the Bride: Women, Weddings, and the Marriage Mystique

Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy

Ian Hacking, “Making Up People”

Eleanor Leacock, Myth of Male Dominance

Judith Levine, Harmful to Minors

Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”

David M. Halperin, “Is there a History of Sexuality?”

Laura Kipnis, Against Love

Saba Mahmood, The Politics of Piety

Angela McRobbie, “Postfeminism and Popular Culture:  Bridget Jones and the New Gender Regime”

John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women

Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Cartographies of Struggle:  Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism”

Richard Mohr, “The Outing Controversy”

Donald Morton (editor), The Material Queer

Jasbir Puar, “Mapping US Homonormativities”

Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence”

Gayle S. Rubin, “Thinking Sex”

Eve Sedgwick, The Epistemology of the Closet

Ruth Vanita, Love’s Rites

Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal

Virginia Wright Wexman, Creating the Couple: Love, Marriage, and Hollywood Performance

Supplemental readings in gender/sexuality studies:

Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera

Leo Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave?

M. Gigi Durham, The Lolita Effect

Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women

Lee Edelman, No Future

Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics

Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires

Roger Hallas, Reframing Bodies

Guy Hocquenghem, The Screwball Asses

Kamala Kampadoo, Global Sex Workers

Audre Lorde, “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”

Catherine MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State

Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “ ‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited:  Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Struggle”

Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes:  Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses”

Cherrie Moraga, The Last Generation

Jose Munoz, Cruising Utopia

Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages

Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics

Minor List:  Media and Resistance in the Information Age

Arjun Appudurai, Modernity at Large

Chris Atton, An Alternative Internet

Nancy Baym, Personal Communication in Digital Media

Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks

Lance Bennett, “Communicating Global Activism”

Wiebe Bijker, Thomas Hughes, & Trevor Pinch, The Social Construction of Technology

Bruce Bimber, Information and American Democracy (Chapter 1)

Jay David Bolter & Richard Grusin, Remediation

Bertolt Brecht, “The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication”

Manuel Castells, Communication Power

Andy Chadwick, “The Political Information Cycle in a Hybrid News System”

Gabriella Coleman, “Code is Speech”

John Downing, “The Independent Media Center Movement and the Anarchist Socialist Tradition”

Christina Dunbar-Hester, “Geeks, Meta-Geeks, and Gender Trouble”

Christina Dunbar-Hester, “Beyond ‘Dudecore’?”

Steven Duncombe, Notes from Underground

Ron Eglash & J. Bleecker, “The Race for Cyberspace”

Ron Eglash, J. Croissant, G. Di Chiro, & R. Fouche, Appropriating Technology

Rayvon Fouche, Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud”

Thomas Frank, The Conquest of Cool

Alexander Galloway & Eugene Thacker, The Exploit

Mark Hansen, Bodies in Code

Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto”

Christine Harold, Ourspace

Pekka Himanen, The Hacker Ethic

Philip Howard, Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy

Kevin Howley, Community Media

Frederic Jameson, Intro & Chapter 1 of Postmodernism

Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture

Henry Jenkins, Fans, Bloggers, & Gamers

Steven Johnson, Interface Culture

David Karpf, “Looking Beyond Clicktivism”

Mary Celeste Kearney, Girls Make Media

Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur

Christopher Kelty, Two Bits

Naomi Klein, No Logo

Daniel Kreiss, “Open Source as Practice and Ideology”

Calle Lasn, Culture Jam

Lawrence Lessig, Code V. 2.0

Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media

Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were Knew

Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion

Lisa Nakamura, Digitizing Race

Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital

Lisa Parks, Cultures in Orbit

Eric Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs

Alison Piepmeier, Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism

Stephen Shiels & Robert Ogles, “Black Liberation Radio”

Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus

Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody

Aram Sinnreich, Mashed Up

Susan Leigh Star, “Power, Technology, and the Phenomenology of Conventions”

Lucy Suchman, “Located Accountabilities in Technology Production”

Douglas Thomas, Hacker Culture

Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen

Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture

Judy Wacjman, “From Women and Technology to Gendered Technoscience”

Mackenzie Wark, Hacker Manifesto

Langdon Winner, “Do Artifacts Have Politics?”

Sally Wyatt, “Non-Users also Matter”

Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet…And How to Stop It

Supplemental Reading (Other media technology or media & resistance readings)

Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry”

Theodor Adorno, “The Culture Industry Reconsidered”

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities

Bela Belazs, “The Close-Up”

Walter Benjamin, “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”

Michael F. Brown, “Who Owns Native Culture?”

James Carey, “Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph”

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life

John Dewey, Art as Experience

John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems

Susan Douglas, “Popular Culture and Populist Technology”

John Downing, Radical Media

Claude Fischer, America Calling

Mary Gray, “Negotiating Identities/Queering Desires”

Dorothy Kidd, “Indymedia.org”

Ronald Kline, “Resisting Consumer Technology in Rural America”

Ronald Kline and Trevor Pinch, “Users as Agents of Technological Change”

Holly Kruse, Site and Sound

Martha McCaughey & Michael Ayers, Cyberactivism

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of man

Nelly Oudshoorn, Els Rommes & Marcelle Strienstra, “Configuring the User as Everybody”

Nelly Oudshoorn and Trevor Pinch, How Users Matter

Lynn Spiegel, Make Room for TV

Susan Leigh Star & Bowker, Sorting Things Out

Judy Wajcman, TechnoFeminism

Jesse Walker, Rebels on the Air

Raymond Williams, Television

Sally Wyatt, “Challenging the Digital Imperative”