  The silly football game is still on. Im rather confident that my team (the one whose uniforms I like best) is on their way to winning  although its tied and not at all clear about who has the upper hand. No, Im not a true football fan. Yet I feel obliged to watch it. Its the quintessential secular holiday in America. The game is fabulous, sure.
Masterful athletes at their best it stirs that competitive spirit of our country to punctuate our inflated sense of nationalism. Why, I saw entire songs devoted to the remembrance of the shuttle crew that was lost a year ago today. Gee! How wonderfully sensitive! But the aspect of the Super Bowl that most captures my attention is the glut of commercial plugs interwoven into the event. As much reporting is dedicated to the best ads of the night than they attend to the game itself.
How sickeningly American is this? The inseparable pairing of machismo dominance with the bliss of consumption. I wonder if the inventor of the game of American football designed it to allow for the maximum number of commercial interruptions? Im having an epiphanic moment here Yes! Thats it! Ill invent a game designed with commercials in mind!
Ill hire some famous folks to endorse it, get people to think its cool then POW! CBS is calling me with a bid for the broadcasting rights. Woo-hoo. Workout Log- 100 sit-ups 10m on elliptical 30 push-ups 30m walk through campus stairs 10m running 3 sets of: 160lbs leg press x 20 30lbs bicep curl x 15 5 on the lat pull downs x 12 90lb quad leg lifts x 15 I was the first in the Queer Studies film class to post a response to the class discussion board (WebCT). Were supposed to write a response to the reading, then make two more posts in response to the writing of others. By Friday.
And no one has done a thing. So since I have nothing else I want to say today, here you go: my post. Reading through the articles assigned to the class for this week, I had to stop half way through the first one I picked up to record some responses that werent fitting in the margins as annotations. Im reading the Savage/Julian article, Queering the Pitch: a conversation. Rather than give my impressions of the discussion in a rambling and disjointed focus, I think Id rather hone my thoughts to one or two specific topics; that of language, and in particular the language of the oppressor. The issue of language is obviously key to the discussion.
The expropriation of the word queer is at the very heart of the conception of queer theory. Like as stated in the discussion, its resultant in the inversion of what was once a derogatory slur. Yes, this weighs in as a significant shift in power. To illustrate this better, lets think of the polarized factions within the abortion debate in America. One side clearly got the upper hand in the naming of their position; the Pro-Life camp. Their name, being a proponent of life, is not a viewpoint that many would attack.
In naming their side Pro-Life, they have in effect secured a label for themselves that, taken literally, no one would defy. They won them the battle of linguistic supremacy. In language, the Pro-Life position has secured victory. This idea of a victory of language is just what the movement to reclaim the term queer has striven for and succeeded in possessing. The LGBTIA[etc. ] community has taken the language of the oppressor and turned it inside out.
Queer used to be a word uttered before getting your head kicked in. Now it signifies something wholly different. Its a semantic revolution. To the question of whether it is right to adopt the language of ones oppressors, one needs to look no further than a little bit of post-colonial discourse to speak to that. In any community in which one portion of the population colonises the other or occupies a position of power, the language of this dominant segment is honoured as the most legitimate. We can create our own language from the margins, but the only one that will carry true weight in the larger scheme (in the immediate sense) is the language of the powerful; the language that is spoken by the mainstream, the words known by the largest population.
Rather than create our own linguistic label to call ourselves by, it is more impacting to take the word of our oppressors. To take it from them and to make it our own. This may seem problematic to some. My own education resists the practice of speaking the language of the oppressor. I think back to Choukris novel For Bread Alone. It was only until he learned to write classical Arabic that he became truly free.
In a period of Moroccan history where a unifying conception of nationalism was uncertain, Choukri sided with his heritage. He chose to tell his story in his peoples language, not the French of the colonizers [or the Spanish of his more powerful neighbours. However, the narrative form of a novel itself is a Western/European construct that has been imported to the region another layer even still. For this example, it is not the language that succumbs to the colonizers but the medium. 
