Thesis Thoughts

Recently, I've been brainstorming concise ways to express the thesis of my honors project. I want to argue that while the confessional mode can lead to normalization (as argued by Foucault, if simplified), confessional can also act as the re-signifier discussed by Butler in Gender Trouble because by exploring the areas between already-defined identity sites, we destroy the notion of neat, controllable identities all together. It's easy to connect this idea to the idea that poetry illustrates and re-signifies rather than categorizes and defines. It also translates well to questioning the confessional in music; music, as the language of emotions...how can in be confessional, necessarily, in its own right? A lot of the scholarship I have come across talks of music destabilizing identity. For instance, from Judith Peraino's book:"...music demarcates a space and time wherein gender and sexuality lose clear definition" (7). This is frustrating because I just had a thread that would have been tied these ideas together in the bathroom, but it seems to be gone now.

This is good. I actually want to work on this. Unfortunately, I also need to work on grad school applications and thing for classes with due dates...

Brown application is in. After taking a closer look at their program, I've decided that if I don't get into grad schools this time around, I want to focus on creating experiments in poetry/music and send them to Brown for round two. I feel like my writing sample is much too conservative for their program, and while my personal statement is laced with allusions to the things I hope to do, I doubt my hopes will hold up next to my poems.

NYU time...