iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Jo Giardini @downevent.bsky.social · 07/06/2025

Sandwiched between two men on the Montréal metro, one reading ‘The Prince,’ the other Camille Paglia.

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Jo Giardini @downevent.bsky.social · 28/04/2025

Joshua Clover—the start of much to reread

My Life in the New Millennium
It was true that the more I hated people the more I loved cats.
Then people started to surprise me.
Often this involved fire or Coca-Cola
bottles with petrol which amounts to the same thing.
Once fire is the form of the spectacle the problem becomes how to set fire to fire.
Some friends were prepared to help with this which Michael Jackson having died and then Whitney Houston was the new pop music. Without an understanding of the world system and the underlying truth of land as the place of politics and the sea as the space of commerce it is hard to integrate that other
most important fact of our era. Pirates. My friends and pirates and cats —it comes down to comrades known and elsewhere.

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Jo Giardini @downevent.bsky.social · 28/04/2025

Rest in peace, Joshua. I vividly recall our first conversations, in the midst of the 2012 student strike in Montreal—his uncompromising intelligence, comradeliness, commitment to the real movements of our times, his poetics, all impressed me then, and on every encounter since.

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Jo Giardini @downevent.bsky.social · 18/03/2025

"Man eats hearty meal, imperilling his sustained fast."

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Jo Giardini @downevent.bsky.social · 18/03/2025

In what possible world is this 'imperilling' the cease-fire, rather than simply breaking it without apology?

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Jo Giardini @downevent.bsky.social · 15/03/2025

Did we somehow never talk about 'By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept'?

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Reposted by Jo Giardini

UAW @uaw.org · 14/03/2025

🧵 IN SHOCKING MOVE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY FIRES UNION PRESIDENT ONE DAY BEFORE CONTRACT NEGOTIATIONS BEGIN, IN FURTHER CRACKDOWN ON FREE SPEECH

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Jo Giardini @downevent.bsky.social · 14/03/2025

Yes, signed this when it was circulating! Was just wondering if, as due dates for panel submissions arrive, people are working to re-publicize this, and put pressure on those who are moving to participate…

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Jo Giardini @downevent.bsky.social · 14/03/2025

Sending power to Sterne, and all those near him. The speech he gave is accessible on his blog, here: superbon.net/2011/11/14/t...

superbon.net

Text of my speech from today’s amazing demonstration (pardon some of the odd punctuation–it’s for timing) – Super Bon!

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Jo Giardini @downevent.bsky.social · 14/03/2025

Through the next months he would continue to be outspoken, even at the most conservative of universities in Quebec. I’m grateful for his powerful scholarship, and I’ll always think of it as an extension of a commitment to the public, contestatory work of thinking in common.

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Jo Giardini @downevent.bsky.social · 14/03/2025

who were gearing up for the monumental strike of 2012, and insisted that police presence on university campuses must not be normalized. It was a powerful speech of solidarity, in support of a vision of the university as a space against privation and privatization, in support of a more just world.

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Jo Giardini @downevent.bsky.social · 14/03/2025

I’ll always remember a speech Sterne gave in November 2011, after riot police had indiscriminately assaulted people in McGill and the adjacent Milton Parc neighbourhood. He affirmed the ongoing fight by public unions in Quebec for fair compensation, spoke in support of student activists…

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Jo Giardini @downevent.bsky.social · 14/03/2025

I can’t imagine participating in the MLA conference in Toronto next year, and I’m curious if anyone has been organizing a more formal response—a statement from members who will continue to refuse engagement after the stifling of the statement on Gaza and scholasticide last year?

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Jo Giardini @downevent.bsky.social · 21/02/2025

So so good! Didn’t realize that there’s been a vinyl release.

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Reposted by Jo Giardini

Pinko Magazine @pinko.online · 19/02/2025

Baltimore! Join us this Saturday for a conversation on the new @haymarketbooks.org edition of After Accountability at @redemmas.org, starting at 6 PM! We'll be joined by @estebanitos.bsky.social @genderhorizon.com @maxfox.bsky.social and Stevie Wilson to discuss withfriends.co/event/227083...

After Accountability launch at Red Emma's with Stevie Wilson, Peter Hardie, and Esteban Kelly
February 22, 2025 6:00-7:30 PM
Red Emma's 3128 Greenmount Ave.

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Jo Giardini @downevent.bsky.social · 18/02/2025

And somehow that's the best of the three pages?

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Jo Giardini @downevent.bsky.social · 13/02/2025

I teach a couple chapters from Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's 'As We Have Always Done': '7. The Sovereignty of Indigenous Peoples’ Bodies' & '8. Indigenous Queer Normativity' to help make this connection.

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Jo Giardini @downevent.bsky.social · 29/01/2025

If you need any other club members…

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Jo Giardini @downevent.bsky.social · 29/01/2025

(feeling devastated, today, and trying to find strength in these words which have been close)

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Jo Giardini @downevent.bsky.social · 29/01/2025

Collective liberation is entwined with the freedom of children, and their abilities to grasp towards new worlds. I've been so grateful to learn this anew in conversation with @lalouverouge.bsky.social. I can't think of something more vital than making sure that trans children continue to flourish.

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Jo Giardini @downevent.bsky.social · 29/01/2025

And today, in a different class, we discussed this passage from Jan Morris' 'Conundrum,' envisioning (with an unfortunate orientalist framing) a version of identity which emphasizes its relationality, its ability to travel.

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Jo Giardini @downevent.bsky.social · 29/01/2025

Last week I taught John D'Emilio's 'Capitalism and Gay Identity,' and lingered with my class on this late paragraph—affirming the necessity of allowing children the ability to explore their own futures, to live lives beyond the identities which they're told are available to them.

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Jo Giardini @downevent.bsky.social · 18/01/2025

Anyway—as someone who’s also at a SLAC with a generalist bent, if we ever end up at the same conference I’d be excited to talk, and combat cliquishness!

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Jo Giardini @downevent.bsky.social · 18/01/2025

ACLA had long been a favourite conference of mine though—the seminar format can lean cliquey, but it’s also a chance to develop involved conversations with new people, and there’s a generalist bent to a substantial chunk of it.

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Jo Giardini @downevent.bsky.social · 18/01/2025

I only did ASA for the first time this year, but was really impressed by the range of conversations and the generally welcoming vibes—but lots of variability across panels.

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Jo Giardini @downevent.bsky.social · 17/01/2025

Not a single one of those things seems to be suggested nor implied by Matt, and I would challenge you to demonstrate otherwise. Rather, Matt’s numbers suggest that the organization makes active choices about where to prioritize allocating its funds, and that these choices are not inevitable.

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Jo Giardini @downevent.bsky.social · 15/01/2025

And ‘Trans Cultural Production’:

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Jo Giardini @downevent.bsky.social · 15/01/2025

In addition to the intro gender studies class, I’m teaching ‘Queer and Trans Lives’:

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Jo Giardini @downevent.bsky.social · 15/01/2025

Semester two at Allegheny College is somehow underway, syllabi are essentially set, and I’m so thrilled by how keen my students are for critical, historical approaches to queer and trans studies.

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Jo Giardini @downevent.bsky.social · 07/01/2025

Ah—wish I could tag along for this (also, hope we can grab a coffee at some point when I visit this semester)!

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Jo Giardini @downevent.bsky.social · 29/12/2024

Cannot say how excited I am for your new book—and to celebrate its coming into the world.

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Jo Giardini @downevent.bsky.social · 23/12/2024

Somehow a worse artist than novelist.

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Jo Giardini @downevent.bsky.social · 23/12/2024

Crudo is number one for me, by far, but hard to argue with this list 🫡

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Jo Giardini @downevent.bsky.social · 15/12/2024

As someone just wrapping up their first semester as an assistant prof, and already feeling the pull of institutional obligation and labour—and as someone who’s gained worlds from the work you produced amidst all these conditions—I’m so grateful for this.

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Jo Giardini @downevent.bsky.social · 24/11/2024

I was intrigued by Koch, but am already Jameson committed, so didn't let myself linger with that idea for too long.

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Jo Giardini @downevent.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

I think this is right, and my language above isn’t the best—I trust the liberating and collaborative reading of his work (which imo comes across a bit more consistently in City of Lost Souls or the AIDS trilogy). Here for horny filmmaking, just wish it had, in this film, a bit more texture sometimes

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Jo Giardini @downevent.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

Tapestry included! But, one of the joys of the film is that fact that folks go along with Praunheim’s questions, even when they’re intrusive, and seem to meet him in his desire to affirm (even if via overfixation) an unrepentant approach to the sexual.

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Jo Giardini @downevent.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

Mostly it’s just Praunheim’s questions—his obsessive perviness, and desire to focus in on the the sex lives of those he interviews, how transition affected and was affected by their relationships. It would have been so nice, in place of that, to have had more focus on the networks folks were in—

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Jo Giardini @downevent.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

Taught it on Monday—a real delight to return to, through all (and in some ways even because of) its problems.

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Jo Giardini @downevent.bsky.social · 18/11/2024

Would love to be added, please! Thanks for making this.

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Jo Giardini @downevent.bsky.social · 17/11/2024

No joke, I’ve been wanting to write something about *exactly* these three novels, with Delany’s ‘Phallos’ added to the mix.

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Jo Giardini @downevent.bsky.social · 16/11/2024

Would love to be added! Thanks for putting this together.

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Jo Giardini @downevent.bsky.social · 15/11/2024

I have the Adnan, and made a pdf to share with folks a few years back. Will dig up and send your way. DM me yr email?

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