Hobnobbing with the stars

A couple of weeks ago our friend Caz at Avatar Briefs experienced one of the wonders of blogging when Jeremy Justus, author of "Surveillance, Paranoia, and Abjection: The Ideological Underpinnings of Waste Management in the EPA's Measuring Recycling Guidelines and Don DeLillo's Underworld," responded (weirdly, if good-humoredly) to her dismemberment of that scholarly work, months after she'd posted it. (He'd googled himself.)

Now, gamely, Justus has honored Her Avatarness with his latest effort: "Piss Stance: Private Parts in Public Places: An Analysis of the Men's Room and Gender Control."

Caz is funny on this, of course, but read the paper, too, which is almost awe-inspiring in its relentless resort to po-mo cliché. Okay, one quote Caz didn't use:

In its function as a place of gender performance, the public men's room represents a stage that both demands a specific gender performance and prescribes this type of performance to its users. That is, as a grand theater, the public men's room is a space that affects its users by demanding that they perform according to the ideological context that the space demands. Additionally, much like an athletic arena, the public men's room functions as a space in which gender performance is comparatively evaluated.

Fun!

Update: This post was originally titled "Touching the stars," but was changed for (now) obvious reasons. Sorry, Caz!