Serious questions

• Affect Theory and Homophobia by John R. Crary, 5/27/98
  • Why the attack mode? by Sharon Willoughby, 6/1/98
    
    

Hi, Sharon! Good to have your input to the forum. Although it may seem strange to you, the questions I asked John Crary really were intended as requests for clarification of his remarks. In areas of thought where reasonable people have intense feelings, any such request is likely to be taken as an escalation of the already high level affect involved in the original question. And there sure is a lot of affect involved with the images I drew in these quotations.

Even though the authors quoted by John claim that I have conflated drive and affect, I don't know what they mean. I still don't know what part of those quotations can be taken as offensive (especially when placed in their original context.) And I really really don't know what he means by "therapeutically responsive." Scholarly questions, especially those that don't make sense on the surface, deserve the same respect we give to a patient in therapy---we always ask more questions, try to learn more about the question and the speaker in order to achieve both empathic contact and logical excellence. Actually, that is one of the purposes of this forum---to separate affect, script, and cognition just enough to allow the best possible answer to any question.

I'm sure John Crary will return to the forum to explain his comments, and then we'll go forward to find some way for all of us to achieve a common understanding. And your post places me in a bit of a bind---if I ask you to explain what you personally found offensive, then I'm answering you rather than John, which might not be responsive to John!

Stay tuned. The more information we get, the more interesting this is going to become for all of us.

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