I have to thank my LGBT and comp professor, Dr. Jackie Rhodes, for introducing me to Mimi Nguyen's Worse Than Queer a.k.a. Slant. You may have seen Mimi's eloquently written feminist sociopolitical perspectives in Punk Planet or in Maximum RockandRoll. You can also view these articles on her Worse Than Queer site. Her writing style and extremely articulate views (not to mention her exceptional music and literary tastes combined with a love for pinball--good god!) are a great source of inspiration for my own writing and sociopolitical views. In fact, I feel it’s best just to include her entire personal statement so that you can see for yourself how truly multifaceted and talented the publisher of this zine really is:

Mimi Nguyen's Mission

I should mention that the title of this site comes from a Bikini Kill song called, "Suck My Left One," and it goes like this:

Sister sister, where did we go wrong? / Tell me what the fuck we're doing here / Why are all the boys acting strange? / We've got to show them we're worse than queer!

This is my "official" academic biography, streamlined and standardized:

Mimi Nguyen is a PhD. candidate in Comparative Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, with a Designated Emphasis on Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Her dissertation work focuses on U.S. Vietnamese cultural production and the politics of diasporic citizenship. She is also working on projects examining the politics of race and sex in reproductive rights discourse, sex-positive feminisms, digital technologies, riot grrrl, drag and other spaces of performance and performativity. Several essays are forthcoming in anthologies about race and technology and topographies of race and gender. She teaches feminist and queer theory and cultural studies and can occasionally be goaded into delivering monologues on stage or performing in lo-fi queer guerilla pop music videos. She is also a columnist for Punk Planet and her writings on history, memory, and popular culture have appeared in Maximumrocknroll, Poppolitics.com, and elsewhere. A disaffected grrrl punk rocker, she did a fanzine long before Newsweek discovered the cut-and-paste "revolution" and continues run with scissors and play with glue.

I'm bi-queer (currently boyfriended, sorry girls) and lucky for you, I'm also devoted to poststructuralist, feminist, and queer theorizing, with a dash of the postcolonial. (Ask me about the heteronormative dyad that defines gendered representations of the national and historical relationship of Viet Nam to the United States.) I teach and give papers at conferences. I've been told that I have a hypnotic cadence when I deliver papers (I blushed twice), which might be purposeful since I write all my essays out loud. Most of the time I'm nervous, which makes me grateful when the panelists' table wears a skirt (my leg kicks uncontrollably).

I was born in Saigon, Viet Nam, between cannon-blasts. Ten months later I spent three days in a sling, wrapped around my mother, while we waited for squatting space on a gutted U.S. cargo plane. (The third time is always a charm.) I was raised in a small town in Minnesota where I learned how to fight.

My first crush was on a blonde tomboy named Snow.

In my academic work, Viet Nam is again a point of departure as I attempt to weave mad theorizing 'round the politics of citizenship, nation-making, cultural imaginaries, the heterosexual matrix, performativity, paranoid patriotisms, melancholy (dis)identifications, ambivalence, and live sex acts.

I'm not the punk I used to be. Once bedecked in black military surplus, a no-nonsense anarchist tomboy with a spray-can tucked under sweatshirt, I'm now the geek grrrl in lip gloss, prone toward plastics and thrift-store cottons, dropping words like "epistemological" toward stunning effect.

(Where's the wheatpaste?)

I've done fanzines since fifteen and I'm well-versed in popular culture. I do a zine called slander, once slant. I write for Punk Planet as a columnist, and the occasional article for Maximumrocknroll, plus zine reviews and the news. I'd like to freelance more often but I don't seem to have the time, but ask anyway.

I do this site as an extension of my fanzine fetish. Because cultural critique is a part of my everyday, this is what my journal consists of (mostly). This is me, keeping my critical tongue sharp and making my brain go. This is not me laying myself out to you, like it's some kind of confession.

But here's something true about me: I don't believe in safe spaces or authenticity. (They elude me.) I don't believe in the transparency of photography, autobiography, or any of the other methods by which we fashion ourselves. Instead, I'll gladly tell you about power, hegemony and the labor of representation.

Ask me why and I'll quote this, what French poststructuralist theorist Michel Foucault once said:

"Your question is: why am I so interested in politics? But if I were to answer you very simply, I would say this: Why shouldn't I be interested? That is to say, what blindness, what deafness, what density of ideology would have to weigh me down to prevent me from being interested in what is probably the most crucial subject to our existence.... The essence of our life consists, after all, in the political functioning of the society in which we find ourselves."

So I wear heels and lip-gloss while I theorize, boots and cuffed jeans while I play pinball. (I like Monster Bash the best.) I climb trees and fences in anything. I like to take road trips and visit those small attractions by the wayside, go to Vegas and revel in the gross artifice.

And you know what? I don't think there's really any going home, of recovering things called "roots" or "tradition," or authentic selves or organic community, as if these were just waiting to be found, hermetically-sealed and otherwise pure, untainted by the violence of war, imperialisms of all kinds, and more. Still, you can try.