Pervasive Deployment Research Articles

Object on the server

Object-oriented concepts such as reuse and encapsulation offer many benefits to application development, particularly in managing complexity and change. All the benefits of OO that apply to the client can apply equally well to the server. However, until recently, these concepts have proven to benefit only the client side. Could there be any intrinsic or conceptual reason for this? Or could it be a result of timing, the availability of the tools, and the conservative restraints that result from the mission-critical nature of server computing?This panel will explore the roles of objects on the server by examining the experiences of the panelists from a technology consumer's perspective. By doing so, we would like to provide insights for corporations that are making decisions on OO technology, point out pitfalls along the way, and identify potential opportunities for technology providers.All panelists have developed production level object servers. The panel will answer the question of whether we are ready for object servers by discussing the following issues:• Different server types: transactional server, data server, application server, web server, etc. Are they really that much different? Which one is the most important kind?• Experience in implementing and maintaining object systems on the server: the configurations of the systems and how they were arrived at; the tools and programming languages used.• Benefits and drawbacks of server object systems.• What's hard? What's easy?• What are the prerequisites for pervasive deployments of objects on the server? (e.g., standards, application types, customer situations, tools, and languages.)• What would be desirable for technology providers (researchers and vendors) to provide? (Tools, languages, execution environments that represents vendor opportunities.)• Practical advice to organizations interested in introducing objects to the server.

You Can’t Go Homo Again: Queer Theory and the Foreclosure of Gay Studies

YOU CAN’T GO HOMO AGAIN: QUEER THEORY AND THE FORECLOSURE OF GAY STUDIES ERIC SAVOY University of Calgary So, while that happy sexuality may be a paxadise of indeterminacy, it can hardly be thought of as an indeterminate paradise. - D.A. Miller (Bringing Out Roland Barthes 16) I have a million theme songs; what I need is an act. - Bette Midler (Public Performance, August 30, 1993) A n account of the genealogy of the queer project might begin, perhaps somewhat arbitrarily, with the 1991 Lesbian and Gay Studies Conference at Rutgers University. Here the pervasive deployment of the term “queer”— which, however inchoate, seemed to promise a more sharply analytical pur­ chase on gender and sexuality—was accompanied by a startling shift in the program, the sense of community, the general look of the academic confer­ ence. In addition to the displacement of the literary text by popular culture as the primary focus, most participants signified through discourse, dress, and performance their allegiance to a particular camp. On the one hand were women and men (tweed jackets, sensible shoes) who had struggled for several years—in some cases, many years—to gain academic legitimacy for gay and lesbian studies; on the other was an army of mostly younger grad­ uate students (whose uniform consisted of buzz cuts, black T-shirts, Doc Marten’s shoes, multiple earrings) clearly impatient with identity politics and the conventional categories of academic address, who demanded a more radical mode of cultural “queery.” My own performance—which focussed on cross-dressing in Bugs Bunny cartoons to argue the possibilities of “iden­ tity” and “community” within 1950s mainstream culture for gay men—was delivered to a sea of people devoted to T-shirt politics (that is, the current slogan on the fashionable accessory) who were somewhat unsympathetic to my historicizing manoeuvres. Clearly, we weren’t in Kansas anymore. (I stopped wearing a tie after the first day.) Most remarkable in the short history ofthe term “queer”—which includes both its performative role as a defiant adjective and its status as arevisionist category that seeks to undo all categories—are the rapidity of its accession 129 to academic currency and its increasingly, ironically attentuated relation­ ship to the lives and cultural production of lesbians and gay men. At the Rutgers conference, the term escaped denotative scrutiny in that it slipped frequently, often in the same performance, between synonymity with gay or lesbian positionalities and an anxious marking ofdistance from those critical perspectives. By the time of the 1992 MLA Convention in New York, aca­ demic queerness had evidently acquired a defiant spin that included an oppo­ sitional relation to the gay and the lesbian. Increasingly, the queer project’s commitment to what Michael Warner has called “post-identity theory” (19) discerns “gay studies” as being imprisoned by outmoded binary logic, and— according to Simon Watney, who emphasizes the dangerous irresponsibility of queerness’s political indifference or evacuation—its proponents as being “guilty of some vulgar, essentialist error.”1 To a large extent, the emerging hostility between gay studies and queer theory arises from a genuine anxiety that academic institutionalization will diminish or circumvent their differently conceived potential for radical cri­ tique and antihomophobic intervention. Such anxiety is, by now, entirely familiar, as is evidenced by the debates in feminist studies and among people of colour for the last decade. However, because the parameters ofgender and sexual perversity are so unstable—gayness, let alone queerness, has had a hard time in establishing itselfas the kind of “visible minority” recognized by affirmative-action programs—the terms of queer theory’s negotiation with gay studies are slippery, shifting, subject to the finest ironies, and governed by reversal. For example, gay studies in its “traditional” evolution (that is, committed simultaneously to revisionist reception of canonical texts for a homosexual readership and to the recuperation of an elided gay-affirmative cultural production) has often imagined its project as generally separatist; yet from a queer perspective, it is frequently viewed as entirely assimilationist and academically “safe.” Conversely, the proponents of gay studies who are committed to a liberationist politic and the construction of “identity” are coming to see queer theory’s investment in...