lwacker's blog

Gender Pay In-equality: A Call to Action In Orange Art

Attached are two documents:

Word.doc With pay gap data & reflective writing.

Artistic reintrepretation of possible road signage: photos of 14 different painted caution signs included.

SourceURL:file://localhost/Users/leecwacker/Documents/Senior%20Yr./GENSEX%20CORE%20COURSE/web%20event%203.doc

Lee Wacker

Web-Event 3

Gender Pay In-equality: A Call to Action In Orange Art

[Figure 1]                                                        [Figure 2]

Humbach's argument for the distinction between the justice of/for rights and the justice of right relationships has me thinking a lot about next Butler lecture, titled Gender and its Allies: Performativity in Precarity. I've noticed in the posts throughout last week and this weekend that many of my classmates are similarly struggling with Anne's question of * how is all this related to gender studies? I think after reading Humbach I better understand Judith Butler's comments on Gay Marraige, Gays in the Military and (although she didn't comment on this one) Gays adopting.

"Most striking is McFadden's admission that his primary theory relies on evidence that is largely circumstantial" (2008, 309). Bonnie Spanier and Jessica Horowitz

     This reminded me a lot of the discussion we had in class about the Biology textbook chapters and the validity of the text based on the author's status at a University and the fact that Kaye had picked the text. Although we seem to have full-diclosure here I am left feeling unamused that such serious research would be conducted from a loose evidentiary base.

"After acknowledging the possibility that there may, in fact, be no common underlying cause for all the different observations, McFadden reminds the reader that until the answer is found "science dictates that one tries to find the simplest possible explanation for as many facts as possible, and the prenatal-androgen-exposure explanation appears to do the job' (2008, 318). Bonnie Spanier and Jessica Horowitz

Again, this is extremely unsettling to me, as an individual I prefer the rational and logic. However, this sounds like more of a wild goose chase to me. Is it really prudent to conduct research simply searchng for the simplest possible explanation? As we have learned, when is it ever simle when it comes to something as complex, individualized and intimate as someone's sexuality and gender?

http://www.autostraddle.com/zachary-quinto-is-gay-says-so-116420/

Over break I stumbled upon this article while catching up on some light reading on a the website autostraddle. It is a website that primarily caters to lesbian and queer female audiences with material written by a similarly aligned writing staff. However, that does not mean that autostraddle doesn't often cover the full spectrum of lgbtq media, entertainment and social issue related events going on in the world. Their scope and attention can and does encompass more than lesbian exclusive interest pieces. This is how I came upon the piece about the "coming out" of actor Zachary Quinto. Much of what I saw in the autostraddle piece on Quinto pointed towards our class discussions on utopianisms and dystopias. Quinto wrote about an, "enormous shift of collective consciousness throughout the world.  we are at the precipice of great transformation within our culture and government." And yet he writes that his widespread, public coming out moment was precipitated by the recent suicide of gay teen Jamey Rodemeyer. It is hard for me to imagine coming anywhere near the utopian vision of Qunito when we are being bombarded with internalized hate crimes.

I was doing reading for another class of mine, Body Politics with Professor of Hist. of Art Lisa Saltzman, and I noticed an incredible amount of references to utopias etc etc.

This piece is by Maud Lavin on Dada Arist Hannah Hoch and her conception of Weimar Germany's, "New Woman" through her photocollages. Starting on page 338 at the top and continuing onto the next page where the article ends the text is ripe with entagled gen/sex themes from our course.

I attached the pdf. below in case some of you were interested. But to start you off here a Lavin quote from the article...

pg 338 "Hoch created alienating effects by using the practice of photomontage to juxtapose the beautiful and the ugle, the feminine and the masculine, the witty and violent. Hers was a disquieting mix of utopianism and anxiety."

Within the Price forward author Tobin Siebers writes that, "individuals who fail the standards are not only considered unfit for the classroom, they are suspected of being unfit for life."

I found this quote to be in opposition to the ideaology that, "mental illness, namely, its link to creative genius" is a truism upheld in film (the example given being A Beautiful Mind) presented in the Price Introduction.


Culturally, we presently cite figures such as Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerbrod as examples of individuals who are crazy smart but didn't fit into the mold of college/university life. They left either because of burgeoning business ventures or social alienation (here I am extrapolating from The Network). These men, and surely there are female equi

It seems to me that the NORMAL thing (since I feel this will be a recurrent theme throughout class) is actually to have some sort of disability or impairment the notion of closeting here can be intereting to me. Often when one has unknown are invisible disabilities they are closeted or pusposefully hidden

I was struck by Professor Grobstein's affirmation of Varenne and McDermott's theory that, "cultures provide individuals with a sense of motivation and achievement." This cross-cultural norm, however, has created a disabling effect in cultures "by setting standards of achievement which... [people] can't adequately satisfy."

Professor Grobstein acknowledges this continual practice of cultural disablement and then moves on to suggest what it would be like to create a "non-disabling culture." My first reaction to a non-disabling culture, at least an American culture that actively works to promote enablement and agency was, was that it was an absurd idea. Of course, it's not that I don't think that it would be splendid to live in union and identify with others based on the skills and abilities they do possess, but that I feel we, as humans, are so trained to identify what is different from us.

We spoke last class, when looking at the image of the women in pink dresses, of the voyeur, indentifiying and analyzing difference. I feel this act of voyeruism and practice of being the voyeur is so much a part of the unconscious shared human experience that to promote an abling culture that doesn't point out or identify difference would be near impossible.

Within Eli Clare's own book Exile and Pride he speaks of feeling at odds within his own crip community. He references he feelings of not being crippled enough, not being wheelchair bound or without sight.