Critical Feminist Studies 2013

We talk about talking, but never listening. (Do we ever even listen about listening? Lectures on the virtues of listening are still yet more talking, and not listening. This regretably, is yet another one of those, though it will, hopefully, make me shut up at some point and listen to y'all, instead of filling silence because I need to fill it.) The problems we have with class discussion are usually put at the doorstep of talking, not really at the lack of listening.

Likewise, much of the dialogue surrounding the silence in Eva's Man has been about Eva's refusal to speak. We talked about possible reactions to what she could have said on Tuesday. I wasn't in class on Thursday, so maybe you did talk about her audience's refusal to listen. I hope so, because hypothosizing about why someone isn't making themselves vulnerable is fine, but unpacking who is making them vulnerable and why is important, too.

Throughout my time reading "Eva's Man", I was constantly reminded of a documentary I watched a few years ago. The film, titled "What I Want My Words To Do To You", followed Eve Ensler (of "The Vagina Monologues" fame) as she conducted writing workshops with the women inmates of New York's Bedford Hills Correctional Facility. What struck me about the film at the time was the immense guilt and confusion felt by the women who had been convicted for committing, mainly murderous, crimes. With the direction of journaling, many women brought to the surface their side of the story and the history leading up to their decisions (or maybe better worded, actions).

I had mentioned a powerful RadioLab podcast in class last week about a prolific serial killer, the Green River Killer, who was never really able to understand why he killed. I made this reference to connect with Eva's inability to understand why she killed Davis and that maybe the deep, underlying reasoning for the killing of another human being may never be understood.

7:30 is when the story begins on the RadioLab podcast titled "Why are bad guys bad?": http://www.radiolab.org/story/180166-why-be-bad/. It's really a fascinating story that is worth your 10 minutes of time! 

After an intensive interrogation with Gary Ridgway, the Seattle-based serial killer, special detectives tried to get Gary to divuldge the details and secrets to the 49 murders of female prostitutes, including the one question that everyone really wanted to know: why?

Gary's most satisfying confession still does not present us with a concrete answer, "I just needed to kill because of that." Neither Eva nor the people around her seem to understand why she killed Davis, but outsiders seem to believe that there must be a true reason hidden beneath her silence.

In Gary's case, after talking to psychiatrists, forensic psycologists, and detectives, a clear patter in conversation would begin and point to the musing that we would never figure out the underlying reason why some humans kill other humans. 

I attended a public high school in the heart of Los Angeles’ inner city, a predominately black neighborhood, characterized by poverty, drugs, gang activity, and violence. This environment is similar to that of schools in many cities across the country, and I have felt some of the negative effects of a public school system operating on a normative standard  that does not fully encompass their students’ multifaceted lives as a result of their low socioeconomic status. 

During class this Thursday, we talked about the concept of time, specifcally in reference to Eva's Man. We debated the different ways it operates in different kinds of time (queer time, crip time, traumatic time, etc). I began to wonder if the time within the novel works within any of these concepts of time at all, or perhaps if it exists in all of these concepts of time at once. Perhaps there is a blend of different concepts of time within it. From this thought I began to wonder if, by defining concepts of time by "queer time" or "crip time," we give those concepts their own "normative" boundaries. Though these concepts are different from normative time, they have their own set of rules (however flexible they are) and have a defined nature to them. Perhaps time is not supposed to be defined, but to exist in its own way; for time to go by undefined by the concepts we create in our minds. Everything exists within the bounds of time, and yet we choose to define it as if we have any control over the matter.

In the 1960s and 1970s, teachers and scholars asked, “Where are the women?”

This question echoes the second-wave mantra that turned attention to the rising issue that women were facing in regards to sexuality, familial expectations, discrimination in the workplace, and many legal inequalities. Women’s Studies was born from the student, civil rights, and women’s movements of the 1960s and the 1970s.

San Diego State University is credited as the first college in the United States to offer Women’s Studies courses. Cornell joined in the movement in same year, 1970. This came to fruition when students from SDSU’s Women’s Liberation Group, along with faculty and other women from the community, formed an Ad Hoc Committee for Women’s Studies. The committee, who felt women’s voices had little representation on campus or in the curriculum, collected signatures from over 600 students in support of establishing a Women’s Studies Program. They hoped the program would address issues such as political equality and questioning gender roles. In the spring of 1974, the Faculty Advisory Committee undertook a nationwide faculty recruitment campaign to develop women’s studies as a strong academic department. The initial course offerings mirrored the concerns of first-wave feminism. Some of their mission statement reads, “We will continue to host engagements that increase awareness surrounding issues of gender and sexuality, acknowledge the social change we hope to foster, and celebrate the transformations we have accomplished.”

The old rhyme was wrong, words hurt. Names matter, labels stick. The stigma isn’t always patent; inherent in our lexicon are modifiers and morphemes that convey status with just the addition of a mere suffix. Too often those bearing the brunt of the verbal assault inherent in the institution that is language are the disenfranchised, the marginalized, the minorities. As they struggle to find equal footing, these intersectionals confront the challenge of overcoming discrimination woven throughout everyday vernacular, starting with, but by no means limited to, the very words used to define their persons. Applications, medical forms, census data, and beyond are a daunting undertaking when deciding what box to check off; those of us who do not fit into that square binary of “male or female”, wondering why checking off our “race” is relevant see these societal structures as oppressive, limiting, forceful. The English language is subject to the binary; the default “he” when a gender isn’t made apparent, the need to make feminine words evident with an “-ess”, all limit our language to thinking in two parts, not as a whole. These restrictions don’t even account for labels the language has created for us. When it comes to language, people search for qualifiers, a way to define one another, fit them in. This is where a great irony lies—language lives to be limitless, so why must people create parameters?

In Don Kulick’s Travesti, he introduces a subculture of Brazilian prostitutes who, despite self-identifying as male, dress in a feminine manner and adopt feminine pronouns. As Kulick joined his new companions in their daily lives in Brazil, he found a culture where feminine language was practically requisite, where the only male pronouns among the group were shot as insults, and where designated-at-birth females were seen as ‘lesser’ because of their conventional methods of having sex. These prostitutes, called travesty, appeared to Kulick as gender outliers, falling between man and woman and integrating aspects of both while remaining entirely a separate category. Given the nature of the Portuguese language, they found it simple to evoke a feminine nature by altering the genders assigned to listeners that they were, in fact, women. In English, similar systems do not exist, and while one would imagine a simple ease into a genderless mode of speech, the language still resists adopting a comprehensive third-gender pronoun and grammatical usage. While far from the only language with difficulties in integrating third-gender/agender pronouns, English lays a simple foundation for gender pronouns, and fully moves to, outside of pronouns, eliminate gender unless speaking about a specific individual.

The embedded video (shows up at the end of the post) is an interview with Eden Atwood, conducted by Dr. Lindsay Doe, who was born intersex, meaning that she does not biologically fit into the gender and sex binary. She shares the story (starting at 4:57) of how she found out she is intersex and how she was treated as a child.

I watched this interview with Eden Atwood a few months ago, and her story shocked me. Her doctors and her parents lied to her and performed unnecessary surgery on her just because of her intersex condition. I also remembered that historically, there were people and organizations that tried to “cure” homosexuality, using physically abusive methods. I decided to look into how healthcare and health insurance in America support the socially constructed gender binary and heteronormative lifestyle by refusing some people care and forcing it upon others.