Prep Notes for Week 4

repetition:

rhetorical potential of repetition in preaching

Sojourner Truth            
Delivered 1851 at the Women's Convention in Akron, Ohio

That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man - when I could get it - and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain't I a woman?

Clare repeats the refrain "The body as home" five times over 3 pages (11-13) in Exile and Pride

"The body as home, but only if it is understood that bodies are never singular, but rather haunted, strengthened, underscored by countless other bodies" (11)

"The body as home, but only if it is understood that place and community and culture burrow deep into our bones." (11) 

This idea was also put forward by Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass

There was a child went forth every day,
And the first object he looked upon, that object he became,
And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day,
Or for many years or stretching cycles of years.

Where were you born, where have you lived and how does that burrow into your bones?  What does it do to you when people are ignorant or dismissive of your places of origin, growth and development?

My discomfort, feeling of alienation in being a Hoosier on the East Coast

The world as seen from New York's 9th Avenue (New Yorker cartoon)

In grade school, my favorite subject was geography. 

draw maps of regions you're most familiar/comfortable with--share

"What I don't say is how homesick I feel for those place names, plant names, bare slopes, not nostalgic, but lonely for a particular kind of familiarity, a loneliness that reaches deep under my skin, infuses my muscles and tendons.  How do I explain the distance, the tension, the disjunction between my politics and my loneliness?" (19)for Clare,

memory palaces from Moonwalking with Einstein.  The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer (2011),

p96-105

"The mountain will never be home, and still I have to remember it grips me." (13)

the mountain

I. A METAPHOR

"The mountain as metaphor looms large in the lives of marginalized people, people whose bones get crushed in the grind of capitalism, patriarchy, white supremacy.  How many of us have struggled up the mountain, measured ourselves against it, failed up there, lived in its shadow?" (1)

the mountains that feed my soul

The Geography of Childhood:  "Both the decision to love and the belief in one's safety in wild country are acts of faith.  To commit to either requires the most delicate balance of wariness and boldness of which we are capable." (63)

, find....

"I wanted to belong somewhere."  rather than human be-ings, are we better described as human be-longings?

"For Jim and others like him, the woods provide sanctuary, home, and livelihood." (56) Spend 5' and write:  What are your places of sanctuary?  Can they also be home and places of livelihood?

Why do we need to call our bodies home?

I came across this art exhibition called unmakeablelove (www.unmakeablelove.org) over the summer which I find quite pertinent to our discussions about gender, disability and how society views us. The exhibition is based off Samuel Beckett's "The Lost Ones". The viewer walks into a darkened room and is immediately confronted with images of dark bodies just roaming around this cylinder. There are various flashlights placed outside of the space and the viewer has the opportunity to shine a light onto these moving figures to see what they are. None of the figures have very distinguishable traits - there might be a hint of genitalia on one of them but it is not so obvious.

I made me think about how important our bodies are to us. They are important because society bases so many things about us on just our outward appearance. They are also important because we seem to be defined by how we look like and many a time, we are placed into 'boxes' based on just this outside appearance. Unmakeablelove made me uncomfortable by forcing me to think of the disconnect between my physical body, prone to society's harsh judgements and categorizations, and my internal mind which, while still prone to judgement, is an entity that can no longer be categorized in the ways that we have discussed. 

But imagine what it would be like if these bodies of ours no longer existed. If who we are is based on what we are internally. It seems like an abstract idea but if I said that we could create ourselves in a virtual space (as I am doing right now) it is quite tangible. Would we still be characterized? Does my online writing suggest that I am male, female, transgendered, crippled, straight, gay, bi, white, black, hispanic? I'm not quite sure that it does completely. I'm not quite sure that you can put this 'blog post' into a category. 

But my question here is really, why do we need to call our bodies 'home'? Clare speaks his reconcilation with his physical body and his mind as though it is so important. While our bodies help us eat, breathe, move, sleep etc. it doesn't do anything else other than put us into the categories that society sets out for us. So why is it so important that we cling to them? Why not just let our mind wander and our thoughts define who we are through simple writing and online communication? Why is it difficult for us to 'live behind a screen'?

http://unmakeablelove.org/movie.htm  how do I embed this video from her post?

Quote from video:  "We need machines that suffer from the burden of their memory."  Jean-Francoise Lyotard (The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, 1991) 

Are we more comfortable discussing, imagining burdens than potentials?

We are embodied creatures who crave touch.  Infants not held do not thrive.  Does this need continue throughout life or do we outgrow it?

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.