English

some of my reactions to meiner's chapters here come also in the wake of my reflection on the silence exercise shirah and i created, as well as reading some of anne’s pieces that involve religion and spirituality.

meiner starts the chapter in a bit of a critique of the ways in which the adult participants in her classroom wrote their autobiographies in a practically formulaic way (“the redemption genre”).

i understand this critique on the level of the institution. she questions the limited tools that are given to these individuals to process their incarceration and traumas, which definitely has a major hand in shaping the internalization of the criminal, deviance, and incarceration narratives.

When I read Eva’s Man, a very personal novel about a poor black woman who experiences violence as a victim, bystander, and perpetrator and serves time in a psychiatric prison for murdering a man, I could not avoid thinking about politics: the politics of incarceration, of identity (gender, race, and class), and of silence and trauma. Eva tells her story in flashbacks, paralleling the experiences of someone who lives with trauma. She tells her story, too, with many silences. She says more in her pauses and not saying than in her speaking. There is no mention of politicians or policies per say, so how does this fictional (and yet so very real) account become political? Eva chooses silence, even though others often demand that she speak.

As Joel was discussing our latest essays in our political philosophy class, the ideas of “realism” versus “idealism” were brought up in regards to framing conversations. In political discourse, realistic is coded to mean the correct, or best, or reasonable course of action, with unrealistic or idealistic coded in the opposite way. It’s loaded and empty at the same time, as anyone can hand-wave away an idea with the premise that it’s “not realistic”. The most likely or most practical solution may not be the best one, and in fact usually isn’t in terms of radical change.

On Gendered Silence

Joie Waxler   

12/2/15

Adrienne Rich Tells The Truth, The Whole Truth, And Nothing But The Truth And But Robby Wideman’s Truth is a Lie

As of right now, I’m a little stuck with my proposal—I have a couple threads that I’m really passionate about braiding together, and I’m not yet entirely sure of how to do so (in part because I think I need some confirmation that I can use these threads in the first place).

I've been very intrigued by Eva's Man, mostly because I found it unbearable to read at first. I couldn't even speak in our conversation in class. I was silenced by the silences within myself, like Eva's (to quote our classmate). I found it peculiar to hear the analytical conversation in class about Eva's silence so closely reflected my own experience with silence and voice and agency, although my story varies so much from her's. Since my inability to engage in the text and in class, I have found a new determination to enter Eva's Man. Perhaps to test the edges of my learning; to look at where I struggle with reading and thinking and speaking as a survivor reading about a survivor. But also because I wonder about how teaching the book itself may elicit voice or impose silence.

Adrienne Rich’s “On Lies, Secrets, and Silence” posits an ideal of honesty in the global community of women. She asserts that a woman lying, under any circumstance, is a direct product of our inability to break free of the patriarchal shackles that hold all women, and that truth, pure unadulterated uncensored truth, is the necessary tool that women must wield for freedom. By truth telling we (read women) create a web of relationship politics that actively resists the default of relationships built upon lies, relationships that perpetuate the patriarchal norms under which we have always existed. Truth telling and honesty not only allow women to build meaningful relationships that resist normative structures but complexify and deepen relationships to be truly meaningful connections.

As we've discussed the Eva's silences in class, and whether those silences have been empowering, I've been wondering about the exact role of silence.

Specifically, I've found myself aksing whether as a woman in American society, you can be [viewed as?] powerful without have control over your own image.