EmmaBE's blog

i.

Meaning Meaning meaning meaning. Mean. ing. Mean inc, incorporation, collaboration, despair. A structure golden overarching there inside fat cats in wall street suits inside our own, love found on greasy fastfood floor in ball pits arches roman water? or sewers. gold money florins in our teeth, corn in cows reborn in cows in muscles ripping in our teeth, on our speech muscle

ii.

gertrudestein #mindblown if we could find these words our own. if we could find if we could find if we could find MY oversoul. community in death, but not in graveyards but not in bones but not but not but not community. community in life, in birth but not in past, in present future past spark of life of soul in mind in brain neural bridges hormones sparks of thought white light in synapses on bio tv screens. no screen nostalgia let it be let it be let it be scratches pages dirt and paper let it be let it be quills and let it be pigeon mites. forward surge, the alien of mind the text upon the screens the text within the quills NO surge force it forward the text upon the screens the text within the mind, white text white light spark of synapses NO the thoughts within the mind the thoughts upon the soul to talk with touch to taste your salt and KNOW cows lick salt and so do we.

iii.

matriarchal poetry. Poetry mothering, othering mothering taking. care

We spend our lives saturated with the ideas in media. We experience different types of media in varying degrees depending mostly on our positions in social power structures, but we all experience it. It is where the value system of our society is taught; it is where the foundations of our mythology our formed. Patriarchy is disseminated through media, where it affects the participants in and the audience of the media.

Because I was not in class on Tuesday, I thought I would complete the "mantrafesto" exercise for Sommers and Brown that y'all did in this post. 

Brown: Silence can be a space to fight against dominating power structures, and breaking silence in a confessional style can substitute a partial narrative of an identity for the whole narrative.

Sommers: Authors of narratives concerning their identity may reserve the right to keep silent about their experience - difference exists between groups and may be retained through silence.

I think Lorde disagrees with Brown and Sommers over the interpretation of silence - where Brown claims confessions that break silence are misinterpreted and are used as a substitute for a whole identity, Lorde claims that "what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood."

I really enjoyed talking about the way Eva's time was structured in the novel because it was a concept I hadn't connected with the book. I think that the way we experience time through Eva's eyes in the novel shows us a new kind of way to look at a life in retrospective. The way that each event in the book is somehow connected with what came before it shows Eva as a conglomeration of everything that has happened to her, a rolling snowball of events picking up mass and steam. She crips the reader's experienced time with the way she unreliably (non-normatively) narrates. She is, as we discussed in class, stuck - living all her life at once, and after she has been forced out of the productive timeline into prison, she will remain stuck. She is stuck not only in her cell or her self, but in the institutions that cyclically continue to abuse her, about which she remains silent.

About this time last year, I was being considered for the Posse scholarship. If I was awarded the scholarship, the Posse office in Houston would train me in workshops for developing leadership skills and then pay my tuition at Bryn Mawr for four years. And what was the purpose of this scholarship? In the Posse Foundation’s mission statement, they say they have three goals:

“1. To expand the pool from which top colleges and universities can recruit outstanding young leaders from diverse backgrounds.

2. To help these institutions build more interactive campus environments so that they can be more welcoming for people from all backgrounds.

3. To ensure that Posse Scholars persist in their academic studies and graduate so they can take on leadership positions in the workforce.”

When I got the scholarship, I was in the unique position of having to explain why a white Jewish girl was being offered money to diversify Bryn Mawr’s campus. Many of the other people with whom I’d been competing for my position in the program and who had assumed they had been rejected because they were not “diverse” (read: non-white) enough demanded an explanation.

I have been struggling since we talked about excessability to figure out how one can crip deadlines in a practical way that keeps the subjects of the deadline accountable. Is there a happy medium between excessability and normative time? With no consideration to how practical it would be for the enforcer of the deadline (for example, the teacher), the ideal situation for the subjects of the deadline (i.e., the students) seems to be for their deadlines to be determined on a case by case basis. But who can determine how long exactly it will take for a project to be completed other than the person completing the project? What if they’re wrong? It seems that everyone’s time would have to be ‘cripped’ somehow. Who even operates on normative time? No matter what system we use, are we to be entirely governed by the arbitrary?

We all read Kathy Acker’s essay “Seeing Gender”, which breaks down the essence of meaning (especially of gender) by questioning the process of mimesis in patriarchal language. In it she searches Lewis Carroll’s novel Through the Looking Glass for gender – but finds “only the reiterations, the mimesis of patriarchy, or my inability to be.” After reading it, I wondered – did she expect anything but a reflection, looking into a mirror? Carroll’s novel is a good example text to display the problems with patriarchal representations of gender, but I wondered if there was a text that addressed and/or transcended these problems.

Then we read Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel The Doll’s House, which offers a different way to look at gender – rather than in a mirror, through a dream. The Dream House, Morpheus’s realm, is a place of possibilities as infinite as our imaginations unlimited by social rules – some darker than we might expect. Gaiman’s dreams help us to see our psyche in a way that offers new insight on our anxiety about the roles in which we find ourselves in the waking world. They portray a self separate from social expectations of gender: a body, as Acker describes it.

While reading Persepolis, I struggled with the term “emancipation”. A religious man tells Satrapi that the veil she is forced to wear is emancipation – from the male gaze, leaving her free to worry about other things. But some women rebel against this ‘emancipation’ with things that attract the male gaze – makeup, hairstyles, tighter clothing, etc. It made me wonder: is it still rebellion if the women are rebelling by playing into their roles in a patriarchy? (to be more feminine, to please men, etc.) However, I have come to realize that emancipation is about freedom of choice and that these women were choosing to attract men when/because their society refused to let them do so, and that this is an act of rebellion.

I had always thought because I had made an effort to educate myself about gender, I had a basic grasp of the concept and its intersection with other identities. But since I’ve arrived at Bryn Mawr and learned more about the people around me and the way they understand gender and how they relate to gender, I have begun to realize that the way I learned about gender was still very normative and not at all inclusive. I have also realized that on a basic level, I have not at all challenged my own views on gender or what my gender really is. An expression of self, yes, but through what mediums and why? Am I only falling into the easiest, pre-assigned slot in the structures of a gendered society? Now I know that my journeys through gender (theoretical and personal) are only just beginning.

The picture I chose for my avatar is one that my friend drew of me. It’s very important to me because it shows me how I appear from her perspective. I have always been concerned with how others see me and let that shape my view of myself – in both negative and positive ways. If someone tells me I should wear my hair a certain way because it looks pretty, I agree with them and alter myself accordingly rather than offering and questioning my opinion of beauty. If someone tells me that I come off as standoffish or rude, I work hard to make sure that I appear friendlier when I’m around them. As I’ve grown as a person and formed a strong identity and opinions, I have slowly stopped shaping my behavior around others’ expectations, but it’s difficult to get past the initial urge of wanting to please. That urge is traditionally considered a feminine trait, so it’s hard for me as a cis woman and a feminist to reconcile that urge with the rest of me – is it from my own mind or part of the messages I’ve heard since birth from the heteronormative media? I think the reason why I value the picture I chose for my avatar so much is because I feel it looks like me – it is not a commentary on my appearance or behavior, but a glimpse into my personality.  It shows why the artist values me; it is an affirmation of my self and that which I should not change.