juliah's blog

We built a graveyard. Plaster and wood were manipulated until they resembled the demolished façade of a building. We put people there, too. People playing people—pedestrians, faces you see every day. We created a world besieged by tragedy, modeled after a very real decimation. The Bi-Co Theater Program at Bryn Mawr College’s production of “Antigone” took the infamous play by Sophocles and made it relevant in a post-9/11 world. For this production, I worked as the Assistant Costume and Set Designer, helping bring to life Director Catharine Slusar’s greater goal: to question where, how and if humanity exists after violence. Throughout the production, we continually sought ways to better represent the horror, the catastrophic events which have altered so many people’s world. To accomplish this, we confronted death; death became our facination. We scrutinized it in the faces of those in the very throes of death, and in the faces of those looking on. Death became a motif—which leads me to wonder, where is the compassion[i] in that?

The intimate gesture of touch can convey caring and concern or, just as easily, dominance and disrespect. Micro-level interactions, be they handshakes or long-term relationships, affect and sustain macro-level institutions of dominance. Despite the fact that body integrity is vital to one's sense of autonomy, kyriarchal systems have a history of appropriating bodies, and continue to do so as a way of systematically securing supremacy. In her essay, “Violence, Mourning, Politics,” theorist Judith Butler makes a call to reclaim the body in an effort to combat kyriarchal establishments. She asserts that violence, from blatant genocide to interpersonal cruelty, reinforces itself through a process of making the recipient “unreal”. This violence, and it is violence regardless of form, is not limited to women, or even humans for that matter. The perpetrators, however, excuse their actions by deeming their victims as unworthy, to the point that “the very bodies for which (the victims of violence) struggle are not quite ever only (their) own.” (26) Through this process, Butler maintains that when “the violence is done against those who are unreal, then, from the perspective of violence, it fails to injure or negate those lives since those lives are already negated.” (33) These arguments are the framework for her theories on derealization, or the act of stripping someone or something of its individual worth in order to grant oneself impunity and to justify acts of cruelty in order to preserve power.

This is mostly unrelated, but I just love the cadence of the story (you really should listen to the author read it in the first link, or read it aloud to yourself from the second), and any excuse to share it is good enough for me. We spoke a lot about death in two ways today--a dead body in itself, and the legacies we adopt and leave. This story speaks to that slightly, and though it does assume normative time, and only references the binary, I personally love the thought behind it. There is a casual acceptance of beliefs of all kinds that I appreciate. I have thought deeply about my personal beliefs on death, life, the soul, and this story’s harmonizing language resonates with me. Again, not exactly related to class, but hey, who doesn’t love a good short story?

Link to the audio (they talk for a while before she actually reads her story, but it happens towards the beginning):

http://www.radiolab.org/story/298146-trouble-everything/

Link to the text:

http://hannahhartbeat.blogspot.com/2013/06/a-history-of-everything-including-you.html

During our discussion, I mentioned a TED talk in which a woman discusses her feminism in relation to that of her mother's. This is one woman's definition of feminism. A new revolution, in my opinion, is happening--maybe one piece to fill the space left after Brown's feminism.

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?

Lately it seems as though a consciousness raising has been happening regarding preconceived thoughts on certain areas of language and associations. One area in particular has peaked my interest--a general fear of the term "feminist". A recent Jezebel article, to which I have posted the link below, highlights a deeply misplaced rejection of that term by current public figures. "Feminist" has moved from being a word used to describe politically active, socially aware people to one invoking images of angry, man-hating monsters hell-bent on shrieking at any innocent, simply to cause a scene. Society has fueled a negative bias against the term, and it has infected many, impeding on the cause. One of the first times I became aware of such an apprehension was while talking with a close friend from home. Since I met her in middle school, she has always wanted to be a pilot in the air force; currently, she is on the path to doing so. During our discussion, she mentioned that she doesn't consider herself a feminist, because "women are basically equal", and that feminists are "too aggressive" for her. She didn't even realize her ability to peruse her chosen career is entirely due to the feminist movement, let alone the fact that the current military system is still profoundly kyriarchal and, frankly, dangerous for many women/minorities, and that feminist work is necessary to combat such issues.

On the surface, Arizona’s ground is purely gravel, beneath is sticky clay and rock-hard white lime. It’s a cruel combination yielding to only the toughest and most determined, and even those somehow able to sink a root must fight for their lives under blistering sun and cloudless sky. Trying to forge a home in the desert can lead to exhaustion and hopelessness, so I readily admit to a certain degree of masochism behind my love for a place that seems, on its surface, to be the antithesis of life and nurture. Growing up in Arizona, I learned to crave the searing burn of sun on my skin, the way my nostrils stung with deep breaths of the dusty, desiccated air, but I didn’t want to belong. I watched my neighbors’ futile attempts to maintain even the sparsest of green lawn, only to become despondent as they turned to hay despite the wasted and wasteful gallons of precious water streaming from their hoses. My love for the Sonoran Desert was hardly immediate; for many years I viewed the barren landscape as a personification of my own inner despondency. I yearned to leave – rejecting the land was infinitely easier that trying to put down roots. When I did leave, however, I felt the ache of displacement immediately. I had unwittingly sunk root into ground that had once seemed impenetrable and I have discovered that beneath the rocks and clay laid a varied and complex soil that has managed, despite my protestations, to feed a soul I never acknowledged.

In class on Thursday, during our modified version of the “Question” activity, as well as during the new “Statement” exercise, my group identified one overarching concern: not one of us “answered” the questions, or even made a succinct, declarative statement in response to the issue at hand. We seemed utterly incapable of distilling a broad question (like mine, “Where does gender begin?”) into a concise, concrete statement. All of the responses merely bloated the issue at hand with nebulous words such as “universe” invading almost everyone’s question series. Our responses were also riddled with shaky, timid statements that could easily be retracted, or our words were hedged with disclaimers. Why is this? Why are we seemingly (I am noting my inability to write fully declarative sentences here, as I automatically used a weak word like “seemingly”) unable to make decisive statements and stand behind them? Why are we afraid of answering our own questions?

As my friends love to point out, I talk about my hometown of Phoenix, Arizona, well, a lot. It was especially intense when I first arrived at Bryn Mawr as a frosh last year, but I was honestly taken aback when this was first pointed out. You see, I spent most of my time in high school working with the express purpose of getting out of "this place", so the idea that I might actually miss it catapulted me into a sort of mini-identity crisis (no matter how melodramatic that sounds). I had never felt at home in Arizona, differing greatly from the majority of my friends on ideological issues, and I thought of going to a liberal-minded college as my ticket out of what sometimes seems like the breeding ground for unstable racist bigots. Once I realized this foreign longing, however, I began to see my state in a new light. I had held so much resentment toward what are merely ideas, and now I am starting to realize that I can love Arizona for its parts, not necessarily as a whole. This picture highlights that idea: I care deeply for and about components of Arizona, and am trying to focus on them. I don’t mean to suggest that I am ignoring the pieces that infuriate me (which is still a good chunk), but this newfound acceptance actually motivates me to fight back for my state, instead of running away.