samuel.terry's blog

I have throughout my education questioned the productivity of inserting the personal, the narrative, the emotion in classrooms and academia as a whole.  In a world populated by so many social ills it seems extraordinarily selfish to be obsessed with the self. In “The Long Goodbye: Against Personal Testimony, or An Infant Grifter Grows Up” Linda S Kauffman echoes this thought and asserts, “writing about yourself does not liberate you, it just shows how ingrained the ideology of freedom through self-expression is in our thinking” (269).  This is the same issue that Wendy Brown explores in her essay “Freedom’s Silences” in her analysis of “compulsory discursivity” as it relates to the current cultural obsession with persona testimonies. This “compulsory discursivity” has an amazing ability to co-opt and appropriate narratives of victimization. Brown wisely warns against casting silence as the opposite of speech, and uses Foucault’s insight into the paradoxical and ambiguous workings of silence to show how silence can be a barrier against power and a vehicle of power. The vehicle of power is potentially making the political personal, which is what Kauffman concludes when she writes,

      I read this book Economies of Desire: Sex and Tourism in Cuba and the Dominican Republic by Amalia Cabazas and I felt like was a really great example of feminism unbound. Cabazas discusses how all-inclusive leisure resorts owned by transnational corporations and placed within developing countries on the “pleasure periphery” are a product of structural adjustment policies. Structural adjustment policies are defined by deregulation, austerity measure, and the removal of trade barriers all mandated by the strings attached to loans from the IMF and the World Bank.  These policies are premised on the development ethic of the “Washington Consensus” which asserts that macroeconmic growth will redistribute or “trickle down” to the poor and thus alleviate poverty and social inequality. What has been found throughout the world is that this ethic is faulty, rather structural adjustment is a form of neocolonialism wherein the third world is further exploited for resources and labor; populations remain dependent on transnational corporations for sub-par employment and are unable to develop a local economy that can compete within the global market. These resorts while simultaneously homogenizing the leisure experience in a way that eliminates cultural specificity/ authenticity, commercialize the “otherness” and exoticism of these locations and their people. Part of this commercialization is a corporate sexualization of women-workers. Indigenous women become another object to be consumed in the commodity chain of pleasure.

So I was really struck today by Edward Said’s call for “willed homelessness.” When we went around the circle others seemed to echo Said’s idea, agreeing that there can be complacency in security. However, I can’t help but rebel against this idea of “willed homelessness.” It feels paradoxical. There is nothing desirable or chosen about being homeless. There is nothing romantic about sleeping on park benches, or buses, or trains, or floors, or random couches. There is nothing exciting about sneaking in friends houses long past parents go to bed so you can find something to eat. There is nothing fun about brushing your teeth in library bathrooms, showering in locker rooms, hiding a duffel bag in the bushes before you go to school. This isn’t learning through being unsettled this is surviving in a world that is actively telling you that you don’t belong here. Sure, I believe in travel, adventure, and exploration, as methods to grow but to call that homelessness is to demonstrate the extraordinary privilege of never knowing what it’s like to not have someone to call along the journey, a porch light on somewhere waiting for you to return. 

Link to Radiolab Podcast "Words":  http://www.radiolab.org/2010/aug/09/

In our discussion on Thursday, Anne pulled some lines from "Seeing Gender" that talked about "imagining language as a place of possibility, as opposed to a simple scripted repersentation;" we talked about signs and signifiers, repersentations and mimicry and related it all back to gender. This conversation reminded me of a podcast I listened to a while back called "Words". (I have conveniently linked the podcast above and I highly suggest you listen to it right now!). I relistened to it and thought about it in the context of gender. The general theme of the piece is, what do words do for us? are they neccasary? can you think without them? It's fitting that in each of these questions the word "words" could be replaced with the word "gender" and you could have an equally revolutionary conversation. Both socially constructed things seem so essential to life in our ability relate to ourselves and others. I'm currently struggling to articulate many of the thoughts I have and I'm hesitant to come to conclusions before others (I hope) have a chance to engage with the podcast but here are a couple preliminary reactions:

When contemplating the image I wanted for my avatar the first thing I knew beyond a doubt was that it was not going to be a picture of myself. I hate pictures, in fact I resist them at all costs. If by some misfortune I find myself the subject of one I never know what to do, do I smile? teeth or no teeth? Is my hair alright? where do my hands go? should I stand closer to this person next to me? Do I look sufficiently happy? Do I pass as male? I have discovered, especially in college, that in an age obsessed with capturing "moments" my aversion to pictures is not always practical. I mean it didn't happen if you can't see it on facebook, right? But I digress. The image I chose instead I did so because it reminds me of a quote I have forever captured on my body: luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. For me, this avatar and the tatoo it accompanies are a constant reminder that our bodies--the physical matter-- are just vessels for the light that is inherent in us all. It is through this idea that I have come to terms with a lot of internal and external revulsion-- and the violence that can accompany such revulsion--that has been associated with my body and bodies like mine.