Reply to comment

My choice in menu items, this evening, is rather selfish. I have two criteria for choosing topics:
Flavor: It must be something I'm interested in.
Variety: It must be something I have not discussed in depth in another academic setting.

Here are my suggestions:
ONE: A class trip to one of the fantastic-looking presentations at this Gender, War and Militarism Conference. Some of the highlights on the program for me include:

Session 6: Gender, War, Media
Chair: Katherine Sender, Assistant Professor of Communications, Annenberg School, UPenn
1. Matters of Life and Death: Debating Militarization and Gender in the New Eritrea, Victoria Bernal, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of California, Irvine
2. A Fresh Crop of Human Misery: Representations of Bosnian "War Babies" in the Global Print Media, 1991-2006, R. Charli Carpenter, Assistant Professor of International Affairs, University of Pittsburgh
3. Fireman Fetishes and Drag King Dreams: Queer Responses to September 11, Deborah Cohler, Assistant Professor of Women' s Studies, San Francisco State University

Session 4: Rape, Violence, Torture
Chair: Heather Sharkey, Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, UPenn
1. Rape as Marker and Erasure of Difference: Darfur and the Nuba Mountains (Sudan), Sondra Hale, Professor of Anthropology and Women' s Studies, University of California, Los Angeles
2. Wars of Attrition: How Men Get Away with Rape, Liz Kelly, Professor of Sexualized Violence and Director of the Child and Woman Abuse Studies Unit, London Metropolitan University
3. The Body as Border, Julie Mostov, Associate Vice Provost for International Programs and Associate Professor of Politics, Drexel University
4. Variation in Sexual Violence during War: The Relative Absence of Sexual Violence by some Non-state Actors, Elisabeth Jean Wood, Professor of Political Science, Yale University and Research Professor at the Santa Fe Institute

My logic for the inclusion of each lecture in the conference is different. But, I generally find it important to be exposed to a wide variety of intellectuals doing interesting work. My hope is that these discussions will be as good in person as they look on paper. The variety of topics in this conference is breath-taking to me. I don't want to miss it. I am a bit concerned about the fact that the majority of conference presenters work as professors at American Universities, possibly reducing the diversity of the type of work being presented. But despite that possible limitation, I still think a visit to the conference would add a very different and I think useful experience to our coursework.

TWO: An in depth (1-2 weeks) survey of womanist writers. Perhaps this could include, as Anne suggested to me earlier, a comparison with bell hooks' feminism? I find it incredibly important that womanist texts, especially their valid critiques of certain 1st & 2nd wave feminist assumptions, be included in our study of feminism criticism.

THREE: An in depth (1-2 weeks) survey of feminist work in disabilities studies. I know that this is an incredibly vague suggestion since so many texts could fall into this category. Sadly, I am not as familiar with them as I'd like to be. I only know that the talks at a Disabilities Studies conference I attended at Haverford last spring helped me understand concepts of the body and agency more than any previous text. And, as far as I can tell, these texts are often not included in any sort of mainstream canon.

There are other topics, of course, I'm interested in reading about. But these are the first three that popped into my head and wouldn't go away.

I also want to briefly record my reaction to Lauter. I loved the last two sentences of his essay. But I had so many, many difficulties with how he GOT there. I couldn't help but bristle at his anecdote about feminists not critiquing properly; his essay, even though I enjoyed much of the content, seemed to be saying: Oh there you go again, silly female feminists. I know you're trying to do your feminism. But just listen to (masculine) me and I'll tell you how to do it right. I wished that Lauter had reflected on the possible resonances behind his masculine privilege while writing.

Also, I don't get what's wrong with Spivak. I kind of enjoyed her writing style.