Week 10--Further Expansion and Refinement?

The reading for Thursday's class I found to be very powerful and kind of disturbing. I have decided that I will probably major in anthropology, and I found it interesting that the piece was written by an anthropologist. A key role of the anthropologist in observing a community is not to impose your own beliefs or understanding of the world on the group. You are supposed to simply watch, and understand that there really is no "sameness" in the world, just variations. "But to attribute 'sameness' across vast social, economic, and cultural divides is a serious error for the anthropologist, who must begin, although cautiously, from a respectful assumption of difference" (355). I tried to act as an anthropologist in reading this material, and I definitely had a hard time. I always assumed motherhood and that unique bond between a mother and child as being universal and surpassing cultural barriers. This piece showed me that environmental factors can have an effect on even this love which I thought to be unshakeable.

I found the phrase "passive euthanasia" used on page 365 to be especially powerful. I found that it reflected much of the attitude toward these babies. It was not always an outward act of abuse committed on these babies, but passive action, which can sometimes be just as bad. Scheper-Hughes claims malicious child abuse is extremely rare in this area. However, I think it is possible to view this passive act of ignoring the baby's health and well-being at such a young age as being malicious in some senses.

It is still hard for me to grapple with this topic of mothers not always having an unconditional bond of love with their child. I think the author provides a sufficient explanation that makes me understand the situation more on page 402. "To give birth to many children and on the expectation that only a few will survive infancy, to invest selectively in those considered the 'best bets' for survival" (402).

 A VOTE FOR: Toni Morrison, Beloved.  A novel based on a life of a real woman – a slave, Margaret Garner. Morrison writes about slavery, sexual abuse, traumatic memories, and the strange existence of slave/woman/mother/daughter/human. Utterly readable (and beautiful), but complicated, and told from a female perspective. And it won a Nobel Prize!  

I haven’t read these, but I’d like to: Isabel Allende, The House of Spirits. (a transgenerational story of Latin American post-colonial political upheavals… My friend says this is her favorite book and that the narrative revolves around the experiences of women). For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf, Ntozake Shange (a play structured as a series of twenty poems performed by women – some themes addressed are love, abandonment, rape, abortion)  

A VOTE AGAINST: Anything by Jane Austen or Virginia Woolf. They are the “token women” of the canon – they’ve already got enough people reading them.

As of right now, I can think of a few books that would fit in great with this class:

--Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K LeGuin. It's a scifi novel about a planet in which all of its inhabitants are physically genderless, and then develop genitalia for a certain time of the month for mating. A human male travels to the planet to act as an ambassador, and it's his sense of gender versus theirs. There are other issues in the book as well, such as politics, religion, and knowledge vs ignorance,  but the gender is a HUGE part. I loved reading it, especially considering that the extreme majority of characters in the novel believe that having a "permanent gender," like the ambassador, is a disorder, almost something to pity.

--What Happened to Lani Garver by Carol Plum-Ucci.  Yeah, this is a Young Adult fiction novel, but it's pretty amazing. It takes place in a very small town, and the school receives a new transfer student, Lani Garver, who seems to defy every category people use to classify others - gender, sexuality, and age in particular. It's narrated by an "almost-popular girl" who befriends Lani, and is taught to completely change her outlook on life and realize that not everything is so easily labelled. The ending (which is revealed in the prologue, actually) is very heavy, though. 

-- Orlando by Virginia Woolf. I actually just finished reading this the other day, and it was fantastic. It's a fictional biography of Orlando, a boy who lives during Elizabethan times, and keeps on living to the present day (well, 1928). Orlando's gender also changes halfway through. Woolf is hilarious and talks a lot about how Orlando acts and thinks in each gender, and other societal commentary. She's... amazing. 

It is interesting that we use Serendip, yet we have never seen/read anything other than traditional books in the course. In many ways, Serendip serves as an online text for the course. Thus, I would highly reccomend exploring feminism/identity in a different medium--in a movie. First, I wanted to second Julia's suggestion of Born into Brothel's.

Another one of my sugestions is the movie Fire, a film I made reference to in a previous posting. Fire is a film my Mira Nair, a highly controversial movie director. I think Nair's film is one that will contribute a great deal to our discussion of what it is like to deter from traditional gender roles (costs? benefits?) as well as, more explicitly, lesbian love. Since we are currently in the "international" facet of feminism/identity, I think the movie (about south asian women) will contribute to the expansiveness of feminism that we, or at least I was, were introduced to by starting with Latina feminism.

One element of Devi's story that stuck out at me was the idea of a women's identity being formed by her motherhood. In the very first paragraph, Devi writes that "Jashoda was a mother by profession" (222).  The idea of someone being a mother by profession seems very limiting.  Why does motherhood need to be a profession?  It is true that there are many women who want to stay home and be a mother, which is a completely acceptable choice.  But women can have other professions besides being a mother.  

In discussing the effect that a liberal journal would have on the women of the town, Kangali says that "'the moment wife, or mother, or sister reads that paper...she'll say 'I'm a woman!  Not a mother, not a sister, not a wife'" (230).  I believe that this was one of the basic beliefs of second wave feminism, the idea that women did not need to stay home and take care of the kids, that they had worth outside of the house.  However, one of the challenges of a modern feminism, and a new definition of feminism, is making it okay to stay home as a mother, just as it is okay to work outside of the house.  I feel like this is often a challenge that is raised at women's colleges, where women are trained to go out into the world.  Can a women be progressive, liberal, and feminist and still be a mother and stay in the home?

One idea for a text that we could read is Middlemarch, as we discussed it in the begining of the course with regards to Middlesex.  I would also be interested in reading some theory, both dealing with "traditional" feminism, and ways to define new feminism - although I realize that this is a lot of what we have been doing.

On a completely different note, I just watched the movie of Persepolis and would highly recommend it. 

There are some texts that I consider to be fairly canonical because I've had to read them, or their authors, for various classes: Chopin's The Awakening; Austen's Pride & Prejudice; anything by Willa Cather, or by Virginia Woolf, if we want to revisit her. There's also The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood. Un Lun Dun and the books in the His Dark Materials trilogy are all young adult fantasy novels written by men that feature female heroines; it might be interesting to look at portrayals of girls in male-authored texts. Un Lun Dun (by China Miéville) is very funny and would be a light-hearted way to end the semester. On the other hand, Caryl Churchill's Cloud 9 (a play) does some very interesting things with gender/sexuality/identity that might be a nice culminationto the course.

That's all I've come up with from scanning my library, but I'll post again if I think of others.