Walled Women

The thing that struck me most about the last reading was the writer's devotion to God and how she understood this devotion to be essential to learning.  I'm so used to "separation of church and state" that being asked to "pray" as part of our class on Thursday caught me off guard.  As someone who is not religious, I wasn't really sure how to pray or what to expect in response if I don't believe there is a God.  At one point she discusses how difficult it is to learn from text alone rather than a teacher and says "yet I suffered these trial most gladly for the love of learning.  Oh, if only this had been done for the love of God, as was rightful, think what I should have merited!" (53).  I think this is so interesting because the general message I receive on Bryn Mawr campus is that learning for the sake of learning is one of the best/most admirable attitudes to have, but the writer of this piece is left feeling guilty for her personal love of learning because she feels as though she is being selfish and giving proper respect to God.  The writer's tone of humility or even unworthiness also struck me; she states "all that I have said can do no more than other that letter to you in recompense for the failure to apply myself which you must have inferred (and reasonably so) from my other writings." (45)  I wonder if this tone has to do with her religious beliefs, or her gender.  From what I gathered, she seemed highly educated and this was written at a time when women didn't have much access to education.

"Competing tendencies reside in a state of simultaneity: they are always at the same time separate and united, this and that...the Self is always at the same time both itself and other"-George Kalamaras

During our last silence exercise of our class this past week, I found myself pushing back on the silence. I found myself constantly wanting to analyze and critically think of Kalamaras' words in relation to silence. I found myself asking: "What is the goal of silence and how much of how silence is perceived, fueled by the "other" that the self "competes" with in a state of simultaneity?" I then found myself wondering whether the individual self has as much to do with how his/her silence is perceived. Can the self manipulate his/her environment in order to fuel her silence in a positive way? if so, what is necessary for this to happen?  

In our last class I was very struck first by our readings, and then by the last part of our class. It was the first time that I realized the difference between how Quakers and Catholics pray. When I go to church, it is usually accompanied with music, sermons, speeches, and lectures and just words in general. Words words words. Music music music. Even in silent prayer we're not silent because the priest leads us. This is very different from our practice on Thursday where we were each in charge with connecting with whatever it is that we wanted to connect with it. I find it very interesting that the Quakers sit in silence and wonder what such spiritual experience would feel like, to be in charge of making your own connection with God. 

...from yesterday that I don't want to forget:
"Just because they have life doesn't mean their life stops."
"What do I get by telling others that they are stuck?"
"Nobody's homework is done."

Paul Doherty, Water Waves Seen by Diffraction

How are you coming to understand women’s prisons and colleges as similar and/or different?  

When I first started researching for this project, I was going to study crime and punishment at Bryn Mawr, specifically rape culture at Bryn Mawr, and how victims and perpetrators of rape at Bryn Mawr have been treated and characterized in the history of the school. Given that Bryn Mawr is an all female institution of higher education, both cloistered in terms of gender and in terms of physical space, and taking into account recent conversation about how Bryn Mawr takes a caretaker role in its treatment of its female students, I thought this to be a very interesting topic to discuss in relation to the overarching topic of women in walled communities. However, as I conducted my research I realized that in order to really get an understanding of this I would have to get first hand accounts of incidents of rape in the history of the college as well as interview campus safety officials about their experiences with rape cases on campus; the aforementioned would be difficult given the lack of voice on the issue of rape among women in earlier times and the latter would require IRB approval. Given the time for this project, I realized this would not be possible.

The reading “How Offenders Transform Their Lives” kept reminding me of our discussion in Voice class today about GirlTime. Someone in class brought up how self-congratulatory many of the people in charge seemed about the program, and how that was a negative aspect because it seems to eliminate possibilities for the program to effectively critique itself and become better for the girls it was attempting to change. In addition, it was brought up that the program was supposed to be for those girls, not necessarily for the volunteers involved. However, I also thought that the reverse would have been equally negative, if not worse. If the women (teacher-artists) had maintained the position that they were the authority and the program had no effect on them, they would have reinforced a sense of hierarchy, a separation between the girls and their more “enlightened” positions. Positioning themselves as authority figures, they would have continued to perpetuate the sense that there was a fundamental difference between themselves and these girls. Doing this places even more importance in their authority, the necessity of having someone “in charge” who by the nature of their position, knows more than those they are intending to change. It sets up a dynamic of us/them, perpetuates the “normal” vs. “other” attitude that can be so damaging to how people chose to live their lives.

In Chapter 7 of the Little Book of Contemplative Photography, “Making Meaning”, Zehr talks the active nature of “receiving” in photography. He calls the still, non-contextualized image of a photo, chaos, and the photographer/interpreter is responsible for creating order/coherence. It is we who, frame, organize, and make meaning of the images we choose to photograph. This, of course, is a metaphor for our experience of the world. The objective world, although it does have its own functional order, does not have “meaning” without the imposition of human perspective. Is it an empowering concept—that people can decide what meaning they will derive from the world? We all do it, but we don’t all consciously or actively do it. It echoes this speech by David Foster Wallace called This Is Water, in which Wallace says that the value – the real value -- of our liberal arts educations is that we are given the tools to escape our crippling solipsism and – our lens of selfishness, and apply new, healthier, more productive lenses. Thus, in situations which inconvenience us, we can choose how to interpret them, and thus, how to react.

            The troubling thing is, not everyone can have a liberal arts education. Now everyone can take photos or make art. So how do you teach someone to feel empowered, independent, and autonomous about their lives and their ability to control and interpret their experiences? Especially when they are so systemically degraded…

Since I won't be in class this Thursday I am posting what I would (or let's be serious) would NOT have contributed to class. Anne asked me to post about what I would say in class and I don't know why I'm so nervous writing this. I think it's a combination of things that we've been discussing in class: silence, inaccessibility, language, taking risks. I just read the Kalamara's reading and I don't know if I fully understood it. There were parts of it that I would like to discuss because I felt like I could relate to it, but I'm nervous to discuss it here because I don't have the opportunity to hear other people in our class talk about it first so I can decide whether or not I actually got the point of the reading. It seemed fairly accessible to me until it brought up eastern religions and then I got confused. I don't get the feeling that this article was supposed to be as dificult to read compared to the other inaccessible readings we read together in class but I started to lose my understanding of the reading towards the end. Because I finished reading the article in a confused state, I am hesitant to explain how I understood it. What if I read it all wrong?! Perhaps this is a situation in which I realize that the little inaccessible parts of some of the readings we are assigned lead to me not contributing in class. I don't want to complain about it - I just choose to shut up.