Precarious, Performative, Playful, Potential...Perspectives!

A student in my Bodies of Injustice class introduced me to a wonderful Canadian resource, HealthJusticeRadio.  Yesterday, they posted a new program about the limited education that medical students receive about LGBT health:

"This week on HJRC we talk gender identity, stigma, “passing” and pronouns with Dr. Carys Massarella. Dr. Massarella is President of the Medical Staff Association at St. Joseph’s hospital. She is a Assistant Clinical Professor in the emergency division at McMaster Medical school. She teaches transgender primary healthcare to students, residents, and family doctors. Dr. Massarella is an outspoken advocate for accessible, and accepting, trans healthcare."

It also includes a link to a recent article published in JAMA.

A number of us talked after class tonight as doing some kind of litany for our final performance.  Just wanted to make a post for us to throw up our ideas, so we can form into groups or come to consensus on one joint project.

I'll start.  I was thinking about reworking Eve Ensler's "I'm Over It" piece, since we as a class o[pointed out so many weaknesses and assumptions in the work.  I thought it might be cool to create our own list of "Over-its", about sexual assault or another issue (although I envisioned sexual assault myself.)  These would strive to address previously posed critiques, and any new ones we might have.  I thought it would be neat to once again have everyone read aloud the piece (yay class participation.)  If this were the case, I think we should post a trigger warning on Serendip/ make explicit what we are going to do before we start.  Maybe we could be right after break to allow for more a more graceful exit of anyone who doesn't want to participate (more snacks for them!)

Anyhoo, that's my two cents.

http://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index.php/cdd/announcement/view/89

Call for Papers: Volume 4 Critical Disability Discourse (CDD)

York University’s Critical Disability Studies Graduate Student Program launched an academic journal in November 2009. Critical Disability Discourse is a bilingual, interdisciplinary journal, publishing articles that focus on experiences of disability from a critical perspective. The journal considers articles from graduate scholars in a variety of academic fields, but undergraduate students, activists, and community members/organizers are also invited to contribute. Critical Disability Discourse's goals are to provide emerging scholars an opportunity to contribute to the expanding field of critical disability studies and to gain exposure for their work in the public sphere.

Possible topics can include but are not limited to the following:

• Critical theory and disability: feminism, post-modernism, postcolonial theory, transnational analysis, Marxism, etc.
• History of disability: Antiquity, Middle Ages, Victorian Age, Industrial Age, etc.
• Law and public policy, and disability
• Qualitative and quantitative research pertaining to disability
• Education and disability
• Culture: disability-related popular culture, television, videos, blogs, arts, literature and film analysis

The more time that I spend in this class, the more I realize how applicable what we talk about it. Although my sister did not appreciate my musings about gender inequalities and expectations of sexual favors when we went to see Footloose, I continue to connect what we learn in class to my life in the greater world. Most recently, I have been thinking about gender's relationship with death. I find it very interesting that death, assuming that a funeral is a closed-casket funeral, is gender-neutral. When born, one is immediately labeled "boy" or "girl", then swaddled appropriately in either a pink or a blue blanket. On the carpet in kindergarten, we are separated into "boys on the left", "girls on the right". Day camp groups are 3GB (3rd grade, boys, group B) or 3GB (3rd grade, girls, group B). There are all-boys high schools and all-girls high schools. And the list continues. Throughout life we are asked to separate ourselves into the appropriate blanket, side of the carpet, and camp group. In each stage of life, there is really only one group in which you can sort yourself. If you're a "pink blanket", you're fated for the 3GB group and the women's college. Unless, of course, you make a conscious decision to switch groups at some point. And yet, in death, none of these divisions and labels matter. Tomb stones are not decided by gender. Men don't get bigger tomb stones, women prettier tomb stones. A coffin is a coffin, whether the individual buried inside of it was a "blue blanket" or a "pink blanket".

"Everyone wants to make a difference, Sarah, but there's a time and place." (233)

I'm learning many things from this course. Perhaps the most meaningful thing I've been asked to consider thus far is the moral imperative of precarity. Or, the responsibility I have toward other humans in precarious situations of ensuring that I am as dedicated to change as they are. Or, in the words of Juan Segundo, "Unless we agree that the world should not be the way it is … there is no point of contact, because the world that is satisfying to us is the same world that is utterly devastating to them." Or, the importance of connections and of making a difference.

Another concept I've been presented with is the notion that there is concreteness neither of time nor of place, that my thoughts and actions echo resoundingly from the before and into the after and overlap so as to make distinctions of before and after quite impossible to make out. The issue is not causality, then, "no longer ensuring the fulfillment of certain aims but setting in place a set of conditions for justice, flexibility, and responsiveness." (Welch 24)

"I do not need to tell this story to anyone else. Thank you for saving me, Sarah." (257)

"We won't ever give up on Little Bee. Because she is a part of our family now. And until she is happy and safe, then I don't think we will be either." (261)

I missed part of last class to attend the screening of Paris is Burning with the director, Jennie Livingston. I have loved Paris is Burning since the first time I saw it as a freshman, and have found it to be a powerful look into the lives of a community that is well-known as being underground (for the sake of safety) and not normally entered by outsiders. Imagine my surprise to find that the director, Jennie Livingston, was a white Jewish woman from a middle class background.

Honestly, until then, I hadn't thought about it: I had just assumed that the documentary was made by someone with an emic perspective. But, when an audience member asked Livingston to address the criticisms made by bell hooks in "Is Paris Burning?" she didn't have much to say. She hadn't realized that, for a brief moment, her face could be seen in the mirror while she was interviewing Dorian Corey, a well-known and well-respected performer in the Ballroom scene: she had intended to be absent from the film, and had assumed that the documentary that she had presented had been based on raw data that she had culled: how could someone else have presented this any differently?

I wasn't able to be in class last Tuesday, which I was especially disappointed about after our class on 11/15. I've read the class talking notes and people's blog posts, and there are a couple people I want to respond to, and a couple points I want to make in general.

I left class two weeks ago feeling totally drained - not only because of the things we'd talked about, many of which touch me deeply - rape&sexual assault, Ensler's Huffington Post piece, activism - but also because I felt totally unprepared to be talking about such things so publicly, and also, to be honest, pretty offended. I'm not trying to speak for others here, but I thought that it was grossly inappropriate to take a student's quote from this website and have them read it aloud in class without any warning. As some students (and Kaye) have already pointed out, to say something out loud, in public, is completely different from writing it (semi-anonymously?) online. I felt that in some ways, a community was created as a result - but I also think that it was very insensitive. Kaye acknowledged that if she and Anne had warned us beforehand that we would be discussing rape&sexual assault, people may not have shown up, or had their guard up. It doesn't matter. That's our right.

A theme that I've started to see throughout this course is just how entangled we all are as human beings. After reading and listening to Barad, I wasn't completely convinced of this. Now that we have read Farmer and Butler who write about an "increasingly interconnected world" (Farmer) and how we undo each other (Butler), I feel like I can solidify my thoughts.

I am intrigued at the call to arms that Farmer and Butler both seem to encourage. While Farmer is not as explicit with his call, Butler definitely is. But I have found flaws with both of their arguments. The basis of their demand for more social work seems to stem from their assertions that all human beings are intertwined, entangled and interconnected. But I'm not quite convinced that we are.