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

& musings on "science" writing.

taking advantage of fall break to read extracurricularly, but---so much resonance with our course in egan's novel, including...

opening passage from Proust In Search of Lost Time with echoes of Eli Clare and "memory palaces":
"Poets claim that we recapture for moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth.  But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success.  It is in ourselves that we should rather seek to find those fixed places, contemporaneous with different years."

(p168-9)  a reporter writes about his 40-minute lunch with a celebrity and brings in Karen Barad:  "--but the throbbing just beneath that surface is the waiter's hysterical recognition of my subject's fame.  And with a simultaneity that can only be explained using principles of quantum mechanics, specifically, the properties of so-called entangled particles, that same pulse of recognition reaches every part of the restaurant at once, even tables so distant from ours that there is simply no way they can see us."  (The footnote continues to play with the idea of entangled particles.)

(p234-309)  Chapter 12 (written by a 12-year old girl about herself, her autistic13-year old brother, and their parents) is in the mode of powerpoint slides!  Particularly interesting to me is the exchange on p253 about the value of using new expressive media: 

...are now accessible from this page. A number of you had tagged them to appear here, in this forum, but I thought they were sorta clogging things up/slowing down the conversation, so I re-tagged them to appear over there. Please feel free to go read and comment on one another's explorations--there's lots of interesting stuff going on over there!

I was fascinated by the concept of “cryptic choice” introduced in the video “Nature: What Females Want…and What Males Will Do.” Female red-sided garter snakes are rendered immobile by males competing to inseminate her. They have, however, evolved a means of defense against forced copulation: they can choose which of the snake’s sperm will fertilize their eggs. Another example of “cryptic choice” is seen in ducks’ reproductive systems: they twist opposite ways to make reproduction more difficult. A third of ducks’ copulations are forced, but they produce only 3% of the young. Explained the narrator, “Evolution has given females the edge.” Last week, my psychology-major roommate sent me an article called “Women’s Avoidance of Rape” which, like the video, acknowledged that “Sexual coercion and rape have been documented in many different species.”

Full episodes of "What Females Want" and "What Males Will Do"
(the Nature videos Kaye has asked us to watch for our discussion on Tuesday night)
are available on-line @
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/episodes/what-females-want/video-full-episode/5371/
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/episodes/what-males-will-do/video-full-episode/5374/

Here is a link to an article explaining the circumstances of the youtube video entitled "Jonathan's Cochlear Implant Activation 8 mo., Rt Ear cont'd"

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1283703/Moment-deaf-baby-Jonathan-hears-mothers-voice-time.html

I find this really interesting in terms of disability studies, I know it can be a dangerous game to look at the comments on youtube videos/websites, but even just a quick glance at the top few were pretty generative in terms of discussion:

"How ironic that 8months ago this boy could have been aborted if it were known he was deaf, apparently considered a serious disability. And here we have him receiving treatment from doctors as if they are life savers. When they could have been killing him behind closed doors not so long ago & we would never have known about it. He is an human being first & foremost, has been since fertilisation. These people are not gods, they have not 'given him back his life' just given him a new sense. A lot of deaf people feel very angry & alienated because of peoples ignorant views about deafness."

"99 people are blind.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2011/09/29/140915714/congratulations-television-you-are-even-worse-at-masculinity-than-femininity

"It really takes some effort to match television's historically disastrous relationship with femininity, but at this point, I'm prepared to say it: Right at this moment, I'm more comfortable with what scripted television thinks being a woman means than I am with what scripted television thinks being a man means.

I'm fascinated with media/television portrayal of gender and sexuality. But I'm not familiar with any of these shows - have you guys seen them? What do you think?

I was doing reading for another class of mine, Body Politics with Professor of Hist. of Art Lisa Saltzman, and I noticed an incredible amount of references to utopias etc etc.

This piece is by Maud Lavin on Dada Arist Hannah Hoch and her conception of Weimar Germany's, "New Woman" through her photocollages. Starting on page 338 at the top and continuing onto the next page where the article ends the text is ripe with entagled gen/sex themes from our course.

I attached the pdf. below in case some of you were interested. But to start you off here a Lavin quote from the article...

pg 338 "Hoch created alienating effects by using the practice of photomontage to juxtapose the beautiful and the ugle, the feminine and the masculine, the witty and violent. Hers was a disquieting mix of utopianism and anxiety."

A chance to hear other scholars discuss the intra-actions among gender, sexuality, and other fields.  This Friday, September 30, at UPenn 1:30-6:30 in the Benjamin Franklin Room of Houston Hall. 

From their website:  The Symposium will examine the fields of feminist and queer studies and their intersections with each other and with topics in race, nationalism, empire, and class. The afternoon will begin with a conversation between Professor Heather Love, University of Pennsylvania, and Professor Ann Cvetkovich, University of Texas at Austin. Ann is the author of Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture and Victorian Sensationalism (Rutgers, 1992) and An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Culture (Duke, 2003).