Naming the Silence

Notes towards Day 13 of
Critical Feminist Studies

Naming the Silence:
Moving from Susan Stryker to Sor Juana

"...que se etienda que el callar no es no haber que decir,
sino no caber en las voces lo mucho que hay que decir/
One must name the silence, so that what it signifies may be understood."

Reporting on my own visit to the
Susan B. Anthony Memorial Unrest Home:
a dance of welcome and exclusion....

ON SILENCE:
"que se etienda que el callar no es no haber que decir, sino no caber en las voces lo mucho que hay que decir/ One must name the silence, so that what it signifies may be understood." (43)

"si no es interviniendo vuestros prespectos, lo que es por mi defensa nunca tomare la pluma/Unless your instructions intervene, I shall never in my own defense take up the pen again" (97).

"'y que no es solo para ellas taceant,' si no para todos los que no fueren muy aptos/'Let [them] keep silence' was meant not only for women, but for all those who are not very competent" (83).

V. RELEVANCE OF THESE MUSINGS TO OUR VISIT WITH SUSAN STRYKER?
my impatience w/ your silences: name them--and their sources?

llauher: Stryker's texts and presence in class were really awe-inspiring.

Linda Kauffman warned us about: personal testimony as conversation stopper....

Were we expecting SS to make herself known without putting our selves @ risk?

Were we handing authority over to SS? Handing speech over to SS? Handing sight over to SS?

Is silence a space for processing sight? Were you choosing silence in order to see?

What did you see?

YJ: All during class I felt pretty guilty, especially after she began talking about everyone's need to gender (or misgender) her because I too felt the urge to box her into some "knowable" category. It made me feel terrible to realize just how tied I am to these social constructs, this gender binary. As much as I would like to consider myself this liberal feminist, I still can't seem to ever step away from those social norms pertaining to gender and sexuality, not even for a moment. Since Stryker is actually the first transgendered person I've ever met, it was the first time I think I really felt how powerful I've been socialized to perceive others in a certain way.

llauher: There are (at least) two members of this course who also identify as transgender. :)

VI. What are the "marks of gender" (Susan Stryker's phrase) that each of us looks for, that each of us "reads," as we encounter one another? How do we recognize gender? What clues are we given to read against our expectations, and how attentive are we to those markers? How important is it, that we attend to one another in this way?

Let's talk about revising the script "written on the body..."

VII. How Stryker, Sor Juana and Anzaldua answer these questions:

"The transsexual body is an unnatural body. It is the product of medical science. It is a technological construction. It is flesh torn apart and sewn together again in a shape other than that in which it was born. In these circumstances, I find a deep affinity between myself as a transsexual woman and the monster in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Like the monster, I am too often perceived as less than fully human due to the means of my embodiment; like the monster's as well, my exclusion from human community fuels a deep and abiding rage in me that I, like the monster, direct against the conditions in which I must struggle to exist. " (Susan Stryker, "My Words to Victor Frankenstein")

Why was Sor Juana silenced?

"I have been persectued...because of my love for learning and letters" (71).

"I brought myself with me, and brought my greatest enemy in my inclination to study" (51).

"Nothing could I see without reflecting upon it, nothing could I hear without pondering it, even to the most minute, material things" (73).

"...not even my sleep has been free of this ceaseless movement of my imagination. Rather, my mind operates in sleep still more freely and unobstructedly, ordering with greater clarity and ease the events it has preserved from the day" (77).

"...these subjects help one another, shedding light and opening a path from one to the next, by way of divergences and hidden links--for they were set in place so as to form this universal chain by the wisdom of their great Author" (57).

Fractal Art: a vibrant interdisciplinary area