Notes Towards Day 22: Woman in the Beehive

Notes towards Day 22
of Critical Feminist Studies

"Woman in the Beehive"

Today we are moving from the feminist classroom to
being a professional feminist and a professional reader,

returning (as anorton noted) to the connection
Virginia Woolf first laid out
in Three Guineas, between a woman's college
and a woman's professional life
(not to mention her pacifist/political views...)

Coupla things to do first....
I. Naming
II. finish the selection process...
hoping for consensus, as sarina suggested

(anorton, again: "selecting one majority-determined text
does not seem a particularly empowering end to our class")

1 vote for 1984
1 vote for What Happened to Lani Garver
1 vote for Middlemarch
4 votes for Transparent (the film)
5 votes for poetry selections (see Becky on this one)
7 votes for Born into Brothels

IV. Schedule for remainder of semester:

Next Tues, read Dalke and McCormack (plus?
Dalke, Grobstein, McCormack, Exploring Interdisciplinarity?)
Tues, Dec. 2 Visit w/ Jessy Brody, "see minotaur" &
re-read Susan Stryker, "My Words of Victor Frankenstein....
both these weeks: please post by Monday evening
(in preparation for Tuesday's discussions)
Thurs, Dec. 4 ??
Paper #3, due Friday, Dec. 5:
How should/might feminism be represented?
A la McIntosh: re-design curriculum for this course, this/another program, your department, the college (requirements?);
a la Sosnoski, Derrida: re-think modes of argumentation;
a la Dalke, Stryker, Brody: play with alternative ways of writing/
representing (lrperry on Emma Goldman, who said, "If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution")--what's the role of play and pleasure in feminism? do something playful!
Tues, Dec. 9: ??
Thurs, Dec. 11: FINAL PERFORMANCES
Final meetings with me: Fri, Dec. 12 & Mon, Dec. 15
Fri, Dec.19: final 12-pp. research paper and portfolio

V. Not quite done w/ Mcintosh....
dhathaway, sarahk, julia, anorton all had related thoughts about "just how stuck in Phase 3 most of their courses at Bryn Mawr have been."

mpottash pulled out/questioned this passage: "the actual liberal arts function...is...to train a few students to climb up to pinnacles and to seize them so as to have a position from which power can be felt, enjoyed, exericised, and imposed on others.''

stephanie2 is questioning the notion of higher education and what the "higher" part of it really means or refers to.

anorton: Is our class pioneering the future of Bryn Mawr?
(another anecdote from the president's reception....
"still trying to push Bryn Mawr?")

(The last of Sonal and Janet's many questions:) we wanted to know if anyone went to the McIntosh lecture. Was it interesting? After her talk, did her argument seem more convincing? less convincing?

VI. Raina & Eve to kick things off
(okay, wrap things up...!) today...

anorton: Derrida's insistence that women's studies not become an oppositely-sided but identical version of the current system of academia.

lrperry: I love Derrida’s distinction between the “very necessary” feminism, which works within society to gain women more access to traditionally defined modes of power (e.g. voting, equal pay, reproductive rights, etc), and the “maverick” feminism, which questions the trade-offs that this movement makes in its quest for power....a now classical program [has] at the same time to ask radical questions which may endanger the program itself.

Jacques Derrida, "Women in the Beehive"

(multiple qualifications: re "authorization")

begins with Kafka's Castle:
"as the research in women's studies gains institutional legitimacy,
it also constitutes, constructs, and produces guardians of the Law...
do they not risk constructing an institution similar to the institution against which they are fighting?...
what is the difference?...
if this future is of the same type as that of all other departments...
is this not a sign of failure of the principles of women's studies?...
it risks to be just another cell in the university beehive...
the risk of failure of women's studies is
the risk of its very own success....

Is there in...women's studies something which...
has the force...to deconstruct the fundamental
institutional structure of the university?

this strategy is difficult....Doing research...and at the same time undermining the very structure you're trying to transform....
it's a problem of how to write, how to behave in front of texts,
in the institution...

there is no gift...one cannot calculate....
the gift determines....
The promise...is a fundamental assumption of any speech act....
convention guarantees the ...pertinence of any performance....
every gift is subversive, because it doesn't rely on any given program.

woman as truth stops the drift, interrupts and assures truth.
But there is a way of thinking about truth which is more adventuresome, risky...the very movement of the drift
...the field is open.

--------------------

"In "A Mindless Man-Driven Theory Machine," James Sosnoski, an English prof @ University of Illinois, Chicago

also challenges feminists not to
participate in "business as usual."

has been
intellectuality=competitive family quarreling
systematic knowlege, modeled on science
symbolic capital: quantifiable, measurable, cumulative
falsification: discriminate correct/incorrect readings,
sound/unsound arguments
rule-governed striving: contest for prize
for particular performance, not available to all

could be different
correct/incorrect pure conventions
not-knowing as a precondition for knowledge
error as heuristic
intuition: strong incisive powerful knowing

Sosnoski's definition of this different sort of literary criticism:

• acting together to solve a problem
• theater for intellectual play requiring

  • compassion
  • commitment
  • collaboration
  • concurrence
  • community

Piaget distinguished between Accomodation and Assimilation, the two complementary processes whereby we take in the world.

Sosnoski re-defines these as

(Re-cyling some of Janet and Sonal's questions....)
What has your own intellectual life here @ Bryn Mawr been like?
To what degree do Derrida and Sosnoski describe
the project you've been involved in?
(i.e.: a bee in a cell in a beehive; and/or
a competitive family quarrel/contest for a prize)?

What do you imagine your own (future)
professional life will be like?
What will your relationship with
your colleagues and your work be?
(beehive? family quarrel? contest?)