Notes Towards Day 2: Designing our curriculum, our program, our selves....

I. Begin w/ some coursekeeping
1. today's class is a history lesson, so let's start by singing  "Sister Suffragette" 
(in part to mark how far we've come from these presumptions....)

2. welcome back (or for the first time....)
let's go 'round and introduce ourselves:
your name and the imaginary (literary, filmic, gaming) character
you would be, if you could...

3. how'd we do on the mechanics of writing for the world?
by 9 a.m., only 9 of you had found your way to Serendip,
created an account, logged in, and made a posting;
so let's talk about the experience of negotiating the site, speaking to the world....
what were the roadblocks? (Courtney! you can change your username!)

4. I also added a "floating forum" where we can note possibilities for new readings
(Emily: put down that "really excellent queer theorist named Riki Wilchins")

5. please sign in today w/ your name and user-name (for my use only; but--
think abt. whether you want to be called by yr. given name or yr. user name in class-->
possibility opens up here for alternative personalities/behaviors!)

6. Upping the ante:
By 5 p.m. this Sunday, Sept. 6 write a short (3 pp.) paper about the relation between your life, your gender, your education: What do you want that relationship to be? What sort of education are you seeking? What has the role of activism in (your) education been? What might/should it be?

(Some story starters to get you going on a first draft:)
What kind of person are you?
What literary character are you?
What sort of education have you had?
How has it been organized?

You are welcome to locate yourself in Mcintosh's narrative--
"Meg is socialized to 'fit in,' Amy to kill herself trying to be exceptional;
Jo understands interlocking systems that work to exclude;
Maya & Angela are canny about systems"--
but equally welcome to go off from it completely into an entirely different genre....

Find @ least one image (or sound?) to evoke the story you have to tell (think of it as a compelling "quote" to start/grab your reader's interest--remember that you are writing for the internet, and images matter!)

Then: log in -->
go to "create content"-->
"blog entry"-->
first tag the paper "GAS Works Web Paper 1" (so I can find it!);
next in the image (please be sure to cite the source!);
then cut and paste your paper (works best if you've saved it as "text only").
Preview it before "sending" (=posting) and correct any technical errors.
Stay calm. Contact me if you have problems.
All these stages are spelled out in the class notes,
accessible from the top of the course homepage.

5. Also some problems for HC, Swat students in accessing the reading
(need to go through yr. own library in the tri-co system).

As per yr. suggestion, I requested that all our texts be put on reserve (don't know what the lag time is, but) the whole of Evolution's Rainbow is available on-line through the tri-co library's ebrary, so there's no excuse not to get going on the reading for Tuesday!

Read the Introduction and first 2 chapters, then read around (another 20 pp. or so) in Part One: Animal Rainbows (Chapter 8 on Same-Sex Sexuality is particularly fascinating; and Chapter 9 on The Theory of Evolution especially useful).

Paul Grobstein, of the Bryn Mawr Biology Department, will be leading our discussion
on Tuesday, so please also read his (very short essay on) Diversity and Deviance: A Biological Perspective, and come w/ responses and questions for him....

6. Questions for me about any of this??

II. Review
Briefly, what I was trying to do on Tuesday was

a) get you all in the habit of talking/contributing to the conversation!

b) explain my pedagogical philosophy and praxis (those of you arriving today should take some time to review this in the on-line notes, realize what you're getting into....)

c) invite you to begin thinking about the field of Gender and Sexuality not as "another cell in the beehive" (in Derrida's language) but as a radical intervention in academic business-as-usual

d) Mark Taylor's essay is imp't because (although it's not about Gender Studies per se)
it suggests that this project is not just my hobbyhorse, but one shared by a number of progressive academics, who think that the medieval university needs to be overhauled, to become

more responsive to the world as it is,
less driven by faculty, more by students' interests and needs,
less discipline-, more problem-based;
less isolated, more integrative in  the way it "divides up" knowledge

--a keynote in McIntosh's essay, too: 
"Teachers are trained to isolate bits of knowledge;

1933 film version of Little Women, with Katherine Hepburn

Peggy McIntosh uses Meg, Jo, Amy
and her daughters to walk her way through 5
"Interactive Phases of (Personal and) Curricular Revision"
asking repeatedly, What are the shaping dimensions of the discipline?
How must they change to reflect women's experience?

IV. Let's find out if this critique is relevant and/or useful: organize yourselves into small working groups around your disciplines/divisions:
2 psych, 2 philosophy, 2 soc/anthro, 2 G&S, 2 undecided, 1 bio + 1 public health
5 English, 1 Russian major (pair off); who else?

How does McIntosh's critique apply to the curriculum of your department?
What "interactive phase" are/do you want to be in?
(Feel free to push back/refuse or refute her premises....)

V. Re-gather in the large group

 
How does her (=Derrida's) critique  apply
to the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies?

Do you think it should apply?

"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?...

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...

Conversation can continue on the course forum...