Self Evaluation

For me, this course chartered some serious unexpected territory, in doing so it broke some normative structures. As structures such as class and time were queered and cripped, so was I. As a result in many ways I excelled (explored) myself in many ways floundered (everything was late).  It is extraordinarily frustrating to see that the exceptional amount of reflection-- written and unwritten-- did not translate onto this virtual space throughout the semester. I recognize that this forum has been (en)abling for so many of my classmates who struggled in the classroom to share but for me Serendip was profoundly disabling. 

In reading Ellsworth’s book for my last paper and her assertion that thought is an act of remembering I was reminded of another post-structuralist thinker, Jaque Derrida. The intersections between power, memory (the unconscious), and knowledge that Ellsworth discusses in reference to a classroom is the same issue that Derrida takes up in “Archive Fever: A Freadian Impression.” It is an argument that helps explain my relationship to Serendip posts. Derrida asserts that the archive becomes the official repository of memory, but is simultaneously a crucial site in the process of forgetting. The forgetfulness of the archive—of omitting that which “operates in silence” and which “never leaves its own archive” is an act of repression, consigning its omissions to oblivion. It is this act that Derrida calls “the violence of the archive.” Serendip is a sort of archive of thoughts and often times I felt emotionally unable to commit myself to the violent task of selection, summary, and distillation of thoughts/rememberings worthy enough to catalogue. Now the obvious counter-argument is that this archive, like this classroom, has resisted the traditional exercising of power over knowledge—rejected the lure of a unified, fixed, closed, and stabilized system. Thus, it is not an excuse simply an explanation of why when the subject began to take on the quality of the experiential and personal I became economical with my words on the written page, covetous of the rememberings I felt capable of documenting.

            I would like to think I supplemented my silence on Serendip by being an active participant in class discussion. (A significantly less quantifiable reversal). Still, I worry that I was one of the voices that inhibited others even while being ever- conscious of the amount of space I occupied in the dialogue. I would also like to think that I offered myself as a learning experience into being transgender (at Bryn Mawr). I was extraordinarily flattered to be given the opportunity. In regards to the readings, I did them all except the Doll’s House, which I just couldn’t get through. I enjoyed the novels (Exile and Pride, Eva’s Man, and Book of Salt) the most, if only because to be able to read a novel in a class is so refreshing.

            In conclusion, no, it did not revolutionize my conception of feminism as being a rallying or starting point for social justice. (Although I’m starting to think I don’t like the term social justice. I am not for social justice. I don’t even know what social justice means. I am for racial justice. For gender justice. For queer justice. For economic justice. I am for self-determination, bodily autonomy, and a community that fights for and with each other. These are not social issues. These are political issues. My body and my community are political. Yours are, too, even if yours are less contested.

When we call political issues social issues we water them down; we make our call for liberation palatable to the institutions, powers, and popular mindsets we are railing against. We appease the power we fight against by making our inequality and injustice demure, domesticated “social issues.” I feel dirty when I get called a faggot, even more so when I see a woman intimidated by my presense in a dark alley, when I got asked “how can you mutilate your body?” when I talked about starting hormones, these are not issues. This is the mundane violence of the capitalist world we live in, with its varied claims upon our bodies and lives.

 I want justice and righteousness to sweep through this world and I know it will not be clean and easy-- it will not be domesticated. It will not be about social order. It will be about political and economic orders, about the very fabric of our collective, interdependant being. It will be about undoing all the violence we have wrought on this world and on each other. I don’t want social justice in this world and all its systems. I want us to change the world, to make it safe and whole for all of us.) This class affirmed that sentiment and also the concept of unbinding terms in that fashion but more importantly it challenged me to find my voice in that sort of way. To say what I believe (and why). It changed my opinion on the value of the personal because it was valued in this space--so much so that I wrote my last paper on it. I remain unsure if I was successful in that particular endeavor but that has been my edge with this course as a whole: all that is inevitably lost in translation.