I don't generally like David Brooks' column (he grew up one block from where I raised my children, and much of what he says bothers me, which makes me wonder what I was doing in that neighborhood for all those years....). Anyhow! take a look @ his recent spoof, "The Inequality Map." It's a pointed pointing-to what sorts of discrimination we find good (as in "discriminating") and what sorts we don't (as in "discriminating against"). Food for thought this Saturday morning.....

One question that came up that really resonated within me throughout the workshop was: do we need to feel ownership over something in order to find comfortability? To me, it was interesting that some people said that they felt comfortable in the space that is Bryn Mawr without feeling ownership. The underlying principles of ownership include having freedom within the control of over one’s environment which I had felt was necessary in order to feel in responsible for one’s actions and their consequences and find purpose from that. In this way, the outcome that would make more sense to me that others would feel more productive and comfortable in being in places where they had command. Nonetheless, in trying to relate to those who did not need ownership, I realized that one could also find greater comfort in being in a collaborative community with other people or find productivity in being guided which made me think of the collaborative nature of school and the individual agency of the student. 

Up until then, I hadn’t realized that comfortability held different meanings to everyone: it made me wonder about the different comforts that each class (social economic, gender, race, ability, ethnicity, etc.) nurtures for its constituents. do some cultures and classes nurture a community based on individual autonomy or collaboration? How is each beneficial? How do these clash or work together?

I have, admittedly, been putting this post off, because I'm not really sure what to say regarding the two very different lectures. Between the darkness in Goodheart during Butler's lecture that prevented me from being able to take readable notes, and my struggle to try understand and make sense of Barad's lecture, I'm left with a bunch of, well, entangled thoughts on gender, space, and time. I was apprehensive about Butler's lecture, because of the way her writing is, however, I found her lecture to be very accessible and easy to understand. I wish I could say the same for Barad. I'm still trying to process Barad's thoughts, and I'm re-reading my notes from her lecture, and the article. In the meantime, please enjoy some of my dis-jionted, entangled notes from Butler and Barad...

-diffraction

-the right to appear

-bodily enactment of gender norms

-trans/formation

-quantum leap (I love that show!)

-queer

-identity politics 

-quantum dis-continuity 

-matter

-gender not only received but enacted

-intra-action

The quotes I will put here are meant to be put in conversation with themselves and each other. Uncredited quotes are pieces from a final paper on T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, which is a set of four poems: Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding. I believe the Four Quartets respond directly to Barad's reading of time and the importance of the past in regards to not trying to return to the past.

I was one very happy woman during Karen Barad's visit to campus this week. As I said in my introduction, I've been talking w/ her (in my head) and thinking with her (in classes and publications) for 5 years now, so it was just a delight to have the time to share supper with her and other colleagues interested in science and justice, to welcome her afterwards to a class full of philosophy and gender studies students, with whom she explored what it might mean to "ma(r)k time," and then to have a "processing-it-all" drive back into the city together afterwards.

To prevent myself from lecturing you all @ length, I'm noting here what were for me the sweetest--because potentially most generative--moments in her talk:
* "we are part of that nature we seek to understand"
* "there are no fish-killers without fish"  (or: the intra-action of an organism
and its environment is a phenomenon that cannot be separated out)
* the "self" I am is the result of specific intra-actions
*  identity is undone @ the heart of matter itself (=the queerness of the quantum)
* setting ourselves to linear time causes great pain
* how is all this related to gender studies?

As alice.in.wonderland so wisely observes below, the "spectacle" that was Judy Butler's appearance here meant that all of those in the audience in Goodhart were "in the dark" = unable to take notes. Here's the residue of what I tried to write while being unable to see what I was recording. I was happiest during the Q&A, when the lights went up and Butler was responding so fully to each of the questions--really hearing them, I thought, and working hard to speak to what she was asked.

In SAT Wars,  Joseph A. Soares (a sociology professor at Wake Forest and author of The Power of Privilege, an in-depth look at the history of admissions at Yale University) writes that the nation would be a better place without the big, bad tests that have long dominated the admissions world: “Our world is not best served by a test-score social Darwinism in support of a collegiate caste system" (from The Rigors and Rewards of Going Test-Optional, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Nov. 4, 2011).