November 19, 2015 - 10:46
first, i want to paste some of my notes from our small group yesterday in which we "occupied olsen":
olsen: she charts the types of silences that writers and women experience
- kregensburg and i agreed that we felt she was often writing about herself rather than women as a whole, but then attempts to speak for women as a whole
- she talks about living in capitalism and patriarchy but does not address any of those systems directly? rich articles do more of this
- writes about the problems but not why the problems are there and how to combat those problems. we are left without any answers in this snippet of text.
- final question: do people “with time” have an obligation to write? do they have the obligation to support those “without time”?
with reading olsen, while this is more focused on productivity and labor and womanhood, i found myself again focused on time, as i was with the balaev article.
the idea of "doing time" is one that comes to mind also, given our work with incarceration and silence. time and silence seem to go hand-in-hand in these situations; if you "have" time - not "doing" time or working, which seems to be "losing" time? - then one can have the space to end silence or articulate something through art/writing/etc. in this way, the olsen article relates to the ARTiculation piece i wrote earlier in the semester, but adds a gendered layer to the "issues" with time.
there are two big questions for me, then-
- how does work and/or "doing" time inherently negate voice? doing time seems more obvious, as there are more boundaries, but is work inherently a silencing? is this merely under capitalism and the idea of "productivity"?
- does gender inherently affect time? with olsen's piece, we see that there are outside forces that affect her gendered time, but her examples seem to primarily revolve around class.
i have yet to read the rich articles under this lens, but i may continue this train of thought...