English

i know this is late, i'm sorry! midnight tuesday isn't a great deadline for me because i go into rehearsal at 5 and get out (and start studying) at 11. anyway. here's what we talked about in class today.

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"people will talk. let them talk. i can bear it. i am a beede... june flowers is a beede by marriage, not birth, so what june flowers can bear is another story." (roosevelt, page 51)
later (page 107), roosevelt expands on this, noting that
"there's lots of families i coulda been born into, families with more luck, or more money, but being a beede means being able to bear the unbearable, so i guess i would rather be a beede than be anybody else in all the world."

freshman year, i took a class called 'interdisciplines of gender and sexuality'. the topics ranged from performativity to labor to citizenship to disability to futurity... and one of these topics was intersectionality. in retrospect it makes sense because everything about the class felt very ~intro 100 level freshman-y~ but my main issue was the fact that we had a separate topic for intersectionality. of course everything about citizenship is tied to race and disability and futurity have roots in each other and and and

kimberle crenshaw coined the term intersectionality and has an esssay on 'demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex' where she details a Black feminist critique on feminist theory and antiracist politics. in one passage, she says,

     Even though Parks makes the repossession and reclamation of Mother the object of Beede’s journey, the Beede family is nevertheless very alienated from mother views her life as dysfunctional. Billy, especially appears to be alienated from mother. She contends that Willa Mae was “a liar and a cheat” who got “locked up in jail every time she turned around. Always talking big and never amounting to nothing” (Parks 9). She says that she doesn’t mind if Willa Mae’s grave is “paved over” proclaiming that “Willa Mae can stay where she’s at” once she retrieves “the treasure she left me” (44, 106). Billy makes it obvious that she feels alienated from Mother when she insists that “I ain’t no Willa Mae” (18) Dill Smiles believes that “Billy was glad when Willa Mae passed” (22).

I think a lot about influencers, especially how past selves are separate from and inform a present self. So I've been thinking a lot about what each character is built from; what do they say has built THEM up? Billy and her 'favoring' Willa Mae//refuting this but still hearing her advice. Teddy holds on so tight to his church and his past role as a pastor, but keeps secret (his shame in) losing God's word in his ear. In others' eyes, Teddy holds the role of pastor more than he does to himself. I guess also it's about outward and inward selves, which calls back to our conversation in class today. What does each character see of themself, what do they want others to see/what do they present, what do others see in them?

I read As I Lay Dying three years ago, in AP English, and we didn't really talk about it in class, so my memory of it is rather poor. Nevertheless, I thought of it as I read the book jacket of Getting Mother's Body, and as soon as I began reading the book, I could tell that Parks had, to a certain extent, based her novel on Faulkner's. So I looked for connections between the two, and the most obvious one was the dead mother and the journey centered around her body. In As I Lay Dying, even though she spent the entire book either on her deathbed or dead, there was a sense that Addie (the mother,) is directing everything that her family does.

I really enjoyed working with my group today--and also wished I had been in class for the conversation about Dill (which I think happened the Thursday before break). 

In our small group today (me, Olivia, Nkechi) we didn’t really get to acting out any instances of intersectionality in Getting Mother’s Body *sorry Anne!*. What took up the majority of our time was a discussion on how we personally define intersectionality and what it means to us in our lives, how we think about it and how we don’t, as well as the word as a practice vs. ideology vs. noun vs. politic. During discussion, Liv mentioned that the places her identities intersect are contact zones in themselves, and she noted that these moments/spaces of interaction/expression can be violent, unsafe, and unpredictable. Little did Liv know that I LOVE talking about contact zones, so I was very glad that she brought this up.

In Anne’s class notes for October 6th, she writes that “in Getting Mother's Body, Parks turns from Hawthorne to Faulkner as another white male forebear she can critique; she uses these intertexual dialogues in particular (says a critic) "to resurrect bodies, especially Black bodies, that have been commodified and exploited.” Now that I’ve finished GMB, I’ve taken up rereading As I Lay Dying so I can better grasp the intertextual relationship between the two. I see Parks’ canon critique (of AILD, through GMB) as a critical re-writing of Faulkner. With that in mind, I’m interested in exploring what writers can accomplish through canon critique.

(this post is my report back of the conversation that i had with bea and kamara)

- intersectionality-

-an intersection is where paths meet. seperate roads join together at an intersection. ie the intersection of class and race. 

-intersectionality is ofter talked about as an intertwining of identities and oppressions. to intertwine, things have to be separate first, only crossing sometimes. we reject this metaphor. this implies that a single black joins with a single woman and sometimes meets a single queer. 

her shroud is loneliness, her god was listening. her heaven will be a love without betrayal