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Gayl Jones places Eva in Eva’s Man in a dysfunctional family, demonstrating how the chilling experiences of sexual abuse Eva struggles with and witnesses around her, frames and influences her later relationships and interactions with men. Jones’ centers an African American womyn's exploration of her fullest and most complex definition of herself in a society that marginalizes and silences her identity and in a culture that devalues her race and gender. Jones addresses how femelle hysteria and irrationality is constructed in the first few sentient encounters a womyn has with the sexist, unjust, and repressive society and specific communities she lives in.

3 December 2015

Treason Can Be Inherited: The Dishonor of Celia’s Crush

     This past semester, Bryn Mawr’s Shakespeare Performance Troupe (SPT) put on a production of “As You Like It”, in which I played the role of Celia¹. Her character is an interesting one, strangely, not for her dialogue when she is present, but for her silent presence in many scenes. Upon reading Adrienne Rich’s piece “On Lies, Secrets, and Silence”, which argues that “[l]ying is done with words, and also with silence” (Rich 186), I came to interpret her choices in a new way. Through the lens of Adrienne Rich, Celia’s silences are a mark of dishonor, and a betrayal of the person dearest to her, Rosalind.

When I read Eva’s Man, a very personal novel about a poor black woman who experiences violence as a victim, bystander, and perpetrator and serves time in a psychiatric prison for murdering a man, I could not avoid thinking about politics: the politics of incarceration, of identity (gender, race, and class), and of silence and trauma. Eva tells her story in flashbacks, paralleling the experiences of someone who lives with trauma. She tells her story, too, with many silences. She says more in her pauses and not saying than in her speaking. There is no mention of politicians or policies per say, so how does this fictional (and yet so very real) account become political? Eva chooses silence, even though others often demand that she speak.

From “Mammie” to “Mama”

Exploitation of Black Female Efforts Around the Civil Rights Movement

                            Fanny Lou Hamer at the Democratic Convention (1964)          Hattie McDaniel & Vivian Leigh in Gone With the Wind (1939)

As Joel was discussing our latest essays in our political philosophy class, the ideas of “realism” versus “idealism” were brought up in regards to framing conversations. In political discourse, realistic is coded to mean the correct, or best, or reasonable course of action, with unrealistic or idealistic coded in the opposite way. It’s loaded and empty at the same time, as anyone can hand-wave away an idea with the premise that it’s “not realistic”. The most likely or most practical solution may not be the best one, and in fact usually isn’t in terms of radical change.

On Gendered Silence

1. If you think about the environment "objectively," you're just deceiving yourself and depriving the earth of the agency it used to be given. Semiotics and philosophy have made this seem like this is a viable way of going about environmental studies and storytelling, but Latour thinks that it is a dangerous act. 

2. Science has to be reimagined so that there is not a "natural world" that is separate from the world at large. The Earth can be reworked and reimagined through the establishment of a new social contract that distributes agency to among the natural and the social. Latour suggests that this can happen if we find a way to ground objects and subjects that are currently deanimated and overanimated.

Joie Waxler   

12/2/15

Adrienne Rich Tells The Truth, The Whole Truth, And Nothing But The Truth And But Robby Wideman’s Truth is a Lie

Here I'm posting my bare bones essay ideas, as well as three pages of blackout poetry I've completed so far for the research project. Cheers!

Art has a way of not working out the way that you plan it to. The process of making this poetry ended up being a lot deeper than I anticipated, and challenged my thinking on abolition. Ideally I want to form this as a sort of theoretical appendix to my art project, adding some background and clarification to my behind the scenes work I put into the piece. I think this experimental essay can delve into my thought process and how examining the question of abolition in this way has expanded my view beyond "abolition is impossible."

[Spoiler alert--Mokckingjay part 2]

Tiny parachutes with little metal boxes sway into the arms of children. Pop pop pop! Red fire and grey dust billow like scary clouds. Explosions. Medics rush in, Pim’s blue eyes. Another explosion. Blood trickling from the bow and arrow wound in Coin’s lifeless body. Masses attacking Snow who is tied to a post. “Goodbye Gale.” The cat. The meadow. The children. The garden.