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The Slippage of Play

            Last week I wrote an essay about the lack of diversity and complexity in the conventional understanding of play, and just a week before that I applied the concept of “slippage” (Dalke) to the “Black at Bryn Mawr” tour. Despite the close proximity timewise between these two essays, I failed to realize my own slippages in my essay about play, further illustrating the pervasiveness of play. Just like how I analyzed the layers of slippage, or thoughts and words that emerge from our unconscious socialized past (“Paradox”), of the “Black at Bryn Mawr” tour, here I will explain slippages of the concept of play itself, my essay about play, and why I slipped even after writing an essay focused on slippage.

Just a few months ago, I found myself trying to choose a college to attend in the coming fall – similar to most high school seniors across America. As I compared academics and extracurriculars and student:teacher ratios and graduation rates, I tried reaching out to alumni of my high school who had gone to the various colleges I had narrowed down to. Surprisingly, no one from my high school had chosen Bryn Mawr College for several years. Very few students had heard of Bryn Mawr at all. After much probing, I finally reached my friend’s adult sister, who had graduated from Bryn Mawr College over a decade ago.

After reading Anne Dalke’s, “Slipping into Something More (Un)comfortable,” I have spent a lot of time mulling over the possibilities of what it really means to “slip.” I rationalized that “slipping,” in a broader sense of the word, means unconsciously allowing one’s own actions to negatively impact others. While the definition I have derived can be applied to an extensive variety of situations, a more limited and possibly closer definition to the one Dalke intended for her novel is that to slip is to unintentionally revert to a mentally constraining belief or set of beliefs ingrained by societal norms.

“Not speaking and speaking are both human ways of  being in the world, and there are kinds and grades of each.

“it is at this point that the peculiar question of the value of art arose. for the mimetic theory, by its very terms, challenges art to justify itself.”

“art is useful, after all, aristotle counters, medicinally useful in that it arouses and purges dangerous emotions.”

Bryn Mawr’s Legacy of Silencing

My brain is pounding into my ears as I trek to my next meeting, hammering the familiar tune of a stress headache into my head. It is only the second week of classes, but my usual spirited fast-walk has already turned into a trudging gait that betrays my exhaustion. My mind, as is its nature, will not let me rest, promptly running an ongoing script of to-do lists and meetings through my head.

Breaking and Imposing Silence through Forgiveness

Each person, by virtue of existing in a world that disallows for complete autonomy, has experienced transgressions, either directed towards themselves, or others. And so each person, by virtue of having, at one time or another, felt wronged in some way, is imbued with the capacity and agency to forgive. But because forgiveness is so inextricably linked with the abstract and often subjective definition of wrongness, forgiveness then also becomes inextricably linked with the personal and with power.

       According to Kim and Markus, there is a sheer distinction between East Asian and American styles of speech in which East Asian culture emphasizes the “other”, “relations” and “context”, while American culture pays more attention into the “individual”, “self” and “content”. Under these cultural influences, many East Asian students, especially Chinese students, while put into a typical American classroom, exhibit a salient characteristic of being introversive, compared to their American classmates. I want to note that I am using the word “introversive” instead of “silent” this time since recently I have started to question the definition of silence and have not gotten a satisfying answer yet.

The Buffer Zone or the Elephant in the Room? : Looking at the Silence of Avoidance in American Classrooms