"In the Garden"

Announcements:
For Friday: post 100-word prospectus for politics paper in on-line forum.
Over the weekend, we'll group the postings into "books"
(let us know if you have a preference for a cluster).

In ten days (by Sunday 11/13) your group will post on-line a collaborative 3-pp. introduction to your book.

For Monday: read Chris Ware's graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan--think about gender AND genre...
(no postings due--but are warmly invited ahead of time--til Tuesday evening).

Cf. the striking similarities of Michael Warner's "Memoirs of a Pentacostal Boyhood":
"...religious culture gave me a passionate intellectual life of which universities are only a pale ivory shadow....when I read Nietzsche on the ressentiment at the heart of Christianity...I recognized what that pleasure had been about. In my experience, ressentiment...was directed against everything....Not even the final paragraphs of The Order of Things contain a more thorough distrust of everything in the human order...

Jesus was my first boyfriend. He loved me, personally, and he told me I was his own....religion makes available a language of ecstasy, a horizon of significance within which transgressions against the normal order of the world and the boundaries of self can be seen as good things. Pentecostalists...require a whole set of beliefs about the limitations of everyday calculations of self-interest, about the impoverishment of the world that does not willingly yield its increase to satisfy your lusts...ecstatic religions can legitimate self-transgession, providing a meaningful framework for the sublime play of self-realization and self-dissolution....

The bliss of Pentecostalism is, among other things, a radical downward revaluing of the world that despises Pentcostalists....world-canceling...can be a kind of social affirmation.... Ressentiment doubles your pleasure....fundamentalists...too consider themselves an oppressed minority. Who gets to say, by what standards, that [they] are not....? This is not a rhetorical question."

The Trouble with Normal calls for
a recognition of diverse sexualities which "would
give us no view of who "'we' are," would replace
the desire to be represented with
membership in a movement that insists on variance.

But cf. Moraga's "The Breakdown of the Bicultural Mind," which takes a counter-view (?),
directing Warner's "non-rhetorical question" as a challenge to us,
with an insistence both on "taking a stand" and being "set apart":

"What fiery pit awits us, we new breed of 21st century mestizo? Into what shapes shall we be transformed?....We light-skinned breeds are like chameleons...We change for...lack of definitive shade and shape....We invent our selves....people read the women you're with....And then ...the choices become more limited....

I have always hated the terms 'biracial' and 'bisexual.' They are passive terms, without political bite. They don't choose. They don't make a decision. They are a declaration not of identity, but of biology, of sexual practice. They say nothing about where one really stands. And as long as injustice prevails, we do not have the luxury of calling ourselves either.

Call me breed. Call me trash. Call me spic greaser beaner dyke jota bulldagger. Call me something meant to set me apart from you and I will know who I am. Do not call me "sister." I am not yours.

...we are the hybrid seed...We are Malinche's children and the new Malinches of the 21st century. We are talkin' breed talk...when Third and Fourth and First Worlds are collapsing into one another....I am of that endangered culture and of that murderous race, but I am loyal only to one..."

A little background re: La Malinche
malinchista ... is used by modern-day Mexicans to identify countrymen who betray their race and country; those who mix their blood and culture with European or other outside influences....Many historians believe that La Malinche saved her people: that without someone who was not only a fluent translator but who also advised both sides of the negotiations, the Spanish would have been far more violent and destructive in their conquest.

My notes from Cherrie Moraga's talk @ BMC, 2/24/05:

• your ego is the stupidest part of yourself
• you know the answer to the question you are asking, as demonstrated by the fact that you have the consciousness to ask
• let us adjust the lens, challenge the "I," singularity, individualism, progress as a plot line w/ a goal @ end
• parenthood teaches you not to think about yourself first: you just want somebody else to flourish. Aside from forcing you to practice your politics (because this entity is looking @ you), being a parent means being responsive to something larger than yourself. It enables you to appreciate the work of revolutionaries, who risked the "I" for the "we" (vs. the notion of the "we" silencing the "I" that has seemed inherent, so far, in our discussion of altruism)
• therapy is the privitized gringo consciousness that our illness is individual, as is our cure
• I wake up every morning knowing I can leave my (university) job: otherwise I'm not free
• the biggest illusion of academic discourse is that conflict is resolvable; even Marxism had a dialectic. As we change and grow, we move in and out of inconsistency; this is not contradiction, but evolution
• in a site of deprivation, as a response to genocide, the clan mentality can be (strategically) useful;
  but the identity of the clan must be malleable, open to shifting and changing

Cf. Orah's account of her experiences with a child @ the Thorne School who WILL NOT sit on the rug:

And cf., finally, Dorothy Allison's "Femme"--how does her story intersect with these others?
"I woke up every morning terrified that anyone would know what I had been imagining....I would will myself different....I wanted an operation...a lever in the flesh, one I could permanently switch to off. I longed for..the end of the need...never successfully denied....

I have an ambition to be my own adolesent fantasy....I want to say, Sex is delicious....I'm going to...promise my younger self that the struggle will be worth...the price, worth the struggle...'Child,' I want to say, 'you are going to be happy.'"

"...the language of personal experience turns into 'confession' when it becomes self-protective, when it shuts people off from really examining themselves and their discourses....'testimony,' in contrast, is 'toward something,' meaningful to other people as well as to the testified." (Alisa Conner, "Feminist Pedagogy and the Feminist and Gender Studies Program at Bryn Mawr College: Reading the Stories," Senior Thesis, 1994).

From Global Collage

"...both the notion of having a rupture with your self and the notion of narrated personal coherence are Protestant conventions....We've invented an impressive array of...conversion religions. They offer you a new and perpetual personality, and they tell you your current one was a mistake you made. They tell you to be somebody else. I say: believe them." (Warner, in conclusion)