Playing with Categories

Announcements:

• Noon, Fri, MCC: "Examining Our History: Inclusion/Exclusion at BMC"
• 5 p.m. Sun, 11/20: describe on-line the thinking of your feminist foremother. Of what use might it be to your own thinking?
• Class, Mon, 11/21: discussion of using origin stories in your papers
• 4:30 Mon, 11/21: Katherine Lower Lounge, GSWSR, "Why Poor Women Put Motherhood before Marriage"
• Re-writing the Story of Jen's life:
  re-scheduling our final day of class from 1 p.m. Wed, 12/7 to... pizza, 5-7, Friday, 12/9?

Some background

The first feminist moment of my childhood:
"Girls, don't look!"

...Said by my strong-willed (and certain) father

Wearing dresses when going to town (where they could look up our dresses) and
working as a telephone operator (where no one could see us @ all)

Noticing the limits of my mother's life, wanting something bigger:

As per Ann Dixon: I'm wondering whether a lot of the guilt
is passed along mother to daughter?
So that all of grandma's choices, or lack thereof,
in the past are passed down in a legacy to daughter/new mom?

Philosophy 101:

Too abtract, too removed from anything I was curious about

Consciousness Raising in Rural Maine:
realizing that I was complicit in shaping my own life....

Graduate School in English @ Penn
"The work you are doing is women's studies" (who knew?!)

Co-ordinating Feminist and Gender Studies @ BMC (1995-present):

• Interacting with (and learning tons from) both social scientists and scientists

• Teaching English 280: Major Texts of the Feminist Tradition--A Process of Reconstruction

• Being a "Praxis Pioneer"

• Confirming, in English 308: The Feminist Difference in Literary Theory
  four things I know for sure,
  which have guided a good deal of my work for the past five years:

  • I'm not interested in performing what I know:
    I'm interested in finding out how other people see things

    (Following from that) I'm not interested in fighting

    (Following from that) I'm not interested in the professionalization of literary study

    (Following from that) I'm not interested in theory unrelated to practice.

Hence:

• General Programs 290: Knowing the Body--and the Categories of War-Making (Fall 2004)

• Re-doing the Politics of Sex and Gender (Fall 2005)

• The Story of Evolution and The Evolution of Stories (Spring 2004, 2005)

I have had MANY feminist guides and foremothers in this process.
Three of the most important ones are

Susan Bordo. (Professor of English and Women's Studies, University of Kentucky)
"Feminism, Postmodernism, and Gender Scepticism" (1990):
"It is impossible to be 'politically correct' . . . all ideas . . . are condemned to be haunted by a voice from the margins . . . awakening us to what has been excluded, effaced, damaged."

Iris Marion Young (Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago)
"The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference" (1990):
"The ideal of community...privileges unity over difference, immediacy over mediation, sympathy over recognition of the limits of one's understanding of others from their point of view. Community is an understandable dream, expressing a desire for selves that are transparent to one another, relationships of mutual identification, social closeness and comfort. The dream is understandable, but politically problematic...because those motivated by it will tend to suppress differences among themselves or implicitly to exclude from their political groups persons with whom they do not identify....The desire for unity...generates borders, dicotomies, and exclusions....difference means the irreducible particularity of entities, which makes it impossible to reduce them to commonness or bring them into unity without a remainder....the ideal of community...has undesirable political implications....desire for reciprocal recognition and identification...denies difference....in making it difficult for people to respect those with whom they do not identify...the desire for mutual understanding and reciprocity underlying the ideal of community is similar to the desire for identification that underlies racial and ethnic chauvinism...Our political ideal is the unoppressive city....defined as openness to unassimilatable otherness...Radical politics must develop discourse and institutions for bringing differently identified groups together without suppressing or subsuming the differences."

"Impartiality and the Civic Public"(1987):
"The bourgeois world instituted a moral division of labor between reason and sentiment....sentiment has been thoroughly devalued because it has been excluded from rationality....I am suggesting that only a conception of normative reason that includes the affective and bodily dimensions of meaning can be adequate ....contemporary politics grants to all persons entrance into the public on condition that they...keep their passions private....Liberating public expression means not only lifting formerly privatized issues into the open of public and rational discussions...but also affirming in the practice of such discussion the proper place of passion and play in public."

• Hence: English 207: Alchemies of Mind--
  The Emotional Landscape of 19th Century American Literature (aka "Big Books")

Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (1938)
demonstrates that three requests for contributions--
to support women's education, a professional women's organization,
and the peace effort-- are inherently linked:

• "to emphasize superiority...rouses competition and jealousy...which encourage a dispostion towards war. We can refuse all such distinctions ourselves. (21)

• Do we wish to join that procession, or don't we? On what terms shall we join that procession? Above all, where is it leading us, the procession of educated men? (62)

• The professions have a certain undeniable effect upon the professors. They make the people who practise them possessive, jealous of any infringement of their rights, and highly combative. (66)

• This is an awful mind- and soul-destroying life....Sight goes....sound goes...Speech goes...Humanity goes...Health goes...What then remains of a human being who has lost sight, sound, and sense of proportion? Only a cripple in a cave. (70-2)

• How can we enter the professions and yet remain civilized human beings...who wish to prevent war? (75)

• [She ends w/ a refusal] to be separated from the four great teachers of the daughters of educated men--poverty, chastity, derision and freedom from unreal loyalties." (79)

Goya's Third of May, from Art and Society Through the Ages, Archbishop Williams High School

Hicks's The Peaceable Kingdom, from Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Interpreting Virgina Woolf's analysis to mean that any distinctions made on a single axis of value lead to war, I have spent the past five years writing and talking about

• Making Sense of Diversity

• Stories of Teaching and Learning

• Story-Telling in (At Least) Three Dimensions:
  An Exploration of Teaching Reading, Writing, and Beyond

• The Grace of Revision, the Profit of "Unconscious Cerebration,"
  or What Happened When Teaching the Canon Became Child's Play

• Theorizing Interdisciplinarity: The Evolution of New Academic and Intellectual Communities

• The Emergence of Reader-Response Theory:
  Why Words Arise--and Wherefore: Literature and Literary Theory as Forms of Exploration

• Exploring Education and Technology

• And even doing some philosophy:
  "We Are, and We Can Talk, Therefore..." about

  • the inherent and insistent social nature of thinking

  • the interaction of mind and body, how each affects the other in what Descartes poetically called "interfibrillar spaces"

  • the provisionality of all knowledge: there is no ultimate criteria for truth, only arbitrarily and temporarily useful constructions which we rely on for decision-making and action

  • the freedom to make something new: how large is that space?
    And wherefrom does the newness (and/or the space/interplay that generates newness) come?

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