Playing with Categories

Announcements

• 7:30-9PM, Thurs, Dec.1: "Always Emerging"
  A screening of "Release" and discussion afterwards with award-winning independent producer Nadine Patterson. The film presents a British dancer father who chooses to stay with his daughter so his wife can join a dance company in America. Nadine will be available afterwards for conversation about her own life/art choices. Of interest to those who are following the discussions about Re-presenting Parenting?

  Course Reminders:

• course evals today?
• schedule a writing conference w/ one of us
• read Walley's essay abt. genital operations/coalition building; post reactions by Sunday p.m., prepare to discuss for Monday's class
• 5-6:30 p.m. Fri, 12/9: final class re-re-re-RE-scheduled prepare presention of draft of your paper as part of book panel
• Fri, 12/16: revised intros, final paper and portfolio, including self-evaluation due

Alex: i am perplexed by our discussion today.... i agree that women are socialized differently, and are different, from men, but i owuld like a concrete idea of how that difference helps us to "cure" war.... more on what i said about her plan not sounding like any fun.... i feel like my reasons for a lot of my actions involve monetary compensation or reception of praise. this is how humans work- this is how all organisms work...woolf's high minded opinion on rewards...goes against the nature of (most) humans....without...pride, people would not have a reason to defend intrinsic elements of their identities, which seems bad to me.

Orah: can we make a distinction between "outside space" and "margins" ? i think of margins as...always in reference to. outside space seems to imply a new environment around which we may create our own limits....woolf...seems less concerned...about the reformation of interior space....Woolf is more radical....as much as she emphasizes the chasm of different experience that seperates, her punchline is that we are gazing in the same direction. and maybe the difference will be beneficial in our search.

Sarah: I can't stop thinking about the discussion we had about separating ourselves from poverty, chastity, derision, and unreal loyalties.... I'm uncomfortable with following her directions in regards to my life. I can't help but to feel that if we refuse to praise those with extraordinary minds or refuse to work to achieve access to a lauded university, we will all linger in some smoothering pool of mediocrity....Bryn Mawr is ...a place built out of a reputation in learning and challenging its students....More than just an "unreal loyalty," Bryn Mawr is a way for me to say that I'm willing to work my ass off in academia. It's a way for me to say that I'm willing to dedicate myself to higher learning.

Talya: I am still struggling to try to understand all of the connections that Woolf makes... I don't understand why she suggests that one must be influenced by poverty, chastity, derision, and freedom from unreal loyalties. I don't think that they are all necessary or even desirable....having pride in something doesn't necessarily mean that you think that it's better than something else...

Samantha: It's interesting to me how folks are so torn about Woolf's proposal and whether or not they can do as she asks in their lives. From my vantage point, not coming from any of the places Woolf talks about, not having a history in establishments such as Bryn Mawr...makes me at once disagree about her points about "pride"...because I MUST believe in the prestige of Bryn Mawr to help me somehow have better chances in this world. But I can also extrapolate from her the idea that perhaps as humans we have not always been warmongers, that societies had once lived a peaceful existence with only what they could grow or get from the sea. It is for want of material goods, it is the imperialism of conquest she wants us to move away from. It seems that the cynicism people have is from only thinking in terms of a western, dominant, capitalist idea of what society can be. Dismissing my school pride would dismiss the main reason why I chose to come to Bryn Mawr...

Kat: I am so frustrated with this book. Actually, I'm just frustrated with the author....I think it's incredibly ridiculous for her to say we should move away from our pride in the things we do because those are the things that make up who we are....I have to draw the line here. I am what I do...what I enjoy, am good at or believe...they are choice that I MYSELF have made....I have pride in my accoladed accomplishments....Sure there have been times when I thought I deserved an award and someone else got it...But after I got over it, it was ammunition to do something better, to push harder so that I didn't get squeezed out again. I feel that pride in yourself is a survival tactic....The problem with this idealistic, "don't-be-proud-of-unreal-things" is that it is exactly that: idealistic and incredibly unrealistic. If we are to live in a capitalist society, there is always going to be a hierarchy....and not taking pride in your own accomplishments doesn't make the wealth gap in this country diminish. hm...

Em: reading three guineas has come at an interesting time for me, because i've pretty much committed myself to...becoming a professor.... i feel that what woolf elucidates at the end of her well-thought-out argument is exactly the kind of life-theory i have been working towards for a long time now....i think that social mavericks will always have value....the things that woolf lays out...i definitely find ... useful to think about....i want a small space of my own...an uncompromising outlook on the value of the mind...to look long and hard at tenure and academic awards and...maintain chastity and truthfulness to oneself in the process of achieving them....there needs to be love and support of families and values, i just think woolf is condemning the ways in which this turns to excessive pride and inflicts harm upon others. this is my little thought-essay for a wednesday morning. call me up in five years and ask me if i'm using tupperware.

Jen:

• there are structural/social reasons why men and women are different
• women are subjugated by these structures
• BUT that very position gives them critical distance.
• women should have more "equality,"
• but what happens then to the critical distance?
• we need to change our lives in such a way that independence is REALLY meaningful independence, not cooptation into the powers that be. b/c a critical perspective is useful
• *so how do we think about how to make this possible?*

II. Anne: Let's look at Three Guineas as "modeling" the sort of thinking-and-writing we are asking you to do
we've covered her claim; let's look @ how she makes it:

1. what form does her argument take?
2. to whom is it addressed?
3. what is the occasion of her writing?
4. how does she support her argument?
5. what concrete particularities does she use to develop her claim?
6. what's the tone of the essay?
7. (how about that humor?)
8. on what key images does she rely?
9. key passages:
   • whole of human life a mistake: end it? (p. 74)
   • adultery of the brain/brain prostitution (pp. 93-94)
   • on judging for yourself (p. 96)
   • cremation of the corpse of feminism (p. 101)
   • old worn ruts of society, like a gramphone whose needle has stuck (p. 105)
   • "as a woman my country is the whole world" (p. 109)
   • "the limelight paralyzes free action...the power to change and the power to grow, can only be preserved by obscurity" (p. 114)
10. what form of authority does she presume? "what possible satisfaction can dominance give to the dominator?...Let us then grope our way amateurishly enough anong these very ancient and obscure emotions which we have known ever since the time of Antigone...but which the Professors have only lately brought ot he surface and named 'infantile fixation'....we must rely upon such evidnece as we can collect from history, biography,and from the daily paper--the only evidence that is available to the daughters of educated men....the daughter must not on any account be allowed to make money because if she makes money she wil be independent of her father....it was not freedom in the sense of license that they wanted; they wanted, like Antigone, not to break the laws, but to find the law..."[footnote 42: "there are two kinds of law, the written and the unwritten..it may sometimes be necessary to improve the written law by breaking it...[and] to discover what are the unwritten laws..the private laws that should regulate certain instincts, passions, mental and physical desires...."] (pp. 129-138)
11. who was Antigone?
    • Sophocles' Antigone (c 441 B.C.A.) is about conflicting duties. The heroine Antigone has defied her uncle Creon's edict and buried her rebellious brother. Creon, concerned with the safety of the state...confronts Antigone, who places family duty above everything.

    • The Burial @ Thebes: Her passionate resistance to an unjust law appears to arise from what some feminists, most notably psychologist Carol Gilligan, have seen as a distinctly feminine trait that develops under patriarchy: an ethic of care, grounded in female emotional experience, over against the masculine ethic of justice, which appeals to rational (if nonetheless arbitrary) principles.

    • In Antigone's Claim (2000), Judith Butler redefines Antigone's legacy, recovering her revolutionary significance and liberating it for a progressive feminism and sexual politics. Butler's new interpretation reconceptualizes the incest taboo in relation to kinship ‹ and opens up the concept of kinship to cultural change. Antigone, the renowned insurgent from Sophocles's Oedipus, has long been a feminist icon of defiance. What has remained unclear is whether she escapes from the forms of power that she opposes. Antigone proves to be a more ambivalent figure for feminism than has been acknowledged, since the form of defiance she exemplifies also leads to her death. Butler argues that Antigone represents a form of feminist and sexual agency that is fraught with risk. She...asks how psychoanalysis would have been different if it had taken Antigone ‹ the "postoedipal" subject ‹ rather than Oedipus as its point of departure. If the incest taboo is reconceived so that it does not mandate heterosexuality as its solution, what forms of sexual alliance and new kinship might be acknowledged as a result? The book relates the courageous deeds of Antigone to the claims made by those whose relations are still not honored as those of proper kinship, showing how a culture of normative heterosexuality obstructs our capacity to see what sexual freedom and political agency could be.
12. how does Woolf bring it home? "the public and the private words are inseparably connected...the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other...[the figure of the Fuhrer] suggests that we are ourselves that figure. It suggests that we are not passive spectators doomed to unresisting obediance but by our thoughts and actions can ourselves change that figure" (p. 142).