As promised, I put my and Jen's talking notes for today up on-line @ http://serendipstudio.org/sci_cult/courses/sexgender/f05/day3.html (you can also find the link now activated @ the 9/5 entry on the course syllabus, @ http://serendipstudio.org/sci_cult/courses/sexgender/f05/syllabus.html).
And here's an addendum:
Following up on Thorne's observation that the painfully sparse language that kids have for relationships between girls and boys...underscores the need for more images of and more experiences with, cross-gender relationships based on friendship and collegiality, as well as Anna's suggestion that we need to start w/ our children as thoughts in our brains or ripples in our ovaries, I asked you all today to describe what concrete images you could call up, as alternatives to "the heterosexual romance": how would you like the world to look, to your children? You answered
| different(ly colored/gendered/classed) people paired to work on science projects |
| home: a house with a red door |
| playing in the forest |
| pictures drawn w/ the left hand |
| taking a hike, with a cairn (a marker, telling you where you are) always in sight |
| children holding hands in a circle, singing "kumbaya" |
| San Francisco (=welcoming lots of difference) |
| safe, in a gated community |
| lots of differently colored people singing together, as in the Coca-Cola ad, "I'd like to teach the world to sing" (but without the corporate sponsorship) |
| the southern decadence and pagentry of Mardi Gras in New Orleans |
| the last scene in Angels in America: flying to San Francisco, while the souls of the dying are fixing the holes in the ozone |
| a multigenerational/multi-colored picnic in the backyard, with everyone dancing to Otis Redding's "Heard it through the Grapevine" |
| sitting on a couch on a sunny spring day, being told that you can trust your mother with anything |
| "following your passions" on Halloween |
| a home where the mother and dad are like Gretel and Hansel: they treat each other as siblings, as equals |
| the perfect snow day |
|
a relay race: each child has a sense of her own contribution, and that of others, to "something bigger" (n.b. limits of this metaphor: the sense of life as a competition with winners and losers) |
| a bowl of vegan lucky charms |
| the scene from Ursula LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness, in which a human and an alien are making their way across thin ice, by pulling and pushing a sledge together |