What is Foucault seeing? What are you seeing?
From ArtLex on Mythology
What happened to the minotaur over time? (What did Picasso see?)
Pablo Picasso (1881-1967), Minotaur Caressing a Sleeping Woman, from ArtLex Art Dictionary
Picasso, Minotaur with a Javelin and Woman Hostage, |
Picasso, Minotaur and His Wife, |
The Simultaneous Fertilization had occurred in the early morning hours of March 24, 1923, in separate, vertical bedrooms, after a night out at the theater. My grandfather...had splurged on four tickets to The Minotaur....A momentous night, this, for all involved....I want to record the positions...and the circumstances...and the direct cause (a play about a hybrid monster)....
While my parents were being given a crash course on gonadogenesis, I...was doing some homework myself. In the Reading Room of the New York Public Library I was looking up something in the dictionary....
hypospadias-
An abnormality of the penis in which the urethra opens on its under surface.
See synonyms at EUNUCH.
I did as instructed and got
eunuch-- A man whose testes have not developed.
See synonyms at HERMAPHRODITE.
Following where the trail led, I finally reached
hermaphrodite--Anything comprises of a combination of diverse or contradictory elements.
See synonyms at MONSTER....
There is was, monster, in black and white, in a battered dictionary in a great city library....Here was a book that contained the collected knowledge of the past while giving evidence of present social conditions....The synonym was official, authoritative; it was the verdict that the culture gave on a person like her. Monster. That was what she was....For a second Callie saw herself that way. As a lumbering, shaggy creature pausing at the edge of woods. As a humped convolvulus rearing its dragon's head from an icy lake....the synonym pursued her....Webster's Dictionary kept calling after her, Monster, Monster!"
And I want us to start,
not with the Eugenides' text,
and not with Darwin's theory of common descent...
What categories do each of us occupy?
What words do we use to describe ourselves?
What words do others use to describe us?
How do the categories "inside" differ from those "without"?
GoPhila CultureFiles--Mutter Museum
Is our occupation of categories willing or unwilling? "Natural" or imposed?
What do those categories (say, "learner" and "teacher") signify to us?
What do they look and sound like to each of us?
What categories matter most to us,
when we discuss our own identities and those of others?
How might we self-organize into a taxonomy that makes sense of those identities?
For help, go to Taxonomy--Wikipedia
Taxonomy Lab: The "Nuts and Bolts" of Taxonomy and Classification
Bloom's Taxonomy: A Classification of Levels of Intellectual Behavior
The Wagner Free Institute of Science
So--split into groups of five to conduct this taxonomic exercise:
How many "kinds" do you constitute?
What are the grounds for your grouping?
(Identify any/all characteristics that seem important to you.)
Identify a table, or grid, or draw a tree...
From Does Biology Have Anything to Contribute to Thinking About Sex and Gender?
...that places you in relation to one another.
What matters in the categories you make?
How do you construct them?
So...what have we learned?
For starters: categorization can begin
It is at the junction of these two ideas--that we must not deceive ourselves concerning our sex, and that our sex harbors what is most true in ourselves--that psychoanalysis has rooted its cultural vigor (xi).
which begins with a meditation on the constructedness of categories:
(See
George Lakoff, Philosophy in the Flesh, on this: we are programmed to see patterns.
As pattern-seeking/pattern-making creatures, we make smaller sets from large amounts of information and,
conversely, infer larger structures from whatever limited information is available.)
For instance: what sort of story is Herculine Barbin? (catastrophic, continuous, tragic, comedic?)
In what kind of style, and from what sort of perspective
(omniscient, first person limited point of view?) is it told?
(Of Herculine Barbin:)
I have suffered much, and I have suffered alone! Alone!...Alas! Happiness has never been my lot (3, 102).
I suffered enormously from...communal living (26).
I was devoured by the terrible sickness of the unknown (34).
Go, accursed one, pursue your fate! the world that you invoke was not made for you. You were not made for it (98).
( Compare this idea--of abusing one's advantage--with the use both Tiresias and Callie make of their double-sightedness.)
Sleeping Hermaphrodite, The Louvre, from Bath Program |
From Intersex Society of North America. |
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