Week 7-- Becoming Monsters

Hello,

Thank you, again, for letting us listen to your class.

This is a general response to yours of Simone de Beauvoir and SUBJECT AND OBJECT.

I just created ( in clay) a sculpture LOVERS.  I loved the swooping line and form, BUT…

After reading our introduction, I realized that I was making women the object.  She is being protected by the cape form.  The taller figure ( usually “read” man) is indeed the subject.

Lovers Object

Lovers Object Back

I did create a prior LOVERS in which the woman was Subject.  She was loving- embracing.  The male figure had no arms and was the object accepting the affection.

Lovers Woman Subject

However…

Collectors wanted her to be “hugged back” so a strong woman turned into a duo.

Lovers Partner

The last image is Marriage Dance.  I love the form and it is a best seller.  However….

The woman is definitely object.  When I created this same image for a same sex union, the object/subject- non equality was nauseatingly and immediately apparent.  The second figure had to be bent down into a more normal “dancing” position to seem like partners.

Traditional Marriage Dance- Woman Object

In our culture, it seems, a common woman sculptural SUBJECT is mother or nurture.  

How do we break/ modify / espand this sculptural tradition?

Grandmother

On Thursday, we began class with a little bit of coursekeeping. One of the main things we discussed was the idea of having alums "adopt" each of us and read our final papers, and then converse with us about our thoughts/ideas via email, Skype, etc. Some of us expressed that we liked the idea of feedback, while others thought we should be able to choose whether we want to participate or not, or thought it was a little bit of an overload to add one more untraditional component to the course. Ultimately, we resolved to wait and decide at a later date when we've had more time to think about it.

As we transitioned into our discussion of Simone de Beauvoir's Introduction to The Second Sex, Anne presented us with two images (one of a knife/letter opener/half a pair of scissors, and one of a woman) and asked us what we saw, and then encouraged us to figure out why we saw what we saw. In doing so, we were able to visualize and begin discussing Sartre's quote (this is only the first part of it): "If one considers an article of manufacture--as, for example, a book or a paper-knife--one sees that it has been made by an artisan who had a conception of it...one cannot suppose that a man would produce a paper-knife without knowing what it was for. Let us say then of the paper-knife that its essence...precedes its existence..." In contrast, we were also presented with his idea that humans are existences that precede their essences... which led us into our discussion on the idea of transcendence.

We spent a lot of time just trying to define the word transcendence and exactly what it means in the context of de Beauvoir's Introduction. Basically, we defined it as the constant, unending task of exceeding what we are... as something that requires us to always be moving and questioning... as something that sounds exhausting.

While still keeping the idea of transcendence in mind, we began looking at the idea of othering. We talked about the ideas of Delphy and Ortner, and whether or not we agreed with the female = nature, male = culture distinction. Throughout our conversation, we looked to our own postings, to Anzaldua's quote about refusing the binary, and to the Hegelian master -> slave idea (like the master, male is defined as what it's not). Essentially, we found ourselves asking the question of whether it's ever possible to not create others, since we seem to always define ourselves in terms of what we are not.

Towards the end of class, we found ourselves back at the idea of how to define transcendence... without as much clarity as we may have hoped to find through discussion. We talked about the role of agency in transcendence, and how transcendence is a relative thing -- we cannot, for example, judge a woman who does not transcend the same way or to the same extent that we may be able if she does not have the choice or ability to do so.

We ended class with a few more of de Beauvoir's quotes, in which she says that the differences between the sexes are not as important as the fact that we are all humans, as well as that the contradictions that challenge us will never be resolved. At the very end of class, Tamarinda presented us with the idea that transcendence seems to mean "denying the dictionary and writing a new language."

It seems to me that the only way to transcend this notion of otherness is for us all to be the same so there is no other.

The way I see it is that the problem lies in the fact that each of us see ourselves as selves in relation to others. But we as women (and other subjugated minority groups) are also conscious of the reality that we are others to someone else's self. Maybe if men, in particular white men (the seemingly only unoppressed group of people on earth), began to also see themselves as others and not as the One we can begin to work as transcending this oppressive duality.

I guess implied in this is the idea that for us to transcend the notion of the self versus the other we all have to embrace our identities as selves and others.

As much as I don't necessarily agree with or feel much of a connection with what de Beauvoir is saying in "The Second Sex," her point in the Introduction that female is always defined in relation to male is a really important and interesting point. I believe a similar point was also made by another author we read, (or I'm confusing this with another class...)- that we as humans are always defined by the dominant (or percieved dominant) standard (whether that standard is the male, heterosexuality, being Caucasian, etc.), and that we cannot even concieve of ourselves as individuals without the existence of an "other." Thus, men needed and need to "other" women in order to define thier own identities as "males."

It reminded me very much of Susan Stryker's point that we will never be without "marks of gender" precisely because we need them psychologically. Who would we be if we had no "other" by which we could compare and contrast outselves with? What has been most interesting in reading all three authors is that they all point out this close relationship between the notion of "other" and "monster" that exists in people's minds. It seems that in order to be "othered" (or perhaps because of the very process of "othering") one must also be turned into a "monster" or percieved to have monstrous elements. Otherwise, than they're just as "normal" as you-in fact, they are you without this constructed notion of "otherness."

But in the case of females, de Beauvoir seems to believe that there is a clear difference between men and women, that there is something fundamentally differet about women. If that's true, then it almost seems to validate the historical process by which women have been "othered" because women are different than men. I suppose the larger issue is to "transcend" this process of "othering" altogether, which I'm not sure I can even concieve of. How would we self-identify then? What would be the mechanism by which we would "know" who and what we were?

Finally, it's so interesting too that this early feminism aspired to "become men" ( according to de Beauvoir, anyway) whereas modern feminism has moved far beyond that in embracing and even celebrating that women are not men and do not want to simply become men but remain females entitled to all the rights and privileges men have.