Notes Towards Day 7 (Tuesday, 9/24): Ordering the Chaos of Dreaming

I. Coursekeeping
Continuing the name-testing:
ask folks whose name you don't know...

Signing in (last Thursday also?)

Signing up for writing conferences this week:
talk about the class, generally; you-in-the-class particularly;
then hear your thoughts re: first "web-event" re: self-representation
(I've had two so far, each selected a particular text/author, not in class,
to examine these questions; don't know how the self-portraits will work in--or not)

many of your posts this weekend were working the question whether
autobiography could be thought of as a feminist form;
in the last post in that particular thread, Sam made the great observation that each of us
"writes" an autobiography every day, in which we "make ourselves readable" to one another...
that might be a great place to begin this paper: how do you "write yourself"?
how do you make yourself "readable" to others?
what identity do you perform?
how much of this is already scripted for you?
how "adequate" is the script?
how much do you script, or re-write, yourself?

making a web-paper interesting/"readable" to the larger world:
--evocative titles draw folks in
--images, ditto (attend to size--large images slow down the loading of everyone's pages)
--don't assume that your audience is this class; explain references/give citations
--better: create active links, as windows into further research
(how to create a link--look @ the icons across the top and you'll see)
--paragraph (spaces between each stage of your argument makes it easier to read)
--chose a readable type (visuals matter)
--this is a different genre: think about "representing" your  ideas,
making them "accessible" to a large audience (rather than just for a prof who has to read 'em!)

Paul Farber, Postdoctoral Writing Fellow @ HC, will offer a workshop, 7-8 p.m. this Wednesday,
in the Meditation Room of Woodside Cottage, on "How to Read an Image":
we will explore interdisciplinary approaches to reading photographic images,
consider the roles of aesthetics, perspective, hybrid text and image forms, archive collections,
technology, and techniques of alteration through a number of examples drawn from civil rights-era
documentary photography and contemporary digital images.

Crystal Leigh Endsley: Keynote Speaker for Latin@ Heritage Month:
reception in Quita @ 5:30, talk in TGH @ 7:00 this Thursday
Her performances and current research focus on issues of performance and identity and the ways they intersect with feminist pedagogy, race, and popular culture; Hip Hop and cultural production as activism; and the connections between academic/home communities, motherhood and knowledge production.

II. Mini-lecture
many of your Sunday night posts said that you don't know what feminism is:
--some of you came in thinking you knew--and have lost that certainty;
others came in not knowing and are more confused than ever;
--some of you think it's essential to find a definition that includes everyone;
others of you think that such a definition is a box, "a dead-end one-way road";
--some of you think feminism is all about individual choice;
others that the movement is about much more than the empowerment of
(already relatively empowered) individuals;
--we heard about "straw feminists"
(extreme examples that turn folks off of feminism),
critiques of women critiquing women,
critiques of "porn for women" that takes the form of buff men doing housework,
critiques of transphobia embedded in a new anti-teen pregnancy campaign...
all very rich, thinking pretty hard!--with lots of great, concrete examples....

I want to give you a little more historical context for some of this confusion.

• Three Waves of Feminism:
  • male-identified ("get what they got"--BMC)
  • female-identified ("celebrate what we've got--w/ an emphasis on embodiment, sexuality, motherhood)
  • postmodern (unidentifying/unessentializing)

• Mridula Nath Chakraborty, "Wa(i) ving It All Away: Producing Subject and Knowledge in Feminisms of Colour," Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration. Ed. Stacy Gillis, Gillian Howie and Rebecca Munford. Palgrave, 2007

global feminist models take into account the political economy of their socio-cultural milieu and are contingent upon broad-based approaches to questions of equity rather than a simple gender divide...a new typology...engages with multiculturalism, racialised class formations, immigration and naturalisation laws..

...an example is the Palestinian female suicide bomber...perceived as a traitor to the feminist causes, without any questioning of the Eurocentric stakes in 'international' feminist politics....

from Rosemarie Tong's 2009 edition of Feminist Thought:
A Comprehensive Introduction, on the diversity of feminist thinking:

• liberal feminists (suffrage; equal rights; equality of education: Bryn Mawr!)
• radical feminists (libertarian and cultural: ripping out the patriarchal system)
  
• Marxist-Socialist feminists (critique of the class system: oppression located in private property--means of production should belong to all)
  
• psychoanalytic feminists (shift focus from macrocosm to microcosm of the individual: psychic trap of the Oedipal complex; explore prelinguistic, pre-Oedipal domain of the Imaginary, before children enter the Symbolic order--French feminists/Kathy Acker/Neil Gaiman)
  
• care-focused feminists (why are women associated w/ emotions and the body, men w/ reason and the mind; women w/ interdependence, community, connection, and men w/ independence, selfhood, autonomy?)
  
• multicultural, global, postcolonial feminists (highlighting differences among women--in race, ethnicity, sexual identity, gender identity, age, religion, level of education, occupation/ profession, marital status, health conditions--challenge female essentialism, chauvinism, "sisterhood")
• ecofeminists (focus on strengthening humans' relation to the nonhuman world: broadest, most demanding definition of self's relation to the other; see Donna Harraway, of "Cyborg Manifesto" fame: "I am fascinated with the molecular architecture that plants and animals share...how like a leaf I am")
• postmodern and third-wave feminists (highlight plurality, multiplicity, difference to re-think the category "woman")