Since last night's lecture, my mind has been spinning with loosely connected threads of thoughts and a multitiude of questions.  Maybe the biggest question I have is: How does one even begin to react to a lecture that expansive and illuminating and confusing and engaging?  I really don't have an answer to that, so I'm just going to jump in here and possibly make a fool of myself.

One of the many things that kind of stood out to me as I read the assigned piece and then listened to the lecture was the poetry of Barad's language.  The rhythm of the way she broke words in half and the pace of the piece and the lecture were kind of breathtaking in a way, and they also made me feel as though I was rapidly excellerating through time, while just sitting still.  It was a strange way to be taking in physics, by way of feeling like I'd been invited into a poem.  later, as I chewed on all the things that had been discussed, and all the things that had been left out, I wondered what Anne and Professor Barad were getting at when they were trying to get us to relate the talk to gender.

I found Judith Butler’s lecture on Monday night very intriguing.  I was a bit apprehensive before the lecture because I expected her to deliver her speech in the same way she writes, which at times can be quite dense, but I think Butler did a very excellent job making her speech much more accessible.   In her speech Butler said that gender is assigned from birth when a stranger checks off a box labeling one as male or female, and that person is expected to reproduce the norms of that specific gender.  I am curious to find out how Butler feels about all woman’s colleges.  All woman’s colleges categorizes and excludes people as well as empower people.  I wonder if Butler finds all-woman’s colleges to be a more positive or negative thing.

Welcome to our first Diablog Poll. Please make your selection and after you do, write a post explaining your selection and write a response to someone else's in which you raise a question to further your and their thinking.  Enjoy!

"Letter to a John" - Ani DiFranco

In thinking about college activism in regard to Judith Butler’s lecture last night, I am struck by the thought of “appearing” on a college campus. While I would like to think that I’m having a typical college experience, the fact remains that I attend a women’s college and have little interaction with the male gender. Attending a domestic study away program last semester increased not only my academic knowledge but my social experiences as well, and I now call several of my male classmates from my time away from Bryn Mawr my closest friends.

Maintaining a friendship, as most of us know, takes a lot of work. So while most of my friends from my study-away experience do not go to Bryn Mawr or reside in the Philadelphia area, I regularly make efforts to remain in contact with them. Most recently I found myself braving a bizarre October snowstorm during a visit to Williams College in Williamstown, MA. While touring campus, I spotted a flier that would never, ever, not in a million years be seen on our campus. The flier reads as follows:

“Are you interested in men’s issues? Are you ‘man enough’ to talk about your feelings? Are you looking for different representations of masculinity? Then come meet, share your thoughts, and learn from other men who are interested in having conversations about the diverse experiences of male-identified people!”

I was very pleasantly surprised by Judith Butler’s lecture last night. Going into it I was very apprehensive, I knew that the lectures were supposed to reflect her more recent dedication to activism, a change I appreciate, but I was nervous that her style of writing (and by extension her style of speech) would alienate a large potential audience and limit the reach of her ideas. In general, I do not believe in a necessary separation between scholarly work and political ideology. I am in favor of scholars who ground their work in activism and/or the pragmatic rather than the simply theoretical. I was very encouraged that Butler was able to do this while maintaining a rigorous and sophisticated academic platform--while still being fairly comprehensible and accessible. The academic content of her lecture did not obscure her point but rather was critically important  as the thread that ties her diverse interests together. This emphasis separated it from other activist or political agendas that I have most often been exposed to.

Hi everyone,

For a final project in my Empowering Learners class year, I conducted interviews with working mothers.  I didn't receive any formal prep for doing interviews, but I thought maybe showing you guys the email that I sent out to my potential interviewees would be helpful so I've copied and pasted below:

As I was listening to Judith Butler talk last night about the power of performativity, I was reminded of a passage from a feminist book I'm reading called Les Guerilleres, written in 1969 by Monique Wittig. The novel is made up of many interdependent paragraph-passages, which taken together envision a society where the patriarchy has been bloodily dismantled by a group of warrior women. The following is an early passage from the book:

By the lakeside there is an echo. As they stand there with an open book the chosen passages are re-uttered from the other side by a voice that becomes distant and repeats itself. Lucie Maure cries to the double echo the phrase of Phenarete, I say that that which is is. I say that that which is not also is. When she repeats the phrase several times the double, then triple voice endlessly superimposes that which is and that which is not. The shadows brooding over the lake shift and begin to shiver because of the vibrations of the voice. (Wittig 14)

The guerilleres must create a new society from the wreckage of their warfare. The only way to build a new order is through a new language, a language that builds meaning and form through its very iteration. So the language in Les Gureilleres is echoic, less focused on temporality than intertextuality (in the continued repetition of themes and images between the alinear passages, in the emphasis on folklore and books, etc.).

The lecture last night was intense and, for me, different from other lectures I've attended at Bryn Mawr. Partly it was the sheer scale of it and the buildup beforehand: while I'm sure there were some audience members only there for a class, there was a collective excitement that you just don't usually feel in an academic setting. The only event I can think of that came close was the lecture by Angela Davis. So first, there was a difference in the audience.

Then there was the difference in the speaker. The biggest difference, and the one I talked about with some friends afterwards, was that Judith Butler was there as an academic and theorist but taking a strong political stance. How often have we seen that? I can tell you how often I've heard it: never. Not once. I've occasionally had a professor take up political issues in the classroom, but not often. And never in a way that tied them so thoroughly to theory. I'd never heard a lecture that was both very academic and intensely political-- they tend to be one or the other.  I'd never seen theory and practice so thoroughly entangled (to borrow Barad's term, which I may or may not thoroughly understand. But it seems right here).

Then there were the ideas themselves. Other people have complained about how hard it was to take notes with hardly any light, but I did it anyway because I knew that otherwise there was no way I'd be able to remember even half of what was brought up. I can even read most of what I wrote.