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spirituality + meiner reading (jody’s missed tues dec 1 + anne’s missed thurs dec 3)

rb.richx's picture

some of my reactions to meiner's chapters here come also in the wake of my reflection on the silence exercise shirah and i created, as well as reading some of anne’s pieces that involve religion and spirituality.

meiner starts the chapter in a bit of a critique of the ways in which the adult participants in her classroom wrote their autobiographies in a practically formulaic way (“the redemption genre”).

i understand this critique on the level of the institution. she questions the limited tools that are given to these individuals to process their incarceration and traumas, which definitely has a major hand in shaping the internalization of the criminal, deviance, and incarceration narratives.

Silence, Power, Politics, and Feminism

Shirah Kraus's picture

When I read Eva’s Man, a very personal novel about a poor black woman who experiences violence as a victim, bystander, and perpetrator and serves time in a psychiatric prison for murdering a man, I could not avoid thinking about politics: the politics of incarceration, of identity (gender, race, and class), and of silence and trauma. Eva tells her story in flashbacks, paralleling the experiences of someone who lives with trauma. She tells her story, too, with many silences. She says more in her pauses and not saying than in her speaking. There is no mention of politicians or policies per say, so how does this fictional (and yet so very real) account become political? Eva chooses silence, even though others often demand that she speak.

Engendering Silence: Political Rhetoric and The New Jim Crow

saturday's picture

As Joel was discussing our latest essays in our political philosophy class, the ideas of “realism” versus “idealism” were brought up in regards to framing conversations. In political discourse, realistic is coded to mean the correct, or best, or reasonable course of action, with unrealistic or idealistic coded in the opposite way. It’s loaded and empty at the same time, as anyone can hand-wave away an idea with the premise that it’s “not realistic”. The most likely or most practical solution may not be the best one, and in fact usually isn’t in terms of radical change.

Shaping Silence 12.1

Today, we delved into a spiritual silence inspired by my Reform Jewish practice of silent prayer in services followed by music. I turned off the lights. We began by centering ourselves, breathing deeply and clearing our minds. I then explained what inspired me and talked a little bit about my personal silent prayer: a self-reflection that calms me, makes me think about where I am and where I want to go, how I can be a better person, what am I grateful for. We then took a few minutes to sit in silence and pray if we chose or simply reflect and connect.

Gendered Silences

abby rose's picture

I've been very intrigued by Eva's Man, mostly because I found it unbearable to read at first. I couldn't even speak in our conversation in class. I was silenced by the silences within myself, like Eva's (to quote our classmate). I found it peculiar to hear the analytical conversation in class about Eva's silence so closely reflected my own experience with silence and voice and agency, although my story varies so much from her's. Since my inability to engage in the text and in class, I have found a new determination to enter Eva's Man. Perhaps to test the edges of my learning; to look at where I struggle with reading and thinking and speaking as a survivor reading about a survivor. But also because I wonder about how teaching the book itself may elicit voice or impose silence.

Gendered silence Paper Proposal

Joie Rose's picture

Adrienne Rich’s “On Lies, Secrets, and Silence” posits an ideal of honesty in the global community of women. She asserts that a woman lying, under any circumstance, is a direct product of our inability to break free of the patriarchal shackles that hold all women, and that truth, pure unadulterated uncensored truth, is the necessary tool that women must wield for freedom. By truth telling we (read women) create a web of relationship politics that actively resists the default of relationships built upon lies, relationships that perpetuate the patriarchal norms under which we have always existed. Truth telling and honesty not only allow women to build meaningful relationships that resist normative structures but complexify and deepen relationships to be truly meaningful connections.