Day Two: Sex and Gender Notes
I. course
keeping
collect $30 for packets
for Monday, read excerpts from Barrie
Thorne's Gender Play,
by Sunday @ 5, post on-line your reactions to
text:
what strikes you in her analysis/what questions you have for her/for
us to discuss as a class
for Wed, read Alice Lesnick's essay on performing
gender/inequality @ work/home/school
by Fri @ 5: first 5 pp. essay due,
cfing one of your own early memories/recent experience of gender
play/work--
(we will divide you up, randomly, for writing instruction)
(Jen--talk
here a bit about writing as an ethnographer/participant-observer?)
II.
Jen reactions to Lakoff (hers/theirs)
III. Anne: follow-up w/ 3
experiences
--blindspot:
http://serendipstudio.org/bb/blindspot1.html
--"this
is not yellow":
http://serendipstudio.org/sci_cult/courses/sexgender/f05/colorfroAnne.ppt
--write
down directions to english house from your dorm
(how many self-orientation,
how many compass-orientation?)
IV. my thoughts re Lakoff:
"the
mind is inherently embodied"/"thought is mostly
unconscious"/"abstract concepts are largely metaphorical"
A.
helped swing pendulum back to body-based thinking: but overstates the case
thinking
is affected by biological organization, not determined by it
acting and
thinking do use the same neural circuits
--dream activity uses same
circuits as used in visual contexts
--movements overlap when
imagining/performing
--coaches: increase athletic performance by imagining
(doctors heal by visualization?)
--"pretty studies": imagining
opening/closing hand=same rate as actual ability/subject to same
constants)
--also true that when the brain changes something from high
density to low density representation:
is making categories
--IS NOT
TRUE, however, that nervous systems are constrained by categories it
creates:
having created low density representations, nervous system can
regenerate high density ones
Jackendorff re: squeezing and
expanding....
exs re: talking about...sex? gender?)
B. that most
thought is unconscious/that our categories are unconscious/hard to
revise--helpful
C. that our thinking is primarily metaphoric: that we
move from concrete to abstract--also useful
(tenor/vehicle: could end w/
game re metaphor of classroom--> implied philosophy of education)