The dream of a common language or no language at all is just that--
a dream, a fantasy that ultimately can do little to acknowledge and to legitimate
the hitherto repressed differences between and within sexual identities.--Fuss
Thought is freedom in relation to what one does,
the motion by which one detaches oneself from it,
establishes it as an object, and reflects on it as a problem.
--Foucault
Drawing from a personal childhood experience...I hope to articulate gender positioning not just as a dichotomy between opposite sexes (male vs. female), but also within the same sex (female vs. female)....In creating a gender dichotomy that contrasts women to men, the possibility of neglecting the gendered activity existing within same biological sex groups develops.... I hope to promote the complexity of gender and biological sex as not just a binary opposition between male and female, but also that of female and female or male and male.--Kelsey, "Gender and Sexualities Paper # 1"
GoPhila CultureFiles--Mutter Museum
Is our occupation of categories willing or unwilling? "Natural" or imposed?
What do those categories (say, "learner" and "teacher") signify to us?
What do they look and sound like to each of us?
What categories matter most to us,
when we discuss our own identities and those of others?
How might we self-organize into a taxonomy that makes sense of those identities?
For help, go to Taxonomy--Wikipedia
Taxonomy Lab: The "Nuts and Bolts" of Taxonomy and Classification
Bloom's Taxonomy: A Classification of Levels of Intellectual Behavior
The Wagner Free Institute of Science
Brief exercise: split into groups of three to conduct a taxonomic exercise:
How many "kinds" do you constitute?
What are the grounds for your grouping?
(Identify any/all characteristics that seem important to you.)
Identify a table, or grid, or draw a tree...
...that places you in relation to one another.
What matters in the categories you make?
How do you construct them?
So...what have we learned?
For starters: categorization can begin
II. What's all this have to do w/ Fuss?
her key idea is that identity is fundamentally relational:
we are defined by what we are NOT
Hegel's master/slave
also psychoanalytic:
Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) French practictioner, theorist of psychoanalysis who
used structuralist linguistics to revise Freud's biological theory of the unconscious and of gender differentiation
Lacan focused on the entry of children into the "symbolic," into the signifiying system of language,
as a result of the break-up of the priordial unity with the mother.
His work focuses on "the lack" (language arises from the lack of the "real"),
on the the "mirror stage," on "object relations"
simply put: an awareness of self by contrast with an other
(old/white/Quaker/traveling American;
exchange student now! aware of what it means to be Mexican,
surrounded by those who are NOT, sees herself through the difference
helps articulate evolution of field of Gender Studies
during name change discussion, dean asked about students looking for woamen's studies;
will they recognize what they want on page called G&S?
can they move from the ghetto of the marginalized (women's history, psychology of women, etc.)
to the relational nature of the identity "woman"
can't talk about women w/out talking about men
(and, per Kelsey: can't talk about women w/out talking about other women)
this is Fuss:
naming any category of "inside" creates an 'outside"
any term dependent on what is exterior to it
danger: this dynamic becomes a structure of rigid/polar exclusion
in particular: fixed polarity of sexual terms
great irony: when homosexuality named/became closeted:
identification=explicit policing
recently it's "in to be out": valorize marginality
is that a tenable position? is it politically viable?
or does an outside always get created
however "out" the inside?
(Stanley Fish on difference: "the remainder that escape the drawing of any line no matter how generous: irreducible")
inside and outside @ same time/disorganize these structures
naming/categorizing/analysis "interminable,'
identity a perpetual reinvention/revision
(Mark Lord: a shell game, not an entity)
the very roots of "hetero" (other) and "homo" (same) are opposites
Fuss says that the rigid polarities of the sexual terms we have hide a lack on the inside;
heterosexual policing of homosexualtiy: fear of w/in
out w/ two meanings; into presence, on outside
to out can be to valorize/idealize/romatnicize the marginal
reconsider "in" and "out" as "alongside"; distance/proximity
[which brings us back to Foucault!]
turn vocabulary inside out
(if time/probably not:) another exercise to end--
name yourself, what you are w/in:
"I am Anne and I am inside the classroom"
listen to woman on your right: name her and her outside on next round:
"She is Anne and she is outside the outside."
Coursekeeping
Reminder re: writing conferences
Heavy reading for Wednesday:
first 50 pp. of first of Foucault's 3 volumes on The History of Sexuality
20 pp. of book by historian Tom Laqueur on Making
Sex (historian @ UCal, Berkeley, friend of Sharon Ullman, spoke here on burial practices); more recent book Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation