I have created two new blogs, which I am linking here, because it all began here.
The first is The Pueblo 090 Project: I have opened this blog up to my PCC Eng 090 students as a place for them to explore themselves and their community. The have administrative privileges because I want them, ultimately, to be the site's creators.
The second blog is White Woman Testifying: I intend this blog to be a reading/writing journal in which I explore and confront my own habitus - my white liberal racist anti-racist tendencies.
Sunday, February 28, 2010
Monday, November 30, 2009
Fundamentalist Poetics, or "Grandma, Where Did Dead People Go Before Jesus Came?"
To paraphrase Viktor Frankl quoting Nietzsche in Man's Search for Meaning - we humans can live with any how as long as we have sufficient why.
For my grandparents, the King James Bible was all the why they ever needed.
In After Theory, Terry Eagleton calls this "a neurotic hunt for solid foundations" (204) - I always called it Chasing the Devil. According to my Assembly-of-God-minister grandfather and my born-to-be-Preacher's-Wife grandmother, anyone who couldn't see that every word in the Bible was minutely, excruciatingly, and, at times, horrifically true and must needs be read in exactly the way Grandpa preached it on Sunday, was obviously and irrefutably being influenced by, if not completely filled with, The Devil.
Eagleton believes this stance is a denial of the "roughness" (204) of life, that Fundamentalists expect to feel life as "a matter ...of treading on thin air" (204) - I must, respectfully, disagree. My grandparents grew up in rural areas of Texas and Louisiana in the early part of the last century with over ten children in each family - lots of chances for children to get sick, get hurt, and die. My great-grandmother was a midwife, which meant that my grandmother, as a young girl, witnessed both birth and death - sometimes simultaneously.
My grandparents married and began a family while traveling many dusty roads of the South around 1930, leading tent revivals, just as the Depression was getting into full swing. Unlike today's t.v. personalities-cum-ministers, my grandfather made only what he received in tithes - they often lived on toast and coffee for weeks at a time. They knew life was "rough;" I argue, they expected nothing else but, instead, waited patiently for reward.
When my grandmother passed away, it was not the thought of "treading [the] thin air" of this world her soul flew toward, but the purified air of a Heaven she felt sure the Bible had promised.
Though I have never been able to share in their "pure ice of absolute certainty" (205), I came to respect very early that they were not trying to hide from reality - they lived long, full lives filled to the top with good and bad, and they embraced every moment. Maybe it's because they didn't have a lot of time for theorizing.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Barry, Super-Readers, and Truth with a Capital "T"
When I first came back to school - and after a semester or two of taking literature "survey" classes - I became frustrated with the idea that, unless I found a way to live forever, I would never have enough time in my life to really get to know every author, every poet, every playwright I was interested in on more than a cursory level.
This semester, I've felt as though I were turning myself into a pretzel trying to capture the "essence" of whatever theory we were studying at the moment. I felt as though I were losing my own perspective in the process of trying to wear someone else's mantle; more than this, I felt, more often than not, detached from what I was writing and that my words were way too often "[bland and superficial]" (Barry 191).
When Barry wrote:
"A genuine interest in one [field of theory] can really only arise from aspects of your own circumstances. These perspectives cannot be put on and off like a suit - they have to emerge and declare themselves with some urgency" (192),
I was grateful.
Theory is like the field of literature itself, too deep and varied for one person to ever be able to focus well and with relevance on more than one area in any one lifetime.
This semester, I've felt as though I were turning myself into a pretzel trying to capture the "essence" of whatever theory we were studying at the moment. I felt as though I were losing my own perspective in the process of trying to wear someone else's mantle; more than this, I felt, more often than not, detached from what I was writing and that my words were way too often "[bland and superficial]" (Barry 191).
When Barry wrote:
"A genuine interest in one [field of theory] can really only arise from aspects of your own circumstances. These perspectives cannot be put on and off like a suit - they have to emerge and declare themselves with some urgency" (192),
I was grateful.
Theory is like the field of literature itself, too deep and varied for one person to ever be able to focus well and with relevance on more than one area in any one lifetime.
Sunday, November 8, 2009
A Talking Book and the Silence of the Dominated
How does silence make, deconstruct, and appropriate meaning? Language has no inherent meaning - what we state, whether written or oral - is true before we verbalize it. Even without words - truth exists.
No matter how eloquently we speak, language only signifies truth (Truth) and our words only create the metaphor for meaning. We can argue, then, that, in silence, we are closer to original intent, especially when the signifier is a member of a dominated group who is merely appropriating the language and structure of someone else's cultural point of view.
In silence, we may refuse to "play the game;" sometimes it's the only move of power available.
In "Writing, 'Race,' and the Difference It Makes," Henry Louis Gates, Jr. teaches that "language use signifies the difference between cultures and their possessions of power... the difference between subordinate and superordinate, between bondsman and lord" (1894).
In a social structure in which race "[lends] to even supposedly innocent descriptions of cultural tendencies and differences the sanction of God, biology, or the natural" (1893),
a society in which a poet like Phyllis Wheatley must prove her grasp of the dominant language after proving her facility by writing a noted volume of poetry in that language,
how can any dominated group fight using the only linguistic weapon available with impunity - when even "to attempt to appropriate [their] own discourses using Western critical theory [at the very least] 'uncritically' is to substitute one mode of neocolonialism for another" (1902)?
"The trope of the talking book," says Gates, "is not a trope of the presence of voice at all, but of its absence" (1900), the absence of the black [minority] voice which, through an appropriation of legitimate language "[preserves]...a tradition of [difference]" (1901).
No matter how eloquently we speak, language only signifies truth (Truth) and our words only create the metaphor for meaning. We can argue, then, that, in silence, we are closer to original intent, especially when the signifier is a member of a dominated group who is merely appropriating the language and structure of someone else's cultural point of view.
In silence, we may refuse to "play the game;" sometimes it's the only move of power available.
In "Writing, 'Race,' and the Difference It Makes," Henry Louis Gates, Jr. teaches that "language use signifies the difference between cultures and their possessions of power... the difference between subordinate and superordinate, between bondsman and lord" (1894).
In a social structure in which race "[lends] to even supposedly innocent descriptions of cultural tendencies and differences the sanction of God, biology, or the natural" (1893),
a society in which a poet like Phyllis Wheatley must prove her grasp of the dominant language after proving her facility by writing a noted volume of poetry in that language,
how can any dominated group fight using the only linguistic weapon available with impunity - when even "to attempt to appropriate [their] own discourses using Western critical theory [at the very least] 'uncritically' is to substitute one mode of neocolonialism for another" (1902)?
"The trope of the talking book," says Gates, "is not a trope of the presence of voice at all, but of its absence" (1900), the absence of the black [minority] voice which, through an appropriation of legitimate language "[preserves]...a tradition of [difference]" (1901).
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Insignificant Linguisic Interaction
Spring 2009 - my first semester as a "teacher:" I walked into my very first Eng 090 classroom at Pueblo Community College, so nervous I couldn't remember if I even actually spoke English - how would I presume to teach it?
23 faces stared at me with varying degrees of trust and friendliness as I handed out syllabi and explained department policy. Then, as I had carefully pre-planned, I asked the class to take out pen and paper for a free-write exercise. At the mark of my completely un-empowered word, all at once, 23 people reached for notebooks and pens and began to write like robots. It was one of the most surreal moments of my life.
In Language & Symbolic Power, Pierre Bourdieu "portrays everyday lingquisic exchanges as situated encounters between agents endowed with socially structured resources and competencies, in such a way that every linguistic interaction, however personal and insignificant it may seem, bears the traces of social structure that it both expresses and helps to reproduce" ("Editor's Introduction" 2).
In other words, though those students didn't know me from a hole in the ground, even the people who glared distrust at me from the minute I walked to the front of the class did exactly what I asked of them because of the "complex [and powerful] historical process" (5) developed in this country around the idea of "teacher" as signifer. It was "habitus" - what Bourdieu sees as a "set of dispositions which incline agents to act and react in certain ways" (12) - that "entitled [me] to speak in the circumstance" (8). They listened because 13 years (more or less) of public schooling inculcated them with specific actions and expectations. I, on the other hand, found myself in a situation "[lacking] congruence", in which I was unsure of exactly "how to act and was [at least for a while] lost for words" (17)
23 faces stared at me with varying degrees of trust and friendliness as I handed out syllabi and explained department policy. Then, as I had carefully pre-planned, I asked the class to take out pen and paper for a free-write exercise. At the mark of my completely un-empowered word, all at once, 23 people reached for notebooks and pens and began to write like robots. It was one of the most surreal moments of my life.
In Language & Symbolic Power, Pierre Bourdieu "portrays everyday lingquisic exchanges as situated encounters between agents endowed with socially structured resources and competencies, in such a way that every linguistic interaction, however personal and insignificant it may seem, bears the traces of social structure that it both expresses and helps to reproduce" ("Editor's Introduction" 2).
In other words, though those students didn't know me from a hole in the ground, even the people who glared distrust at me from the minute I walked to the front of the class did exactly what I asked of them because of the "complex [and powerful] historical process" (5) developed in this country around the idea of "teacher" as signifer. It was "habitus" - what Bourdieu sees as a "set of dispositions which incline agents to act and react in certain ways" (12) - that "entitled [me] to speak in the circumstance" (8). They listened because 13 years (more or less) of public schooling inculcated them with specific actions and expectations. I, on the other hand, found myself in a situation "[lacking] congruence", in which I was unsure of exactly "how to act and was [at least for a while] lost for words" (17)
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Very Superstitious
Neither of my mother's parents were educated beyond the sixth grade, but my grandfather became an ordained Assembly of God minister - a "learned" man of God.
My grandmother grew up in rural Louisiana; her mother was the local midwife and "healer" who believed the power of prayer superseded all.
My grandparents met and married around the time of the Great Depression; their "conditions" colored by poverty, struggle, and Fundamentalist Christian superstitions, they were girded by the hope ("faith"?) that no matter how they toiled or what they endured if they were "[good] subjects" (Althusser 1271), subjugating themselves to the Will of the Subject (1272) in this world, a better world - with more satisfying conditions - awaited.
My mother moved to Colorado, married a law student, and finished a college education in the late sixties and seventies - she was a staunch feminist, and that's the world I was raised in. Consequently, outside of their conditions, I noticed the way my grandparents' Biblical ideologies morphed in direct correlation "to those [perceived] conditions of existence" (1265), and I rejected their religion at a very early age as childish and nonsensical.
I was unable to reject all religion, however:
"Before its birth, the child is ...always - already a subject, appointed as a subject in and by the specific familial ideological configuration" (1270)
and spent many years searching for the specific explanation of the conditions of existence as I perceived them.
Finally, as I approached 40, I recognized that searching for another belief system to take the place of my grandparents' rejected religion failed to get me any closer to the answers I sought or to the "knowledge of the mechanism [of recognition]" (1269) at all. In a way, this has become the new ideology of my life - and I continue to be the subject.
My grandmother grew up in rural Louisiana; her mother was the local midwife and "healer" who believed the power of prayer superseded all.
My grandparents met and married around the time of the Great Depression; their "conditions" colored by poverty, struggle, and Fundamentalist Christian superstitions, they were girded by the hope ("faith"?) that no matter how they toiled or what they endured if they were "[good] subjects" (Althusser 1271), subjugating themselves to the Will of the Subject (1272) in this world, a better world - with more satisfying conditions - awaited.
My mother moved to Colorado, married a law student, and finished a college education in the late sixties and seventies - she was a staunch feminist, and that's the world I was raised in. Consequently, outside of their conditions, I noticed the way my grandparents' Biblical ideologies morphed in direct correlation "to those [perceived] conditions of existence" (1265), and I rejected their religion at a very early age as childish and nonsensical.
I was unable to reject all religion, however:
"Before its birth, the child is ...always - already a subject, appointed as a subject in and by the specific familial ideological configuration" (1270)
and spent many years searching for the specific explanation of the conditions of existence as I perceived them.
Finally, as I approached 40, I recognized that searching for another belief system to take the place of my grandparents' rejected religion failed to get me any closer to the answers I sought or to the "knowledge of the mechanism [of recognition]" (1269) at all. In a way, this has become the new ideology of my life - and I continue to be the subject.
Sunday, October 18, 2009
We Can't Fix What We Won't See
"And that clarity helps us remember that all of us, female and male, have been socialized from birth on to accept sexist thought and action" (viii)...
as I was reading bell hooks' Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, a movie came on t.v. - one I had seen so many times before, at first I didn't even recognize the connection.
Baby Boom starring Diane Keaton came out in 1987. In the opening sequence, a narrative voice over (Candice Bergen, I think) a standard Bill Conti 80's score and a background scene emphasizing busy New York streets filled with women wearing skirt-suits and tennis shoes (no one could walk that fast in heels) assures us that "33% of the American workforce is female. Three generations of women," we are told, "have turned a thousand years of tradition on its ear."
Eventually, we are introduced to J.C. (a suitably androgynous name), known in the business world as "the Tiger Lady...first in her class at Yale with an MBA from Harvard." J.C. is a marketing executive who is soon offered a partnership - with reservations, of course, because she may change her mind at any moment and walk away from her hard-earned, six million dollar a year salary to start creating babies instead of ad campaigns.
"You know that normally I don't think of you as a woman," her boss tells her, "but in this case I do have to look at you as a woman-slash-partner...I'm lucky," he says, "[as a man] I can have it all." To nail the partnership, she tells him what he wants to hear:
"I don't want it all. I don't."
Before 29 more movie-minutes have run, however, J.C. is nearly ready to walk away from it all after "inheriting" a baby from deceased relatives, a baby she has no idea what to do with until, miraculously, while taking the child's temperature (rectally) she finds her inner-Mother and falls in love. Before the movie closes, she will lose her job, move to the country (after purchasing a 60+ acre farm with a working apple orchard), develop and market her very own gourmet baby food, and shove her new-found success in her former company's collective face.
On the surfact it's just a sweet movie with an obvious feminist bias - all based on what Barry calls "essentialism:"the "view that there is some natural given essence of the feminine, that's universal and unchangeable" (128), but by squinting your eyes ever so slightly, this innocent movie becomes a grand cog in bell hooks' "systemic institutionalized sexism" (1) machine.
Not only did the script not consider the possibility that a woman's heart would not automatically be changed by the mere presence of a baby but the fact that J.C. uses a stream of working-class women (secretaries, nannies and later employees) who are barely given any voice and are often portrayed as bumpkins or damaged in some way (and absolutely no women of color) is never even mentioned.
"By failing to create a mass-based educational movement to teach everyone about feminism we allow mainstream patriarchal mass media to remain the primary place where folks learn about feminism, and most of what they learn is negative" (23).
The character of J.C. was what hooks calls a "reformist feminist" who was able to "break free of male domination in the workforce and be more self-determining in [her] lifestyle" (5) without a second thought to her less fortunate "sisters" in the struggle. Movies like this, produced in the "patriarchal mass media" allowed everyone to pretend the feminist battle was not only over and done - but won. Years after this movie was released (and since played and re-played on weekend television), I sat in a Women's Studies class, full of young female students who all "assume[d] that sexism [was]no longer [a] problem" (17).
But women still make significantly less than men in the workplace, most single-parent homes are still headed by women, and they still live, for the most part, below the poverty line. Birth control is not covered under most insurance policies, but Viagra is. None of the young women in that classroom even considered voting for Hilary Clinton - but they still believed they could do and be anything that men could.
If they can't see a problem, they will never look for a solution.
as I was reading bell hooks' Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, a movie came on t.v. - one I had seen so many times before, at first I didn't even recognize the connection.
Baby Boom starring Diane Keaton came out in 1987. In the opening sequence, a narrative voice over (Candice Bergen, I think) a standard Bill Conti 80's score and a background scene emphasizing busy New York streets filled with women wearing skirt-suits and tennis shoes (no one could walk that fast in heels) assures us that "33% of the American workforce is female. Three generations of women," we are told, "have turned a thousand years of tradition on its ear."
Eventually, we are introduced to J.C. (a suitably androgynous name), known in the business world as "the Tiger Lady...first in her class at Yale with an MBA from Harvard." J.C. is a marketing executive who is soon offered a partnership - with reservations, of course, because she may change her mind at any moment and walk away from her hard-earned, six million dollar a year salary to start creating babies instead of ad campaigns.
"You know that normally I don't think of you as a woman," her boss tells her, "but in this case I do have to look at you as a woman-slash-partner...I'm lucky," he says, "[as a man] I can have it all." To nail the partnership, she tells him what he wants to hear:
"I don't want it all. I don't."
Before 29 more movie-minutes have run, however, J.C. is nearly ready to walk away from it all after "inheriting" a baby from deceased relatives, a baby she has no idea what to do with until, miraculously, while taking the child's temperature (rectally) she finds her inner-Mother and falls in love. Before the movie closes, she will lose her job, move to the country (after purchasing a 60+ acre farm with a working apple orchard), develop and market her very own gourmet baby food, and shove her new-found success in her former company's collective face.
On the surfact it's just a sweet movie with an obvious feminist bias - all based on what Barry calls "essentialism:"the "view that there is some natural given essence of the feminine, that's universal and unchangeable" (128), but by squinting your eyes ever so slightly, this innocent movie becomes a grand cog in bell hooks' "systemic institutionalized sexism" (1) machine.
Not only did the script not consider the possibility that a woman's heart would not automatically be changed by the mere presence of a baby but the fact that J.C. uses a stream of working-class women (secretaries, nannies and later employees) who are barely given any voice and are often portrayed as bumpkins or damaged in some way (and absolutely no women of color) is never even mentioned.
"By failing to create a mass-based educational movement to teach everyone about feminism we allow mainstream patriarchal mass media to remain the primary place where folks learn about feminism, and most of what they learn is negative" (23).
The character of J.C. was what hooks calls a "reformist feminist" who was able to "break free of male domination in the workforce and be more self-determining in [her] lifestyle" (5) without a second thought to her less fortunate "sisters" in the struggle. Movies like this, produced in the "patriarchal mass media" allowed everyone to pretend the feminist battle was not only over and done - but won. Years after this movie was released (and since played and re-played on weekend television), I sat in a Women's Studies class, full of young female students who all "assume[d] that sexism [was]no longer [a] problem" (17).
But women still make significantly less than men in the workplace, most single-parent homes are still headed by women, and they still live, for the most part, below the poverty line. Birth control is not covered under most insurance policies, but Viagra is. None of the young women in that classroom even considered voting for Hilary Clinton - but they still believed they could do and be anything that men could.
If they can't see a problem, they will never look for a solution.
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