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)
Saturday, October 31, 2009
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grandmother grew up in rural Louisiana; her mother was the local midwife and "healer" who believed the power of prayer superseded all.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.
Saturday, October 10, 2009
No Art in the Void
I turned to the "art" of journaling and from there to "creative" writing many years ago in order to save my sanity as a young mother with four small children and a nasty case of cabin fever. I learned quickly that what I wrote mirrored the unspoken, nearly unthought, emotions and contexts in my head. Even then I knew I couldn't separate internal and external experience in any significant way.
We see only with our own eyes and are seldom our own best judge or most honest critic. It requires no particular stretch then to find agreement with Marxist theorists who believe "the author is unaware of precisely what he or she is saying or revealing in [his or her] text" (Barry 161).
However, Hegel points out in The Phenomenology of Spirit "work forms and shapes" the worker (The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism 635), and any English major knows - writing is work. The author (artist) creates initially from a place of social and cultural context, but the process of writing shapes her in unexpected ways, and she is no longer just the product of society but sees from a new place, perhaps a collaborative or a dialectic between social and work experience...
Through this process of change, the author (artist) gains authority as an agent in the "struggle for power" (Barry 151) against the current dominant class, the struggle which defines the Marxist ideal of progress and without which progress would be impossible.
We see only with our own eyes and are seldom our own best judge or most honest critic. It requires no particular stretch then to find agreement with Marxist theorists who believe "the author is unaware of precisely what he or she is saying or revealing in [his or her] text" (Barry 161).
However, Hegel points out in The Phenomenology of Spirit "work forms and shapes" the worker (The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism 635), and any English major knows - writing is work. The author (artist) creates initially from a place of social and cultural context, but the process of writing shapes her in unexpected ways, and she is no longer just the product of society but sees from a new place, perhaps a collaborative or a dialectic between social and work experience...
Through this process of change, the author (artist) gains authority as an agent in the "struggle for power" (Barry 151) against the current dominant class, the struggle which defines the Marxist ideal of progress and without which progress would be impossible.
Sunday, October 4, 2009
The Power of Pop Culture to Create Real
"Even today," Derrida said, "the notion of a structure lacking any center represents the unthinkable itself" ("Structure" 115) - this is chaos. We believe in the need for meaning as a basis for the "moral" choices we make; without the "transcendental signifier" we are alone with our own will, with no one to blame when the choices go wrong.
A student told me he wished we could all be blasted back to the Stone Age. He said he was just bored - but maybe he's searching for purpose in a generation being taught reality is found on MTV and survival is a game with only one winner per season. This student and others display a startling lack of connection to Foucault's "historical knowledge of struggles" (Foucault 129).
Jameson says Foucault's theory of "genealogy" makes a clear statement for a nonlinear history ("Postmodern" 269), but our modern cultural history is being deconstructed one episode at a time, giving the illusion of a linear, repeating history that restarts itself at the beginning of every new season. Jameson's "frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods" (270) has led to a reality-show mentality of relationship parodies and communities that last only until we vote someone else off the island to save ourselves.
Though Foucault argued the "endlessly repeated [definition of power as repression]" (134) is "wholly inadequate to the analysis" of power (135), I have to respectfully disagree. Merriam-Webster online defines repression as that which "[prevents] the natural or normal expression, activity or development." What we have right now is a generation repressed, seeking to deconstruct its own society "back to the Stone Age" - a generation to which chaos seems like a viable alternative.
A student told me he wished we could all be blasted back to the Stone Age. He said he was just bored - but maybe he's searching for purpose in a generation being taught reality is found on MTV and survival is a game with only one winner per season. This student and others display a startling lack of connection to Foucault's "historical knowledge of struggles" (Foucault 129).
Jameson says Foucault's theory of "genealogy" makes a clear statement for a nonlinear history ("Postmodern" 269), but our modern cultural history is being deconstructed one episode at a time, giving the illusion of a linear, repeating history that restarts itself at the beginning of every new season. Jameson's "frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods" (270) has led to a reality-show mentality of relationship parodies and communities that last only until we vote someone else off the island to save ourselves.
Though Foucault argued the "endlessly repeated [definition of power as repression]" (134) is "wholly inadequate to the analysis" of power (135), I have to respectfully disagree. Merriam-Webster online defines repression as that which "[prevents] the natural or normal expression, activity or development." What we have right now is a generation repressed, seeking to deconstruct its own society "back to the Stone Age" - a generation to which chaos seems like a viable alternative.
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