The futility of language is a concept which came up a number of times in the readings for this weekend, both through the abstractness/inaccessibility of the writings themselves and in the discussion of language directly. Specifically, Luce Irigaray opens “When Our Lips Speak Together” by saying that “if we keep on speaking the same language together, we’re going to reproduce the same history.... If we keep on speaking sameness, if we speak to each other as men have been doing for centuries, as we have been taught to speak, we’ll miss each other, fail ourselves. Again” (205). She proceeds to construct a text that I could understand only on some oddly confused “poetic” level.

I admire the desire and the practice of creating a new language. According to linguistics, a language fits the needs of its community. According to muted group theory, language is the product of the dominant/dominating group, a tool to perpetuate its domination by not allowing for expression the specific experiences of marginalized people. I do not see how these ideas have to be mutually exclusive. Local dialects can prove both, and perhaps offer an alternative, however paltry, to muted group theory, as do the attempts by these French feminists to recreate language, which are clearly much more elaborate and, therefore, revolutionary.

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In “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism,’” Judith Butler claims that power is a never-ending, always-changing structure: “If the subject is constituted by power, that power does not cease at the moment the subject is constituted, for that subject is never fully constituted, but is subjected and produced time and again” (13).

This reminds me of Lacan’s rereading of Freud and, in particular, de Saussure’s Borromean knot used to explain a subject’s progression to and relationship with language. The claim there was that people are never complete, never stable, because they are always trying to get to a place (back to the “real,” the “baby blob”) that they could never possibly do. So, therefore, taking into account both claims, both inside and outside forces will always keep us as struggling, striving, incomplete, people.

This is an idea that needs to hit the masses, and quickly. After all, who doesn’t think we’re supposed to grow and mature until we are complete? How much existential turmoil is spent in this unending and futile process? (Although, I suppose, it keeps therapists in business.) As a twentysomething there has not been a moment when I have not struggled with this. For some years now, I have chalked it up to the fact that, because I am in between generations (I was born in 1981, right on the border between Generation X and the Millenial generation—the cusp, or fence, if you will), there are very few media outlets targeting my age group directly (I have a whole theory on this that I won’t go into now). As a result, there is little outside guidance as to what people my age are supposed to be like and do, except, of course, for having long since graduated college, but that’s a whole other theory, of the social clock...

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Ireland's "Crack" Habit - Explaining the faux Irish pub revolution.

Of particular interest to me (especially the readers' comments), as both an appreciator of "authentic" Irish-American pubs and a former American "barmaid" in the UK.

damali ayo (creator of rent-a-negro.com) was interviewed in Bitch magazine's Fall 2005 issue.

I found a lot of it inspiring and/or paralleling to my own aspirations and/or practices in political art.

(I don't really agree with the very first sentence--on all art being activism [though that might depend on how you define activism]--but the rest is just beautiful.)

"'I believe that all art is a radical form of social activism. In the art world and in our society, we've made the grave mistake of separating the two--sometimes, when we look at socially minded art, we think it's less artistic, when it's actually the height of art.'"

"'Satire cannot exist without reality,' she insists, 'and only reality can be absurd enough to build solid satire. I find reality to be far more provocative than anything I could ever make up...'"

"'Intellectualizing and comedy both create an atmosphere where action becomes an option. This [book, How to Rent a Negro] is in between those two extremes--it is at once really funny and really not funny.' Following the modest proposal once made by Jonathan Swift, Ayo [sic] believes in the need for startling provocation in order to instigate meaningful change. 'We need to throw the pepper in the sauce [in order] for people to start tasting things. When you intersect the radical with the mundane, the socially weighted with the everyday occurrences, that's when things get really fascinating."

from BBC News- Slobodan Milosevic: Your comments

What is your reaction to the death of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic?

"I think it is appalling that he didn't recieve the healthcare he required. He should of been kept in best health so he would survive the trial, then we could put him to death. That's just good, sensible justice, after all."

A post on Antioch's intranet by Judith Kintner, who runs the gym:

Yep, it's today. Check out some web sites (World Vision is good).
Call your Mom if you have a mom, or your Grandma, or your fifth grade teacher.
It's a good day to remember that worldwide, women are still oppressed, discriminated against, and disproportionately economically disadvantaged.

It would be really cool if all of us women people today took a minute to acknowledge what we have, or plan to, overcome--for ourselves or for others-- to acknowledge what it's taken for older women to be where they are, doing what they're doing.

Remember: women are dying in disproportionately high numbers due to smoking related ilnesses--maybe skip a few cigarettes today.

Remember: 30 years ago we weren't allowed to play lots of sports, we weren't allowed to play with the boys, and a lot of now-grey-haired women made sure that changed. Maybe come over to the gym and work out, or play basketball or volleyball at noon. Come play or watch rugby this afternoon.

Happy International Women's Day, Antioch Women!

A number of years ago I attended a presentation by a women who worked in inner-city elementary schools. This presentation was of a project she ran with the kids. She’d asked them to draw themselves as they would look if they were a member of a different race. One black student drew a homeless person. When asked why, he explained that he saw white people as having no home, no community, no support network like he did with his family and neighborhood.

In Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins, when paralleling white and black feminist epistemologies, brings up the idea of a supportive community: “While white women may value the concrete, it is questionable whether white families—particularly middle-class nuclear ones—and white community institutions provide comparable types of support” (212). Later, she says that “white women may have access to a women’s tradition valuing emotion and expressiveness, but few Eurocentric institutions except the family validate this way of knowing” (217). In contrast, “Black families and churches... encourage the expression of Black female power” (217).

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On the way there

We're in traffic right now so watching the scenery pass to The Decemberists is not a very inspirational prospect. We're driving to Knox College in Illinois for the Love Your Body Conference (hosted by SASS- Students Against Sexism in Society). We = me, Anat, Rachel, and Julie.

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In “Choosing the Margin” from Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics, bell hooks says that “Our survival depends on an ongoing public awareness of the separation between margin and center and an ongoing private acknowledgement that we were a necessary, vital part of that whole” (149). Often I see the undervalued qualities of oppressed groups remain undervalued in struggles against dominance. This was an issue with second-wave feminism: By making the solution to the housewife’s oppression letting her work for wages outside the home, domestic work—a “necessary, vital part of the whole”—remained undervalued. This led to either women working two jobs—one inside the home and one out—or the more economically privileged hiring people (usually women of lower class statuses) to take care of their house and raise their kids.

This has also been an issue within more contemporary class struggles. It has been established among these struggles that capitalism needs an underclass in order to function; it often has not, however, recognized that society needs a working class in order to function. There are a ton of jobs that are currently considered “low-“ or “un-skilled” that need to happen—domestic work being one, as well as service work, manual labor, etc. These jobs are mostly body-oriented, hence the tendency to see them as unskilled—everyone can use their body, right? It’s those that can use their minds that get the big bucks.

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In Gyn/Ecology, Mary Daly speaks to the idea of women being coerced into their own oppressive demise. She quotes Simone de Beauvior’s The Ethics of Ambiguity: “One of the ruses of oppression is to camouflage itself behind a natural situation since, after all, one cannot revolt against nature.” (56)

This brings to mind the idea of hegemony as “consensual” oppression. I swear I learned that as one definition, though Dictionary.com does not say that. Though it wouldn’t now, would it? It does, however, give the definition as a “predominant influence” of one group over another (whereas the Oxford University Press dictionary says only “dominance”). The idea of “influence” versus “dominance” indicates a slightly better definition, closer to the idea of “consensual” that I learned in Intro to Women’s Studies all those years ago, and so therefore I give props to Dictionary.com (well, the American Heritage Dictionary) over Oxford University Press (bloody Brits, who needs ‘em anyway).

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Continuing the responses in Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?, Yael Tamir agrees with Okin’s original essay, and elaborates upon her thesis by asking us to look within the ethnocultural groups that would benefit from the group rights multiculturalism promises. Tamir suggests that these groups are divided amongst themselves regarding the issue of reform, and that multiculturalism can be used to favor the traditionalists while disregarding reformists within the groups as assimilationists.

Sander L. Gilman doesn’t offer suggestions so much as just universally slams Okin. His essay is not only patronizing and angry, littered with entirely too many exclamation points, but rather pointless, as he is merely reactionary and does not offer any suggestion of moving forward. The closest he gets is suggesting that a problem with Okin is that “she fails to see ceremonial acts in her own culture as limiting and abhorrent” (57-8). This reminds me of the theory of diatopical hermeneutics, which I will discuss after these summaries.

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In “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?,” Susan Okin’s argument is that minority ethnocultural groups that are more patriarchal than the Western societies to which they have emigrated should not be given the special groups rights that multiculturalism offers, if these group rights impede on the individual rights of group members, particularly those of women. She continues her argument by stressing that we need to look beyond the legal matters and into the domestic lives of these groups, because traditional private practices can oppress women, even if, legally, they are liberated.

In response, Katha Pollitt suggests that multiculturalism and feminism are inherently incompatible, because “multiculturalism demands respect for all cultural traditions, while feminism interrogates and challenges [them]” (27). She suggests that the West’s willingness to legally accommodate practices oppressive to women and children through the multiculturalism defense stems from women and the family being inferior within the West as well.

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Though I had some problems with Nancy J. Hirschmann’s “Difference as an Occasion for Rights: A Feminist Rethinking of Rights, Liberalism, and Difference” (most notably, its being unnecessarily repetitive and convoluted), I appreciated one of its critique of liberalism as it is similar to (one of) my own critique(s) of capitalism.

Hirschmann suggests that liberalism’s “individualism and rights were constructed specifically for propertied white men and are sustainable only through the subservience of white women, landless workers, and people of color” (28). She reiterates this later, and adds that liberalism’s “key concepts such as property and equality... depended upon [white women’s and people of colour’s] subservience and classified them as forms of property” (31).

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In the Liberal Feminism chapter of Feminist Thought: A More Comprehensive Introduction, Rosemarie Putnam Tong describes Betty Friedan’s progression as one towards humanism and away from feminism. She then quotes Friedan, who says we need a “new [human] politics that must emerge beyond reaction” (31). A critique of this transition by other feminist is that as long as patriarchy is firmly in place, “it is premature for feminists to become humanists” (32).

This is yet another issue I am ambivalent on. My first reaction (a bit ironically) was yes, let’s move beyond being reactionary. It’s a thing I try to accomplish in my personal life as well: being active instead of reactive. It’s a constant struggle, and on my more cynically reclusive days I wonder if action is possible, if we are ever autonomous enough to make a pure, active move. And moves we may think are active might actually be reactive; and sometimes, it’s so hidden, so internalized, we can never know.

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Hit upon both in “A Vindication Of The Rights Of Woman” by Mary Wollstonecraft (1792) and “The Subjection Of Women” by John Stuart Mill (1870) is the idea of the attractiveness of women—how it has, historically, been the aim in life of women and on which their worth is solely measured (which, naturally, perpetuate each other). What I find interesting is comparing ideas of attraction in these historical perspectives to today’s standards.

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