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Hi everyone,

For a final project in my Empowering Learners class year, I conducted interviews with working mothers.  I didn't receive any formal prep for doing interviews, but I thought maybe showing you guys the email that I sent out to my potential interviewees would be helpful so I've copied and pasted below:

As I was listening to Judith Butler talk last night about the power of performativity, I was reminded of a passage from a feminist book I'm reading called Les Guerilleres, written in 1969 by Monique Wittig. The novel is made up of many interdependent paragraph-passages, which taken together envision a society where the patriarchy has been bloodily dismantled by a group of warrior women. The following is an early passage from the book:

By the lakeside there is an echo. As they stand there with an open book the chosen passages are re-uttered from the other side by a voice that becomes distant and repeats itself. Lucie Maure cries to the double echo the phrase of Phenarete, I say that that which is is. I say that that which is not also is. When she repeats the phrase several times the double, then triple voice endlessly superimposes that which is and that which is not. The shadows brooding over the lake shift and begin to shiver because of the vibrations of the voice. (Wittig 14)

The guerilleres must create a new society from the wreckage of their warfare. The only way to build a new order is through a new language, a language that builds meaning and form through its very iteration. So the language in Les Gureilleres is echoic, less focused on temporality than intertextuality (in the continued repetition of themes and images between the alinear passages, in the emphasis on folklore and books, etc.).

The lecture last night was intense and, for me, different from other lectures I've attended at Bryn Mawr. Partly it was the sheer scale of it and the buildup beforehand: while I'm sure there were some audience members only there for a class, there was a collective excitement that you just don't usually feel in an academic setting. The only event I can think of that came close was the lecture by Angela Davis. So first, there was a difference in the audience.

Then there was the difference in the speaker. The biggest difference, and the one I talked about with some friends afterwards, was that Judith Butler was there as an academic and theorist but taking a strong political stance. How often have we seen that? I can tell you how often I've heard it: never. Not once. I've occasionally had a professor take up political issues in the classroom, but not often. And never in a way that tied them so thoroughly to theory. I'd never heard a lecture that was both very academic and intensely political-- they tend to be one or the other.  I'd never seen theory and practice so thoroughly entangled (to borrow Barad's term, which I may or may not thoroughly understand. But it seems right here).

Then there were the ideas themselves. Other people have complained about how hard it was to take notes with hardly any light, but I did it anyway because I knew that otherwise there was no way I'd be able to remember even half of what was brought up. I can even read most of what I wrote.

I thoroughly enjoyed Butler's talk tonight. It was also my first time in the Goodhart Auditorium, which is gorgeous! I think it will take me a little time to form some more complete thoughts, so for now here are some musings. I think my favorite moment of the evening was when Jane McAuliffe was mediating the questions and requested that speakers "identify themselves." While Butler emphasized that relaxing norms/categories/definitions is not the same as transcending them, it seemed somehow ironic to me that the moment the official lecture ended, we were confronted with the question of identity. During the lecture I also found myself reflecting on my own relationship with gender. Butler discussed the notion that our genders are "proclaimed" for us when we are born and suggested that perhaps this is not the best way to go. This made me wonder how individuals would gender themselves if it stopped being done for them. Clearly we all have a different way of 'being' in our gender - performing our gender per se. I personally feel that a large part of my identity is rooted in my gender - in woman/she/her, but its interesting to look back on the ways I have "performed" that woman-ness over the years -including the short haired, baggy clothes tomboy days of elementary school. While I've never really questioned my woman-ness, I agree with Butler's idea that there is a way in which we all wonder if we are "doing our gender" well enough.

As I sit and reflect on Judith Butler's opening lecture tonight, I find myself getting caught up in some tangential questions about the experience of seeing her speak. What does it mean to rally around a public intellectual with the fervor many in the audience(s) showed tonight? How did she convey authority through body language and actual language, and how did she try to connect with the audience on a less intellectual level occasionally (the Biblical joke in particular, coming early on, seemed to catch everyone off guard a bit). It has been/is/will be really interesting to see how people talk about and think about the person Judith Butler and the ideas of Judith Butler, and then transfer that into the experience of actually interacting with Judith Butler. I must admit that I ended up musing on these issues more than on the content of her lecture -- and while I was frustrated with myself for this partial inability to "rise to the occasion" and focus on the material, I think it has to do with the fact that I really have a hard time processing a lecture, especially one of that density, with no ability to take notes or even doodle while I listen.

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Our best universities have forgotten that the reason they exist is to make minds, not careers

By William Deresiewicz

It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work. Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League degrees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. “Ivy retardation,” a friend of mine calls this. I could carry on conversations with people from other countries, in other languages, but I couldn’t talk to the man who was standing in my own house.

I was unable to be in class this week, but I would like to share my thoughts on the article that we read on the 2 to 1 abortions. I have always been, and still remain, a staunch advocate for a woman’s right to choose. It is her body, not that man’s, and she should have every single right to decide exactly what and when things happen to her body. No questions asked. I have spoken to congress on behalf of this right, and am more than happy to share my knowledge with others when the topic of abortion comes up in conversation. And yet, I found that I really struggled with this article. To be honest, I don’t know what made me more uncomfortable –the article or my discomfort with the article. I truly believe that as women, we have every right to choose, so why should this differ when a woman is choosing to have one baby or two or none? The answer, is I’m not sure. I should put in a warning here, this post will not have a definitive answer from me, but merely the beginnings of what I am sure will be a lifelong conversation with myself. Why does it bother me? I guess I feel as though either you should have a baby, or not have a baby. But to have half of the pregnancy, that is more difficult for me. I can understand the rational behind it, if you have enough money to have a child, that doesn’t mean that you necessarily have the means to have twins. If you have 2 children already, and you don’t think you have the time to devote yourself to 4 kids, you do to 3, I can understand it.

I would hope that the Friday forum would result in a better understanding of how to appreciate class differences on campus and how to be respectful of them. Despite anyone’s background we can still learn from one another and build really strong relationships and I think by understanding where someone comes from helps strengthen that relationship. I would also hope that the participants In addition, just acknowledging the fact that we are all facing life and life can really suck sometimes.

For some reason, the following link about gender scandals in the Olympics popped up in my facebook feed yesterday.  The link is over 2 years old, and I suspect that the poster put it up because they like getting reactions.  While I didn't react on FB, I did click through both this story and the ones which were connected to it.  

http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/t, he-10-most-shocking-olympic-gender-scandals

In the above article, I thought it was interesting that the commentary offered by the author upholds the idea that sex organs and gender are the same thing.  However, I found the following article that was in one of the click through links more interesting in terms of offensiveness.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/explorer25/10-things-you-didnt-know-about-hermaphrodites-172z

Aside from the fact that the article confuses intersex with being a hermaphrodite, I can't believe that the first example given is a fictional space villian, and that the rest of the article places a lot of focus on inanimate objects.  This raises some questions for me about the common public perseption of intersex, as well as what is considered "normal".  I'm wondering what my classmates think about pop articles like this one, in terms of people's awareness.  I know the article is only meant to entertain, but is it damaging?