drrobinjames-blog

[drrobinjames-blog]

Here’s the syllabus for my spring course on Theories of Sound & Music

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“The oppressor does not merely try to justify himself as a conserver. Often he tries to invoke future realizations; he speaks in the name of the future. Capitalism sets itself up as the regime which...

Let’s talk about the “not even having a choice” idea you mention at the end--it bears on Beauvoir’s discusion of women’s “situation” and their specific form of oppression.

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For generations, men has dominated society because they have the freedom to dictate their own lives. Women, on the other hand, were often seen as objects that were only silly, little play things....

Let’s talk about your two questions at the end

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This question seems to be my burning focus as I read Simone de Beauvoir. I kept waiting for her to tell me how I am this label throughout her "Introduction" and "Ambiguity," yet it never gave me a ...

Let’s both go over Beauvoir’s intro to TSS, and as you ask here, consider how we might update it today? What IS a ‘woman’?

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Despite decades of feminist theorizing on the question of difference, difference continues to be “difference from”, that is, the difference from “white woman.”

Whether or not the concept of intersectionality is itself, as a concept, inadequate to its stated aims, we can ask if "intersectionality discourse, as it has become practiced in gender studies, has been taken up in a way that is inadequate to its aims. That is: is the way 'intersectionality' is discussed one that still centers the experiences of white women's relationship to patriarchy, femininity, and so on?

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You say "I argue that intersectionality does not limit epistemological output (puar), but progresses it."

So, let's try to work this argument through. How, with Puar's critiques in mind, woudl intersectionality progress epistemological output?

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“Women have recognized that the political demands ofmillions speak more powerfully that do the please of a few isolated voices” –CrenshawThat quote was in the first paragraph and it just really...

The way you discuss intersectionality here makes me wonder: does "feminism," as a concept or a discourse, center gender as an identity in a way that occuldes us from talking about patriarchy as a system of social organizataion? Would anything change if instead of calling it "feminism" we called it "anti-patriarchy"?

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You had a number of questions worth discussion:

Do we need multiple lens to completely analyze a situation? Must we strip feminism down to analyzing the individual, or can group analysis work without injustice towards specific members? What are the advantages to both? 

Are the foundations of feminism primarily white? Does this create an issue similar to the foundations in science being masculine?

Are these misrepresentations or simply incomplete pictures?

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identities & assemblages

Here's another question: How might IDENTITIES make us legible to specific kinds of patriarchy (enlightenment liberalism), and how might ASSEMBLAGES make us legible to a different specific kind of patriarchy?

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Two really great sets of questions here:

1. In order to make our legislation more useful to individuals in every situation we must stop ignoring the differences within different groups; we must stop limiting identity to one group or another and instead see the whole spectrum. However, as intersectionality broadens and the groups included in analysis of identity expanded beyond that of just gender, race and class the groups become so numerous that no one identity is the same anymore. At some point will there be so many groups to take into consideration that they essentially disappear? And to what extend do these groups and categories define an individual, are they merely events and actions instead of set entities? If we saw these categories as linking us together instead of differentiating us how would our outlook on such groupings change?

2. If our political opinions are constructed by the apparent needs of the market, are then our gender systems also constructed by what is needed of men and women in order for the market to thrive? If we as citizens remain misinformed so as to keep our opinions where the market wants them, how might the gender system be different if we were better informed?

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Goddess feminism and cyborg feminism aren't that different--if goddess feminism adopts a pre- or extra-modern approach to enlightenment liberalism, then cyborg feminism adopts a post- or post-post modern approach.

In class let's talk a bit about cyborg feminism (there's some background that Puar doesn't discuss).

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You talk a lot about the aporias that occur when we try to talk about individual particularity and group-based identification (we could just as well be talking about chairs as about people's genders here).

But I wonder if all these aporias happen (that is, that we can't seem to figure out a way to address individual particularity and group/category membership) because we stay, erm, too zoomed-in on the individual level? If we step back and look more on the institutional, social level, do these aporias persist? In other words, what if instead of talking about intersecting identitites, we talked about intersecting types of oppression and privilege (white supremacist patriarchy, for example)?

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Agenda: Intersectionality (Crenshaw & Puar)

Agenda 2/16/15

Attend & Announce

Pitch workshop next week: bring (1) quesitons/best practices; (2) draft of your pitch

Group Discussion of blog posts and questions

Presentation

Questions

A little background: Crenshaw’s article is THE definitive article on “intersectionality,” which has now come to be a foundational concept even in popular feminisms. It was published in 1991. But a lot has changed since 1991. And there have been many critical-race feminist critics of “intersectionality” (e.g., Paula Moya, Michael Hames-Garcia, Puar).

Is “intersectionality” the best concept or discourse to describe the phenomenon it is intended to capture (i.e., the interlocking nature of identity-based oppressions)?

Why would the lived experience of otherwise privileged subjects (e.g., white women, black men) SEEM to indicate that social identities are separable, not “intersectional”?

Are accounts/critiques of “intersectionality” primarily modeled on the relationship between race and gender? Why? How does this focus/limit the concept/discourse? (or: how is our understanding of how identities relate predicated on the relationships among the two cases through which we study it?)

Has intersectionality, especially the “traffic metaphor” model of intersectionality, been interpreted as a classically liberal answer to the question of how interlocking identity-based systems of oppression relate? That is to say: has “intersectionality” been interpreted and used as a way to reinforce the generally liberal notion of race, gender, etc., as properties of bodies or individual characteristics, rather than as systems of social organization? Does intersectionality, as a concept, necessarily work this ways? Are there other, non-liberal ways of understanding intersectionality?

Puar argues that intersectionality has been interpreted such that “gender” is taken as the central term with which everything else “intersects,” thus ironically privileging gender as the primary mode of oppression. While this may or may not be an accurate description of scholarship, is this a necessary feature of the concept of intersectionality? Does it HAVE to center gender (or race) as the primary form of difference with which everything else intersects (or not)?

Another of Puar’s criticisms is that “intersectionality” centers a Modernist/humanist subject (a coherent self that is rational, autonomous, and so on), whereas contemporary technologies of racialization, gendering, queering, etc.--these work at the micro- and macro-subjective level (e.g., on our data, or across populations). Relatedly, she argues that intersectionality has been interpreted to be primarily about individual identity, not hegemonic institutions or structures. Especially w reference to the Crenshaw, are Puar’s criticisms of the concept of intersectionality accurate?

“the subject is divided up into subhuman particles of knowledge that nevertheless exceed the boundaries of the body, yet it is also multiply splayed through, across, and between intersecting and overlapping populations” (Puar TA 12).

How might “assemblages” help us think about the micro- and macro-levels of perception that biopoltiics uses but that can be seen by “normal” human eyes?

Traditionally, vision perceives images, appearances, and representations—a subject perceives an object. Puar argues that superpanopticism follows a different “economy of sight,” one without either “subjects” or “objects.” Instead, we have “assemblage[s] of subindividual capacities” that are “visualized” in the way that data is visualized in a new media environment.  The point is not to see objects, but relationships among types of info. Word clouds are a good example of data visualization and how it differs from “the visual” re-presentation of content. Word clouds use algorithms to analyze a text—a book, a blog post, every post in a blog, etc.—and find the most frequently occurring words in that text. The most commonly used terms are then put in a graphic, their relative frequency expressed in terms of size—frequently used words are larger, less-commonly used words are smaller. You can find many word clouds at the website wordle.com. Here, you will see that the words in the images are not signifiers pointing to some signified content; they are graphic expressions of relationships among the verbal elements of a defined text. The word cloud expresses relationships among data (word frequency).

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This is from Luz's post; tumblr doesn't seem to like the link.

You raise a few really good points through here:

1. "Health" is the new 'beauty"--except 'health' seems more objective bc science, as compared to 'beauty,' which seems more obviously subjective.

2. "What if humans stopped being “Human”? Would it be easier to be a member of society if we stopped placing such an important role on our appearance and more on the value of what we have to offer our culture?" To what extent would we have to significantly rework or abandon concepts of 'humanity' to undo patriarchy?

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At the end you say "'The war on ____' is always biolitics"--which is so interesting bc Foucault also makes this connection: biopolitics is war by other means (this is at the beginning of SMBD). So, who's waging war on whom in the war on obesity? How might the "wars" on drugs and terror be biopolitical projects?

A Performative Acts & Gender Construction and the Biopolitics of Fat both speak upon the roles that thought, language, and habit play in the construction of inhibiting constructs in society through phenomenology.

Language is a phenomenon that often serves as a social agent and aids in the...

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Your second paragraph raises the question: Is it NORMS that are bad (ie the cause of oppression), or is it the CONTENT of the norms (what they make normal) what's bad?

Biopower adds a strange twist to society. On one hand, we seem dominated by norms. What does it mean to be a woman? We constitutes a woman? Why is fat bad? However, there is a weird circle between normalizing the individual and the population. Maybe a girl looks to celebrities (or whatever you...