Archive for November, 2013
Sucessful Attempts at Failure
Megha Baikadi 985 archives and feelings Dr Alexis Lothian Writing Assignment Four, 11/19/2013 What text from this course will you take forward with you into the development of your dissertation and future projects––or into your life in general? Choose a short passage from something we have read this semester and write an extended reflection […]
Recognition
When I reflect on the course thus far, it is hard to choose one text I will take forward because I know there will be more than one. Ahmed’s, The Promise of Happiness, introduces me to ideas for pulling everything together. It was particularly useful after the readings from a disability studies perspective, discussing […]
Fettered to Feminisms
I think it is really hard to pin down one particular text from this course that will be carried forth because several of the texts speak to me on so many levels that range from my own personal teaching experiences to the theoretical lenses I typically engage with on a regular basis. That being said, […]
Dr. Strangelove’s Babies: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Reproductive Politics
Lauren Shoemaker Dr. Lothian ENGL 985 19 November 2013 Dr. Strangelove’s Babies: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Reproductive Politics Last February I prepared for a class presentation on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s utopia/dystopia in Herland, and the eugenics movement that she was a part of in early twentieth century America. […]
Shoveling Matter
“Perceiving the lost subjects of history – the missing and lost ones and the blind fields they inhabit – makes all the difference to any project trying to find the address of the present” (Gordon 195). The irony, of course, is that for decades, the activities of literary scholars have been centered around the concept […]
Trading Happiness for Confinement: Making Space for Intimacy
The text that is most influential to the scholarly work I am currently invested in is Sara Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness. Not only does Ahmed discuss how happiness is structured as a heterosexual paradigm, but she also discusses the idea of the structures that give space to the acts of engaging in homosexual behavior. […]
Brightly Moving Forward into a Future of Failure
Matthew Loudon Dr. Alexis Lothian ENGL 985 19 November 2013 Brightly Moving Forward into a Future of Failure There is a video floating around on the internet wherein a group of parents, adults, are asked what they believe will happen in the future. Their answers are bleak, depressingly so, all variants of “there is no […]
Teaching Queer Theory and Alleviating Public Depression.
Kamal Salem Dr. Alexis Lothian ENGL 985 Assignment # 4 Nov, 19th, 2013 Teaching Queer Theory and Alleviating Public Depression Anne Cvetkovich is the writer who impressed me most in this course. This basically came through her two texts, Depression: A Public Feeling and An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. […]
It may or may not be relevant to the course…
…but http://adanewmedia.org/ is the link to the special issue of Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media and Technology that I just edited.
disclosures, identities, politics, academe
Reading the critical memoirs thus far has been quite a humbling experience; thank you to all of you for being so open to the spirit of the assignment and of the writers we have been reading in class. Having begun many drafts of more concrete moment-based memoirs, in the end I offer you some disconnected […]
Recent Comments in this Document
December 3, 2013 at 4:33 pm
I think this is precisely Gramsci’s point — the factory worker and the sculptor may both be intellectuals or artists, but only one has the *function in society* ––the class position, the privilege––that makes it his or her assigned role. Just as it no doubt requires a certain class status or aspiration to see oneself as able to choose a social function or calling.
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December 3, 2013 at 2:37 am
And, regarding the university as machine, Ferguson would have it even more strongly: he would say that the liberal multiculturalist concern for development of identities is part and parcel of the university as machinery of capital, since it refocuses students’ energies on individual identity rather than the potential for redistribution of resources.
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December 3, 2013 at 2:23 am
Great articulation of the temporality of the classroom.
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December 3, 2013 at 1:46 am
Coming back to this, I’m thinking about whether this discussion of taste might be interestingly put in the kind of terms Mel Chen uses in her discussion of the boy licking the train…
Another possible citation for you, if you pursue this, might be Siane Ngai’s Ugly Feelings, which deals with various literary affects––and the sizeable subdiscipline of food studies, about which I know relatively little but which seems extremely interesting.
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December 2, 2013 at 1:45 am
This is, overall, an attempt to expand on my first writing assignment, channeling the concept into some practical form with some practical justification.
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December 1, 2013 at 4:59 pm
Gramsci’s idea of the organic intellectual is of one who is part of the subaltern group committed to opposing and transforming the social order first; intellectual work is developed with and for the group, rather than in an institution outside of it. So Nafisi’s commitment to the interests of women, which goes beyond her institutional role, might be a kind of organic intellectual work. The distinction between organic and traditional intellectual often doesn’t fit neatly onto the real world, though…
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December 1, 2013 at 2:58 pm
What do we gain by using the term labor––why might it be important to recognize what we do as *work*?
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November 28, 2013 at 7:30 am
Yeah, when we read it in class some of these critiques came up. They have a lot of textual support, too.
But that doesn’t mean its not a good text to tackle issues with – actually, it may be the best way to deal with them. after all, we can sometimes get the best critiques out of texts we *don’t* agree with. It really shows how the cultural scripts differ from the actual truths.
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November 28, 2013 at 7:24 am
Addressing the first part of your comment, there is a binary between bad-old times and good enlightened now, but I think there’s another possible binary between the good, golden past and the present troubled times. I mean, so many historical moments get romanticized, likely because those past things were good to some, and those who would or think they would benefit are those who romanticize them.
And yeah, looking at every ill does sometimes does come across as polarizing all groups into subsets of ills. It becomes too difficult to speak generally, then.
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November 28, 2013 at 7:14 am
Very nice!
I like the examples you’ve chosen to reflect on. The idealization of certain times or actions (often historical) is rampant, and it seems to be an important tool for disseminating happiness scripts, both those of perceived history and the now in which they are created and disseminated.
The female troublemaker and the feminist killjoy… I agree just the act of not enjoying, or not wanting the thing they are ‘supposed’ to want can be itself a killjoy (it doesn’t have to be starting arguments, though that’s fun too).
I’m not sure how much the subject (middle/upper class women) is simply problematic and how much it is simply the script, the happiness script of the culture. I think that probably didn’t sound right. I mean, given the racial, class and gendered nature of happiness scripts, I wonder if this film might be a site for finding problematic elements in the cultural happiness scripts, and not itself a problem choice for such a script because of its exclusions.
I can see how well you’d do with these texts – its really fascinating to me. popular culture is rich with layers of meaning, and so can be carefully analyzed… but it is also dear to students, so they should care (very much) about how it is analyzed. This combination can be a very powerful tool!
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