Monday, October 24, 2011

Nothing Stays Still....

DYNAMICS IN OUR FIELD OF WOMEN’S STUDIESTuesday 25 Oct – Reframing Narratives & Reclaiming Histories
•    Hewitt: Part I: pick 3 of the 5 chapters in this section to read, be prepared to discuss why you chose the ones you did
How does Hewitt talk about traveling knowledges? How does travel across time compare to travel across space and geopolitical location? How can you compare what Hewitt does with what Davis does? With what Berger and Guidroz do? How are these epistemological projects similar and different? 



4: "Activists thus highlight their distinctiveness from -- and often superiority to -- previous feminist movements in the process of constituting themselves as the next wave." 

[KK: yes, but it should also be said that generational hierarchies of supposedly knowing things better exist as well!] 

How do "waves" and "generations" compare, converge, or divide? 

Look at Wikipedia's timeline of key events in the second wave (scroll down to see it). 
Wikipedia on the third wave.  
Wikipedia on the first wave
Which parts of the world are centered in these?
Wikipedia's Portal: Feminism  
Wikipedia's Feminism by country   

What about feminist generations? 
From Young Feminist Wire 
Symposium on inter- and transgenerational feminisms 
Call for papers by Feminist Memory    
Nancy Whittier's book & KK's handout on generations  

All six volumes of Stanton and Anthony's History of Woman Suffrage are available free as ebooks online. See Google books and Project Gutenberg. 

Hewitt, Thompson, Taylor, Chávez, Fernandes



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===Thursday 27 Oct – Theoretical Explorations, Exploring theories and their worlds
•    Berger: Part II: pick 2 of the 4 chapters in this section to read, be prepared to discuss why you chose the ones you did
Although you pick only 2 of these, look at all of them enough to compare the approaches they take, and to consider the disciplines they come from. How might that matter? 



Recall Yuval-Davis' point: (54): “social divisions, such as those relating to membership in particular castes or status as indigenous or refugee  people, tend to affect fewer people globally. At the same time, for those who are affected by these and other social divisions not mentioned here, such social  divisions are crucial and necessitate struggle to render them visible. This is, therefore, a case where recognition - of social power axes, not of social identities - is of crucial political importance.”

power: macro-, meso-, micro-political (fr structure to interpersonal interaction) [Foucault, biopower]
structure: longer term, more stable, affect most, mostly at macro-political levels and layers [Marx, social structure]

Keating, Luft, Caldwell, Sherwood 

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Tuesday 1 Nov – CLASS ON ITS OWN: KATIE AT 4S – Coming together and pulling apart, which is which?
•    Hewitt: Part II: pick 4 of 7
Coalitions happen on the ground with activists, how do activists work with other activisms? What are the difficulties involved?

Thursday 3 Nov – CLASS ON ITS OWN: KATIE AT 4S – Method, theory, praxis – do they need to be connected or are they already?
•    Berger: Part III: pick 2 of 5 from the section on methodological innovations
Come with ideas and questions that look ahead to our workshop. 


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from Bernice Johnson Reagon's Coalition Politics:  
343ff: "I wish there had been another way to graphically make me feel it because I belong to the group of people who are having a very difficult time being here. I feel as if I'm gonna keel over any minute and die. That is often what it feels like if you're really doing coalition work. Most of the time you feel threatened the core and if you don't, you're not really doing no coalescing.... Coalition work is not work done in your home. Coalition work has to be done in the streets.... You don’t get fed a lot in a coalition. In a coalition you have to give, and it is different from your home. You can’t stay there all the time. You go to the coalition for a few hours and then you go back and take your bottle wherever it is, and then you go back and coalesce some more." [In Barbara Smith, Home Girls: a black feminist anthology. Rutgers 2000]

• "listening with raw openness" (Keating 2009: 92)
• disagreeing in continued conversation that goes on! 
• complex personhood (Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters 2008) 
• "some misunderstanding is inevitable" (Keating 2009: 94) 

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Monday, October 17, 2011

Point of View: our first workshop! Fun, yes!

Tuesday 18 Oct – WORKSHOP #1 – Power, Movements, Worlds
Today we will share our work poster session style: divide in two groups, and all move around talking to each other about work during the class time. Complete 3 eval sheets & one for yourself (turn these in next class). 

Thursday 20 Oct – WORKSHOP #1 – Talking about it all
•    LOGBOOK 2 DUE along with either paper and handout or digital picture of poster, after presentations
Today we will have a conversation about what we learned, noticed, thought about, and draw from the last class presentations. 


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•    Workshop 1: Power, Movements, Worlds

For our first workshop you will create either a paper or poster (which determined by lot) in order to explore how feminists analyze how power structures our worlds. 

You will explore two class texts carefully, and chose EITHER 

• to analyze Zandt’s book through the analysis (eyes, lens) of Davis’ The Making of Our Bodies, Our Selves; OR 

• to analyze Davis’ book through the analysis (eyes, lens) of Zandt’s Share This! 

• Davis’ book explores power in transnational and transdisciplinary frames. NOTICE what it demonstrates and assumes about what counts as power, which social movements matter, and how worlds are connected across differences. 

• Zandt’s book explores accessibility and the currency of social media today. NOTICE who is addressed in this book, and why? 

No matter which of these approaches you take, also NOTICE that you will need to do some additional research. You will need to find out more about the various editions of the book Our Bodies, Our Selves, and you will need to play around with social media yourself, and do some web research checking out both Our Bodies, Our Selves and also how feminists today are using social media, as well as how social media and marketing are interconnected. Always make a point of connecting projects to class readings and lectures.

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Posters and papers are shared in one or the other of two class workshops. In each workshop you will do either a paper or a poster. Which one you will do when will be determined by lot. 

You cannot get full credit for either assignment until after you also present them on the first day of the workshop week, and participate in workshop follow-ups on the second day of the workshop week. In other words, just the written paper or the poster does not in itself complete the assignment. If an emergency or illness kept you from participation either or both days that week, to get full credit you will have to meet with three other students to share your work and their work outside class, and write up the experience and what you learned from it to complete the participation portion of that grade. 

SO DO NOT MAKE OTHER PLANS FOR THOSE DAYS: BUILD THEM CAREFULLY INTO YOUR SCHEDULE FROM THE BEGINNING OF THE TERM! Put them into your logbook from the beginning so that attending them will always be at the forefront of your term plans. 

This is also true of the final day of class, when you discuss your learning analysis with everyone else. Full credit for the learning analysis also requires attendance and participation on that last day. 

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Thursday, October 13, 2011

OBOS Interview

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Our Bodies Ourselves on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/OurBodiesOurselves TV interview with Judy Norsigian, one of the original OBOS founders, on the new edition of "Our Bodies, Ourselves"! 

Monday, October 10, 2011

Connecting across differences....

Tuesday 11 Oct – Transnational Body/Politics
•    Davis Part III, read all of it (ch 6, reread 7); also read Davis’ essay on intersectionality (link for pdf online)


How is Davis’ analysis of OBOS similar to her analysis of intersectionality? (Don’t get sidetracked by the term “buzzword” in her title for the intersectionality article, or at least not at first. Consider it AFTER you have made your comparisons, and think about what other terms might have been better?
boundary object, buzzword, traveling theory


• acquiring new body understandings: Davis, p. 173: after translations of OBOS required inventing new words to express emotional care for one's body, one translator said: "I have developed a much greater love for my own body. It is not merely that I have to know it better but that I feel that I have learned new ways of experiencing the world differently."   

individualism from • POV Spanish translation (177, 180); • POV Bulgarian translation (189) :: different contexts, different oppositions; one expresses isolation from community resources & support, different from consumer health care commodified individually. the other expresses resistance to totalitarian structures, impersonal and collectivist in the worst sense, different from self-care and self-assertion needed both personally and socially. THINK NECKER CUBE: first one face, then another

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Thursday 13 Oct – Making Intersectionality Transnational?
•    Foundations Intersectionality, Berger Part I: Yuval-Davis’ essay
Why does Yuval-Davis start off with a little history of intersectionality? “All-inclusive”? Transversal? What can you learn about feminism in 2006 that will help you understand why she is approaching these issues the way she does? What other kinds of articles were being published in the journal European Journal of Women’s Studies in 2006? In other feminist journals in countries other than the US? What other feminist journals were big internationally in 2006? 

sedentism from Wikipedia  
sedentarism in Nomadic Studies 

Wikipedia versions "intersectionality": 

2005; 2007; 2010; 2011 

By 2007: includes line: "Collins' theory is one of particular interest because it represents the sociological crossroads between modern and post-modern feminist thought."  

By 2010: added: "Theories of intersectionality increasingly also address the more than human. Examples of posthuman intersectionality include ecofeminism and are under development in the field of animal studies."

=another line of argument, some including critique of multiculturalism, others centered around legal issues, others around academic disciplinary and other methodologies:

Gordon and Newfield, 1996, Mapping Multiculturalism 
critical race theory from Wikipedia  
Crenshaw on intersectionality, google scholar  1989, 1991, 1994 
Dill essay in FS 1983
Yuval-Davis essay in EJWS 2006 (23 yrs later) 
Davis on intersectionality 2008, bk OBOS 2007
Berger book beginning with Dill, 2009 

=& non-centering critiques of white women's movement from postcolonial, postmodernisms, Chicana feminisms: 

Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed, 2000
postcolonial feminism from Wikipedia  
oppositional consciousness in Sandoval 2000
differential consciousness in Sandoval 2000  


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Collins book first published 1991. Then it was substantially revised in 2000. 

Patricia Hill Collins: Black Feminist Thought (2000):

p. 228: putting black women at the center without privileging their consciousness

• transversal politics: both/and thinking: varying expressions of power, distinctive forms of participation in domination and resistance
• US black women could be both penalized and privileged. So could others be.





boundary object III: some use intersectionality for this "transversal politics"
or even matrix of domination

p. 247: groups only have partial perspective on their own experiences
• and thus need critical self-reflection (think: violated assumptions?)
• groups police each other, making coalition difficulty

p. 248: no absolute oppressors or victims
• groups find some oppression more salient than others

p. 268: Elsa Barkley Brown: everyone can learn to pivot their "center. 
• everyone can learn to center in another experience, and, in this case, to engage "black feminist thought"

Sunday, October 2, 2011

Looking Through Histories and other Feminist Mappings


POWER, MOVEMENTS, WORLDS: FEMINISMS IN THE PLURAL, FEMINISTS IN MOVEMENT

 – Feminist Myths: Davis Part II
 – Foundations Intersectionality, Berger Part I: Dill
 – Transnational Body: Davis Part III
 
Foundations Intersectionality, Berger Part I: Yuval-Davis [& Guidroz]
Tuesday 18 Oct – WORKSHOP #1
Thursday 20 Oct – WORKSHOP #1 : LOGBOOK 2 DUE
  
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So you see here the shape of the next section of the course, and how it culminates in our first workshop. We have already finished Zandt (yes, you should have read all of it by now), and we will be finishing up Davis, while reading ahead in Berger for tools to use for projects for workshop 1. Remember what it is about?


•    Workshop 1: Power, Movements, Worlds

For our first workshop you will create either a paper or poster  in order to explore how feminists analyze how power structures our worlds. (Whether you are doing a paper or a poster has already been determined by lot; if you don't know which one you are doing, talk to Katie asap!) 

You will explore two class texts carefully, and chose EITHER 
• to analyze Zandt’s book through the analysis (eyes, lens) of Davis’ The Making of Our Bodies, Our Selves; OR 
• to analyze Davis’ book through the analysis (eyes, lens) of Zandt’s Share This! 

Davis’ book explores power in transnational and transdisciplinary frames. NOTICE what it demonstrates and assumes about what counts as power, which social movements matter, and how worlds are connected across differences. 

Zandt’s book explores accessibility and the currency of social media today. NOTICE who is addressed in this book, and why? 

No matter which of these approaches you take, also NOTICE that you will need to do some additional research. 

You will need to find out more about the various editions of the book Our Bodies, Our Selves, and you will need to play around with social media yourself, and do some web research checking out both Our Bodies, Our Selves and also how feminists today are using social media, as well as how social media and marketing are interconnected. Always make a point of connecting projects to class readings and lectures.

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Tuesday 4 Oct – Feminist Myths in a Feminist Politics of Knowledge
•    Davis Part II, read all of it (chs 3, 4, 5)
Why does Davis connect “empowerment” and “bewitchment”? What’s her point here? And why might a “colonialist trope” be contrasted with something called a “critical epistemology?” What are feminist subjects and why do they need to be created? How does Davis make us aware of the time periods involved?



Davis, 85-6: the feminist myth in action:
• "make sense of their history"
• "an origin story"
• "become agents of historical change"
• "heroic tale with plucky female protagonists who bravely take on a series of powerful adversaries...and come out victorious."
• "a family saga about a group of women who created an enduring personal bond that enabled their political project to survive and thrive for more than three decades."
• "constructing a history that made sense in different and sometimes contradictory ways."
• "understand their individual and collective experiences at different periods"
• "provided the motor for the group's activism."
• "generated a powerful symbolic imagery" that allowed for global impact
• "a shadow side": "deny or gloss over events in the present that did not fit their collective sense of who they were or what their project was about"
• "an impediment to a more historically informed and self-reflexive understanding of themselves and their project"


From the Wikipedia on "myth": "The term 'myth' is often used colloquially to refer to a false story, but academic use of the term does not pass judgment on truth or falsity. In the study of folklore, a myth is a sacred narrative explaining how the world and humankind came to be in their present form. Many scholars in other fields use the term 'myth' in somewhat different ways. In a very broad sense, the word can refer to any traditional story."

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Thursday 6 Oct – Intersectionality’s Foundations
•    Berger Part I: Dill’s essay
Why would Dill start off with the notion of sisterhood? “All-inclusive”? What does that mean? What can you learn about feminism in 1983 that will help you understand why she is approaching these issues the way she does? What other kinds of articles were being published in the journal Feminist Studies in 1983? In other feminist journals? What other feminist journals were big in 1983? 


DOWNLOAD DAVIS ON INTERSECTIONALITY FOR NEXT CLASS! PDF HERE.

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post positive realist and post positive realism
   
Mohanty's Feminism without Borders pprealist
virtual speculum haraway   
problematize, criticize, critique, debunk 

socialist feminism   

bourgeois individualism 
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese
• using privileges of class and race to get into public sphere despite the disadvantages of gender 
• calling into question the politics of personal experience as decentering experiential differences (of power by race and class) that are structural 
• "sisterhood" as feminist myth, usable by some more than others, with its shadow side. 
• women of color, inside, rejecting, along side, pushed outside, uninterested in, accomplishing other justice goals.... 


elegant, accessible, quick take <====> dense, specialized, detailed take 
considering the spirit and the letter of the story, or stories 
boundary object -- which parts are detailed, which parts are broadly drawn, for what reasons, when? 

earning "sisterhood" -- not given, but part a shared struggle -- whose struggles shared with who else? standpoint and shared struggle -- what about anger and power?

exceptional vs. normative practices in feminist movements -- the roles of racism, anti-racism, ideals and realities -- political expediency and the abandonment of black women in the history of feminist movements in the US, participating in the creation of separate movements of color and race -- what and when to make choices? who has to and why? hierarchies of oppression? universality? research and methology in the social sciences? class differences within collectivities of black women?


salience and intersections: intersectionality   
oppositional consciousness and chicana theories and mythologies of malinche   
how many "intersections"? should any be "centered"? when about all women of color and when about particular groups of women of color? why might it be important to center particular women of color, when and for what reasons? can intersectionality itself be critiqued? what does that entail?
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