Class Minutes for 14 April 2014

Elizabeth Mack

14 April 2014

Outline:

I.               Business

II.             Girl Power! Ophelia! Neoliberalism! Subjectivity!

III.           Next Time

Business/Announcements:

- Dr. Sparks gave deadlines and prompt for second short paper

- Guest Speaker for Wednesday

                 

Reading for the day: Marnina Gonick, “Between ‘Girl Power’ and ‘Reviving Ophelia’: Constructing the Neoliberal Girl Subject” (2006)

We watched the Spice Girls’ video “Wannabe.”

Then, we watched Dominique’s artifacts/videos/ads for future girl engineer toys.

Class Discussion Topics                

“Ban Bossy” Campaign

“fixing” girls/women

What does it mean and how does the word bossy affect young girls?

                  “Ban Bossy” targets the wrong issues

                  noticing the gender of words like bossy

                  cultural method of policing girls

                  Should we protect girls from being called bossy?

Why are we trying to turn girls into boys? Is this actually the feminist thing to do?

traditional jobs/feminizing of masculine jobs/degendering feminine jobs

pink/purple Lego’s for girls

the responsibility of the oppressed to teach their oppressors

Description

- Girls get called “bossy”/”bitchy”

- The effects: discourages some girls from leadership/from speaking out

Analysis

- It’s a gendered term

- It polices girls to their detriment

- “Girl Power”: consumer capitalism

Visions/ Strategies

- Ban “Bossy”

- Create a culture that values girls as leaders and who are outspoken

- “Lean In”

- Buy girls engineering toys

- Redline Bossy

- Degender Bossy

Critiques

- Goal of taking charge (a neoliberal subjectivity) versus changing what we think leadership is

- Who can claim “bossy”?

- not radical enough/individual solutions that don’t get at the larger/systemic ideas

Next time, we will discuss Kaplan and Grewal

Class Minutes April 9, 2014

Class Minutes
April 9, 2014

Agenda

I.                   Business

II.                Crip Theory

III.             Representing Disability

Business

•  Final Exam Format - identify the genre, date (within the decade), and key themes of 20 or so excerpts of contemporary feminist theory
• Completed participation estimation feedback activity (how does your perception of your participation relate to Dr. Sparks’ notes?)

Robert McRuer’s “Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence” (2006)

• McRuer is strongly associated with the body of scholarship known as “crip theory,” which primarily seeks to integrate aspects of queer theory into disability studies and ultimately queer disability 
• Gender Trouble/Ability Trouble – McRuer invokes Butler’s language to draw on parallels between performing gender and performing ability
•  Similar to the way repetition of gendered practices constitutes “gender” (copies of copies of copies), repeated performance of able-bodiedness constitutes “ability” (both types of performance – gender and ability – are bound to fail since neither is “authentic”) à Disciplinary Power!!!
• There are multiple showcases for able-bodied performance (such as athletic events, “beauty” pageants, etc.) that encourage performing ability and reinforce compulsory able-bodiedness
•  Just as compulsory heterosexuality relies on the existence of lesbians and gay men to define itself, compulsory able-bodiediness and ability ideals depend on the construction of “disability” as a social category
•  Able-bodiedness is posited as the universal ideal/desire (“wouldn’t you rather…” narratives surrounding disability)
•  Despite the constant pressure and effort to achieve able-bodiedness, McRuer is interested in the subversive possibilities of performing (dis)ability (just as with Butler and gender – how can difference of ability be “cited” without simply perpetuating existing categories of norms and exceptions?) à What if we “crip” things and expose disability as just as constructed/unnatural as ability?
•  When looking for this disruption/defiance incorporating and citing disability is not enough à reiteration (even proud reiteration) does not guarantee subversion or effective disruption of these categories (we must fail at ability in critical way)
•  Can “able-bodied” people participate in this subversion/cripping of ability? (if so, how à what are the ethics?)

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory” (2002)

• Explosion of disability scholarship in the early 2000s à Dr. RGT’s recently published review of the field in a contemporary American Studies journal
• Myth of the “normal” à age, mental and emotional “health,” disease, body type, eye glasses, etc. are all ways in which “normal” people are interact with disability à “normal” and “abnormal” bodies is a false dichotomy
• Temporality and vulnerability studies – theory that in time, everyone is vulnerable/dependent/fails at the able-bodied ideal (one is born vulnerable, temporarily achieves ability, and then degenerates with age)
• Does this life-cycle model perpetuate the system of categorization that marks certain forms of embodiment as “exceptions” and others as normal/typical
• McRuer doesn’t want to acknowledge how we’re all exceptional (although this is an improvement on “othering” models that marginalize a minority of people as exceptions and celebrate others as normal), because he wants to understand and analyze how we determine what is normal and exceptional in the first place
• “Overcoming adversity” narratives surrounding disability do not dispute these categories or the normal curve
• Lady Gaga using the wheelchair as an accessory – is this subversive or offensive? What about wearing non-prescription lenses as a fashion statement? Where and how is the line drawn about who (which bodies) can participate in which kinds of cultural/aesthetic practices?
• Drag? Is Lady Gaga calling attention to artifices of gender and ability with her performance style? (“Performing Disability”
• How does the juxtaposition of reality and fantasy function in her performances (mermaid tail à allusion to disability or fairy tale?)
• Video on mannequins with human variations – is the gazing/shock-value/spectacle of putting these mannequins in storefronts problematic? Are these still posited as “exceptional” bodies (as opposed to average bodies à there was no racial/ethnic variation, people of size, or any other types of bodies that are typically excluded from standard mannequins)
• What are the implications of the plasticity (and static-ness) of a mannequins?
• Fashion and Disability: what role does “democratic capitalism” (or better: capitalism) play in equity? Is incorporating “disabled” into mainstream fashion and beauty culture a necessary step toward equality (“freedom to be appropriated and commodified” – RGT)?
• Is the equality narrative a fallacy? Are progress, social justice, change, and attention to intersectionality inevitable or myths? What about identity?
• Does popular rhetoric about progress, representation, and equity still occlude and pathologize existing spaces of resistance?

Minutes for 2 April 2014

WGS 302 Scribe Notes

April 2, 2014

Theresa Lee

Agenda:

1. Business
2. Paris is Burning/Butler
3.  Logan’s Artifact Presentation

Today’s Reading: Butler, “The Question of Social Transformation” (2004)

I. Business

• Get into groups, figure out who is posting for the next two week
•  Leader bloggers must comment before 9pm the day before class, so that other groups members have enough time to post.
• Make sure to make comments before 12noon of class day
• Allowed to miss a maximum of 3 comments for the semester – make sure to post comments!

II. Paris is Burning (1990) – Drag and Performativite

• Butler’s “Gender Trouble” was published in 1990
•  Butler’s notion of gender performativity and what is the relation between theorizing about something and changing something in the world (social transformation)
• The idea/relationship that Butler is setting out: the importance of thinking about gender in a way that we can change social norms around gender
•  Butler is interested in drag
• 1) drag reveals performative aspects of gender
• Brielle – concerns of drag being implemented on gender characteristics to begin with. Why is it considered drag and not just gender performativity?
•  Malina – When something is considered drag, we have an understanding of what gender should be performing the appropriate gender performativity
•  2) Drag shows us that ontological presuppositions are at work
• 3) These presuppositions are open to re-articulation
• Emilia – is drag and gender performing inter-changeable
• When we use it in today’s culture and society, we think that drag is one someone performs an opposite see
• We can think of drag in various ways: “hyper” and “realness”/“passing”
•  Logan – Nicki Minaj openly talks about hyper feminization
• There are different types of drag
• “Realness” – trying to pass as a woman/man
• For Butler, gender in general is a survival strategy
•  Gender is not natural, not binary
• It is not real men dressing/acting as fake women
• You are a women if you perform femininity
• So much law supports that there is a real gender and that someone acting outside of this is “fake”/“not real/normal”
• In the movie, Venus spoke about how getting a sex change would make her a “real woman” – this makes us think about what we think is natural as a woman, what really makes a woman a woman
• Emilia – In Iran, transgenders can be trialed to death. However, after awhile the state changed their belief and now they view transgenders as men and women who were born into the wrong body. Therefore, Iran will be pay for your surgery in order to fulfill the right body for each man/woman
• Bodies -> gender -> sexuality -> sexual desire. BUT butler things it goes the opposite way
• For so many people, surgery looks like the solution. BUT this shouldn't be the case
• Is sex change surgery Denaturalizing or disciplinary power? Butler would ask: Why is surgery the solution?
• Theory is part of constituting our sense of what we are doing when we think about things – we must write theories, talk about it, and discuss it in order to better understand

III. Logan’s Artifact (available on the blog)

• Legwork – images of legs are important in the images of Logan’s PowerPoint
• Think about the history of legs and what they mean about gender
• Napoleon in Egypt
• Critique – to be masculine in fashion, you must be sexed
• The Blue Angel
• Her legs are what make Marlene Dietrich sexy as a woman
• “The little black dress” and how it sexes women. Men’s suits have become more fitted
• Fashion is becoming more androgynous 

Minutes for 26 March 2014

Emilia Truluck

26 March 2014

Reading: Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory” (1988)

I. Business

• When should we turn in final paper?
• Debate between last week of classes and time of the final exam; still TBD
• What will be on the final exam?
• The exam will be large but there will be a study guide
• In the past, there has been 10 quote identifications (what kind of feminism is this), some short answers
• This year, it will be 10-25 questions about something that we’ve had; we will be given a passage, and we should be able to identify the author, the time period in which it was written, and the main points of the argument

II. Butler: Gender Performativity

• We separated into our groups to apply the DAVS model to Butler’s article

Description

• binary, reified, naturalized conceptions of gender and sex (especially in feminist theory and practice) that reproduce and conceal compulsory heterosexuality

Analysis

• feminist misconceptions of gender as expressive
• gender as essential; e.g. born that way/unchangeable; you’re born male/female and are still expressing a natural gender, a sense that gender is natural, if you don’t do you’re gender properly you’re being unnatural
• gender as socially constructed; e.g. socialization averages, “roles”; these were created to critique the gender essentialist argument, draws a line between sex and gender, looks at the ways that roles are socially constructed; however, she says it still relies on a notion that there is an “I” inside which expresses gender, it still relies on a sense of “self” that is doing the expression

VS

• gender as performative and scripted by social sanction and taboo (stylized repetition of acts, citation)
• as a strategy of survival (not something that we happily express)
• gendered selves as compelling illusions that feel real
• we don’t pre-exist the gender that we are doing
• we become gendered selves by a stylized repetition of acts, citation of certain gender, performances; this way of thinking about gender is very attentive to temporality; doing gender must be legible, intelligible, recognizable as gendered; very relational, no matter how you’re doing gender it is referring to the way that other people are doing gender, all people are citing gender
• Gender creates the “I” (the “I” doesn’t pre-exist the gender that we’re doing); it isn’t that I am doing gender by wearing a skirt, it is that by repeatedly wearing a skirt, gender feels real 
• Performative she gets from speech-act theory: classic example is when the minister or rabbi says “I now pronounce you man and wife,” the words themselves do the act, “I quit” (in saying you are doing the act), coming out as a speech act, baby is born “It’s a…”; making it real through language
• We make gender real by the doing
• You also can’t say that there is a pre-existing group (women) that needs to be represented in a certain space

Vision

Subversion

Strategies

Subversion when possible