Example Minutes / Scribe Notes

WGS 302  Scribe Notes

Thursday, 16 September 2013

Jane Student

Agenda

I.               Business.

II.             Christine de Pizan Part II:  The Residents of the City of Ladies

III.           Critiquing De Pizan

IV.           Epistemology and Essentialism in Pizan

I.  Business:

• Remember to send Dr. Sparks your gmail address.
• There is a WGSS talk next Thursday at 4 pm in Candler Library 125 on transgender.  Attend and post 100 words to the blog for extra credit.

Readings:

            Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies (1405). Part II.

II.  Christine de Pizan Part II:  The Residents of the City of Ladies

·      How can we categorize the people mentioned in Part II?  The women are exceptions to the claims that men have been making about women.  The second part has more about the daily activities of women, i.e. daughters who love their parents, loyal wives, women who can’t keep secrets, constant women, women whose husbands take their advice, women who were prophets-privy to the thoughts of God, women who care for men- there are entire sections on great men who would not have lived if not for women, much of the second part can be described as detailing the “work women do that makes the world go around” (Dr. Sparks).

III.  Critiquing De Pizan

·      We had a very long discussion on the way that Pizan replaces traditional assumptions about women with ideas that seem just as patriarchal to us. 

·      How relevant is this work today?  Many students expressed surprise at just how relevant Pizan’s conversation is, i.e. the issue of women “wanting” to be raped.

·      Does Pizan ignore entire segments of women?  Some students argued that she does not include all women, because some go against a “woman’s nature”.

·      Important questions raised:  Shouldn’t she support all women?  Does she take class, education, race, etc. and lump it into “nature” as a means of exclusion?  Who is she really building this city for?

·      Many students defended Pizan, arguing that she came from privilege and was well educated, so it makes sense that she would have a preference for her social class.  They also argued that we are lucky to have the document, because without her education and ability to write, we might have no information on these women or their perspectives.

·      Dr. Sparks suggested that we try to find a balance between appreciating the step this book made in its historical context, but, not allowing it to be free of criticism simply because it was written in the 1400’s.

·      Some points to consider in striking this balance: -audience-who is Pizan writing to?  Men?  All those who have access?

IV.  Epistemology and Essentialism in De Pizan

·      Essentialism:  belief in a natural essence, something irreducibly distinct that can’t be changed by experience, e.g., all women are x.

·      Epistemology- a theory of knowledge; how we know what we know.  Pizan refutes knowledge from history books with knowledge from experience…feminists think a great deal about the dimensions of what/how do you communicate across boundaries…ex. Consciousness-raising groups where women looked for patterns in their experience and checked their intuition against others’ experience, so that it becomes something you know both from personal and compared experience so that you can begin to analyze it, this is an example of inter-subjective experience

·      pg. 110- the comment about women who go against their nature-how can we assume her knowledge?  Do we assume that she doesn’t know about other classes of women?  How do we judge someone whose experience is completely foreign to us?  How are we authorized to critique this while still appreciating it?

·      How does Pizan juxtapose her criticisms with her statements about women?  It is clear what it means to be a good man in the book, and that most men are not it.  Is the juxtaposition part of her strategy?  Is she simply trying to make baby steps?  Is she trying to make a connection with men by talking about women as mothers and daughters, which is how they most commonly think of women?

·      Perhaps Pizan is simply trying to get women on the map as “possibly good” or “possibly bearable to live with”?

·      Women can be rational and are also God’s creatures.  Pizan argues that part of what is wrong with the world is that people are living unchristian lives, and that the misogyny makes it impossible for men to live Christian lives because of how they treat women.  But, she isn’t going to challenge the tradition of separate worlds for men and women, which is frustrating to us as modern readers.

·      Pizan transforms women’s nature from bad to good.  It is surprising that even now, “nature” is still an argument, i.e. nurturing, caring, intuition, murder-husbands and children, athletes/bodybuilders, soft/gentle/feminine, women in military, women in authority, leading vs. following, instruments, school subjects.  The problem is making a distinction between gendered experience at the moment vs. what is natural for a gender, because calling something natural is a serious epistemological claim and then people use it to make a political claim.

·      It is not yet clear in the book whether women who do not do what is “natural” for their gender from Part I will be included in the city of ladies.