Cara Ortiz
March 3rd, 2014
WGS 302 Minutes
I. Business
II. Perpich and Scott, The Status of Experience
III. Feminism and Post Modernism: Critiques of Elitism,
Theory/Practice
I. Business
-Email about papers- see attachment for possible template
-Dr. Sparks is
letting everyone have a second shot at the paper, but you don't have to
-Template will show you how to rework your paper if need be
-Dr. Sparks will not give the papers back, you must go back
to your paper to see if you want to redo it
-Think about when you want the second paper to be due
-Midterm information will be handed out Wednesday in class
II. Perpich and Scott, The Status of Experience
-two things emerging from blog posts:
-how should
we think of experience?
-Elitism
and feminist activism, on hold for second part of the class
-how do you know something is the Truth with a capital T? Or
how are we asking these questions in the first place?
-major
questions at hand
Collins/hooks
-treating experience as a foundation for knowledge is
important because it breaks the silence- "coming to voice"
-thru this
process, knowledge and authority are produced
-this has
political and social consequences
-what is Collins' account of identities here?
-historical
in the longview, categories come into being at certain points in time
-but
subject positions aren't identities to her
-identities
to her are relatively stable
-she
believes you can "draw knowledge out of" basic identities
Scott
-she doesn't think experience is a foundation of knowledge
-instead, she wants to think about how the experiences are
what produce a subject position
-because of
this, what matters are things like discourses, historical specificity
-the experience is not something the individual has, the
individual is constituted by the experience
-if you treat experience by historicizing it, and you dont
take them for granted, it opens up a lot of inquiries into how you even came to
have a subject position in the first place, how those subject positions even
exist and WHY
-e.g.- why
did feminists use the term "third world feminists"?
-its not that discrimination and power don't exist, its just
that she wants to get at these structures in a different way
-you don't start off with a particular identity, experience-
it is historically contingent
-anti
essentialist, post structuralist, anti foundationalist
-things
become recognizable through language, things become intelligible with the production of concepts
-Scotts way of thinking about language shapes how we think
-gives us
the ability to see something as a problem, to think of yourself as an individual with rights
-even
the ways you imagine yourself if subject to language!
-Scott is asking questions about how dominant groups got to
pass their perspective off as captital H History
-She is asking who draws the categories, who makes these
separate discourses
Williams/Perpich
-Perpich says maybe there isn't as big of a divide between
PHC and Scott as we think
-worried about how voice is concerned, if they are visibile
or invisible
-worried
because it can generalize experience- voices can be judged based on their experience, it becomes LIMITING
-e.g.-
talking about sexuality, someone gives an experience that no one else had, because they had that experience they're
the only one who has the authority to
speak about this experience
-there
exists a DEMAND for authenticity
-there's
a lot of deferral to that in feminist work
-Scott
says we have to give this up, PHC says its too much to give up
Relativism
-"everything is relative"
-"subjective" or "biased"
-saying that there's no way to judge things and that we
SHOULDN'T judge things
-"who
are we to judge female genital mutilation?"
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