Good morning all. Well, I can put it off no
longer. This morning I must confess to failure: failure in imagination,
failure in research, failure in understanding. Assuming these little
failings mean only one thing—that I am underequipped to talk about gendered
writing—I shall write at random!
To recapitulate, the project is given as (at least in part)
. . .
Men’s Studies: a field that treats men, manhood, and masculinity
as objects of inquiry. . . . It investigates discourses and cultural
representations of masculinity, particularly men’s gendered relations to
language, culture, nature, women, other men, and modernity.
But I think we agreed to broaden our investigation to
include anything gendered, whatever that means (like power relations,
masculine/feminine divides or confluences, theyness).
Now that’s a lot to undertake for one week’s
exploration. So, over the past week I have looked into what literature I
have regarding same, namely, Sexual/Textual Politics by Tori Moi, a book
now pretty well dated (1985) but a vigorous response to the “Anglo-American
literary feminist movement” (the so-called Second Wave) of the 1960s through
1980s; then a compendium of writings by Julia Kristeva, titled Revolution in
Poetic Language which, despite its title, is not really about poetry
but about the complicating of, decentralizing of and de-legitimizing of
“authority,” “authenticity,” and “phallocentricity” in Western language, which
Kristeva argues constitutes “poetics” (meaning, language used for purposes
other than simple communication). Both of these books constitute a
European response to Anglo-American feminist theory and focus mostly on
language, the uses of language in political ways, and cultural politics—all the
stuff that Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem first defined as unequal power
relations in American life and that woke us up. Both of these books are
long on theoretical language, short on accessible writing; difficult reads full
of references to Deconstructionism, French Structuralism, and Russian
Formalism, and references to Derrida, Lacan, Sassure, Foucault, Barthes (get
the idea? Ils sont tous français!).
Then I looked at a much more accessible and fun book of
essays by Laura Kipnis, the academic writer and Northwestern Univ. prof, titled
simply (an ominously) Men. Again, the title is a bit
misdirecting. It begins with an essay on Larry Flynt and from there
categorizes people (men and women) by masculine types (Slimeball, Groper,
Juicer, Men Who Hate Hillary, the Lothario) and ends with a rather critical
critique of Naomi Wolff. Basically, it’s a book about gender-based
categories of thought to which we are all enthralled and/or encouraged to
respond to with outrage, indignation, revolutionary fervor and the like, but
which in the end are merely categories, not men and women.
If your head is spinning, I wouldn’t be surprised.
Mine simply aches by now. BUT. We live in the Era of the Donald,
the Matt, the Charlie, the Harvey, the Al, the Bill (O’Reilly) and yes, even if
they are merely collateral damage, the Tom (Brokaw) and the Garrison. And
the Stormy. A Fifth-Wave Feminism, anyone?
What does all this randomness have to do with exploring
gendered images, symbols and language tomorrow? Beats me. Do
we examine some of the more incendiary and loaded language of maleness (like
certain obscenities, body-part references, or the seemingly innocuous but
probably oppressive use of the masculine pronoun in our language)? Do we
talk about some of the legitimate and possibly over-cooked responses to such
loaded language (“theyness,” for instance, or MS vs. Ms vs. Ms., or chairperson
instead of chairman/chairwoman)? Do we examine, in our poetry at least,
the lurking presences of some well-known examples of “patriarchal binary
thought,” meaning binary oppositions like sun/moon, day/night, active/passive,
logos/pathos? Do we consider the possibility that formal and traditional
poetry (that is, metered, rhymed, lineated and “numbered” poetic forms) is basically
the history of male prerogative writ rhythmical? Perhaps we will discuss
the correlation (at the least) or cause/effect relation (at the most) between
the so-called open forms in poetry and gender? And will we get around to
such notions as “lean in” in a literary sense, in a literary professional
sense, in a literary theoretical sense?
I don’t know. Maybe we’ll just share some poems and
try to talk about them as poems. I have one & I look forward to
sharing it tomorrow.
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