hegemony and culture response

 I really enjoyed this reading, particulary Hegemony and Culture.  I understood culture to be a controversial term, often subjective and used in reference to topics such as human rights, societal standards, quality of life, etc. In Raymond Williams discussion of Culture and Society, he sparked wide conversation and criticism of what we deem and experience as “culture”. It’s particularly interesting to me to think about how we see culture nowadays and what that entails, as I feel the meaning is often misconstrued. I.e., “cancel culture”, a “culture” where society deems people in positions of power and privilege unworthy of their position. For example, the famous YouTuber Shane Dawson was a focus of “cancel culture” earlier this year and was “canceled” due to his history of racist, transphobic, and homophobic videos and remarks that he displayed over the years in his YouTube videos. R. Williams view of culture is especially intriguing to me because for him, culture should aspire for a hierarchy-controlled community, and no distinction between leisure and labour. He wanted us to move “towards the future, to a socialist utopia”. This, i believe, is contrary to itself. How can we live in a socialist society where we also view the world in a hierarchical sense?   

feminism, sex and desire

 “The political assumption that there must be a universal basis for feminism, one which must be found in an identity assumed to exist cross-culturally, often accompanies the notion that the oppression of women has some singular form…” I found this so intriguing, I think as a lot of our readings have done for me this semester, I just never really thought about these issues in-depth before. I don’t think its ever occurred to me that feminism or the idea of a feminist identity isn’t just one thing, its many. It’s almost absurd that so often in our western society and way of thinking, we forget that there are so many other cultures and places where a woman’s identity is something more, or else. Something I’m beginning to wonder as well, is if America or other places even considers transgender women, two-spirit women, or the myriad of other femme identities when considering and discussing what we call feminism? What can we do to help the variety of femme identities, in the subject of feminism, instead of catering to the limited folk who we consider feminists?

dover beach mirror stage response

 I was especially drawn to how much the mirror stage as well as our id, ego, and superego affect how we interpret and interact with texts. I was particularly drawn to the Psychological Depths and “Dover Beach” from Holland, although i didnt really understand defense mechanisms until we discussed it in class. I understood the mirror stage to be when one is “intelligent” or sentient, and able to recognize themselves. The function of the mirror stage, i assumed, is to establish a relationship between an organism and its reality, so the organism is better able to understand its function and place in the world. “Not until we begin to understand words does hearing begin to convey as much to us as sight does.” I thought this was really interesting, I never really considered in depth that there are some things that are easier to understand by seeing rather than with speech, similar to our difficulties to accurately describe colors such as red. A line from the mirror stage essay, “... the spectacular image seems to be the threshold of the visible world.” invoked several questions for me. Like, does it contradict the or dismiss the presence of the ego, when also including this line from the Dover Beach essay?  “In this poem we look at and listen to the sea, the shingles, the Sophocles, what are we not looking at? What is being hidden from us that we are curious about?” I struggled seeing the ego play through either lines, and i feel like the presence of the ego is necessary or at least somewhat important when we analyze literary works. 

For Jürgen's Sake...

Deep breath, and on to Habermas! 

Jürgen Habermas’ “Modernity – An Incomplete Project” is an … interdisciplinary… investigation, or at least that’s my major impression. Where to begin?

There’s the way his argument, at least the one he initially advances, hinges on the definition of modernity which Habermas is intent upon us understanding. Modernity is “that which … preserves a secret tie to the classical,” and as such is distinguished from something fashionable, which will go out of style with relative alacrity. (4)

Habermas quotes Walter Benjamin, “The revolution cited ancient Rome, just as fashion cites an antiquated dress. Fashion has a scent for what is current, whenever this moves within the thicket of what was once.” (6)

My understanding of what proceeds is as follows: neoconservatism sees modernity as being fatally flawed, as predisposing people to basically sloth and consumption, and would rather see them wage-slaving but frugal… furthermore, an issue with this neoconservative viewpoint is that it blames the interweaving of modernity throughout life upon various other social and cultural entities, for instance, “the Left.” (Whatever “the Left” was at that time and place!)

Habermas draws clean distinctions, such as one between societal modernization and cultural development. (8) His issue with the neoconservative criticism of modernity seems to be mostly due to their emphasis on protesting in ways which distract from / erroneously project the actual cause of the negative societal developments neoconservatives associate with modernity.

Habermas seems to see the solution as coming not from alternatives to modernity, but from a better iteration of modernity. In his discussion of art, Habermas describes the difference between the bourgeois and the layperson, and basically how there is a divide between those who are “experts” and those who ought to be the recipients of the aura of an artistic work, the “everyday expert.” (12)

Where Habermas draws distinctions between young conservatives, old conservatives, and neoconservatives, I get a little lost as to why those distinctions are so important, is it because he wishes to clarify the three groups in the hopes of uniting them? I also can’t tell which, if any, of those three groups he’s most partial to.

On (a bit of) Queer Theory

 

Hi all, I’m sad I missed such a good week of class last week!

I really enjoyed Jack Halberstam’s writing, both in “Dude Where’s My Phallus” and in “Gaga Feminism for Beginners.” The author has such an upbeat writing style, and after so many sassy critics, it’s refreshing how even when Halberstam sounds critical and disenchanted, he’s so good natured about it. Beginning “Gaga Feminism for Beginners,” I wasn’t sure where Halberstam was going with his critique of the stale, dated feminism he encountered at that conference, but it was so helpful as a counterpoint to the nuanced, thorough concepts Halberstam writes about. I’m inspired by his creativity and skill. I love his use of various pop culture references to bring various aspects of feminism to light – one part I found particularly provocative was the inclusion of mention of the author who writes about children’s sexuality, and I thought Halberstam’s reflections on the subject were fascinating.

Halberstam notes, “If we can figure out how to stop policing children’s sexuality, we might also be closer to understanding how to disrupt the transmission of moralistic and inadequate narratives of sex, love, and marriage from one generation to the next.” (15) I think a lot about how to parent mindfully in the area of gender and sexuality, and it was so empowering and refreshing to read a perspective from such a brilliant queer theorist about the non-necessity of raising children in a “normal” hetero-married-family. I checked out his blog after reading those pieces, curious to learn more, and on his blog Halberstam muses, “I wish more people would behave like my partner’s son (he’s 9 years old) and simply ask, politely and without judgement, what pronoun anyone prefers – he rarely presumes and often asks.” It’s so heartening to see more templates for raising kids without presumptions of binaries! I’ve found with kids that the younger they are when they’re explicitly presented an alternative to the heteronormative binaried myth, the more immediately they embrace as obvious the complex and varied nature of people’s identities and gender.

I also appreciated the elements of Lady Gaga and Beyonce’s “Telephone” music video that Halberstam focused on! His mention of hesitation throughout the video, and on the Thelma and Louise quality of the piece, really intrigued me. Actually, the video feels rather derivative of Thelma and Louise, and also it made me wonder whether “Orange Is The New Black” was popular when that music video was made? Halberstam doesn’t address the symbolism of the women’s prison setting for the video, or the rather brutal fight between two female prisoners which allows Gaga to change her appearance. The analysis Halberstam performed on “Dude Where’s My Car” was also fascinating, and I’ve never seen that movie, but had to look up the competitive kiss scene. I’m also curious about the aliens, etc, but mostly was blown away by Halberstam’s critique of the symbolic and narrative elements of scenes throughout the movie.

The Term “Untidy Identities”

Shaelene Grace Moler

Prof. Richard Simpson

Introduction to Literary Studies

April 15, 2021

The Term “Untidy Identities”

Many of the readings this semester, to me, especially when dealing with the concept of “identity,” felt very personal. Out of this week’s readings, the one the resonated with me the most was “Queer and Now” by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and perhaps this is because of how in depth it got in the concept of “untidy identities.”

To put this concept into conversation with my own life, I grew up in a community where queer people were not publicly encouraged. This is not to say that they didn’t exist, it’s just to say that since my community has a majority of Christian practitioners, LGTBQ+ people weren’t encouraged freely to be themselves by hardly anyone, and they were rarely ever talked about. It was not until my high school years when new teachers were brought into my school district that I was made fully aware of their existence, and began to get better educated on what struggles they face, how I can better respect them, and even figure out how I identify on this spectrum of “untidy identities” which cannot be solidly defined without excluding others as Sedgwick seems to argue.

That being said, the parts in this article that stood out to me the most was Sedgwick’s discussion on “Christmas Effects,” because I recognize this as a prominent experience in my own community where “they all—religion, state, capital, ideology, domesticity, the discourse of power and legitimacy—line up with each other so neatly once a year, and monolith so created is a thing once can come to view with unhappy eyes” (Sedgwick 6). To me, this quote highlights what may be considered a “dominant ideology” that is fueled and reinforced by religious views and biases. 

The Exploration of my Own Dynamics Through Proposed Ideologies Within Gaga Feminism

 The Exploration of my Own Dynamics Through Proposed Ideologies Within Gaga Feminism

(Perhaps a better suited title would be: My Own Understanding of ‘Normal’  through Halberstam's lenses; Taking Those First Few Baby-Steps into Analyzing the Structures of My Life.) (More Drabbles by Jurny Hinz)

As I look around at modern television series (modern of my own childhood--in the 90’s--, but perhaps not the modern of now), I am reminded of the strange dynamics that people found humorous. Dynamics perpetuated on TV, to an extreme, in order to be comical, but portray a ‘Normal’ household, nonetheless: The stereotypical trope of the tired, hardworking, ever-nagged husband who tires of his ever-nagging and cynically-aged wife that equally tires of him. Those types of dynamics had once concreted themselves in the media as funny while also demonstrating the average household (I say this in past tense because I do not know what is currently portrayed as ‘Normal’ in media family dynamics; I no longer have cable). 

Households where the parents probably weren't suited for each other for the long-term, got married on a whim, and are now at each others throats constantly yet stick together for the kids and (somehow) remain wholesome at the end of each episode; that is what I recall as being the ‘Normal’ family in the media. As my own life went on, I would say it is of no surprising --yet still cruel-- fate that this media depicted imagery of family life ended up mirroring that of my own homelife, and equally that of my friends’ home-lives. Reality is much less Hollywood like, however, and our days did not end in some wholesome moral lesson. Our days ended with silent dinners, parents holding whispered or shouted arguments behind closed doors, and staged pseudo-happiness for routine Christmas cards sent to the grandparents. Why, oh why, did our families not, instead, look at those shows and think ‘What If?’. Why, oh why, did they not realize that those images were not a good ‘Normal’ and seek something like marriage counseling? Well, to do so would mean admitting there is a problem in the dynamic; consequently meaning that there is something wrong with the ‘Normal’.

Realizing that the ‘Normal’ is bad comes with the deconstruction of one's own life, down to how they were brought up, and the analysis of even their own parents, their parents parents, and so forth. It prompts the deconstruction of patriarchal norms, questions the ethics of heteronormativity, and one's own contribution to each issue. Self-incrimination is part of the process which some cannot bear to do. I cannot say I am much better, as I am still analyzing the ‘Normals’ of my own upbringing. But I also try to look at what was seen as ‘Not Normal’, see why it was labeled as such, and what good may end up coming from it if I could simply extract those finer details and apply them. The most opposite, yet loving, family dynamic I ever saw in the media growing up was that of The Addams Family. The husband was always doting, always madly in love and infatuated with his wife, and adored his kids while his wife was mysterious, smart, independent, cunning, adored her kids, and remained madly in love with her husband. This family was seen as the most un-’Normal’ of all, but it ended up being what many of my friends and I wish we had, or wish to one day have. Now, after reading J. Halberstam's piece, I wonder how much further I can analyze the ‘Normals’ of my own life, and begin to apply the ‘What-Ifs’.