The next section of the course is about how power structures everyday life, about how art participates in our abilities to make things change and move; participates in our abilities to work with, around, through and against these structures in dynamic ways.
Feminist theorists call these ways we have impact on power's movements, on structures that regulate power, and on social change -- agency. We can and do shift power all the time. We are also shifted around ourselves by power in many forms.
Our next project is an exploration of these theories, claims, and insights into the world.
Experiment with seeing your worlds and your lives through these lenses. Analyze elements of your worlds that put you one up and one down. What we are working, struggling, to realize is how all these forms of power interlock, interconnect, intersect. We call this aspect "intersectionality."
From
Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought
in the Matrix of Domination:
"A broader focus stresses the interlocking nature of oppressions that are structured on multiple levels, from the individual to the social structural, and which are part of a larger matrix of domination. Adhering to this inclusive model provides the conceptual space needed for each individual to see that she or he is both a member of multiple dominant groups and a member of multiple subordinate groups. Shifting the analysis to investigating how the matrix of domination is structured along certain axes--race, gender, and class being the axes of investigation for AfricanAmerican women--reveals that different systems of oppression may rely in varying degrees on systemic versus interpersonal mechanisms of domination.
"Empowerment involves rejecting the dimensions of knowledge, whether personal, cultural, or institutional, that perpetuate objectification and dehumanization. African-American women and other individuals in subordinate groups become empowered when we understand and use those dimensions of our individual, group, and disciplinary ways of knowing that foster our humanity as fully human subjects.... Using one's standpoint to engage the sociological imagination can empower the individual. 'My fullest concentration of energy is available to me,' Audre Lorde maintains, 'only when I integrate all the parts of who I am, openly, allowing power from particular sources of my living to flow back and forth freely through all my different selves, without the restriction of externally imposed definition.'"
Audre Lorde was a West Indian Black American feminist lesbian poet and activist who died of cancer in 1992. She was a founder in the 1980s of Women of Color Press. Here is one poem she wrote on interlocking systems of oppressions:Who Said It Was Simple, by Audre Lorde
There are so many roots to the tree of anger that sometimes the branches shatter before they bear. Sitting in Nedicks the women rally before they march discussing the problematic girls they hire to make them free. An almost white counterman passes a waiting brother to serve them first and the ladies neither notice nor reject the slighter pleasures of their slavery. But I who am bound by my mirror as well as my bed see causes in color as well as sex and sit here wondering which me will survive all these liberations. |
Adrienne Rich, another poet and friend of Audre Lorde, a white Jewish woman lesbian activist and theorist whose poetry, like Lorde's, was an inspiration for the Women's Liberation Movement wrote also about the contradictions of power.
Power by Adrienne Rich
====Living in the earth-deposits of our history
Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate.
Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil
She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power.HERE IS THE DESCRIPTION OF THE ASSIGNMENT WE WILL BE WORKING ON THROUGHOUT THIS SECTION OF THE COURSE
====
WMST 250: Women, Art & Culture, Spring 2008 – http://wac250spr08.blogspot.com/
Professor: Katie King; email: katking@umd.edu
Office: 2101F Woods Hall; Office phone: 301.405.7294 (voice mail)
TAs and TR: Maren Cummings (mabcummings@gmail.com); Carissa Liro-Hudson (calirohu@gmail.com); Genevieve Page (genevievepage@yahoo.com); Ana Perez (ana.amperez@gmail.com); Maria Velazquez (maria.i.velazquez@gmail.com)
ASSIGNMENT THREE-B: THE ANALYSIS OF EVERYDAY LIFE
Individual and paired analysis on creative forms – DUE handed into TA in class TUESDAY 22 APRIL AND POSTED ONTO YOUR SECTION'S BLOG; YOU WILL PRESENT YOUR WORK IN SECTION
AND DON'T FORGET: you will also turn in early drafts of essay and creative assembly, with comments made for each other's work, to document your collaboration.
Your next assignment asks you to work with a partner, investigating where power is located in your everyday life and how art forms can analyze this. We will be spending much time in class preparing for this assignment, with freewrites, with class discussion and lectures, with readings. We will take as primary models for the assignment the kinds of analysis offered by bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins and others. The ideas of marked and unmarked categories and the matrix of domination should be the anchor for your analysis of everyday life. You won't fulfill the assignment if you do not use these ideas as the focus of your analysis.
There are two parts to the work you will turn in:
• THE ANALYTIC INTRODUCTION (may be individual or collaborative)
This is an analytic essay (around 10 pages long PER PERSON, printed out) in which you come up with a conceptual map for where you see power located in your own everyday life. Your analysis should ultimately interconnect with the second part, your creative representation of everyday life.
Use both the notions of power as, on the one hand, choices, influence, optimism but especially privilege, and on the other hand, as constraint, limits, necessity, but especially oppression. YOU MUST DISCUSS THE MATRIX OF DOMINATION IN WHICH YOU ARE LOCATED: BOTH YOUR OWN PRIVILEGE AND YOUR OWN OPPRESSION. This is not about analyzing your blessings and being thankful for them, even though such examination can matter, but about something perhaps more uncomfortable and less often thought about: how our privileges are the effects of systematic structures in which others are oppressed. This is not about personal issues of blame and guilt, but about coming to be curious and concerned about what it takes to understand various systems of power honestly, and is a prelude to addressing issues of social justice very broadly.
Some conceptual maps we will be discussing: bell hooks' "railroad tracks" story and the idea of a standpoint; the problems with the conceptual map that charts "progress" (which arranges differences in a false hierarchy, always ending with "US": the most privileged group). Thinking of yourself in terms of the marked and unmarked categories you embody is another kind of conceptual map. We will continue to discuss conceptual maps in class while you are working on this assignment. Attendance in class will be crucial for your best performance in this assignment, as will regular close collaboration with your partner.
You can approach the essay from either one of two viewpoints: a) putting yourself in the center and looking at power in your everyday life, in the activities and structures you move through, say, during the week; or b) you can think rather of where you fit into various international systems of power and how they are represented in your everyday life: for example in the shirt you wear as you learned about its journey from Sweet Honey in the Rock.
HOW THIS IS A COLLABORATIVE PROJECT: Each person should start off with their own analysis. However, as you share and edit your work with each other, you may want to alternate parts of each person's analysis, or put them together in some other kind of creative pattern in the final collaborative essay. You and your partner will function as a small writing group, helping each other come up with ideas for this analysis, reading each other's drafts, and editing and proof-reading the final product.
• THE COLLABORATIVE CREATIVE REPRESENTATION OF EVERYDAY LIFE
The conceptual map for where you see power located in everyday life should be crafted to interconnect with this second part, your creative representation of everyday life. This means you and your partner have to choose structures of power you can compare and contrast in both lives and both analyses. These should be evident as sections in both individual essays.
Partners have important choices about what creative representations they will draw upon. Some ideas: photos, either taken now for this assignment or from your own collection of photos of your life, or of the collectivities of people you come in contact with, or see your self in the world with. Or consider other sorts of pictures – with the exception of magazine pictures and other ads. Instead use pictures you draw or are drawn by others, maps, and such. Or consider poems, songs, stories – ones you write or ones you collect from other places; your own work or an anthology of other people's work, or a combination. Or come up with other creative representations you can think of. BUT NO MAGAZINE COLLAGES! In our experience magazine collages are rarely able to draw out your best creative potential, or inspire your most careful, thoughtful and sophisticated efforts. So do something else instead.
Each partnership will turn in:
(1) 1 creative project
(2) 1 20 page collaborative analytic essay (10 pages per person) OR 2 separate analyses (10 pages per person)
(3) evidence of collaborative work (drafts, blog posts, etc)
Your grade will be determined by
(1) the essay; how well you understand marked and unmarked categories and the matrix of domination, how well they are presented in this written form (you can use different dialects of English, not only formal written English, but if you do, you must show your own creative understanding of the powers of that particular dialect),
(2) the quality of the entire project; how well it fulfills the assignment, its persuasiveness as a representation of everyday life, its thoughtful analysis in creative work, and
(3) how much you helped each other, as demonstrated in your turning in early drafts edited and commented upon by each other.
=====
Adrienne Rich accepts the Jews for Racial and Economic Justice Risk Taker Award and reads Audre Lorde's poem "A Litany for Survival" and her own poem "Transparencies":
=====
We will be reading Kindred over Spring Break. Here is Octavia Butler discussing "Science Future, Science Fiction" at UCLA in 2002.
