Faith Ringgold in her studio (her website)
ANALYSIS IN WOMEN'S STUDIES: EVERYDAY LIFE SEEN WITH NEW EYES
Tu 11 Mar—Intersecting our various forms of movement, feminists and more
• Read bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody, pp. 1-43
• Freeland, Ch. 3
• Handouts in class
• help with Ass. 3 experiences
Alice Neel in her studio (official website)Th 13 Mar—Intersectionalities and histories, the matrix of domination—ASS. #3a DUE
• Goldbard, Ch. 5
• Handouts in class
• Read Butler, Kindred over the break
Tu 18 Mar—SPRING BREAK—read Kindred
Th 20 Mar— SPRING BREAK—read Kindred
Freeland pp.63-4: "Can art break down barriers among cultures?"
ways around and critical of "mystifying our experience of art as direct, wordless appreciation" and around and critical of "a universal formal quality of Beauty."
Freeland likes instead art as "the expression of the life of the community," but she points out we need to know more about these communities than just our engaging the art: "I do not comprehend their social meaning without understanding additional facts about why and how they were made" and "information adds considerably to our experience." (66)
This is a project that is on-going: one begins somewhere and continues, in good faith and with both labor and pleasure to know more about cultures, art and their interconnections. You cannot know what you don't know: Beginning matters as does real learning and engagement.
Freeland pp. 70: "Cultures in conjunction. Despite gaps between cultures, intercultural contact is age-old."
"Indigenous peoples in the Americas and Australia are not culturally isolated and homogenous." (82)
"There is a new impact of diasporas on the production of art, partly because of global communications.... As people are forced (or choose) to move around the globe, their decendants emerge with a new, hybridized identity." (84)
"The 1980s raised consciousness about identity politics, as many younger people with hybrid or 'hyphenated' identities used art to explore issues of racism and cultural assimilation." (85)
Depicting power as it organizes and shapes everyday life is one of the forms of analysis many artists practice both intentionally and inadvertently. Making art is done inside structures of power, as is understanding and using art.
Our next set of experiences culminating in Assignment 3 will work to interconnect such art with feminist theories of power and empowerment, of domination, privilege and intersectionality, and of social change and social movement, especially "feminist movement" as described by bell hooks.
Unmarked categories in feminist analyses of power: specious (false) generics:
not actually standing for all humans:
• the generic masculine
• whiteness
• middle class
• heterosexual
• able bodied
• (in US) English speaking
• (in US) (Protestant) Christianity
standpoint theory and the matrix of domination
intersectionality
oppositional and differential consciousness
transnational subjectivities
bell hooks' Railroad Tracks story of a segregated town.
View Larger Map
From Feminist Theory, from margin to center.
Angie Reed Garner's art "for bell hooks"
From the Wikipedia, "Power (Sociology)":
"Unmarked categories
"The idea of unmarked categories originated in feminism. The theory analyzes the culture of the powerful. The powerful comprise those people in society with easy access to resources, those who can exercise power without considering their actions. For the powerful, their culture seems obvious; for the powerless, on the other hand, it remains out of reach, élite and expensive.
"The unmarked category can form the identifying mark of the powerful. The unmarked category becomes the standard against which to measure everything else. For most Western readers, it is posited that if a protagonist's race is not indicated, it will be assumed by the reader that the protagonist is Caucasian; if a sexual identity is not indicated, it will be assumed by the reader that the protagonist is heterosexual; if the gender of a body is not indicated, will be assumed by the reader that it is male; if a disability is not indicated, it will be assumed by the reader that the protagonist is able bodied, just as a set of examples.
"One can often overlook unmarked categories. Whiteness forms an unmarked category not commonly visible to the powerful, as they often fall within this category. The unmarked category becomes the norm, with the other categories relegated to deviant status. Social groups can apply this view of power to race, gender, and disability without modification: the able body is the neutral body; the man is the normal status."
hooks, Feminism is for Everybody (2000) p. 7:
"Feminists are made, not born. One does not become an advocate of feminist politics simply by having the privilege of having been born female. Like all political positions one becomes a believer in feminist politics through choice and action."
Feminist epistemology, that is, feminist ways of thinking about how humans come to know their worlds, calls such choice and action "struggle," that is to say, making and being made in and together with the planet, its processes and beings. Donna Haraway calls this "worldliness."===
MUSIC: "Which side are you on?" by The Freedom Singers, from Voices of the Civil Rights Movement (1997)
See "American Roots Music" on PBS:
"THE FREEDOM SINGERS
"The Freedom Singers were originally formed in 1962 to raise money for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and their songs and music played an important role in the Civil Rights movement. One of the group's key founders was Cordell Hull Reagon, known for his many nonviolence training workshops and anti-segregation efforts in the Albany, Georgia area. Other founding members included Bernice Johnson (who later married Reagon), Charles Neblett and Rutha Harris. They traveled widely and won new fans at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival. In 1964 the group reformed as an all-male quartet with another Nashville native, Matt Jones."
