So this whole grad school experience has taken a sharp turn for the difficult this week, as things start moving inexorably toward finals in a very ominous way. Ominous like having two presentations in one day—I'll be dead after Tuesday, so if you've got something to say, say it now. Some notes:
Panopticon is a funny word
I don't know if you've ever read Foucault, but we're doing Discipline and Punish in Theory tomorrow. It's a fascinating book and wonderfully written, with the added bonus of being scary as all get-out. Foucault seems to have this idea that everybody should live in a sort of imagined panopticon, which is where you are constantly under surveillance, and you know it, so you behave. Very 1984, right? It is, of course, more complicated than that—he has some fun (anti-)Marxist ideas about how it would maximize production and so on—but mostly it led to my informal discussion group trying to plot an overthrow of our theory class that featured the phrase "Stop gazing at me, Dave!"
See? This is what happens to humor under stress.
Speaking of things not being funny anymore
Early in the semester, I was kind of having fun telling people that I was reading until my eyes bled. That was an enjoyably visceral (if cliched) metaphor, but it's abruptly stopped being funny this weekend, as my eyes have literally started to hurt at all times. For the past four days, there's been kind of a dull pain in my eyes that feels like the precursor to a migraine that will never come. It's leading me to have wild day-mares about slowly going blind from reading like Mac in Eight Cousins by Louisa May Alcott.* Mac had to wear green goggles and he couldn't read anything for like, a year. The horror! Anyway, there's no point to this except maybe that there's a physical component to my pain. It wasn't helped by the fact that I stabbed myself in the eyeball with the corner of my comforter this morning, in a boneheaded moment that could only have happened to me. Flipping the comforter off the floor onto the bed, and whoosh! It's in my eyeball and I'm cursing. Owie.
Candy isn't going to cut it, here
In somewhat brighter news, the graduate student Halloween party is coming up at the end of the month, and it promises to be a crazy bash. Although in my current state, I keep thinking of really...morbid costumes. Virginia Woolf: long skirt, hair in a bun, cardigan with rocks in the pockets. Okay, that's the only one I've thought of, but the more I think about it, the funnier it seems. I don't think that's a good sign.
Sometimes theory is like brain candy: tasty, but it'll rot everything right out of your head
So one of my presentations next week is on Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, which revolutioninzed feminism and how the academe thinks about gender (allegedly). And while I'm interested in her theories, I'm almost more interested in my reactions to them. Let me give you an example from the text:
"Further, the feminine could not be theorized in terms of a determinate relation between the masculine and the feminine within any given discourse, for discourse is not a relevant notion here. Even in their variety, discourses constitute so many modalities of phallocentric language. The female sex is thus also the subject that is not one. The relation between masculine and feminine cannot be represented in a signifying economy in which the masculine constitutes the closed circle of signifier and signified." (15)
Okay, if you're like me, you just skipped right over the block quote, so let me quickly summarzie. She's saying we can't talk about femininity as a relation to masculinity, because our language is set up to focus on the male. Basically, we can't conceptualize "woman" because "man" is too pervasive. So we've got this wild, radical idea. And on some level, I find it really attractive. Because I think it's true that culturally we've set up "male" as kind of the base level of functioning and thought (she's got some interesting stuff on how male = mind and female = body) and so whenever we think about female, we're really thinking about male and not-male. Which, you know, problematic. On the other hand, though, I'm kind of like, "...so?" I mean, these ideas are so entrenched that it's going to be literally impossible to ever think about female without thinking about male. It's an inescapable ideology. So identifying the problem is really just complicating a system that already works, essentially—this is where you get people going, "Why are you even thinking about that? It's ridiculous." And they're not wrong, really. I mean, there are obviously some problems for some people in the system, but at the same time, everybody functions, you know, we've all got issues, so this theory is great, but it's just that. Theory. Conclusion: the problem with theory is that it's too theoretical. Bon mot: Theory is the Catholicism of the academe. Identification of sin, confession, and ritualized guilt, except here nobody is absolved and the Bible is really really confusing.
That theory part was not coherent, so now you know how I feel ALL THE TIME
Fun facts to get you out of this ramble at least a little ahead of where you started:
-Malayalam is the only language in the world whose name is a palindrome. It's spoken in Kerala, a southern state of India.
-Peasant children in the Middle Ages were more likely to have parental supervision from ages 4 to 7 than from 0 to 3. Evidently parents weren't big on getting attached to infants that were just going to die of the plague anyway, so they'd just leave them in the cradle when they went out to work in the fields.
-Virginia Woolf killed herself in 1941 by putting stones in her pockets and walking into the River Ouse. Now do you get the costume thing?
P.S. Bread update: still not moldy. Self update: getting increasingly weirded out by bread.
*Eight Cousins was one of my favorite books ever when I was younger; I probably read it for the first time in about fifth grade and I adored it and its sequel, Rose in Bloom. (Quick plot synopsis: Rose is an orphan, and comes to live at Aunt Hill with her eight male cousins. She becomes their darling and eventually ends up married to Mac, whom she nurses back to health from his eye difficulties, even though she has spent both novels entirely in love with the oldest cousin whose name I can't remember.) Anyway, I tried to go back and read the two books last year and could. Not. STAND the writing. Just awful—everybody patronizes Rose, probably because she's absurdly insipid, and the cousins are total twerps. And don't even get me started on the other romantic subplot, which is so...sexist and class biased and...gah. Okay. Rant over. The moral? I'm now afraid to reread other books that I loved absolutely as a child (The Chronicles of Narnia, Little House on the Prairie, The Wizard of Oz, and so on and so forth).
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