Blogs

This is an essay I wrote last semester for my Women's Studies class. For some reason, I've been hemming and hawing about posting it here, but finally decided what the heck, maybe somebody will get something out of it. At any rate, those who took the class with me might like reading it.

Identity politics has become a pervasive theme both in everyday life and in scholarly work. As a feminist scholar, I know I need to have a well-articulated “take” on identity politics, but I do not yet. The essay that follows is a critical reflection on the academic conversation surrounding identity politics. In it, I review briefly the genealogy of and problems associated with identity politics, including experience and its interpretation, normativity within groups, transience, and self-subversion. I then discuss the place of identity politics in my own work on the conflict between proponents of the women-born-women only policy at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival and advocates of trans inclusion, and conclude with a preliminary evaluation of the need for identity politics. Although politicized identity is fraught with legitimate problems, I argue that for psychological, social, and emotional reasons, most people have a need for it, a need that, it could be argued, is powerful and as legitimate as identity politics’ critiques.

In my Modern Rhetorical Theory class, we just read a few works by Bakhtin, including "Discourse in the Novel," "The Problem of Speech Genres," and "Discourse in Dostsoevsky." I was pleased to see that Clay Spinuzzi recently blogged about Bakhtin. I'd blog about Bakhtin too, but we are now reading Burke, heh, and I'll be posting a response to "Semantic and Poetic Meaning" from The Philosophy of Literary Form in the next couple of days.

Andrew Ó Baoill links to a sad story about what happens when authorship and copyright get out of hand:

[T]he Joyce estate has informed the Irish government that it intends to sue for copyright infringement if there are any public readings of Joyce's works during the festival commemorating the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday this June.



James Joyce died in 1941 and the copyright in his work expired in 1991. Then the EU extended terms to life+70 years, and the work went back into copyright in July 1995. The estate has been very active in enforcing their copyright, suing regularly. While some of their actions have been aimed at issues such as protecting the memory of Joyce's daughter Lucia from scrutiny, other suits have been against non-commercial uses of the works by fans. As such, they seem solely concerned with the financial health of the estate [admittedly one of their roles] having no concern for nurturing the greater cultural legacy of Joyce.

Unbelievable. So wrong!

AKMA posted some observations about teachers and teaching that have been making me look at myself. He says that teachers will very often--almost always, in fact--say that they are excellent teachers. Few will "cop to being a mediocre teacher." I believe I am slightly better than mediocre, but only slightly, and it took an enormous amount of work just to get to mediocre. My first semester teaching was an unmitigated disaster; I was lucky to get through it in one piece. The evaluations, which ranged from excellent, very good, good, fair, and poor, averaged out to be "fair," and I can't believe I even got that.

Okay, let's hear it. What do you think of the redesign? I've been meaning to do it for a while. My friend Adam made me three images, and when I was first trying to decide which one to use as the banner, most people I asked picked this one I have now. I decided to go with the other one with the red and black polka dots and the retro font, with the intention to do a redesign later. Let me know how it strikes you. I can always go back to the previous design, but I will keep this one for a couple of months regardless of what folks think. :-P

By the way...please tell me if the favicon you see is red or blue. I changed it to blue and FTP'ed it, and on my roommate's browser, it is blue (she uses Safari). On mine (Mozilla), it's still red, gah.

Update: Favicon is finally blue. I had to go in and rename the file, but at last I can rest.

Oh! I am laughing so hard my sides are hurting, I'm crying, snorting, and afraid I'm going to wake up my roommate. Some guy has a blog with lists of five things, and it is the funniest thing I've read in quite a while--right up there with Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris. My favorite lists are, in no particular order:

• Five odd things my hateful stepfather consumed in large quantities
• Five words I'd like to hear the Pope use in everyday conversation
• Five things I've considered arbitrarily becoming very opinionated about
• Five fake names for defecating
• Five “Brady Bunch” Characters (and what sometimes make me fear I'm a little like each of them)
• Five great reasons to buy a Hummer™

Via Household Opera.

Looks like Enterprise might get cancelled, sigh.

This article in Salon helps to remind me why I study blogs. I tend to get asked a lot of questions about blogs and blogging; usually people want a list of good resources on blogging, or they want to know what a blog is, or they have questions about software tools or how they can use blogs in their teaching. It's not that I'm not happy to answer these questions--really! In fact, I'm flattered that those who ask consider me to be a resource. But...sometimes it feels like when I worked as a hostess at Logan's, and I had to repeat the same sentences over and over, all day long:



Taking guests by case of raw, red meat because I had to do this for everyone who came in:



"Did you know that our meat is cut by hand every single day by our own meat cutters? Then it is seasoned and aged three days for tenderness!"



When we got to the table:



"Our soup of the day is chicken noodle, and our catch of the day is halibut."



But this article in Salon reminds me of what the right questions are. Of course you have to know something about blogs before you can ask such questions, and I have nothing but love for newbies. I think that in the future, I will throw in with my informational responses a little taste of why blogging is so important to me. The article describes a pro-democracy protest in Iraq that at least one Iraqi blogger wrote about, which didn't get picked up by The New York Times:

"Here is one young man in Baghdad equipped with nothing but a camera and a keyboard who reported on news better than established media worldwide," says blogger Jeff Jarvis. "This shows what citizens media can accomplish." (It was Jarvis who put the digital camera in Zeyad's hand, sending it to him via Federal Express to Baghdad at a shipping cost half as much as the $200 camera.)



"My guess is that it would take years for Westerners to understand Iraq and Iraqis," Zeyad tells me, "but we're working on it and that's what my blog is mostly about." As it turns out, the first step may be convincing Westerners that their own press isn't always (or even usually) the best authority on the subject.

That's what I'm talking about: Blogging brings up issues of hegemony, disenfranchisement, and marginalization. It presents implications for understanding social structures and maybe even effecting social change. I wish I had more specific claims to make, but I'm learning. Those more specific questions and claims are what I'll be working on for the next few years. I know the instrumental questions are necessary, but I'm more interested in the effects of blogging.



Thanks to Jen for emailing me the link.