Blogs

Ever have a day when you just don't want to do all those things you have to do? Well, today's like that for me. I just want to curl up in my apartment and watch the movie Riding in Cars with Boys. Eh, for now I'll have to settle for listening to "Ooo, Ooo, Child" by the Five Stairsteps as I get ready to do all those things I have to do. I don't own the Riding in Cars with Boys soundtrack, but I know that song was on it.

I have a case of the Mondays! (If you haven't seen Office Space, see it now.)

Here are some preliminary thoughts on genre analysis as a method for studying blogs. I'm taking Carol Berkenkotter's genre theory class this semester, and this is a response paper I wrote to some forthcoming work by John Swales and "The Problem of Speech Genres" by Mikhail Bakhtin.

While I appreciate genre theory, the primary material in the reading that interested me is genre analysis as a method (or methodology), as I desire to acquire knowledge of genre analysis as a tool to analyze weblogs. Swales' work, then, was particularly useful to me. One methodological problematic I have been struggling with lately is the question of why, when analyzing an Internet genre one would need a print referent. Three concepts helped me see why a print referent is necessary: Bakhtin's notion of intertextuality among utterances, Todorov's remark that genres come “'[q]uite simply from other genres,'” and Linell's idea of recontextualization. Now I realize that a print referent—a paper journal, perhaps—is needed, but I am still grappling with the problem of genre and subgenre, e.g., a poem is a genre and a sonnet is a subgenre; a blog is a genre and a warblog is a subgenre.

Both died today.

There's an automatic addition to my blogroll. She has some great, just righteous stuff to say. Thanks Paul (or is it only Paul?). The use of "we" in the posts makes me wonder if God's Audio/Visual Aid is a community blog now. Perhaps I missed something.

This is a really disorganized response paper I wrote for my favorite class, Gender, Rhetoric, and Literacy: Historical Bedfellows, taught by Lillian Bridwell-Bowles. The readings for yesterday's class were parts of Rhetoric Retold by Cheryl Glenn, the first two essays in Reclaiming Rhetorica, edited by Andrea Lunsford, and the selections on Aspasia and Diotima in Available Means, which is sort of a Rhetorical Tradition, but with only women. The selection for Aspasia was from Plato's Menexenus, and the selection for Diotima was from Plato's Symposium.

Here's my first response paper for my Feminist Theory and Methods class (my professor calls them "problematics."). We were to discuss what's in a name; in other words, is it a problem to continue to call this field "women's studies"? Why not "gender studies," "identitarian studies," "women's and gender studies," "sex and gender studies," etc.? Here are my thoughts:

In the 1970s, when the field of Women's Studies was in its nascent phases, the women's movement had a vital presence in mainstream culture. Academic feminists saw an underrepresentation of women in college curricula in such disciplines as history, literature, psychology, sociology, anthropology, rhetoric, philosophy, and science, and they worked to recover the silenced contributions women made to these disciplines and to implement gender as an analytical category for disciplines that had not previously studied women. Such recovery was, of course, a feminist project, but "Feminist Studies" was not only ideologically charged, but also not indicative of the object of study. Women's Studies became a interdisciplinary field of study in which women were both subjects and objects of research.

One of the things we're doing in my Women's Studies class, in addition to the weekly response papers, is taking turns writing abstracts of one of the readings (total of 3 over the course of the semester). I decided to get one of those out of the way. Here's my first draft:

Abstract of "The Progress of Gender: Whither 'Women'?" by Robyn Wiegman

Wiegman argues against the effectiveness of gender studies as a replacement term for women's studies by pointing out that the search for a coherent referent to the object of study in women's studies is futile because the way knowledge is formed in feminist thought is based on identity, which gender does not escape but only sidesteps.

Wow, I had no idea how attached I am to this blog! Those six days without blogging were awful. In case the site goes offline again, I should say that I'm planning a move to a different server, so there might be a day of database transfer in there somewhere.