Teaching Handout Sample

2009

This dissertation relates the violence perpetuated by phallogocentric traditions of reading and writing to the violence of appropriating traditional categories of gender and asks whether or not and how texts that resist these traditions might help us change the way we think about identities, our own and others', opening up a space for new and as yet un-thought ways of exchanging texts and the identities they make possible. Focusing on the ways in which Jacques Derrida's Éperons, Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas, and Elena Garro's "La culpa es de los Tlaxcaltecas" and "El árbol" interminably reverse the roles of readers and writers, further disorienting them with the complex blend of genres in their texts and the networks of other texts that they juxtapose with their own, leads to the conclusion that the ultimate revolutionary function of these texts is to be found in the ways that they suspend the processes of appropriation and identification indefinitely, giving time, namely the time of waiting, but also time that is filled with the constant weaving of narratives, maintaining the possibility that a way out of historical cycles of violence, especially the violence of being forced to fit within current categories, might be found. iii BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Cristina Dahl received a Bachelor of Arts Degree in English from California State University, Chico in 1997, a Master of Arts Degree in English from California State University, Chico in 2001, and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Cornell University in 2009. She currently teaches full time in the English Department at Butte Glenn Community College in Oroville, California. Her primary interests lie in comparing historical representations of gender in a variety of different genres and media in European and Mexican culture, including fiction, philosophy, painting, photography, sculpture, and film. She is also interested in the relationship between ethics, hermeneutics, and pedagogy. iv I would like to dedicate this dissertation to Michael and Groverlee Dahl. Without their constant support over the past two years, I could never have completed this project. I would also like to thank Aaron, who continues to inspire me and who patiently and unwaveringly supported me through many years of just reading, writing, and thinking, a gift and a debt that I can never fully return. I would like to thank Lisa Patti, Ana Rojas, and Angela Naimou for showing me what an ideal network of reading and writing can look like, another gift that defies response, and I will be forever grateful. Finally, I would like to thank Jonathan Culler, Ellis Hanson, and Debra Castillo for their thoughtful and thought-provoking feedback on my first draft, which I will continue to take into consideration as I proceed to other projects. I also want to thank them for exposing me to so many rich texts and asking so many provocative questions in the seminars they taught. Again, I hope I may continue to respond to these questions for many years to come. v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to acknowledge the graduate school at Cornell University, for the Sage Fellowship that allowed me to focus exclusively on my research during my last year at Cornell and for the Provost's Diversity Fellowship, which also allowed me to take a semester off from teaching to complete that research.

This course is designed to provide an introductory overview of the histories, debates and political stakes in the study of gender and sexuality. We will examine sex and gender as modes of social organization in which sexed, gendered, and desiring individuals and groups are placed at the intersections of power, privilege, work, reproduction, and the creation of "self" through sexual identity. We will always keep in mind the effects of race, gender, class, economics, public policy, and the political climate on expressions and interpretations of gender and sexuality. Students will be expected to critically and respectfully engage with a variety of materials on human sexualities and develop a working understanding of the modes of study of gender sexuality in order to push back against commonly held, damaging notions on the "nature" of gender and sexuality.

Journal of feminist scholarship, 2011

2014

Social Semiotics, 2000

Gender Issues, 2001

Rhetoric and Reality in Women's Studies Feminist activists frequently complain about the failure of most women today-even women of independence and accomplishment-to identify themselves as feminists. Advocates of women's studies usually explain away this uncomfortable fact by calling it "backlash" or blaming it on women's false consciousness or adherence to "privilege," In this essay 1 offer an alternative explanation for women's public indifference or outright hostility to feminism, arguing that it is a result of the rhetoric and positions adopted by feminists themselves, especially those working in academic women's studies. I draw on recent books and articles reflecting on women's studies, feminist pedagogy, and feminism in general; publications of feminist organizations such as the NWSA and the AAUW; the Women's Studies E-Mail List (WMST-L); women's studies programs' own mission statements and course descriptions; and comments addressed to me personally by women's studies' supporters as well as critics. In drawing conclusions from my reading of these materials, I attempt to gauge the status of women's studies as an academic and/or a political endeavor around the year 2000. On Valentine's Day this year, thousands of women gathered at Madison Square Garden in a celebration of their vaginas. It is evidently possible to incite 18,000 women, led by the actress Glenn Close, to repeatedly shout "cunt" with great enthusiasm, and to join with the "Vulva Choir," made up of fifty famous women, in orgasmic moaning. But getting a few notables who participated in the staging of Eve Ensler's wildly popular Vagina Monologues to embrace another everyday word seems quite a different matter. Daphne Patai leaches at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Among her books are The Orwell Mystique: A Stud)' in Male Ideology; Brazilian Women Speak: Contemporary Life Stories; and Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism. She is also the author (with Noretta Koertge) of Professing Feminism: Cautionary Tales from the Strange World of Women's Studies (revised edition forthcoming, 2002).

The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet."-Adrienne Rich, Poe The beginning of Feminism as a socio-political movement is quite hard to trace back. There are texts that can safely be referred to as feminist in their content although they were written centuries before the word was coined. Among those works are Olympe de Gouges' The declaration of the Rights of Women and the Female Citizen 1791 followed by the famous The Vindication of the Rights of Women 1792 by the ahead of her time Mary Wollstonecraft. Fast forward in the 19 th century, precisely in France was the word féminisme coined by the French socialist Charles Fourier, The term also appeared in Hunburtine Auclert's journal La Citoyenne as La Feminitè in the late 1880s. By the first decade of the twentieth century, the term appeared in English first in Britain and then in 1910s in America and by 1920s in the Arab World as Niswia. In the 1960s and 70s, feminism, as a socio-political movement, gathered momentum in America; this movement continues to inspire scholars to examine literature as a reflection of both society at large and of the political and social ideology of specific writers. The feminist literary criticism of today is the direct product of the 60s movement. It was literary from the start, in the sense that it realized the significance of the images of women promulgated by literature, and saw it as vital to combat them and question their authority and their coherence. As Rebecca Copeland defines it "feminist criticism is a heterogeneous grouping…from all professions and walks of life who believe that women and men are equal. As a social movement, feminist criticism highlights the various ways women, in particular, have been oppressed, suppressed, and repressed. It asks new

The Feminist has much in common with conflict perspective. Feminist critics assert that the social construct of woman is defined in a way that it relegates women to men and consequently, prevents women from realizing their potential. They argue that the definition of woman in patriarchal societies is restricting. In male perspective, the ideal view of a woman was chaste, silent and obedient. Therefore, the very act of publishing works by women was a threat to patriarchal standards. Hence, feminine creation was associated with madness and freakishness, and inherently monstrous. In a brilliant article entitled " Is Female to Male as Culture to Nature " , She notes that women are associated with either evil or angelic images. Ortner studies the image of women in Western culture and contends that " the psychic mode associated with women seems to stand at both the bottom and the top of the scale of human modes of relating " (Gilbert and Gubar 598). She maintains that both subversive feminine symbols (witches, evil eyes, menstrual pollution, [and] castrating mothers) and the feminine symbols of transcendence (mother goddess, merciful dispenser of salvation, [and]female symbol of justice). .. can appear from certain points of view to stand both under and over (but really simply outside of) the sphere of culture's hegemony. (Ibid 601) Thus, woman becomes the embodiment of the extremes of Otherness which culture defines to worship, fear, love, or hate. In fact, the image of the angel in the house enshrines a woman within the home, turning her to a " living memento of the otherness of the divine " (Ibid 601). Hence, this image of woman makes her an inhabitant of the world of the dead and a messenger of the otherness of death. Whether depicted as angel or monster, women are condemned to Otherness by patriarchal male writers. The sole difference between the image of angel and monster, Gilbert and Gubar believe, is in the kind of otherness. While the monster is condemned to the damning otherness of the flesh, the angel is doomed to the inspiring otherness of the spirit. Gilbert and Gubar assert that in order to have literary autonomy, female writers should transcendent the extreme images of angel and monster. In Mary Elizabeth Coleridge's words, " for the female artist the essential process of self-definition is complicated by all those patriarchal definitions that intervene between herself and herself " (Gilbert and Gubar 596). Gilbert and Gubar suggest that female writers should murder both angel and monster in order to be able to define themselves as creative artists. The gender biased view of male authors toward women affects the female readers. The recurrence of such pattern in literature leads to women's exclusion and affects women's self image. In article entitled " On the Politics of Literature " , Judith Fetterley examines the effects of American fiction on women. She asserts that American fiction is essentially male dominated

All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone's feelings."-Diderot Note: Much of what follows isn't exactly "politically correct." A large proportion of respectable psychological and scientific literature from the past and present is contrary to feminist dogmas about gender, but I'm skeptical that this fact in itself invalidates that literature. As I see it, there are interesting innate (and also socially constructed) differences between men and women, and over the years I've liked to reflectively probe what those differences might be. Perhaps in doing so I've been a bit too provocative sometimes; but we should all be open to perspectives that diverge from our own, at least if they're professed in good faith. Anyway, for what it's worth, none of the following bears on the feminist moral crusade, which every ethically aware person is obligated to support. We should all be feminists in the sense of fighting for political and economic equality. I'm critical only of the movement's idealist, postmodernist (and thus pretentious) orientation. To speak bluntly, in order to explain gender and sexuality I don't think it's necessary to resort to the airy discourse-mongering and labyrinthine deconstructionism of postmodernism, feminism, and queer theory. These sorts of "theoretical" writings may be useful for academics hoping to get tenure, but they often serve more to obfuscate than to explicate. A more fruitful and accessible approach is to use good old-fashioned straightforward reasoning, combined with respect for the findings of relevant scientific research. Readers accustomed to academic language and argument will find that much of the following (excerpted from books) has a rather unsophisticated and even offensive sound. This is because, unlike academic language, it's direct and unpretentious, based only on neutral observation and contemplation of humanity, rather than adherence to disciplinary norms. Professional intellectuals would do well to reflect on Noam Chomsky's statement that their institutional function, which they carry out with relish, is to make simple things appear complicated. *** On feminine self-ambivalence.-Why does the feminine as such seem to be more prone to insecurity about itself and its place in society than the masculine? There are many reasons, of course. One set of them is suggested by this passage from Christine Downing's book Women's Mysteries: Toward a Poetics of Gender (2003): …From a series of letters written to me over the course of years I have culled these reflections: "I write today as I bleed. The first day and the heaviest flow. I write feeling my weightedness, the drag of my uterus. Feeling my wound, my incapacity. All the changes in my body-my voice flattened, my belly swollen, my clumsiness, a flood of dreams I cannot bring back to consciousness. "How difficult it is to stay in the body. I get up, get to the bathroom, reach into my vagina for the menstrual sponge-a bloody mess! Squeeze the blood into a cup. It splatters everywhere. "Can I write this to you? Am I so crazy I don't even know it? Today I feel such selfdoubt. "The knowledge of taboo returns. The blood is not to be touched, let alone saved. "Even what we value of menstruation-are our bodies there? We value the rhythmic cycle, the feelings, the dreams, the bond. We talk and interpret. Analyze dreams. Theorize. Baroque elaborations. Virginal fluffy clouds. Ascending out of the blood, the mess, the ache, the wound. "Even this writing. How difficult for me to stay with my body. My feelings of vulnerability. My tears that I had hoped were past, falling again. Fears and doubts. "Here I am. The ache in my lower spine is sensual, as is the openness of my vulva, my blood slipping in my vagina. "A wound not to be healed-but attended to-felt, touched, smelled, seen. Received." Merida's words remind me of how our monthly periods open us to our vulnerability, our tears, our doubts, our fears, to a sense of wounds as not to be fixed but attended to. She encourages us to honor our dreams, the dreams we have that prepare us for our bleeding, the dreams that accompany our bleeding, the dreams that warn us we may cease to bleed… This passage highlights the importance of the body, and of biology, to our behavior and selfconceptions. What it suggests, for instance, is that the body tends to be more "other" for women than for men, even as women have a more intimate relationship with it. It asserts itself against their will, it has its own cycles and rhythms, it bleeds and leaks and swells and gets pregnant and determines moods. These facts, combined with women's relative physical weakness and smallness, evidently cause them to feel, at least implicitly, more "passive" and weak than males as such (which is what makes it possible for them to desire the feeling of being "protected" by their man). 2 Firmness, leanness, muscular tautness, as in young men-but also in some women, for example female athletes or bodybuilders-is experienced as signifying things like fighting against opponents, being active and confident, dominating, being mobile and strong; softness, physical weakness, pregnant immobility, do not foster a dominating self-confidence relative to the opposite sex. A second obvious answer to the question I posed above is the ubiquity of the "male gaze." It seems to be a biological fact that male sexual arousal operates largely by virtue of the look, the look at a beautiful woman, a naked woman, a scantily clad woman. Women tend to be aroused by touch, emotional intimacy, male assertiveness and strength; men are aroused, in large part, by sexobjecthood in the woman. So there are strong tendencies for the male gaze, and hence for some degree of objectification of women, to be an ever-present element in most or all societies. This will, first of all, tend to make women relatively self-conscious, conscious of their appearances.