Posts Tagged ‘Gender Issues’
I was asked to speak at Ocean County College during their women’s history month celebration. I spoke last week to about 30 people , which was a period I was heavily invested in during graduate school. There are numerous references to Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, F.R. Leavis, Storm Jameson, and Mulk Raj Anand, amongst others.
I will have a podcast of my lecture up as soon as I figure out how to transfer it to mp3 from my phone.
Ada Lovelace Day is an awesome idea going on today to celebrate women in technology. Participants are asked to blog about a woman in technology who has inspired them.
There are so many women I could blog about. To name a few: Angela Thomas, Molly Wood, Christy Dena, Samhita Mukhopadhyay, and so many others. However, the woman who rises above all others in my mind, and for readers of this weblog this should come as no surprise, is Jill Walker-Rettberg.
I first encountered Jill’s work via, her now husband, Scott’s weblog while I was taking his senior seminar on postmodernism in 2004. She blogged about everything I was becoming interested in: weblogs, electronic literature, sticker art, and other emerging forms of New Media. It was her paper on that really was the big “ah ha!” moment for me about New Media. Combining sticker art, literary theory, and reader/user participation the way she did in writing about things like sticker novels and Online Caroline really opened the blinders for me about all of these things.
(Funny story about that article: the day I read it, I met Jill! I was at an event on and I overheard a woman talking to Dr. Tompkins, what sounded like an Australian accent, squinted at her for a moment, and realized who she was. I went over, introduced myself, and embarrassingly gushed about how much I like her weblog and articles. After talking for awhile, she was also very supportive of my then burgeoning hypertext project that would become War Prayers. Seeing a link to it on her weblog a few days later blew my mind at the time.)
Jill’s work with has been extremely influential in how I engage with both print and electronic literature. A lot of the first ideas I engaged with while planning what would become my MA thesis came from the time I spent the holiday break before last spring reading that article over and over.
Even if you don’t care about New Media (how dare you!), Jill’s weblog is filled with useful links. Whether about knitting or motherhood, or social networking, or other weblogs, or anything else I’ve always thought of it as the Boing Boing of New Media. So many websites I read daily I first encountered via her own.
Can I also mention that I have rarely met someone as honestly just flat out nice and engaged as Jill is? I’ve been told by people I am bit overwhelming at times, and don’t doubt it, and she has always been a wonderful person to email with or spend time chatting in person. While writing my thesis she has been helpful and interested in what I was doing with her work, to which I cannot truly state how appreciative I am.
Jill inspires me every time we send messages back and forth on Facebook or when I load her weblog in Google Reader. She even went and married my favorite professor, one of my favorite people ever and now they have a baby together. I wouldn’t be as involved in New Media if it weren’t for Jill’s inspiration. Thank you.
Recently read: The History Of Sexuality by Michel Foucault.
I finally read this book from cover to cover after having examined bits of it at different times in the past. There are a few things I don’t really like about this book, but it is an interesting discourse on the history of, and power issues involved, with sexuality. I’ll have a few more posts examining a few lexias in more detail soon.
This week’s video is the pretty common video of John Coltrane playing My Favorite Things with one of his classic groups. That flute solo in the middle after Coltrane moves off to the side? Yeah, that is Eric Dolphy! Wow.
The focus of my final graduate course, on ancient world literature, became the cyclical and intertextual nature of creation myths. One of the stories I ended up narrowing in on was the story of Kain and Able in the Hebrew Bible. That said, my favorite short piece in In Praise Of Darkness is Legend:
Cain and Abel came upon each other after Abel’s death. They were walking through the desert, and they recognized each other from afar, since both men were very tall. The two brothers sat on the ground, made a fire, and ate. They sat silently, as weary people do when dusk begins to fall. In the sky, a star glittered, though it had not yet been given a name. In the light of the fire, Cain saw that Abel’s forehead bore the mark of the stone, and he dropped the bread he was about to carry to his mouth, and asked his brother to forgive him.
“Was it you that killed me, or did I kill you ?” Abel answered. “I don’t remember any more; here we are, together, like before.”
“Now I know that you have truly forgiven me,” Cain said, “because forgetting is forgiving. I, too, will try to forget.”
“Yes, said Abel slowly. “So long as remorse lasts, guilt lasts” (12)
The changes in intertextual narrative direction in ancient literature, whether Sumerian’s Descent Of Inanna, or Greek’s Persephone myth in The Homeric Hymns, or otherwise, are a form of erasure each time the narrative is changed as oral myths were passed from civilization to civilization and adapted for them. This is particularly true for women in creation myths, which was the subject of my seminar paper. Women are liberated and powerful in some versions of the creation myth, in others they are docile and lack agency.
More on this when I get around to posting my seminar paper.
This paper was initially intended to be about the roles women like to take when playing games. How do they socialise? What roles do they prefer and how do they imagine them in terms of role-play? It quickly became apparent however, that a more pressing issue was at stake, prompted largely by the responses to questions asked amongst players of both genders. Why do men like playing women so much, and how do they understand this role?
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Recently read: Powers Of Horror: An Essay On Abjection by Julia Kristeva
I picked this up for a journal article I have been tinkering with for a few years (should really try to submit it somewhere…) but ended up using it for my seminar paper this fall. I don’t like a lot of Kristeva’s writing on gender, but this is really good. I found the sections of phallic signifiers in the Hebrew Bible to be especially useful. My final seminar paper, on linear narrative and misogyny, was greatly accentuated by it.
Zotero Library
