postmodern daftness

I worked doing grounds maintenance at a home for retired nuns this summer. One day during lunch, a male co-worker related a story about a beautiful young woman who had come to stay at the home to finish her nun training.∗ The punch line of the story was that it was a waste for her to become a nun. I then spent the majority of my summer wondering, what was being wasted? Could it be that because there would be no penis entering her vagina, she was wasting? If women are being objectified as no more than sex objects, that would be an essentializing identity discursively produced by a dominant ideology, would it not?

Let us assume that women’s bodies and sex have a long history of conflict. How may a woman’s action(s) interrupt the dominant ideology that is informing her subjectivity? This week’s class discussion focused on 50 Cent using rap as a tool for empowering nihilism. As I understand it, 50’s empowering nihilism includes packaging an over-the-top version of the discursively produced black man and throwing it back at the white bourgeois male, who gladly pays out his ass for the music. If 50 can gain an empowered identity and create a network of shared sensibilities through empowering nihilism, then why can’t women? Next time I’m at the strippers and a nearly naked, extremely talented woman comes my way off the catwalk, I’ll be sure to yell: “you go girl, wrap up those stereotypes and shove them right down my throat! Here’s a bill for ya!”

∗ My apologies to the Sisters for this crude term, I don’t know the right word for it.

Happy Monday...did you remember your pants?!

Jumping off a cliff, Adorno & Horkheimer in hand....

Adorno and Horkheimer talk about technology, the culture industry’s greatest achievement, as simply being an assembly line of standardized products. These products are so well designed and mechanized that there is nothing that escapes appropriation by the culture industry. Style of products becomes no style at all when they are all mass produced to masquerade as unique, and natural. Thus, the culture industry creates a veil of ideology in which individuals buy into their falsely needing the industry’s standardized products. According to Adorno and Horkheimer, the culture industry is selling the dominant ideology’s dream, and we are lapping it up like the good Pavlovian mutts we are.

What I don’t understand is, if all the culture industry’s products are predictably the same, and nothing ever changes, then there is a sense in which what it means to be human, in a technological environment, never really changes either. Adorno and Horkheimer mention that there is no escape from appropriation by the culture industry, and that “anyone who resists can only survive by fitting in”. To be clear, then, within a Marxist paradigm, the economic base determines the culture industry, which determines the superstructure, which feeds back to the capitalist that determines the economic base. Therefore, what it means to be … is essentially to fulfill this economic circle of life. For anyone not in the capitalist class, there is no freedom to choose, no historical situation or social context that can alter your inevitable obedience to the culture industry. How do Adorno and Horkheimer explain the history of human existence before or without the culture industry? And would that defense prove without a doubt their prescribed nature of human being in the future? Or does the future even matter?

The other day I sat in a classroom and listened to a classmate explain that a contemporary feminist movement could not effect change because knowledge and power are held, and disseminated, by government officials, “the higher-ups”. I said nothing.

In the same classroom, I sat in amazement as another classmate insisted that segregated bathrooms were integral to Canadian society because challenging sex difference would shatter the foundation on which many legal and statistical institutions are built. Again, I said nothing.

The next day, walking through HUB mall, I wondered if the sideways glances and the judgmental stares directed at me were issues that I should take up with my MLA. For that matter, perhaps next time I am asked if I am in the right bathroom, I should be thankful that there is at least some government agency that has my gender identity checked neatly in a box.

What does this have to do with the blog assignment? As Jacqueline Rhodes pointed out in this week’s reading, the internet can be an invaluable tool in allowing feminists to become at once both writers and activists. Acting from a false stability of identity created by association with links and themes, feminists can create a network of “fictive coherence that serves as a point from which to work for change”(128). I believe blogging this term will be the "fictive coherence" that brings our class together, and, for shy people like me, the seemingly ever-changing subjectivity of identity online is a huge benefit.

I look forward to the opportunity that blogging will afford me to voice my feminism, including challenging hetero (and homo) normatives through theory, and incorporating such feminist theory in public and private life. With such a view of feminism in mind, the purpose of my blog is to build and maintain a network with the 320 radicals that serves to interrupt and integrate academic theorizing with action.

Let there be blog!