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.