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Week One: Advanced Introduction to Gender Studies - Seminar

Trinh - famous for reassemblage. As a writer she players with different voices, poetic/academic writing, other peoples quotes, plays with formatting, often without announcing who she is speaking as.

She manages to connect the questions of gender and race, being othered in a white western environment and being a woman in the sphere of gender.

She finds a way through the personas and personal experience, to discuss gender and race together if we want to address knowledge production and repression.

Concept: difference and differences

Being invited to speak about difference but being expected to only speak about her difference. Her difference is turned into a commodification. If difference in a way to be consumed, it becomes a category and is identified as an identity which becomes fixed to become consumed. The performance of authenticity - the identity is chased for consumption or exploited in a colonial sense.

Difference can be productive - she is critical of the concept of identity. It makes sense for third world women, but it then becomes an identity to be consumed or misunderstood.

Differences within.

I is not a fixed subject - instead of there being a core essence to me. There is a core essence covered by layers. She says there is no core essence beneath white, woman, queer. I is actually made by all these layers.

The capital I is the One, or the Other - speaks of the speaking subject (western, patriarchal, middle-class, dominant). By using a little i, she is engaging with a different kind of subjectivity. Presenting ones speaking voice with different subject positions.

Us and them - essential core entities and identities, someone is put in them, someone is othered.

How do we deal with oppression?

If identities are rigid, it might be difficult to see how the boundaries are crossed. There are complexities within our identity.

Positionally: the difference between speaking about/nearby

p.101

Some anthropology speaks for and about, also white feminism speaks for/about WOC.

Speaking nearby/together with means you have someone alongside you who you are creating dialogue with.

It allows us to challenge the hegemonic truth of research/knowledge. Trinh says she wants to engage with and create dialogue with instead of speaking for.

Specialness is a way to exclude a group of people, the moment they become outspoken and have gained a seat at the table.

You can receive special care as long as you stay within the boundaries given to you. But the moment you go past those boundaries, it no longer works.

hooks - concept of theory as healing: children make the best theorists. Still relatable and current even though it was published in '91.

hooks engages with theory and practice together.
What does it do to the people who read a text and feel excluded from it?

hooks: the mind and body/male and female/theoretical abstract thought and grounded field work - hierarchy to be broken down.

we should narrow the gap between feminist theory and practice, between academia and non-academic people

hierarchy that the written word hols more value than the spoken word

Any feminist movement that isn't rooted in theory may be coopted for commodification

you can embody the feminist struggle rather than just think about it

CONNECTION: despite our attempt... categories allows leak - trinh... hooks: dissolving categories may be more productive for us












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