She feels the men find a contrast
>between "feminine dress" (slacks and sweater, a little jewelry, a scarf)
>and brains -- and she enjoys confronting them with the fact that a woman
>can have both.
> so: wearing conventionally "nice" clothes is "transgressive"! If only
>her mom knew.
>
>Katha
>
heh. when i first read gender trouble in a seminar, i was ticked -- exacerbated by the fact that in my late twenties i was finally figuring out that i was working class! i'd already been involved in pracitical politics and read a lot of marxist social theory as an undergrad, but also knew the pomo stuff too. so, same thing happened in seminar as with your students. i sat there and listened for awhile and then told them that i planned on giving a paper in the summer and, in honor of butler, i'd go in polyester, pink rollers, snapping gum and puffing away on cigarettes and pop a can of genny cream ale half way through.
dead silence.
you know, though, that rosanne was given a lot of readings because of this whole identity/performative politics analysis. maybe catherine will join in the convo if she isn't too busy. i think she once knew a bit about the lit on that topic.
i'm disheartened to learn that things haven't changed. i'd honestly thought that it was a fad that would pass. and further i fail to understand how the argument escapes them. there's not much to gender trouble -- after you wade through all the words the meat of it is a 30pp chapter, really.
i suspected as much about editing but wasn't sure. i *do* know that it's a deeply troubling thing to go through --wrangling with an editor can be pretty threatening.
but, again, i don't care that butler's not accessible to the wider audience. i really can't see how her ideas are valuable in the least. the attack on essentialism was well under way before Gender Trouble came along -- i mentioned this a couple of weeks ago-- and it was surely being felt among feminist via the s&m wars, the dildo wars, the women's studies conferences of the 80s among other things. hell, even in the 70s --in fact the 60s-- there were "from the ground up" critiques of hegemonic white middle classness of mainstream feminist politics and theorizing.
this is another thing that is troubling, though i suspect feminists are better at it than other theorists/activists. the critique of the canon has been important, however, feminists are really only now starting to talk about how they continually reinscribe a feminist canon in the name of destroying the concept of the canon. important voices and literatures are left out -- this is particularly the case since feminist lit was often, as i'm sure you know, passed around at conferences, meetings, etc and mimeographed on ditto machines! because no one would publish it. the written record [that is published record] of the second wave has surely left out the tremendous diversity and conflict within feminisms through the 60s and 70s.
one of my diss advisors was among the infamous cornell 7 who filed a sex discrimination lawsuit against cornell in the early 70s. she was the only one--because of her blueblood heritage] who survived life in academia --albeit with a decline in stature as she ended up having to settle for a third tier uni when she'd been hired out of michigan on a tenure track position at cornell. heh. talk about identity politics: she used to smoke a pipe. i about died when i learned that. but i shouldn't have really because she likes to drive with me to conferences in her little yellow mazda miata! anyway, excuse the trip down memory lane, but judy clued me into this fascinating history of erasure and canonization which took on particular forms then --even in a context in which publishing houses and universities had little to do with it. i helped her get materials together for a book and she was referencing those old yellowed manuscripts and mimeographes with faded purple ink! what a painstaking process.
why i'm babbling away about this --beats me. but it's interesting and at some point i think it would be really fascinating to do a social history of the way in which "the feminist lit" got canonized. and i certainly hope that there are people archiving this stuff because from what little research i've done on the topic for judy, there is a fascinating history there about the discord and dissension within the second wave that might be important to uncover.for example, i did a little bit of work on the early critiques of betty friedan from working class feminists, particularly union organizers. and, of course, another project that i'd like to see is the erasure of the black feminst critiques. folks have managed to canonize bell hooks et a, but there were quite a few women writing, giving talks, holding cons. raisings, etc. it would be important to ask how certain voices were privileged while others were erased in this very recent history.
kelley [sorry for typhos --typing all day! i don't care anymore]