>those, rob, were _objective_ assessments of me because i was the dept pet,
>won all the awards and positions and was considered one of the best TAs in
>the uni. instead, he described me that way. so, this young woman found me
>and shared her bewilderment, to my embarrassment, that my dept chair would
>describe me that way. firstly, i'm not beautiful, but secondly it is
>inappropriate to tell a student that her teacher is beautiful when the
>student is someone neither of you know. she was looking to try to switch
>from one section to another i was teaching.
Oh, I'm not saying he did the right thing, Kel, and I wouldn't do it myself. I just don't see (or, I suppose, 'don't get it') how this sad customer's insensitive old-fashionedness is so very terrible to you. And in my world at least, his like is no norm.
>why not tell a student she was getting one of the best TAs, one of the best
>grad students? tell her i'd won a fellowship. whatever. those are
>appropriate things to say to someone you don't know in a professional context.
Sure, that's what he should have said. And most would have. Would it have jeopardised your career to have mentioned that to him?
>and then there's something that starts to plague me as i age. am i really
>good enough? maybe all of this was because some jackass liked my casabas.
So all those high grades and awards made less of an impression on your self concept than some geezer's estimation of your looks and the importance of said looks? Look, I don't know exactly what happened to you when you were eighteen - something horrible I suspect, something that seems to have gutted you, but be assured, it's not that I'm talking about. I could only talk about what was on the table at the time.
>thanks for assisting me in the task of remembering that part of my life
>once again. and thanks for making me see that i've been an utter fool to
>think it will ever change and that i will be told to be happy with what i
>actually got. and to know that the only people that will say anything are
>other women. the feminist men retreat and have nothing to say. carry on
>with mina, i'm outta here.
I did all that?
As for Frye:
>It is now possible to grasp one of the reasons why oppression can be hard
>to see and recognize: one can study the elements of an oppressive
>structure with great care and some good will without seeing the structure
>as a whole, and hence without seeing or being able to understand that one
>is looking at a cage and that there are people there who are caged, whose
>motion and mobility are restricted, whose lives are shaped and reduced.
True of us all. But we were talking about a wire, not a network. As you know, I've recently had my say on this network dimension on PEN-L (so vociferous was I, Doug thought I'd gone over to the puritans), but sometimes a look, or a clumsily spontaneous attempt at flirting, well, they're gonna happen, aren't they? Not every wire is part of a network, Kel. Of course, if the network stifles or hurts you particularly viciously at eighteen, I can understand how every wire might well look it. As I say, I didn't know about that.
>That arresting of vision at a microscopic level yields such common
>confusion...One cannot see the meanings [of these practices] if one's focus
>is riveted upon the individual event in all its particularity, including
>the particularity of the individual man's present conscious intentions and
>motives and the individual woman's conscious perception of the event in the
>moment. It seems sometimes that people take a deliberately myopic view and
>fill their eyes with things seen microscopically in order not to see
>macroscopically, At any rate, whether it is deliberate or not, people can
>and do fail to see the oppression of women because they fail to see
>macroscopically and hence fail to see the various elements of the situation
>as systematically related in larger schemes.
I agree that the structural analyst must stand back, lest the whole be missed. But I think it important to remember that once we have fixed upon a structure, everything can look to be part of it, and every such component lent the significance and might of the edificial whole. Well, I think it's important to remember that not everything is (the world ain't that neat, nor that static), that some bits are unconnected or can be prised open (an individual can often be moved to see he's going wrong, I think), and that humans ain't ever gonna manage not to irk each other at times.
Structuralism is an analytical approach, not the world itself.
Cheers, Rob.