Collectivities

ACTIVISMS, MOVEMENTS, WOMEN’S STUDIES

Tuesday, 21 February – The F-word? What about Women’s Studies?
• Your section will meet this week. Make sure you know where to go and when. Attendance will be taken!

Download this Info Sheet from Google docs. DOWNLOAD FIRST! (go to top menu, choose File, click on download from there. or you can email it to yourself too). Only then fill it out electronically, print it out and take it to your section this week. You will have to download it into a format you can fill out with your equipment: a pdf cannot be filled out in, say, Word. You may need to experiment a bit to figure out which format is best for your situation. Keep the electronic version to put into your dropbox. You will learn more about this in section!

• How to do Assignment #2! Yes, we begin it NOW!!!
• You should have finished Seely, Preface, Intro, Ch1-3 for today
• She blogs at: http://fearlessfeminist.blogspot.com/  Be sure you’ve read parts of this.
• She tweets as: meganseely Be sure you’ve checked this out!

What do we learn about Women’s Studies from reading Seely’s book? This set of readings is the beginning of the experience that culminates in Assignment #2: your group’s event, flyer, and collective definition of feminism. Why is feminism defined collectively, in our project and in the world? Each feminist speaks from several collective locations. What are yours? How do they compare with Seely’s? Which collective locations might matter the most to you? To people you care about? To people you don’t know?

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In pairs or threes: in the reading for today make notes to share about:
• something new you learned from the reading
• something you found surprising
• an assumption you discovered you had and now want to consider
• a passion Seely might inspire you to take seriously

• Seely talks about how she became an activist in the Preface to her book (xi). Passion is at the heart of her story. What are you passionate about? 

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What does this quotation from Seely mean for Assignment #2? --
(p. 2): "Most of all, feminism does not have a static definition but encompasses and encourages many types of feminisms." [My emphasis: and what does it mean to not have a static definition? And, as the Wikipedia says: "Like other words, the term definition has subtly different meanings in different contexts."]

• What does it mean that individual feminists might speak from several collective locations?
• What collective identities do you find yourself inhabiting? • When are these "labels" you find controlling you? • When are these groupings that empower or care for you? • When might you work in "collectives"?

• How do you, how do we "START WHERE YOU ARE"? How do you, how do we create the feminisms that will empower you, those you already know and care about, those you need to learn more about and learn to care with and for? Empower many "us" -- many collectivities of feminist concern?

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From hooks (2000: 7): "Feminists are made, not born. One does not become an advocate of feminist politics simply by having the privilege of having been born female. Like all political positions one becomes a feminist through choice and action."

From Sarachild (1978: pdf 1): "...let's examine the word 'radical.' It is a word that is often used to suggest extremist but actually it doesn't mean that. The dictionary says radical means root, coming from the Latin word for root. And that is what we meant by calling ourselves radicals. We were interested in getting to the roots of problems in society. You might say we wanted to pull up weeds in the garden by their roots, not just pick off the leaves at the top to make things look good momentarily. Women's Liberation was started by women who considered themselves radicals in this sense.... to get to the root, it seemed logical that we had to study the situation of women, not just take random action...."

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http://www.ted.com/talks/suheir_hammad_poems_of_war_peace_women_power.html  

From TED profile: "Suheir Hammad is the author of breaking poems, recipient of a 2009 American Book Award and the Arab American Book award for Poetry 2009. Her other books are ZaatarDiva; Born Palestinian, Born Black; and Drops of This Story. Her work has been widely anthologized and also adapted for theater. Her produced plays include Blood Trinity and breaking letter(s), and she wrote the libretto for the multimedia performance Re-Orientalism. An original writer and performer in the Tony-winning Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry Jam on Broadway, Suheir appears in the 2008 Cannes Film Festival Official Selection Salt of This Sea. She is the Artist in Residency at the NYU’s APA Institute for 2010."

From her website: SuheirHammad.com  -- "Suheir Hammad is a Palestinian-American poet, author and political activist who was born on October 1973 in Amman, Jordan to Palestinian refugee parents and immigrated with her family to Brooklyn, New York City when she was five years old. Her parents later moved to Staten Island."  

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From Reed (2005: 78): "As I look at poetry...as one key place where women's movement ideas, attitudes, positions, and actions were formed, expressed, and circulated to wider communities, I will also be using poetry as a metaphor for the larger process of inventing feminist analysis and diffusing feminist ideas and actions throughout the culture." 


(89): "The formal CR group...proceeded through four stages: opening up (revealing personal feelings); sharing (through dialogue with other group members); analyzing (seeking general patterns by comparing to other experiences); and abstracting (creating a theory)."


(91): "...no movement has had a more sweeping need for epistemological transformation, for transformation in the nature and scope of knowledge...." 


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