Visions for Justice: structural inequalities

FEMINISM IS FOR EVERYBODY

Tuesday, 24 April – Blood and Beauty: Visions for Justice
• Read Freeland, Intro, 1, 2, 3, Conclusion
• Read Perez, Intro
• Read hooks, 9 -19

What are these three books about now you’ve worked with them and done projects that tie you into the insights they want to share with us? How do they each speak to the idea that feminism is for everybody? What feminist worlds do they open? Which aspects of Women’s Studies do you glimpse from these? How do they offer versions of intersectionality, feminist identities, visions of social justice?

From the Wikipedia: "Structural inequality is defined as a condition where one category of people are attributed an unequal status in relation to other categories of people. This relationship is perpetuated and reinforced by a confluence of unequal relations in roles, functions, decisions rights, and opportunities. As opposed to cultural inequality, which focuses on the individual decisions associated with these imbalances, structural inequality refers specifically to the inequalities that are systemically rooted in the normal operations of dominant social institutions, and can be divided into categories like residential segregation or healthcare, employment and educational discrimination."

With a partner, discuss and take notes to share with the whole class: 
1) As you look back on your own and your team's work for assignment #3, which aspects of your project addressed "cultural inequalities" or focused on individual attitudes or biases or actions (even with others, but understood as many individuals) as pivotal to social change? Give some examples.

2) Which aspects addressed "structural inequalities" or those rooted in how social institutions run day to day in their normal operations? Give some examples.

3) Why might it matter to look at these as distinctive? What makes it complicated to see them both in action, separately or together somehow? What things can you change about yourself and help others to change about themselves that will widen the possibilities for social justice? What things have to go beyond yourself to make justice happen? How does that kind of change occur? What are your experiences with that second sort of change?

4) How does "intersectionality" work to make both visible -- why does that matter? What are some differences between "identities" and "inequalities"?

Picture from Environmental Justice Guidelines for Maryland State Highway Administration's Projects online.... Click it to get the link.

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notice the set up on two days and the need for a first draft one week and the final version the second week: "FIRST DRAFT READY TO SPEAK FROM DUE Tuesday, 1 May; FINAL REDRAFTED AND EDITED VERSION TURNED IN AT THE END OF CLASS Tuesday, 8 May."
Learning Analysis for Women Art and Culture

What matters most in this assignment? The LEARNING! This is a time capsule assignment: how are your ideas and knowledge, your learning, different from when you first arrived in this class?

What will be most impressive? Demonstrate that you did all the reading. Demonstrate that you have thought carefully about and experimented with ideas about intersectionality. Demontrate that you have learned from other students in projects and in discussion.

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Freeland 2001, "Blood & Beauty": 26-7: "A lament can be a legitimate message in art, even when delivered with shocking content that prevents us from maintaining our aesthetic distance. Perhaps Serrano meant to insult established religion, but this could stem from a moral / motivation. When he photographs corpses it may not be to wallow in their decay but to offer anonymous victims some moments of human sympathy." 28-9: "Art includes not just works of formal beauty to be enjoyed by people with 'taste', or works with beauty and uplifting moral messages, but / also works that are ugly and disturbing, with a shatteringly negative moral content...."

From NPR online: "Vatican Reprimand Of U.S. Nuns Divides Faithful: April 23, 2012: The Vatican reprimanded America's largest organization of Catholic nuns, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. The Holy See charged the LCWR with promoting programs with 'radical feminist themes' that are incompatible with doctrine on issues ranging from homosexuality to women's ordination." 

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Perez 2007: 11-12: "...the Chicana art included here...has responded, in greater and lesser measures, to the rise of particular social, economic, and political forces. Some of the most salient of these have been postindustrialist, digital-based production and distribution systems enabling accelerated, transnational flows of information; the restructuring of business and labor; the disempowerment of workers and the growing relocation of unskilled manual labor jobs in manufacturing industries from the United States to the third world and elsewhere, including the Mexican side of the border; the independence movements in former third world colonies; and ethnic, gender, sexual, civil rights, / and student movements.... I use 'Chicana' as a term that artists identified with the ongoing, albeit shifting, shape of civil rights struggles have applied to themselves and their work, as artists decisively shaped in the United States, resistant to the racism against their Mexican and Native American cultures and the discrimination against a still largely pauperized, economically exploited, and culturally stereotyped and marginalized body of citizens."

[Image caption online chicanoart.org: "True to her generation of artists and iconographic roots, Barbara Carrasco visually navigates those struggles for social justice that informed the era, as well as the complexities of identity politics which dominated the political landscape of the late twentieth century. She is close friends with labor activist and co-founder of the United Farm Workers Union, Dolores Huerta and is married to the renowned artist and writer, Harry Gamboa, Jr. She is a painter who has produced large-scale, national and international public murals, monumental banners for the United Farm workers, yet is often recognized for her diminutive ballpoint pen and ink drawings. Long considered a significant contributor to the construction of Chicana feminist iconography, Barbara has also worked to sanctify the familiar and lived spiritualities found in the Chicana/o community, so foundational to the genre."]

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Sharing our work today!

DELANY AT 70:
Honoring the Life & Work of Samuel R. Delany
The Fifth Annual DC Queer Studies Symposium
A One-Day Conference at the University of Maryland
April 20, 2012, College Park
Free and open to the public

Complete program and registration form available here:
http://lgbts.umd.edu/dcqueerstudies-symposium/index.html

Please join us for what promises to be a lively spring festival of scholarly exchange in an interdiscipline that continues to challenge and transform the humanities, the social and behavioral sciences, and the world in which we live.

REGISTER FOR THE SYMPOSIUM: Registration is FREE and OPEN to the public. To register, please complete the online registration form, which is available here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dGp6U3Y1UU9RN01fY1VfS0JNQnNYUWc6MQ

Or, you may also send an email to lgbts-dcqueers@umd.edu with the following information: your name, department/title (if any), institutional/organizational affiliation (if any), and email address. Also, please let us know if you will be joining us for the buffet lunch and/or the closing reception.

We ask that attendees preregister so that we can plan food accordingly. However, on-site registrations will also be accepted.
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Sharing Projects for Assignment Three, Poster Session-Style Tuesday 17 April. That means for the first half of class time, 50% of class members will create small displays of their work all around our room, and the other half will walk around among these displays, talking to their presenters about their work individually and in little groups, interacting with them all at the same time. Katie and your TAs will also wander around, learning about your work and offering insights. Who displays and who walks around will switch in the second half of class time. 

You cannot get full credit for this assignment until after you present your work in this poster session-style event. In other words, just a project object does not in itself complete the assignment, displaying yours and interacting with others is similarly important.

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Bring with you: • any extension cords you might need to use your laptop in ANY PART OF THE ROOM; • masking tape to tape posters onto walls; and any other pieces of the station you are going to set up with your team members. Think ahead about what you will need and imagine with your team how you will create your own station in our classroom. Remember you have to be able to do it in any part of the room!! If anything is electronic remember it will be displayed only on any laptop you bring with you. Don’t expect to use the projector or computer in the room. Everyone will be showing off stuff all at once.

Be on time! As you come into our classroom on Tuesday 17 April you will • sign in, as a member of your team or partnership. Each team or partnership will • receive ONE token, with either 1 or 2 marked on it. We will flip a coin to decide whether the 1s or the 2s go first.

Half the teams or partnerships will then have five minutes to set up their small displays of their work all around our room. Then for half an hour everyone else will walk around among these displays, talking to their presenters about their work individually and in little groups, interacting with them all at the same time. Katie and your TAs will also wander around, learning about your work and offering insights.

Then the other half of the teams will set up in five minutes and we switch who displays and who walks around in the next half hour of class time.

You cannot get full credit for this assignment until after you present your work in this poster session-style event. In other words, just a project object does not in itself complete the assignment, displaying yours and interacting with others is similarly important. 

If an emergency or illness prevents your participation, to get full credit you will have to find two other WHOLE teams or partnerships to share your work and their work outside class, and write up the experience and what you learned from it to complete the participation portion of that grade. It will be your responsibility to locate these other students to help you out, from the goodness of their hearts and with the supportive understanding that we all need help sometimes. It is a lot easier not to miss the presentation day. SO DO NOT MAKE OTHER PLANS ON THIS DAY: BUILD IT CAREFULLY INTO YOUR SCHEDULE!

Digital photos: you can take them on the day and send them afterwards, or you can take them before the day and bring print outs of them with you to turn in to your TA. Any print outs should have the first and last names of all team or partnership members on them.

Logbook 3: be sure to bring your own individual logbook with you to turn in at the end of class to your TA, updated to include everything you are turning in for Ass. 3. Make sure it has your name on it!

Group’s Process Report: remember this is one of the places where you show how you all are analyzing what your project does with the tools of intersectionality. You are demonstrating in this report what you know about intersectionality, how it works in analysis, and how you used it in your project. Turn it in at the end of class to your TA. Make sure it has the first and last names of everyone in your partnership or team on it.

After class: copies of digital photos, process reports, and logbooks go into your dropbox folders. Label files <YRLASTNAME> 250 section # <WHATITIS> to make things easier for everyone! [for example: King 250 #02 Team Process Report]  

How to do well in Assignment 3? DO THE READING!

WHAT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING TO DO FOR ASSIGNMENT 3? THE READING! Demonstrating how course materials relate to intersectionality is number one, along with having explored this course website's links about intersectionality from the time just before and since Spring Break. Having done that makes working out the connections with art activisms clearer. Play with curations to share with us and enjoy what we have learned in fun ways. How you talk about process and why it matters is one way you demonstrate your reading and analysis, and so is your project itself. You are working in partnerships and teams, so share your understandings, pool your knowledge, collaborate with ideas, and even have some fun!

Tuesday, 10 April – Altar, Alter – Self, Other

• Look at artists in Perez, Ch 3. Pick the artwork that speaks to you most. Learn about it and tell us.

• Read Perez, Conclusion 

Self and Other, Otherings of various kinds are political and power transactions with implications for social justice. Perez is interested in how people survive oppression through art and spirit, creating culture and meaning, and “politicizing spirituality.” What are the implications for intersectionality? What feminisms are vibrant here?

Connected Learning Exercise: "The point is interaction, collaboration, and thinking about how we think, alone and in groups, and in how we learn---by rote, by hearing, or by processing, applying, explaining, defending, and mastering." (Davidson 2012)

1) Write down three things that you notice once you start paying attention to intersectionality. (How have you come to understand it?)

2) Turn to the person on your right, and together look over the six things you have listed together now. Share why you picked these, and decide together on what the single most important thing is. 
(Davidson points out that "all studies of learning show these are the minutes where the real learning happens, where you adapt what you have heard or read to your own lives, where you make it all memorable, where you understand it in new and individual and also collective ways, and you even learn from how each other learns and values what you have learned." --I've modified her words slightly.)

3) At least five groups volunteer to explain their choice of the one best answer. Some general discussion comparing those answers to what other partners came up with. Should we all come up with one best answer? With three best answers? How does that work? What do you notice about reflecting on this alone and figuring it out with others both? 
(Davidson notices "how we have to learn and respect collaboration and connection, and make the most of how we can learn from and teach one another.")

4) What does this whole process itself have to do with intersectionality as you understand it? How will doing this help you write about process for that part of Assignment 3?

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The College of Arts and Humanities presents Angela Davis in Conversation for the 2011-2012 Dean's Lecture Series. A Conversation with Angela Davis April 18th, 2012, 7:00 PM, Colony Ballroom, Adele H. Stamp Student Union. Followed by audience Q&A.
• Angela Davis' talk will be streamed LIVE at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, April 18th. You will need the free Silverlight plug-in to watch the stream here: http://www.arhu.umd.edu/events/deans-lecture-series-conversation-angela-davis 

"For over four decades, philosopher and writer Angela Davis has been one of most influential, controversial, and fearless activists and public intellectuals in the United States. She has been hailed as 'a courageous voice of conscience on matters of race, class, and gender in America.' Her work as an educator – both at the university level and in the larger public sphere – has always emphasized the importance of building communities of struggle for economic, racial, and gender justice. Professor Davis is a leading advocate for prison reform and abolition and the founder of 'Critical Resistance,' a grassroots organization working to abolish what she has popularized as 'the prison-industrial complex.' Currently Professor Emerita of the History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Professor Davis has taught and lectured internationally on feminism, African-American studies, Marxism, popular music, social consciousness and the philosophy and history of punishment and prisons." (from the ARHU website)

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Perez 2007: 305-6: "The art of Chicana women is among the most vibrant today, and the most threatened by lack of funding, minimal acquisition, and limited exhibition and publication. Few of the more than forty women whose work is presented here are able to fully support themselves through the // sales of their artwork or writing alone, or by supplementing these sales with grants and artist's residencies. In spite of the overwhelming number of M.F.A.'s among their ranks and tenured positions in art, Chicana/o studies, and ethnic studies departments, the sobering fact is that very few of the artists studies here are employed in steady or even temporary higher education settings because of corporate-modeled university downsizing and its unwitting collusion with the cultural conservatism and neglect of many art history and art practice departments."

Perez 2007: 91: "...the altar has been a site for the socially and culturally 'alter,' or other, to express, preserve, and transmit cultural and gender-based religious and political differences." 92: "That altar-installation and related art forms have inspired Chicana artists can be more precisely connected to the search for, and expression of, alternative spiritualities and alternative art practices, particularly those that are visionary with respect to social justice and transformation."

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[above at Smithsonian America Art site]: "Image of 'An Ofrenda for Dolores del Rio' by Amalia Mesa-Bains. 1984 Amalia Mesa-Bains Born: Santa Clara, California 1943 mixed media installation including plywood, mirrors, fabric, framed items and decorative elements 96 x 72 x 48 in. (243.8 x 182.9 x 121.9 cm) Smithsonian American Art Museum Museum purchase through the Smithsonian Institution Collections Acquisition Program © 1991, Amalia Mesa-Bains 1998.161 Not currently on view." Who is Dolores del Rio and why would Mesa-Bains want to create an altar for her?

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