During the early weeks of my internship in London, we were wondering around somewhere close to the British Museum when it started to rain. Not unusual. It is London after all. Huddled under an umbrella on the sidewalk, I noticed a woman across the street in a very sharp navy coat with white polka dots.
I'm not sure what it is about this particular print. I like it a lot. Some might point out that it's a classic that keeps getting reinvented with each new fashion trend. That is true.
My mother owned a navy dress with white polka dots. It's one of my earliest memories of her. I must have been quite young since she still towered over me like a giant. She was putting on her earrings, wearing the dress. I was flitting about. Into the closet crowded with clothes (where did adults keep all their toys?) behind the sliding mirror door. Back out to look up at her. She must have been getting ready to go some where. I was going to be left behind. I needed to get her attention. I hid in the closet again.
This took place a year or perhaps two before I entered kindergarten. School means being away from my mother for many hours every day. It means being surrounded by strangers. Strange adults. Other children. Not my brother. But school has not yet begun for me. I am still too young for school.
This is my first memory of my mother as a person, as a separate, distinct being and not the undifferentiated maternal force surrounding my tender young life entirely.
Freud would mutely note the separation anxiety. He would also have much to say, I suspect, about my fondness for this pattern. I saw a young woman wearing it a few days ago as I commuted home by tube. It was slightly less than knee length; short sleeves. It had a modest collar, squared in lacy white. And I've noticed a similar dress hanging in the window of a charity store near where I work. I have passed it many times, admired the print, the low neckline and buttoned front. It makes me happy.
I could fall in love with a girl who wore a dress like that.
Showing posts with label Freud. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Freud. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
tourniquet
unfortunately it's that busy time of year around here for 1Ls. brief is due in a few days. applications for fall clinics and field placements must be submitted by tomorrow. and just 3842 more minutes until spring break for this guy.
but i didn't want to leave you without a daily dose of my own special brand of geek.
here's a link to an article about the fear of the feminine in video games. there's a lot of freud in there, especially vagina dentata, castration anxiety, and repression / expulsion. i've got a troubled relationship with freud but that's gonna have to wait for another entry.
here's an interesting video about the origins of wonder woman.
i've discussed the complex story of wonder woman and her creator william moulton marston before in the context of jodi picoult and gail simone scribing for the amazon. it's particularly interesting stuff, especially dr. marston's unconventional lifestyle and beliefs about gender inequality (spoiler: they aren't equal; i for one welcome our new female overlords); maybe i'll revisit it in the future in the context of gender and representation. oh goody, the topic of comic books and feminine bodies. better haul out the gallagher poncho now...
but i didn't want to leave you without a daily dose of my own special brand of geek.
here's a link to an article about the fear of the feminine in video games. there's a lot of freud in there, especially vagina dentata, castration anxiety, and repression / expulsion. i've got a troubled relationship with freud but that's gonna have to wait for another entry.
here's an interesting video about the origins of wonder woman.
i've discussed the complex story of wonder woman and her creator william moulton marston before in the context of jodi picoult and gail simone scribing for the amazon. it's particularly interesting stuff, especially dr. marston's unconventional lifestyle and beliefs about gender inequality (spoiler: they aren't equal; i for one welcome our new female overlords); maybe i'll revisit it in the future in the context of gender and representation. oh goody, the topic of comic books and feminine bodies. better haul out the gallagher poncho now...
Thursday, January 14, 2010
The Whorient
Here we go. This is the inauguration of an ongoing series of blog posts discussing the ideas, arguments, conundrums, etc. of my proposed but ultimately uncompleted Plan II thesis.
::applause::
Thank you. First, a procedural detail. All of the blog entries dealing with this topic will be conveniently labeled with the tag "(porn)" so you can easily search for them in the sidebar. If you read them from oldest to newest, a line of argumentation might even manifest. No promises of coherency.
Without further ado about nothing...
---
Let's start at the beginning and address the topic itself. Now stick with me because I know it may seem a little absurd at first. My proposed (and mind you, approved) thesis would explore the representations of Asian women in porn literature. Not all Asian women, actually, because that scope would have been too broad. I planned to focus on East and Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands (e.g. the Philippines) because, well, that's who American men like to talk about fucking even if they can't keep all the details straight about what signifier belongs to which collected signified.
The academic legwork consisted of two parts. First, an analysis of the literature about porn, both the anti-porn and the sex-positive / pro-porn camps. Second, an attempt to "color in" the blindness of the critique of porn through an interpolation of the works of black feminist such as Elizabeth Spelman and post-colonial authors including Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan. The final third of the thesis would apply these elements in a bricolage "methodolgy" for examining actual porn texts involving Asian women.
My argument boiled down to this: the anti-porn critcisms were incomplete and inadequate when applied to women of color. They treated race / ethnicity / cultural difference like, as Spelman described it, merely an "ampersand" to the primary category of woman. This "woman plus" analysis failed to adequately capture the unique forms of oppression spawned at the intersections of race and gender. What's intended to get you off about an Asian woman in porn isn't that she's a woman primarily who also "happens to be" Asian; her Asian-ness and female-ness are intertwined in a unique identity whose representation differs not marginally but fundamentally from the representations of other (white) women. The attending signifiers of "Asian" aren't merely accessories to "spice up" the ordinariness / blandness / repetitiveness / scripted structure of the typical porn narrative. They are intended to evoke specific sets of ideologies about the woman or women who are its sexual objects.
One of the first questions posed to me after people stop looking at me like I'm a perv is why I chose to read dirty stories instead of look at dirty pictures or watch dirty movies. Like all good answers, mine is three-fold:
1) I didn't go through a film crit or art /photo crit program as an undergraduate. Interpreting pics or movies seemed to require a critical language which I didn't possess and couldn't rapidly acquire in a short period of time. On the other hand, as a philosophy major interested in social theory, adopting that already-at-hand framework of critical text analysis seemed a lot easier. Also, text seem to "state" what they mean in a much more straight-forward way than unpacking the visual vocabulary of pics or movies.
2) My goal was to examine the representations of Asian women in porn. The problem with pics and movies is that, well, they involve actual Asian women at the level of their production. Although the reality of women's lives involved in porn is an important issue, I didn't want my thesis sidetracked by whether most or every woman involved in porn is abused and unhappy (as some in the anti-porn allege) or if most porn workers are happy, well-adjusted individuals from backgrounds not involving sexual abuse who are capable of forming healthy relationships (as sex-positive women such as Nina Hartley claim).
By working with written narratives, I managed to side-step the controversy of women's bodies at the level of production and focus instead on the representation of those bodies in the act.
3) It's a lot easier and cheaper to cut excerpts from a written story and insert them into your written thesis as evidence than it is to provide pictures or stills from a movie. Text also looks less like you're a naughty boy trying to pass off looking at naked women as rigorous academic work.
As time passed and I read more, I found I had more problems with the anti-porn feminist critique of porn than just its color-blindness. Several re-reads of Michel Foucault's seminal work The History of Sexuality, Vol 1: An Introduction, Rachel Maines' history of the pathologizing of female sexual pleasure and its medical treatment, and an extended meditation on the subject of my authorial position vis-a-vis the topic of female represenation yielded a position that was critical of porn's representations of racial-gendered bodies and the Freudian / Lacanian theory of masculine displacement embodied in anti-porn literature.
To be continued...
---
In the next installment I will try to start presenting the anti-porn position and my critique of the Freudian / Lacanian theory relied upon by its proponents such as Andrea Dworkin, Susan Griffin, et al.
::applause::
Thank you. First, a procedural detail. All of the blog entries dealing with this topic will be conveniently labeled with the tag "(porn)" so you can easily search for them in the sidebar. If you read them from oldest to newest, a line of argumentation might even manifest. No promises of coherency.
Without further ado about nothing...
---
Let's start at the beginning and address the topic itself. Now stick with me because I know it may seem a little absurd at first. My proposed (and mind you, approved) thesis would explore the representations of Asian women in porn literature. Not all Asian women, actually, because that scope would have been too broad. I planned to focus on East and Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands (e.g. the Philippines) because, well, that's who American men like to talk about fucking even if they can't keep all the details straight about what signifier belongs to which collected signified.
The academic legwork consisted of two parts. First, an analysis of the literature about porn, both the anti-porn and the sex-positive / pro-porn camps. Second, an attempt to "color in" the blindness of the critique of porn through an interpolation of the works of black feminist such as Elizabeth Spelman and post-colonial authors including Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan. The final third of the thesis would apply these elements in a bricolage "methodolgy" for examining actual porn texts involving Asian women.
My argument boiled down to this: the anti-porn critcisms were incomplete and inadequate when applied to women of color. They treated race / ethnicity / cultural difference like, as Spelman described it, merely an "ampersand" to the primary category of woman. This "woman plus" analysis failed to adequately capture the unique forms of oppression spawned at the intersections of race and gender. What's intended to get you off about an Asian woman in porn isn't that she's a woman primarily who also "happens to be" Asian; her Asian-ness and female-ness are intertwined in a unique identity whose representation differs not marginally but fundamentally from the representations of other (white) women. The attending signifiers of "Asian" aren't merely accessories to "spice up" the ordinariness / blandness / repetitiveness / scripted structure of the typical porn narrative. They are intended to evoke specific sets of ideologies about the woman or women who are its sexual objects.
One of the first questions posed to me after people stop looking at me like I'm a perv is why I chose to read dirty stories instead of look at dirty pictures or watch dirty movies. Like all good answers, mine is three-fold:
1) I didn't go through a film crit or art /photo crit program as an undergraduate. Interpreting pics or movies seemed to require a critical language which I didn't possess and couldn't rapidly acquire in a short period of time. On the other hand, as a philosophy major interested in social theory, adopting that already-at-hand framework of critical text analysis seemed a lot easier. Also, text seem to "state" what they mean in a much more straight-forward way than unpacking the visual vocabulary of pics or movies.
2) My goal was to examine the representations of Asian women in porn. The problem with pics and movies is that, well, they involve actual Asian women at the level of their production. Although the reality of women's lives involved in porn is an important issue, I didn't want my thesis sidetracked by whether most or every woman involved in porn is abused and unhappy (as some in the anti-porn allege) or if most porn workers are happy, well-adjusted individuals from backgrounds not involving sexual abuse who are capable of forming healthy relationships (as sex-positive women such as Nina Hartley claim).
By working with written narratives, I managed to side-step the controversy of women's bodies at the level of production and focus instead on the representation of those bodies in the act.
3) It's a lot easier and cheaper to cut excerpts from a written story and insert them into your written thesis as evidence than it is to provide pictures or stills from a movie. Text also looks less like you're a naughty boy trying to pass off looking at naked women as rigorous academic work.
As time passed and I read more, I found I had more problems with the anti-porn feminist critique of porn than just its color-blindness. Several re-reads of Michel Foucault's seminal work The History of Sexuality, Vol 1: An Introduction, Rachel Maines' history of the pathologizing of female sexual pleasure and its medical treatment, and an extended meditation on the subject of my authorial position vis-a-vis the topic of female represenation yielded a position that was critical of porn's representations of racial-gendered bodies and the Freudian / Lacanian theory of masculine displacement embodied in anti-porn literature.
To be continued...
---
In the next installment I will try to start presenting the anti-porn position and my critique of the Freudian / Lacanian theory relied upon by its proponents such as Andrea Dworkin, Susan Griffin, et al.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Status Report
Ugh, the twitter update feed for the sidebar is broke. Since the messages streaming through haven't been approved by my mullet or Chuck Norris, I've disabled the timeline until such time as the issue has been resolved. So if you want to follow my tweets, I'm @katosmullet.
Writing my personal statement for law school is hard. Really hard. Harder than pretending I care about Leibniz's ontological proof of God even. I don't find it easy to talk about myself and, what's worse, I don't have any great stories to tell about designing some nanotube thingy that circumvents a rival's patents or working on a major case resulting in big penalties for a global finance group's financial malfeasance. I'm smart, didn't graduate on time, and hate my job. Why wouldn't every law school want me ;)
Writing my personal statement for law school is hard. Really hard. Harder than pretending I care about Leibniz's ontological proof of God even. I don't find it easy to talk about myself and, what's worse, I don't have any great stories to tell about designing some nanotube thingy that circumvents a rival's patents or working on a major case resulting in big penalties for a global finance group's financial malfeasance. I'm smart, didn't graduate on time, and hate my job. Why wouldn't every law school want me ;)
You may have noticed I like to complain about stuff in this blog. Stupid bigots, what were you thinking moments in racism, famous rapists, crappy songs... Well, I plan to continue exploring such "vital" topics. Maybe some stuff about movies, too. And music I like. And other stuff. But I'd like to take a minute to introduce a new, ongoing future feature to That Texas Drawl.
I never finished my Plan II Honors Thesis. It's not because I didn't have anything to say on my topic; far from it. I had way too much to say and had too many troubles trying to pare it down to a coherent argument. Well, 8 years after the fact, I put this one little blight on my otherwise flawless academic record behind me, took my last philosophy class (and wrote the aforementioned paper about Leibniz), and finally obtained my B.A. (yay me). But I don't want to let all that thesis research go to waste, especially given the importance of my subject. So I would like to inaugurate a discussion of porn on my humble blog.
No, I'm not going to show you porn. Rather, I plan on critiquing it. And anyway, I focused on textual porn, not the visual kind so no dirty pics anyway. But over the next weeks, months, and possibly years I'd like to submit to the wide world of the interwebs the issues, arguments, and such that interested, confounded, upset, and amused me. I'll try to spell out in greater detail the goal of my project as well as introducing my reasons for rejecting the standard Freudian / Lacanian line of criticism advanced by anti-porn feminists. Party party stuff, I know.
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