Changing the Norm
Speaking of “changing the norm,” I’m wondering who else in class (besides me and Melanie!) heard Angela Davis’s hugely-attended talk, in Thomas Great Hall last night, on “Democracy, Social Change, and Civil Engagement”? And whether (despite the absence of technology–though she does “like the internet”) you thought of any connections to our class discussions. I saw many; here are some of the passages which seemed particularly evocative of and extending to what we’ve been talking about:
* Things are defined by their negatives
(i.e. “Freedom was first imagined by slaves, those whose lives were its negation.
We know we are free, because we are not in prison.”)
* The Civil Rights movement represents only one aspect of the Freedom Movement
(there are limits to realizing our rights).
* “Histories never leave us. They inhabit us, and we inhabit them.”
[BUT]
*”We have the capacity to imagine a very different kind of world.”
* “All power to the imagination” (Marcuse).
* “Our amazement @ the election of Obama is not about his racial identity. We couldn’t imagine that a man @ head of the challenge to the state should become head of state.”
*How (amid neo-liberal individualism) to create the “we” for revolutionary change?
* What daily life practices might contribute to changing the world?
Re-imagine your relations with one another.
Focus not on revenge, but reparation.
Doing so will contribute (eventually) to a restorative system of justice.
* “We rarely win the victories we think we are fighting for.”
*”Get your education, and be critical of it.”
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Anne,
I was going to ask you about what connections you might have seen when I ran into you after the talk, but in my quite embarrassingly overwhelmed state I completely forgot! I had the opportunity to speak to her later in the evening, and I asked her how she thought we could bring the smaller issues that seem to be neglected in the public eye to the forefront: LGBTQ youth who aren’t safe attending their schools, soldiers returning with untreated PTSD, etc. She told me that every one of us should bring the issues up whenever and wherever we could, to use the new arenas of technology to spread word through things like Facebook and YouTube (and like this blog!). She said that we can never be afraid to make people question their ideas, or to question our own ideas.
I think that our class is exactly the kind of thing to which she was referring. Here we are, challenging commonly accepted ideas as a whole and in our own minds, and bringing our thoughts out into the public sphere for others to consider.
Later, she also spoke of needing something greater than a 2-party political system in this country, because the binary nature of it is stifling our possibilities for change. It instantly made me think of our discussions on gender binaries and how limiting that notion can be.
I was at the talk, and I think Anne pulled out everything that stood out to me, too. “We know we are free because we are not in prison”–I had never thought of it that way before, but we do construct “freedom” as something that the government can take away from you. So it made me wonder what would “freedom” actually mean in the world Davis is pushing toward (not with prison reform but with prison aboliton, as she said).
In Sandy Stone’s article, she says that patients who want sex changes still need to say that feel like they’re in the “wrong body” in order to be considered genuine transsexuals, and she doesn’t think that’s an adequate way to make a category. Instead of having to choose one “normal” body over the opposite “normal” (if “wrong”) one, people should be able to choose a gender regardless of their sex. And the gender shouldn’t have to be easily categorized in opposition to m/f. (At least that’s what I got out of the end of her article!)
Davis’ opinion that we need more than 2 political parties is in the same vein. Why does everything have to be red or blue, male or female, free or imprisoned?? Well, if there’s one thing I took away from Emerging Genres last semester, it’s that NOTHING can be purely one or the other; there are always grey areas, and if we could always keep that in mind the world be a much more accepting place.
Oh, thanks, Hannah, for that addition to my list of relevancies: Angela Davis’s critique of the binary that is the two-party system–restrictive, like the gender binary. She also mentioned prison as a gendering system, btw: one that only allows for a binary.