Style and Sense: Acquiring Literacy

I’m just back from another talk that I found interestingly-related-to-our-conversations-here (okay, so what isn’t, @ this point, interestingly related to our conversations here?!?): by Patricia Williams, a law professor @ Columbia and critical race theorist, who was speaking @ St. Joe’s this morning about Gender and Politics.

Like Angela Davis, who spoke @ Bryn Mawr earlier this week, Williams was thinking out loud about how Obama’s presidency is changing the way we imagine the world. What struck me was how her ideas wove together something adelacruz said some time ago about the transcendent quality of fashion, and the more recent conversation taking place among js, Ryan, Rebecca and me about “showing respect.”

Williams started by explaining that “liberation” looks different in different contexts. For whites involved in the Freedom Movement, she said, the ’60’s were about “the freedom to be less formal”: not having to dress for success, or to address one another with titles. For blacks, however, whose families had always been dressed and addressed informally, first as slaves, then as servants, the movement was in part about the “liberation to be dressed up,” to assume more formal dress and address. Williams went on from there to analyze the “freighted performativity” of Michelle Obama

–and it’s probably a testimony to my own subject position that I was not entirely convinced by her claim that MO has been “liberated from others’ expectations”–even in generational, comparative terms, being less fretful than Hilary Clinton had to be, about her hair and what to wear…

But where this is really taking me is back to last Wednesday’s discussion, in which so many of us questioned the validity of surgical procedures that are “only cosmetic.” Williams’ argument (which she drew from a passage in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own) turned on the difficulty of making distinctions between “style and sense,” between “style and what it means,” between “surface and substance” (and I would say between the “technological and the human”–though those weren’t Williams’ terms). Style can signal something substantial, she said; appearance can tell us a lot. Williams talked about the need for “political literacy” (being able to read performances such as those of Michelle Obama); I think we’re talking here about literacies that are not only political, but also aesthetic, economic, psychological, technological…

Well, I’ll let this be for now, and see if it raises any associations for anyone else in this (now nicely expanded) room of ours–