Representing Foucault and Feminism Via A Bunch of Research Questions

I want to do some thinking in this weekend’s post towards an essay I am writing about the gendered discourses of power at work around, in and through preschool teachers, which shape and are shaped by early childhood teaching as feminine labor.  I am going to try to brainstorm my way through connections to Foucault (via Weedon, 1997 and Bartky, 1992 for now), language as representation (Hall, 1997), and movements in gender and language studies to understand gender as working through multiple discourses, which particularly act to erase multiplicity and highlight difference (Baker, 2008).   Some of my notes on these are pictured here.   

 From these I want to see how well I can get this to work with the research idea I have been playing with about teacher labor in preschool.

So where are the discourses of preschool labor located?  How do I recognize them?  One publicly available place I have been thinking about is in curriculum materials, including the ways that teachers, administrators, companies, district officials talk about, embody and act on and around the curriculum.  The OWL curriculum and surrounding sites of dialogue a packaged set of materials, resources, teachers manuals, and pacing guides used in many public preschools  in the large urban area I am working in, is one such set of texts.  

Thinking about discourses, language, power, representation, and gender, some questions I may ask to build my lens for reading the OWL are:

What is the common sense relayed by OWL curriculum and surrounding discourse?  And how particularly is this stuff represented?

What is erased? (with my interests, particularly in terms of labor)

What languages are used or associated with the curriculum (language of teacher’s manual, language of materials, language of authorized children’s books) (… hmmm… language doesn’t feel like quite the right word, but I think this is the way Stuart Hall uses it…?)

Whose meanings about preschool, teachers, labor are represented in OWL?  

How are/might these meanings be countered, negotiated and/or sustained through activities working through, around and within the curriculum discourse?

How does the curriculum attempt to control the bodies of teachers?

In what ways is the discourse gendered?

What is the relationship between the discourse and power?   What are the material implications for preschool teachers?

How are my roles and authority as writer, researcher, student, early childhood teacher, mother, feminist, college lecturer implicit in the particular storied answers to these questions?

References

Baker, P. (2008). Sexed texts: Language, gender and sexuality.  London: Equinox. 

Bartky, S. (1992). Foucault, femininity and the modernization of patriarchal power.  In J.P. Sterba,  J. A. Kourany, R. Tong (Eds.). Feminist philosophies: Problems, theories, and applications, (pp. 103 – 188). Edgewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.

Hall, S. (1997). Representation: Cultural representation and signifying practice. Sage.

Weedon, C. (1997). Feminist practice and postructural theory. Malden, Ma: Blackwell.

A Study in Dictionary

I used to own a dictionary.  As a child I had a big green and white one, with colored pictures on creamy white pages.  It was the kind of book that just felt good to flip through.  There was a huge purple speckled paged dictionary at my grandmother’s house.  We had pocket dictionaries and pre-smartphone, hand held techno-dictionaries.   In the library at my high school and in the public library too a dictionary that would be too big to fit on a shelf, sat like an idol on a pedestal waiting for the faithful.  

Now I don’t think there is a dictionary in this house.  Not a paper one.  We do still have books.  At every corner, spilling off every shelf, nightstand, corner of flat space, but not a dictionary.   We have Google instead, and Wikipedia, and the red squiggle line in Word.  

The dictionaries as symbols of languages in my life come with contexts and histories that shape some of who I am.  As much as any words themselves it’s the context surrounding them that create meanings.  In my read of another chapter of Baker’s Sexed Texts this week she wrote about how more contemporary researchers in gender and language studies have moved to see  these social constructs of gender through, especially the importance of context and ways that gender is taken on, particularly through language.

In a chapter of her book, Feminist Practice & Poststructuralist Theory, Chris Weedon, creates very particular constructions of poststructuralist feminism and other feminisms (radical, Marxists, etc).  She builds a history of understanding the way women have been positioning through either negation, essentialized or fixed particularly through the projects of rationalism and humanism.  For Weedon poststructural lenses offer a more complicated, multiplicitious, power conscious and context-based understanding of gender.   As I spent time yesterday in Atkins Library interacting with three feminist dictionaries, I was thinking of the work similar to reading Weedon that this genre study into feminist dictionaries does for me as a student of feminism.  As Weedon tours feminisms and names the theories at work for constructing gender and difference, the dictionaries, work as part of a metagenre, which shows the thinking behind language in particular conversations.  In looking at dictionaries of Maggio, Kramarae and Treichler and Daly, I construct for myself understandings of how language works for these three feminists, as representative of larger movements in the field.

MJ Hardman writes about the material power of language in her work with speakers of the Jaqi language.  She explores the ways the non-sexist language constructs the everyday lives and power structures for and of women, and the contradictory structures created when outside languages (of conquerors) moves into the context.  She explores the particular contexts of words, including the people and location and history surrounding the social work they are associated with.  In looking next at selections from feminist dictionaries, I am wondering about the ways context is constructed or hidden by dictionaries. 

The Nonsexist Word Finder: A Dictionary of Gender-Free Usage (Maggio, 1989)

Maggio’s describes her goal to change words that are no longer useful, while for Maggio this may or may not change social issues, the language itself can become more socially useful.

A Feminist Dictionary (Kramarae & Treichler, 1996)

The excerpts below exemplify the goals of Kramarae and Treichler to counter traditional dictionaries by making visible women’s words, critique of languages of privilege, make visible multiple ways of knowing, to counter traditional processes of authorization and to inspire research and further thinking.

 Webster’s First new Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Langauge (Daly, 1987)

Below are examples of Daly’s work in this dictionary to connect words to women, through unbinding their definitions and disrupting the contexts and histories attached to them, making them undone.

Commonly these dictionaries  displace for the most part language from everyday life, partly fixing it in the traditional format of dictionary.  Each counters the dominant dictionary form, though: Maggio by demanding word replacement and change.  Kramarae and Treichler by exploding each “definition” with multiple forms and authors.  And Daly by critiquing and revisioning dominant forms for new and subversive purposes.  

In a  critique of Mary Daly’s work by Jane Hedley notes the parallels and differences in theory and political work between Daly and Andrienne Rich.  Hedley sees Daly’s binary-flipping work in revisioning language as useful only to a point, while Rich’s revisioning of language use as connected to everyday life as having more impact on the situations of women.  I think Hedley’s critique works to some extent for all three feminist dictionaries, possibly as they are contained by the form of dictionary in itself, even as they undo the form.  I wonder to what extend Elgin’s working of theory through novel puts power back into the everyday experiences (even if they are not completely common to my world everydays) of women.  Does this drawing on the day to day do similar political work to Adrienne Rich, or being fantastical are there still limits?  In some way the fantasy element may do greater work than ethnography or dictionary building or research article, since Elgin lays precise claim to the fact that her story, her theories the lives of these women are completely fiction.  The rest, I think Weedon would say (and sometimes me), is fiction too- it just pretends to be non.

Not Quite a literacy narrative

 In the First Year Writing course I am teaching this semester we have been reading mentor texts to support our own work in writing literacynarratives.  Four that we have been reading are Amy Tan’s Mother Tongue, AnneImbrie’s Words Become Us, Carpet is Mungers by Megan Daum and Living Like Weasels by AnnieDillard.  The first two pieces by Tan andImbrie are as one might expect about

Language

Words

Reading

And writing

Things we think of as literacy

These two pieces are creative, personal, academic,narrative, theoretical and for many of us “good reads.”  With their help we can start to see okay,yes, a literacy narrative might be about how literacy is part of my life… whatit has to do with me. 

Then at the suggestion of my wise friend Cindy Urbanski wealso read two more pieces from Daum and Dillard.  Neither piece seems to be directly related toreading and writing or language particularly. So then we start to think…. Well a literacy narrative is just anarrative.  Can be about anything?  Huh?

A look on Google defies this answer many a writing teacherhas assigned a literacy narrative and guideline after guideline mentions thatthe piece should be a narrative about one’s experiences with reading andwriting.   Where do carpet and weaselscome in?

I entered class on Tuesday with all of these thoughts on mymind.  Not totally sure why these two pieces are literacy narratives.  I was both curious and scared to figure this out with my students.   As we talk in small groups I came up with a question, what is our broadest definition of literacy? What does it mean to read and write? Some ideas begin to surface. Literacy is about

Making meaning

Sharing ideas

Symbolic thought

Creating stories we live by

Oh!  So it starts tocome together, the reason why the weasels fit in here.  Just as the words I type here are representations or symbols of my thinking, the weasels are symbols of a theoryabout experience.   So is thecarpet.  So are the words.

And you know how when you learned the word “meme” or “pedagogue”or “kvetch” you then hear it everywhere? Well, this week alongside thinking about literacy narratives with 1101students, I have also been reading for the gender and language studies course Iam taking.  In one of these, Lakoff andJohnson goes right to the idea of metaphorical thinking, they map the ways ourlives are narrated by cultural-specific metaphors.  The metaphors not only describe our lives butcreate them as we live out the metaphors of our culture. 

M.J. Hardman and Lisa Perry describe views of women asshaped by language.  I particularly latchonto her making visible the derivational naming of women in English.  In English women in word and idea are derivedfrom men and are marked that way by language like

Female

Once the French femme

Stewardess

Waitress

-ess

The Bachelorette

Kitchenette

Not hardly leather

-ette

And

When Harry Met Sally (See the subject position of Harry?)

Does it matter?  Well,if a metaphor describes what something is like, narrates an idea togenerate connections in our thoughts, what if something or someone is know onlythrough being not quite enough like something else, a diminutiveversion, not even lucky enough for a metaphor of her own.  Just derivation.  

The words matter. They hold the intention of social thought behind them.  They do things and create things in theworld.     

Donna Wilshire writes about metaphorical thinking as a primarysource of feminist activity in that metaphors offer a different kind ofworldview that can and has challenged the literal and linear mindness ofpatriarchy.  Metaphors get messy, theydon’t tell us exactly how things are, they make visible the stickiness ofunderstanding .

Today as I am writing up the literacy narrative work as an assignmentI am wondering how I can make this writing and work recognizable enough in the academiccontext, where linear and literal rule, while also creating space for play withour own conceptions of literacy, academy, and our understandings of what getsto count here and why.

Yall, See Here Now! Thinking Further About Essentialism and Native Tongue

 “It’s an essentialist argument about what language is… about how it works.  It’s like she has this belief about how certain kinds of language are right or proper…. And so they like…. Hold some kind of power… I mean I know words do hold power… but like she is not questioning that power in terms of …. It’s about social class!  Okay, this guy who says ‘See here’ rather than ‘Perceive this’ on page … lets see …. ”  

Imagine the above with rambling hand motions to accompany the rambling tone.  Imagine these spoken and emoted into a room where no heads nod in affirmation.  That would be a picture of me last week speaking into the Language and Gender class I am taking this semester.  Everyone had their copy of Suzette Hayden Elgin’s Native Tongue open in front of them, but the discussion wasn’t all that open to my go at critique.  For the rest of class I scribbled sideways notes into my daybook to try and peel back the stammer and see the idea under there.  So here I am again with another try at articulation-away from the in-class-ego-talk, so that I can make visible this question I have in terms of the arguments about language, power and gender being made in the science fiction novel, Native Tongue.  

 In Native Tongue Elgin assumes that language holds power to change material circumstances.   She assumes that this power is contained in knowledge of language use, and particularly knowledge of the best, clearest, most articulate language.  She thus assumes that there exists a best, clearest and most articulate form of language.   In the novel Elgin ties this authority with language to a particular group of people, the Linguists, who are for the most part a ruling class in a hierarchically organized culture.  The non-linguist characters could be analogous to working class peoples (though there are even more hierarchies within and within and within).  In the novel’s world, these characters do not have the facility with language that the Linguists, both female and male, do.  

When I put this up next to the ways that language works in my life, it feels like maintenance of current systems of power.   In another reading I did for class this week, a chapter from Sexed Texts, Paul Baker gives his tour of early research in language and gender studies.  His basic claim is that while all of this early work is historically interesting and useful in making critical turns toward the current discipline, it still does the theoretical and political work of maintaining understandings of gender through essentialism.   According to Baker, this period of research saw traits of women or gay people or men as bounded together in firm categories of difference.  The characteristics of categories could be known through essential and “true” qualities.  

Elgin similarly frames language itself in essential ways.   Language in Native Tongue has a true and pure nature, which can be mastered and put to creative use.  I am with her (to a point) on thinking that language holds power in the world.  My question is more about the essential qualities of this power.  I believe that power through language is socially constructed and that no pure and best or true or clearest language exists naturally.  It’s all contextual.  

Elgin’s argument is that the Linguist’ language is superior to others, not just culturally constructed superiority, but materially is better: better at doing things in the world, better at changing reality.  Well.  I do see (perceive!) how some language use is socially constructed as better, clearer, more articulate.   There is as a material reality to the ways that, for instance, Standard White English functions as a language of power, but this doesn’t mean that the Standard White English is naturally a better dialect or that language users, teachers and theorists should go along with this socio-historical creation uncritically.

Native Tongue sees the creative opportunity of language and is itself a critique of power relations, but it is not a critical examination of how power works through language (and other tools) and to whose benefit.   Elgin does an imaginatively intellectual job of naming and disrupting gender hierarchies at work in our own culture by hyperbolizing them in the world of Native Tongue.  She does this useful and interesting work, though, by sustaining notions of social class boundaries, which maintains the normalizing of all gender traits as white and middle class, marginalizing all others.

In the end of the novel, through the powerful work of their language use, the upper class, Linguist women begin changing reality to the material advantage of upper class, Linguist women.  Meanwhile, Michaela, the only heavily narrated non-Linguist, working class woman, is left to be an awesome listener and to do the dirtiest labors of murder.

Freewriting My Way to Critical Teaching

So last week I brought Theme for English B by Langston Hughes to our Writing 1101 course as the starting point for Writing Into the Day. We generally begin class this way with a point of inspiration and time to just write anything that comes to mind.    

The day I brought the Langston Hughes poem was the second day of class.  As I sat writing with students also writing around me, I had one of those moments when I was struck by an immediate idea about what I wanted to say about this poem.  (I don’t always just have a spark of an idea right away when I write... sometimes I can’t think of anything to say.)  But in this moment I was immediately reminded of a recent conversation with a friend and my ideas just flowed out onto the page in a messy and sprawling kind of way.  I put pen to paper and just freewrote my thought-flow onto the page,   

 I learned this strategy of freewriting from Peter Elbow... and it is one of the most useful tools to me as a writer.  Just get your thoughts down on the page.   Keep your pen moving.  Even if you are writing “I don’t know what to write...”  It frees my thoughts up (even at 8:00 am) to go in directions I didn’t even realize I wanted to go.  

When I did this writing in response to Langston Hughes, I knew that issues of race, class, gender and sexuality... issues of identity... are concepts that I want to be visible part of our conversations in class.  And I did choose Langston Hughes’s piece about school writing for that reason, but I guess as I sat down to actually write alongside students and Langston (via the coffee stained poem glued in my daybook) I started thinking newly about my own position as white, middle class teacher and feelings of insecurities in broaching issues of race, even as I know intellectually that I want to and need to.  Writing into the day with the Langston Hughes poem let me start to articulate ideas that had been simmering that I didn’t even realize I needed to think through.

Open Access to the Academic-Personal

In reading around rather than actually within Paul Baker’s book, Sexed Texts, I have possibly figured out more about the book than I would have having had it in front of me.  Here’s what I know.  

1.       Paul Baker and his readers are either "not into" or "not up in the know-how on" open-access sharing.  A pdf of the first chapter of this book (required reading for the fall course course I am taking, Language, Gender and Power) is not to be found on the internet.  And the book, of course, is out of stock everywhere from Amazon to our local Grey’s University Bookstore.  So, what does one do?  Read around the internet to see what I can find out about this book. 

2.       Elaine Fraser (2009, Sociolinguist Studies) reviewed the book, naming the work of bringing current context to a history of research in language and gender.  Fraser names part of Baker’s larger work as critique of the project of Queer Theory.  She also problematizes the range of contexts Baker uses, particularly naming his foregrounding of male over female gay communities.

3.       Lancaster University identifies this as an undergraduate textbook.  Dang. (If one day someone names something I write a textbook, I will be totally irate.)  More handily, Lancaster University also provides the only snippet of this text to be seen on the web.    This pleasantly turns out to be a narrative of the author’s problematic encounter with gender-labeled muffins.  This excerpt really gave me enough to go on until my nice, used copy arrives next week.  Baker, like many of us, wants to disrupt category boundaries.

As I will be doing with most of my “school” readings, I am putting alongside Baker, my summer reading of Native Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin.  This book is actually also a required course reading.  For some reason it is the first one I picked up to get started on while on a family RV trip to Indiana in July.  Somewhere in the North Carolina mountains I opened the book and read the preface.  And read it again, stopping to tell my mom that this book seems weird.  Finally, I flip the book over and to the back cover and realize this is a novel!  And science fiction!  Woot!!  Well, then it actually felt like summer reading!!  Through several states and a campground stay in Kentucky, I read the first couple of chapters, intermittently also attending to children, work emails and somehow risking the danger of fixing myself cups after cup of tea en route.  The book opened with narrative and dialogue of men in a meeting and a rather pitiful if hardened introduction of the novel’s protagonist, Nazareth.  Putting these alongside my knowledge that this was a “feminist” book, I started getting worried what kind of feminist Suzette Haden Elgin might turn out to be.  I probably flipped to check the copyright date, 1984… hmmmm…. Somewhat before movements I knew of to complicate ideas of gender difference.  I kept reading, still rather hungry for whatever kind of fantasy that this novel might let me have the rare dip into.  

Fascinated as I was with Elgin’s fiction I have similar feelings when reading her writing about her work with language, particularly in her Introduction to The First Dictionary and Grammar of Laadan.  I feel compelled to read much more about her, from her.  I want to ask her about the ways that difference is constructed in Native Tongue and in the language primer for Laadan.  I want to ask what she thinks about critiques of essentialism in this kind of work.  I would tell her that I am so drawn to the way she makes visible the material issues of women and that still I find problematic the firm categories between gender that, for instance, a “women’s language” might sustain.  I am wondering, in what ways could a women’s language disrupt the appearance and social activity around firm categories of gender.  And by using categorical and possessive words to name a language as “women’s” doesn’t that continue the binary way of patriarchy?  Sigh.  

To bring all of this together for now, I want to think about how identity categories construct my literacy practices in these readings.  I am maddened and offended at required readings that are categorized as “textbook” reading.  It puts both the book and me as a reader into a box that presses in on me, defining me as someone in-need of learning, not someone who brings ideas to a text.  It makes my reading, my ideas, my identity as a student less part of “real” work.  And yet, I am reading and writing about Baker and Elgin here because of my identity as a student, while I somehow don’t make time to post to my blog about readings that have to do with my life at home and in community outside of “work”.   And so, I also name here on my blog my academic and professional lives as the “real” part, the part worth sharing and talking to others about.  And I don’t tell you that as I type a four year old with an earache is pressed against my arm or that in another window on my computer screen is an email to a the women who run our preschool co-op. It seems that at just about at every turn as student, as mother, as teacher (more on that elsewhere) my work is shaped as other.

Categories of identity, as I write them, write into them, rewrite them, shape me.  Somehow I would like to lean on both Elgin’s disruptions of dominant power stories and Baker’s critique of the naturalization of gendering language to figure out how to tell my academic story in a way that values and complicates my too personal and too private work of mothering and teaching.  So that's where I'm headed in more discussions of  readings coming this fall :)