Tuesday, May 11, 2010

FINAL study group notes.

Thinking Out Loud
Tuesday May 11th, 2010

Butler
- If we begin to think about the material of the body as being informed or constructed by regulatory norms then what is ‘at stake’:
o Power can affect the matter of bodies (i.e. dance teacher pressing on your back when you’re bent over affects your flexibility)
o Performance acts out those things that norms already
o Sex is not the object on which performance is placed, but is in fact at the mercy of norms itself
o Process is not something that happens to me, it is something that I am part of (I assume it, I don’t undergo it) and I am not me until that process has happened
o Assuming a sex is a process influenced by discourse, and discourse of the heterosexual imperative favours certain possibilities (straight male and female) and which excludes a bunch of other possibilities

Other things that came out:
- Next year: similar syllabus but find better articles and a better approach
- May also be a secondary study group that covers one text over the course of the year
- “I gotta use words when I talk to you” – there is a problem in speaking in that you are going to end up saying something (when we speak out against or mock stereotypes, we in some way give them credence simply by speaking them)
- How subtle a regulatory norm can have an affect on a baby? If boy and girl babies were left alone in a room to develop, does the material of their anatomy affect the way they learn to move (would they develop the same way or differently)?
- We can’t know … there’s no possible human without the social – there is no blank slate, there is only social construct
- Evolutionary biologists and constructionists (like her) don’t seem to see eye-to-eye
- If we can learn new languages when we are adults (construct a new language as opposed to the one we learn first as mother tongue), what about learning a new gender?
- Perhaps the complexity of the idea of assuming a new gender late in life (in late adulthood, for example) speaks to the extent to which these gender
- Football player who changes gender can’t walk in high heels and muscles must change in order to allow him to do it (material of the body can and does actually change)
- Idea that we need to exclude and create other/abnormal/abject so that it can circumscribe what is normal; and idea that otherness is always within me because I need it to help me define how I am different from you
Thinking about next year’s study group…
- Might be nice to do more reading aloud next year? Helps you to hear it. Nice equalizer. Even if we all have different subjective experiences, at least we have this paper in common!
- Is there a benefit to having some kind of a guiding question that we examine in conjuction with the articles (for example, along with just working to uncover Butler’s ideas, we also having a leading question like “what is my opinion about the way that dance reinforces the gendering of bodies”
- Better: One article per topic. Spreading articles out over two sessions. Primary articles.
- Weren’t successful at introducing a practitioner or an art piece or an art process
- Context for the articles ahead of time would be helpful to situate reading
- Favourites? What is the contemporary? (Agamben) and Emancipated Spectator (Ranciere) were Jacob and Leora’s favourites.
- High hopes for the Dave Hickey article but we strayed too far into just talking about our thoughts about the topic that the author is writing on. Close readings are nice because they always literally bring us back to the actual text. Only so far off we can go before we can be gently nudged back to the page.