ANTHOLOGY WORKSHOP: May 5th
We will meet in Room 6496.
Before class:
You will send a draft of your abstract (250 words or less) of your paper by May 3rd [5 PM] to me at: jasontougaw@gmail.com
You will include your email address with your abstract, which will be released to all students in both classes—unless you choose to “opt out.” If you do not want to share a personal email address, you might consider creating a dedicated gmail account just for your work in this course.
Carrie Hintz and I will use the abstracts to come up with categories/group pages for the anthology—and divide everyone in both classes into groups whose papers speak to each other. There may be 5-6 groups in total.
Carrie and I will come up with some possible titles for the anthology—but of course we will also take suggestions from members of the class.
In class:
If her edit is ready, Julia will screen her video: “A Fat Girl Made Ten Video Clips. You Won’t Believe What Happens Next.” Inspired by Viegener, Julia is making a “video list” that is a sort of autobiographical provocation focused on gender and embodiment. She’s taking questions from theory and making them personal. We will begin the class with a screening of this video.
Carrie and I will talk the class through the process of putting together your section for the anthology. You will gather in the groups we’ve assigned.
You will compare abstracts with the students in your group, make suggestions for improvement, and talk about what you want to say in the introduction to your page–and come up with a way of distributing the work among the group.
Carrie and I will consult as you work.
We will then reconvene and Carrie and I will take questions.
A couple of sample abstracts:
Gender has been theorized to be one of the primary frames from which understandings of self and other arise. In this paper, Yana Walton explores the ways that the popular modern western discourse of the “true self” has fostered the conditions under which formations of non-binary gender identities have proliferated. More salient than any medical or psychological research done to pinpoint the causes of Gender Identity Disorder (GID) or gender dysphoria, linguistic narratives rooted in the concept of the “true self” have expanded access to mental, physical, and social transition for transgender and non-binary identified individuals, and modified the standards of care and practices of community health clinics. Despite the ways in which queer theorists have problematized the concepts of identity and true self, Walton traces the relationship between this popularly accepted concept, and the pathways and narratives used by gender non-conforming individuals to access transition care from the 1970s to present that function to produce gender. Despite such gains, access to care remains limited for many transgender and genderqueer people. Because the types of care available actually constructs and constricts the ways in which gender operates and is performed, this work raises implications for the conditions under which we may imagine less restrictive possibilities of gender experience for us all.
Shona Mari Sapphire, “Selfhood: A Corporeal Understanding“
The theoretical concert of neuroscience, personal narrative, phenomenology and affect offers critical insight into the primacy of corporeality in comprehending selfhood. Shona Mari Sapphire orchestrates a cross-disciplinary analysis on the theories of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, literary author Siri Hustvedt, and feminist cultural philosophers Elizabeth Grosz and Lisa Blackman, demonstrating the validity of the body’s generative function in understanding selfhood. Sapphire identifies surprising consonance within these disparate methodological standpoints, which are sometimes characterized as oppositional to one another in basic, foundational ways. How do a neuroscientist and a feminist cultural philosopher view the vitality of the body’s active and reactive life-forces in a similar manner? Why are body image and body schema deduced comparably by thinkers from phenomenological, affective, and neurological perspectives? How do a literary author and cultural philosopher traverse theoretical thresholds in their assessment of the blurred borders between self and other? These questions form the basis of a meaningful dialogue on the relationship between corporeality and selfhood-revealing the permeability of perceived boundaries between body, self, mind, and other.
