Masculine writing Uses the economy of the phallus

Tuesday, December 6, 2011

•  This means that:
• It aims to present a unified truth (there has to be a bottom line, a point, a take home message, an argument with a conclusion).
• becomes stationary static and unchangeable (It is a success if it becomes something that we can put down in history texts that will stay the same)
• It places itself at the center and tries to marginalize everything else in relation to it (Bible (the plants and the animals and the garden and eve, were all created for man) and evangelism (Christianity is a rare kind of religion that entails evangelism, it is necessary to go out and conquer other kinds of ideas))
• It casts everything else into the role of Other (example, what gets to count as Canon in a discipline, philosophy major)
• Other things have meaning only in relation to it (an idea and criticisms of that idea – we have never studied a section on Elshtain, but we have looked at her in relation to other sets of ideas)

• Masculine writing looks at the world in terms of binary opposites.
• Culture/ nature
• Active/ passive
• Speaking/ writing
• High/ low
  
  
• These dualistic, binary opposites map onto the BIG dualism: Man/woman
• Woman exists in man’s world, on his terms defined by the fact that she is different from him.
• If woman refuses to be defined as man’s Other then she is unthinkable, there is no place for her in language or culture, in some sense, doesn’t exist.
• Think of the omission of women’s perspectives in history for example

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Feminine writing – the ways to escape the world that men have constructed

Monday, December 5, 2011

• You break the system by putting the unthinkable (women themselves) into words.

• Feminine writing is flexible and moving and dynamic.

• Letters -- Most of the women that have made it into the philosophy canon have done so in terms of the letters that they wrote to male philosophers ex. Princess Elizabeth, Queen Christina.
• Poems: an interpretation a point of view that has no purpose but the beauty off itself or of expressing the experiences of the artist. No claims to universal Truth, just to the truth of my Truth, just to the truth of my own experience of it.
• Marginalia: little scribbles in the margins of our books, where we talk to ourselves or the authors
• Journals
• Cookbooks – you need practical knowledge to make recipes work. They are suggestions not rules.
• Emails – new grammar and style, playful icons that express more than the words of the message. They are ephemeral, once we let them go they may get deleted or may stay on some computer where the text can degrade.
• Graffiti – Stop signs becoming “stop rape” signs
• Novels – ex Handmaids Tale was written as a found journal

• Feminine writing is a place where we can be subversive and perhaps get away with it.

It is a way to change the world

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Connections between male sexuality and male writing, and female sexuality and female writing.

Sunday, December 4, 2011

Male sexuality

• “the big dick”
• the writing, like the sex, is a whose is bigger contest that is ultimately a boring game to play.
• “little pocket signifier” = penis/phallus/pen
• A signifier is a sign or a name or a word or a concept that we use to mark out the boundaries of things or thoughts in our culture.
• Male writing, like male definitions of sexuality, is rigidly controlled and defined so that it can be used to maintain the social order that already exists

Female sexuality

• The book has yet to be written about female sexuality.
• Women haven’t had the words to think it, nonetheless write it. 
• In masculine writing, women are written as the Other that is defined by the Man
• When women struggle to write themselves it is halting and creative, because we are building it as we go.  It is a creative desire.
• Consider it in terms of our sexuality
• This lets it be free and diverse and exciting.
• It is multiple and mobile and complex

• Women write in “white ink”
• It doesn’t draw boundaries, it opens possibilities
• She creates language as she goes

• The desire to write is an embodied desire,
• a desire to become a self in a body,
• a desire to give life to experiences and ideas -- ideas that change and grow because they are alive too.
• A desire to be thought and to think using what ever concepts and language that you need

• Jouissance.

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