Miranda Joseph

For the most part, I found this very challenging to read.  While I have taken several entry level business classes here at University of Maryland, none of them took the time to address how the concepts related to society.  I learned some of the principles Miranda Joseph emphasizes in the introduction of her book that pertained to basic accounting with a few larger applications.  However, I found this writing to be too verbose and difficult to relate to fully comprehend.  Because this was such a challenging read for me, I would like to outline some of the ideas that I gathered from the introduction of the book, and then try to detail some of the information I found interesting from the following chapters.  I would like to start with her emphasis on accountability.  The concept of accountability means that people "will do the right thing (act responsibly) or be punished."  I believe the concept of economic entities being accountable for their actions is central to her underlying argument about how debt is incurred by society.  Accountability allows the social world to interact with the financial world.  When an economic crisis occurs, the media wants to figure out who was accountable.  This shows that all people are affected by the dynamic economy, and "high finance" becomes palpable for all people.  The reality of economic crisis is most evident in strike debt.  Debt creates a world for individuals to be safe from poverty, or rather, safe from financial institutions that accrue capital from the debts of others.  Financial institutions manipulate debt against particular communities in the pursuit of accruing more capital.  Miranda Joseph uses the example of the Wells Fargo branch in Silver Spring Maryland in this point.  In this case, Wells Fargo targeted African American consumers by hiring exclusively African American employees to solicit loans.  Baltimore filed a complaint against the company because its program relied on stereotypes of African American communities in order to exploit debtors.  This example feeds into the notion that financial institutions have the power to polarize and exploit entire communities in the process of accruing capital.  Baltimore forced Wells Fargo to be morally accountable in this lawsuit, as exploiting particular communities creates an almost eternal state of debt for the exploited.  When Miranda Joseph focuses on women as a community exploited by neoliberalism, she explores the state of welfare and poverty for women.  She argues the entrepreneurial subjectivity relies on gender norms.  Social norms are dramatized by the economy when financial institutions assume women have poor financial management skills.  Women must be controlled by men in their financial practices for fear that they are incapable of maintaining balance.  Welfare perpetuates female inability to control their money, as they need to rely on a government system in order to support herself and a family if she has one.  The problem is that women are not encouraged to be independent of their own finances.  I would like to relate this to an article I read recently about motherhood.  In this article, it is argued that motherhood is not biologically instinctive, but a learned desire.  Because women are forced by society to become mothers, and only mothers, men are expected to earn wages to support the family.  Women who are both mothers and professionals experience more scrutiny if they slip up in raising their children, yet men are applauded merely for being their for the uprearing of their children at all.  In this way, women who contribute to the economy in other ways than being a mother are scorned.  Men, then, take control over the entire economy and create a system of welfare in which a woman can never be independent of men.

Story-March 24

Yabo creatively gives personal stories aarger significance. I have been researching a lot about how memoirs, although it is a more intimate form of historical writing, makes the everyday lives of people historically and politically important. Take the chapter titled "Massa Bull Massa Cow" for instance.  In this chapter, Rudy and Ramses discover that their child is born intersexed.  Being born as an intersexed child creates an inherent mixed identity.  What makes this chapter even more interesting is the fact that this family is black.  This challenges the idea of an intersecting idea even further, as it makes intersexed anatomies a total reality for both the family and the doctor.  For example, the doctor notes that although she never witnessed the birth of an intersexed child, her medical studies of this phenomenon lead her to believe that only white children could be born this way.  This relates to history in that historical and medical writing expunges black identities from existence.  In this way, the doctor without even realizing it, forgets about the identities of black individuals.  I am a history major, and I have definitely noticed that black stories are forgotten, unless it is in the context of black discourse.

Situated Knowledge

Donna Haraway questions whether writing about feminist theory can ever be objective, even if science is used as the factual basis for rationality.  On one side of feminist discourse argues that objectivity cannot be acheived through the scientific method because of inherently existing stakes of power.  Yet, people whole-heartedly and unconditionally trust that science and technology are distant from emotional and social preoccupations.  Haraway states that feminist theorists insist that Marxism is the ultimate example of scientific objectivity.  However, failure for feminist theorists to question the relevance of Marxism in objectivity silences them, and prevents the drive of creative knowledge.  Marxism, like capitalism and colonialism were reinforced by the widely accepted belief that they were scientifically objective.  And yet, the reliance on vision throughout history has allowed people to question the true objectivity of the systems of oppression.  The stakes that oppressive systems maintain in knowledge and what is understood to be objective forms feminist's situated knowledges.

History-March 12

"Your understanding of the past changes the history you tell."-Julie Enszer
Your definition of feminism changes the starting and ending points of historical movements.
White washed history
claiming that feminism is about only equality eliminates other feminist plights from history
acknowledging autonomous stories advances feminism
feminism is multiracial
positivism jeopardizes feminist telling of history--historical progressivism

After Spring Break Wishes

Things I would like to discuss/surface after break:

1. I would like to further articulate the legacies of western dominance over the understanding of Iranian feminism.  Essentially, I would like to break away from my western feminist view of Iranian society.
2. I think it would be interesting to look more into popular/multimedia forms of art in order to get a better picture of feminism.  If we are talking about epistemology, different forms of media are essential to gaining more complex knowledges.
3. We talked briefly about the theory of the panopticon.  I think it would be interesting to talk more about how this theory dictates our lives today.

 Praises: I like her idea about the use of multimedia in class to get better understanding about the feminism.

History -- Conditions

Conditions is a literary magazine that consists of poems, essays, and short stories with a strong emphasis on the lives of lesbians.  The collections demonstrate strong intersectional themes, specifically in terms of class, race, gender, and sexuality.  What I found most interesting while looking through Conditions was the close relationship between personal experience and underlying theory.  On Tuesday's discussion about history, I was able to contribute my idea that the lives of women, due to the private (feminine) and public (masculine) dichotomies of gender, are only made public through the publications of their stories.  I related this to the state of women's literature in Iran, where women are silenced in the public sphere, unable to define history.  However, women writers give themselves voices through groundbreaking publications of their autobiographies and fiction, offering the public insight into the private, yet profoundly political, lives of women.  This reshapes the telling of history.  We established that history is subject to constant change as new perspectives, specifically those of the dominated (aka not white men), enter the public.
In relation to Conditions: four and Conditions: fifteen, each contributor demands to explore and bring forth the unknown or the unaccepted.  The authors provide insight into the intersections of their complex, yet still highly valuable lives, that is overlooked in history.  The essay that stood out to me as demonstrating complex theoretical thinking as well as deeply personal, emotional narration was "Man Child: A Black Lesbian Feminist's Response" by Audre Lorde.  In this essay, Lorde presents her experience, as a black lesbian, raising her son, in an oppressive world.  She clarifies that her writing is not intended to be universal, nor is she attempting to assert her theories about motherhood.  However, I gathered that her revelations about her relationship with her son were entrenched in Freudian and poststructural epistemological theory.  Growing up in a private world dominated by women and a public world dominated white men dismantled the socially established structures of gender for Jonathan.  Lorde's greatest fear was that her son would employ the legacies of male dominance and avoid looking within himself and his complex relationship strength.  The idea of looking "within" is thematic in this essay.  I believe that to look "within" means to recognize and not hide your identities from the public.  If you do, you begin to deny yourself and live in ultimate fear of the world.  The relationship between a black lesbian mother with her black son represents a struggle between diverging identities within a relationship.  Although this relationship poses difficulties on both sides, it also creates an advantageous platform for feminist perspective that accommodates an ever-growing audience.  Her experience, while she avoids being didactic, places high value on the relationships between people with intersecting identities.  She ultimately asserts that the advantages outweigh the burden in this relationship, as her son was blessed with the ability to understand more about people than most children his age.  Thus, Lorde's experience offers a model for the future in which different experiences and lives do not have to be threatening.  This model, strengthened by Lorde's ability to look "within" herself, entirely reshapes my understanding of feminist history, as I can now see is apparent exclusions and limitations.  For example, Lorde struggles to avoid feeding into the patriarchy when he is bullied by his peers or when a feminist conference does not allow men over ten to attend.  In this light, I can see that isn't just male dominated form of history that prevents the public exposure to different experiences, but the multiple histories existing in the world that intersect and dominate each other, like weeds choking out a plant's ability to blossom.

Course Reflection

Overall, I find this course to be rather challenging.  While the readings are effective and help shape my own thoughts about feminism, I find them sometimes to be too difficult for me to comprehend.  I believe this to be due to the lengthiness of the readings.  When I feel as though I have a good grasp on the reading, the author continues to throw in more thoughts, and that's when I get lost.  The tendency for me to get confused by the reading prevents me from contributing to the discussion and offering profound criticisms to my assigned partner.  I enjoy the readings for the most part, but perhaps they could be reduced for each week.  I think this would create a better, more focused learning environment because there are many times when one or two out of the three readings will go unmentioned.  If we focused on fewer readings, the discussion would be more lively, and we could better articulate our thoughts.  Other than the volume of the readings, I really enjoy and get a lot out of this course.  I like the discussion format, especially now that the discussions are now facilitated by the students.

History-March 10

"The Poem as Mask," I believe, uses the metaphor of masks to look at the evolution of womanhood throughout history. As the lines proceed, the poet's theory is developed, revealing the absence of God and the changing face of femininity. Poetry allows the female poet to articulate the abstract and create powerful, historic theory. Women in the 1960's women's movement used poetry in a similar manner. Poetry became the political, when groups of women would come together to discuss gender, race, sexuality and more. The best medium to expose an all-inclusive experience and to attempt to create a universal, political articulation for their platform. This reminds me of the poem I incorporated in my research paper about sexuality in the 1960's titled, "A Rose with No Name." A prostitute is the central figure in this poem whose morality is compared to the evilness of the Vietnam War. The use of a prostitute as the main subject creates a platform in which the freedom of sexuality as well as the politics of war are discussed. This relates well to the topic of history in relation to poetry, as the poem, while criticizing women's accepted roles in society by analyzing the morality of a prostitute also serves to theorize about the historical struggles of the U.S. in the war effort.

Local vs global
biases of historiography
generation vs geneology
story vs history

Poststructural Epistemology-March 3

The poem "Prisons of Silence" thematically uses notions of boundaries, or rather the negative connotation, prisons, to underscore the narrator's experience of a Japanese American woman.  The boundary created by the gender relationship between her and her husband is represented by the "cold wall of flesh," or as I interpreted, her body.  The emphasis on her body is an important one, as it is the manifestation of her limitations as a woman and a Japanese person.  Walls of barbed wire separate her from the United States as well as her husband who is leaving to serve in the military.  Unlike the narrator, her husband is not bound by his gender in leaving the imprisonment of the barbed wires.  Then she remarks that the walls encompass her body like the tomb in which her husband lie.  When she can finally break her wall of silence, she also breaks the "cell of history" that has drawn the boundaries of her identity and restricted her from living freely.  This poem relates to both theory texts of Moya and Mani.  Moya uses the lens of Chicana feminism in order to criticize the relevance and truthfulness of postmodern epistemology.  In relation to "Prisons of Silence," Moya's greatest point resides in her assertion that identity creates boundaries.  She claims that women of color have the ability of traversing these boundaries.  Her claim is set up in opposition to the postmodern theorist, Sandoval, who wrote that identities are unstable, and the woman must shift identities according to her situation.  Moya argues that identities are not encompassed by strict boundaries, and become "more or less visible," instead of shifting in various circumstances. The experiences of women of color, as argued by Moya, ought to preside over new political thought as these experiences allow for the indispensable ability to negotiate boundaries.  In comparison to Moya, Mani analyzes the Indian tradition of sati, and comes upon interesting insight into how knowledge is formulated based on location.  The varied understanding of knowledge is due to the "boundaries of gender, race, class, sexuality and historical experience," according to Mani.  Layers of history in respect to location create the barriers between western and eastern ideologies.  Mani examines sati to show that the Indians believe this practice to be integral to their culture, however, the legacy of colonialism and racism in US and British affairs has branded this tradition as appalling, putting the "woman's question" into India's political landscape.