Look Mom! I'm a subject!

I always feel like I got my money's worth when I leave a class hopelessly confused, so shout out to Dr. Tapley who always leaves me hopelessly confused.

That was a hell of a class. Not only did I out myself as a misogynist-music lover, I think I might have implied rape makes me feel powerful. So not my intention! But, I have to admit, after a long day of Women's Studies classes full of analyses of oppression and detailing my own subjugation, nothing hits the spot like locking myself in my den, blasting 50 on my computer and singing along at the top of my lungs! What can I say; sometimes a girl needs to feel powerful. That music is powerful. And so I have been thinking about power and empowerment. 50 Cent uses powerful language. He talks about what he does, who he is and, often, what he is going to do to other people. So is power always about who gets to sit in the subject seat and who they get to place in the object seat? Does power necessarily imply that you have power over someone, or are at the least more powerful than someone else? Even as feminists, we feel empowered by our enlightened state of being to the extent that we can recognize others who are not as enlightened as we, and thereby feel more powerful than they. Can I feel powerful without the knowledge that there are other people who are less powerful than I? Basically, what I am wondering is this: if, tomorrow, the world magically became a totally egalitarian place where we were all equals, would we all be equally powerful or would power simply cease to exist as a concept? Is power dependent on the notion that some people have more than others?

An analogous example to better illustrate my point: Dove thinks we should fight for real beauty. Dove thinks we should recognize that everyone is beautiful in their own way. But beauty doesn't work like that. If we were all considered equally beautiful, beauty would no longer exist as a meaningful concept. Nobody would say "wow, you're really beautiful", if all that meant were “wow, you look just like everyone else”. Beauty is a comparative concept. We can only be and feel beautiful by recognizing others who are less or more beautiful. If the above is also true of power - if we can only be empowered by feeling more powerful than others - is empowerment a good thing? Should we really be proud that we feel empowered? Should we really be working so hard to empower ourselves? My head hurts.

White and Adorno and Horkheimer, oh my!

"Everybody must behave (as if spontaneously) in accordance with his previously determined and indexed level, and choose the category of mass product turned out for his type" (Adorno and Horkheimer, 123). Did anyone else pause and worry that perhaps they accidentally picked up A Brave New World instead of their WST 320 reading? I did. And personally, while popular culture can sometimes seem interminably formulaic and mind-numbing, I am not quite ready to give up hope and resign myself to the category of drone or automaton. Adorno and Horkheimer strip the audience of all agency by insisting that media messages are inevitably received and absorbed unquestioningly and uncritically by a vapid audience. On the other hand, White rightly acknowledges that, while media messages may be encoded with particular aims and in similar ways, these messages inevitably give way to a plurality of understandings as differing subject postions produce different decoding processes.

In thinking about this subjective aspect of culture and cultural judgements in the context of representations of women in media, Sex and the City came to mind. I'm gonna go out on a limb here and admit that this is one of my favourite shows. I realize that its representations of women are hardly all-inclusive or even particularly representative, but I find aspects of it empowering and, frankly, hilarious. In discussing Carrie and her friends with my feminist pals, I have found that my buds either loathed or loved the gals with no inbetween ground. So who's right about the buxom bunch? Is there a "right" way to absorb culture? Can we objectively state that a cultural form is or is not feminist? Can something be at once feminist and anti-feminist depending entirely on subjective understandings of feminism? How far can we stretch this pluarlity of meanings? I certainly do not have the answers, but if any of you do, could you let me know so I can either right off Sex and the City forever or finally feel free to proudly exclaim my love from the rooftops?

A Vision Statement

Having never written a "vision statement" before, I must first warn that I write this rather self-consciously with the worry that it may lack somewhat in vision and abound moreso in general blurriness. Here goes:

I suppose what stood out most for me in today's reading was the idea that the Internet, with its interactive and public format and its potentially egalitarian structure, can and should be appropriated by feminists in order to empower new, diverse and, perhaps, radical, feminist ways of knowing. In addition, it seems hard to miss the fact that text is a powerful medium with the authority to define and legitimize "ways of knowing" and the identities that may produce or follow from such epistemological standpoints. Following from these ideas, I suppose the purpose of my blog is to attempt to write into being my own feminist identity. I hope to bring a degree of authority and legitimacy to my feminism by way of engaging in a textual conversation with other feminisms online.

At the same time, by engaging and responding to links and comments, I hope to connect with the idea that this textual "me" cannot and will not be stable, and to track the changeability of "me". I guess, ultimately, I hope to engage with the idea that texts, and the other online feminisms I will encounter through classmates' blogs, work to produce me as a particular kind of subject/subjectivity and, likewise, my textual self works to produce other individuals' subjectivities. I hope to explore how exactly this process works. (Did that make sense to anyone other than me?)

Does anyone else note a glarring contradiction there? I do, and while I would rather ignore it, I suppose I should engage it by also attempting to explore the tension I feel between my desire to authorize a strong, solid identity through text and the apparent reality that that identity can never be stable.

So, yeah. I bet next week I'm gonna look back at this and be, like, "what the hell was that textual me thinking?"