I didn't post after the party, but it was TOTALLY AWESOME. I felt proud and validated and also that I had fun.
I also felt, and feel, that I have been making really inordinate use of the word "awesome" for the past month or so. I am not sure from whom I got it.
So I got really excited last night when I was trying to figure out what I wanted to post about in Renaissance prose fiction by a discussion I had with Jamie in which I identified the idea that women in society are often like canals – conduits between one social realm and another. This was sparked by Jamie's repeating the observation she's made before that she thinks a lot of men simply aren't socialized to relate to their peers at all, and that they compensate by glomming on to women (usually girlfriends) as a way to meet the social needs that don't get fulfilled in the wider world – things like "whom do I make silly jokes with?" and "with whom can I discuss my fears?" Her point is that men in our society are frequently denied the opportunity to make intimate friends who aren't sexual partners, and so when they meet a woman who acts as an intimate friend – with whom, for instance, they can share confidences, they make that the foundation of a romantic or sexual relationship. I think that a lot of things about this idea are really spot-on. It isn't total, of course – not all men experience this; not all heterosexual relationships experience this; etc. – but it's a really interesting thought.
And it made me think, in conjunction with the travel literature I was reading for class, about the idea of the female body as the canal. The woman becomes the way to mediate between inner world and outer world, between ideas as-yet-undeveloped in social mind, between classes or social milieus. This idea has a lot of beauty for me. The canal has obvious anatomical associations, for one thing, which is essential if I want to talk about the female body (and, eventually, about the prose text as a female or feminized – maybe hermaphrodite -- body). And it's also a site of contention whose ownership is always in debate – a canal is a place-that-is-not-a-place, in that its existence is defined by the temporariness of being on it. It's a way to get places, not a place itself.
And I think femaleness can (in some ways) also be construed that way – a gender-that-is-not-a-gender; defined by lack. Mind you, I’m not talking about the way people would say they define femininity (at least not anymore), and I’m working out of a Renaissance framework – things have certainly changed with regards to ideas of femininity since then. But I also think that transitionality, if that's a word, is a quality that seems to me to apply more strongly to female bodies than to male ones, culturally.
Jamie also got excited about this idea, and related the results of several studies she read last year, that examined the very large number of female children of immigrants to the United States who become doctors, lawyers, etc – a larger number, even, than the male children of first generation immigrants. The premise had been that this finding was surprising, considering that the cultures many of these young women's parents came from do not value professional occupations for women. The studies, according to Jamie, concluded that the reason was that, while being a doctor may not be "women's work," being a doctor _in a strange new country_ is, because women are the mediators. Daughters, at least according to these studies by way of my housemate, are consistently expected to be the mediators, the canals that can bridge between the old culture and the new one – being a doctor is partially about perceived career success, but just as much about mediation and transfer of information, just like, I'm thinking, the daughter-texts (or hermaphrodite daughter-son texts) of travel in the Renaissance.
It's all really cool. I was really terrifically excited about it last night – less so now that I've been to class, and perhaps seen that the idea may not be as useful as I wanted to claim it was. But I'm still interested.
I also felt, and feel, that I have been making really inordinate use of the word "awesome" for the past month or so. I am not sure from whom I got it.
So I got really excited last night when I was trying to figure out what I wanted to post about in Renaissance prose fiction by a discussion I had with Jamie in which I identified the idea that women in society are often like canals – conduits between one social realm and another. This was sparked by Jamie's repeating the observation she's made before that she thinks a lot of men simply aren't socialized to relate to their peers at all, and that they compensate by glomming on to women (usually girlfriends) as a way to meet the social needs that don't get fulfilled in the wider world – things like "whom do I make silly jokes with?" and "with whom can I discuss my fears?" Her point is that men in our society are frequently denied the opportunity to make intimate friends who aren't sexual partners, and so when they meet a woman who acts as an intimate friend – with whom, for instance, they can share confidences, they make that the foundation of a romantic or sexual relationship. I think that a lot of things about this idea are really spot-on. It isn't total, of course – not all men experience this; not all heterosexual relationships experience this; etc. – but it's a really interesting thought.
And it made me think, in conjunction with the travel literature I was reading for class, about the idea of the female body as the canal. The woman becomes the way to mediate between inner world and outer world, between ideas as-yet-undeveloped in social mind, between classes or social milieus. This idea has a lot of beauty for me. The canal has obvious anatomical associations, for one thing, which is essential if I want to talk about the female body (and, eventually, about the prose text as a female or feminized – maybe hermaphrodite -- body). And it's also a site of contention whose ownership is always in debate – a canal is a place-that-is-not-a-place, in that its existence is defined by the temporariness of being on it. It's a way to get places, not a place itself.
And I think femaleness can (in some ways) also be construed that way – a gender-that-is-not-a-gender; defined by lack. Mind you, I’m not talking about the way people would say they define femininity (at least not anymore), and I’m working out of a Renaissance framework – things have certainly changed with regards to ideas of femininity since then. But I also think that transitionality, if that's a word, is a quality that seems to me to apply more strongly to female bodies than to male ones, culturally.
Jamie also got excited about this idea, and related the results of several studies she read last year, that examined the very large number of female children of immigrants to the United States who become doctors, lawyers, etc – a larger number, even, than the male children of first generation immigrants. The premise had been that this finding was surprising, considering that the cultures many of these young women's parents came from do not value professional occupations for women. The studies, according to Jamie, concluded that the reason was that, while being a doctor may not be "women's work," being a doctor _in a strange new country_ is, because women are the mediators. Daughters, at least according to these studies by way of my housemate, are consistently expected to be the mediators, the canals that can bridge between the old culture and the new one – being a doctor is partially about perceived career success, but just as much about mediation and transfer of information, just like, I'm thinking, the daughter-texts (or hermaphrodite daughter-son texts) of travel in the Renaissance.
It's all really cool. I was really terrifically excited about it last night – less so now that I've been to class, and perhaps seen that the idea may not be as useful as I wanted to claim it was. But I'm still interested.
Labels: bodies, feminism, queer, representation, space
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