I've read that Upton Sinclaire's intent in writing The Jungle was to draw attention to the immigrant labor pool, and the horrific working conditions under which they labored, and the hobbling poverty that held them bonded to such wage-slavery.  Instead, the public's outrage turned against the meatpacking industry--perhaps rightly so.  Ergo, we have the creation of the FDA.  All of this is general public knowledge, nothing insightful or innovative.

What is surprising to me is how closely today's factory farms mirror the conditions that President Roosevelt responded to when The Jungle was published.  And I continue to be amazed at how the profit motive supercedes any humanitarian imperative when it comes to publicizing and/or regulating industry.  To illustrate, consider the viewer response to the following YouTube clip from a cruelty-free dairy farm, in which the (friendly) audience laments the fact that cruelty-free farming is just "too expensive":



Furthermore, I'm dumbstruck at the willful ignorance and antagonism from many in the public sphere.  The vitriol with which Joe (carnivorous) Citizen responds to some of the animal rights videos posted on YouTube illustrates my point while begging the question: why such an intense and violent reaction?  For example, the following 5 minute clip is accompanied by 7 pages of lowbrow "debate" about the merits of eating or not eating meat.  It's true that this particular clip is heavy on the pathos, perhaps eliciting the violence in response.  But this is only one of many, many examples I could have chosen.

Midterm Essay (aka "TL-DR")

“We Were Girls Together”

-Tony Morrison, Sula

The collective “we” who tells the story of Karen Lee Boren’s debut novella Girls in Peril stands out as a curious defining feature, begging the critical reader to explain, interpret, and justify its unusual mode of narration. The “we” in question refers to the story’s main character(s), a group of five young neighborhood girls aged 11 to 13.  The use of the collective first person serves to obscure the identity of the narrator, while blurring the boundary between subject positions of the five girls.  Narrative cues throughout the novella distance the role of the narrator from the individual identity of each girl in turn, as Jeanne, Donna, Lauren, Stacey, and Corrine are each referenced in the third person, and the reader is never offered an intimate, detailed view into any character’s innermost thoughts or perspective.  In this way, the story achieves ambiguity and coalition in its narrative subject. 

            Competing with the narrative point of view for center stage is the curious spectacle of one of the girls’s, Jeanne Macek’s, “extra” thumb: a birth defect.  Remarkably, rather than ostracize Jeanne for this oddity, the group of girls fetishizes the extra thumb, worships it, “court[s] Jeanne’s favor for the chance to pet it” (1). The girls envy the extra thumb, and see that it confers on Jeanne a number of (traditionally male) privileges, for example, exclusion from childcare, housekeeping, and personal hygiene responsibilities.  The thumb is also obscurely and ironically credited for Jeanne’s exceptional athletic and strategic prowess, and “when she won, she treated her thumb like a teammate who had helped her out” (3). In short, the thumb stands in as a sort of phallus, a transcendental signifier of sorts. And in fact, despite the ambiguity of the narrator, it is apparent from the early lines of the novella that Jeanne centers and directs the group of five girls.

In her critical essay on the use of the collective first person in French literature, "’Romans Des Nous’: The First Person Plural and Collective Identity in Martinique," Dawn Fulton advances the claim that the use of the collective identity—for example as in the “royal ‘we’”—has historically functioned as a discursive strategy conferring legitimacy and power upon a line of discourse.  In Girls in Peril, the use of the collective first person is significant in this respect, because the gang of girls achieves legitimacy and power through use of collective identity.  In fact, they are acutely aware of the fact that coalition confers power as they negotiate their interactions with adult authority figures.  “Alone we were vulnerable,” they reason. “We felt more comfortable as a group…together, we had a firmly fixed identity” (6).  In the comfort of this firmly fixed collective identity, the girls garner confidence in their collective action.  Also, the narrative voice achieves greater authority to tell its story.

Furthermore, the girls achieve an even greater measure of authority through their association with Jeanne, who possesses the transcendental signifier in the third thumb.  Laura Kipnis explores the nature of the phallus as the marker of entitlement (to authority and power) in her 2006 article “Something’s Missing”.  Historically, she claims, it is inexplicably and invariably true that authority and power coincide with the phallus—which is why Lacan refers to it as the transcendental signifier—what is transcended, in this case, is the physical body.  Power is entitled by virtue of anatomy but extends beyond anatomy.  The female response, according to Kipnis, is to choose between feminism, constituted by social activism opposing male entitlement in the first place, and femininity—by which the female can obtain access to the phallus on a “time-share basis” through pair bonding/marriage (23).  In the case of the girls of Girls in Peril, however, association with the transcendental signifier is appropriated though the use of collective identity as opposed to marriage.  By forming a coalition with Jeanne, in other words, Donna, Lauren, Corrine and Stacey all attain a share of the collective power conferred by the phallus.

Jeanne Macek’s third thumb may also be read as a symbolic clitoris. In this scenario, collective identity is associated with youth and sexual immaturity.  As long as the group remains sexually immature their collective identity is secure.  Reading Jeanne’s thumb as a clitoris, however, is not inconsistent with reading it as a phallus if it is also read through the lens of sexual immaturity, and therefore the thumb still symbolically confers upon Jeanne the status of transcendental signifier.  This is because, according to Freudian psychoanalysis, the preadolescent girl’s clitoris functions much in the same way that the preadolescent boy’s phallus does.  It is, in essence, a substitute—or inferior—phallus.  According to Jane Gerhard, in her Feminist Studies article "Revisiting "The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm": The Female Orgasm in American Sexual Thought and Second Wave Feminism," Freud maintains that until the transfer phase, in which an adolescent girl transfers her libidinal center to the vagina, it is located in the clitoris.  During this pre-transfer phase the girl is gender and sexually ambiguous—being neither masculine nor feminine, neither heterosexual nor homosexual, but somehow all of these at once (452-3).  This description of the adolescent girl as androgynous seems well-suited to Jeanne Macek, who navigates the sphere of preadolescent girlhood as well as dabbling the in the sphere of male privilege.

 Furthermore, as Gerhard elaborates, Freudian psychoanalytic theory holds that failure on the part of the adolescent girl to successfully navigate the transfer phase, reassign her libidinal center to the vagina, and achieve sexual maturity can result in penis envy, hysteria, and neurotic discontent.  This is relevant to a reading of Girls in Peril insofar as the amputation of Jeanne’s thumb can be read as a forced transfer via clitorectomy, and her resulting hysteria evidence of its failure.  The amputation signals a move toward sexual maturity in alignment with Freud’s transfer phase. This is reinforced in the text by Jeanne’s escalated role in the domestic sphere. “As her hand healed,” the narrative voice recounts, “Jeanne’s chores increased and we saw less and less of her than ever” (61).  The idea that the amputation corresponds with sexual maturity is also reinforced by the shift in dominant personality from Jeanne (whose sexuality is rooted in the third thumb as clitoral symbol) to Lauren, who represents a traditionally feminine (vaginal) sexuality.  What is problematic about this sexual maturation is the fact that it is enforced upon Jeanne, without her consent, via the authority of the medical community.  Furthermore, it accompanies her rapid disappearance from the public sphere, and ultimately her silence and the dismantling of the group identity.  These events signify a feminist critique of assigned gender roles and the authority conferred upon the owner of the transcendental signifier (see Cicoux and Kuhn, and Lindenmeyer.)

Moreover, the group’s collective identity breaks down after Jeanne’s amputation.  The loss of the thumb signifies a disconnection from the phallus and its conferred privileges, among which may be included the discursive authority that also accompanies the collective first person (i.e. “royal we”.)  However, this also can fall within the purview of reading the third thumb as clitoral symbol, the amputation read as a clitorectomy forcing Jeanne into the transfer phase.  The loss of collective identity here is associated with sexual maturity and the traditional feminine domestic role, which forces her out of the public sphere and into the private sphere.  The implication is that women in the home—in the private sphere—are disconnected from each other and from society; therefore the group sacrifices its collective identity.

The climax of the feminist critique in Girl’s in Peril is signified by Jeanne’s breakdown at the end of the story, whereby her brother Joey’s attempted murder and successful suicide trigger Jeanne’s (apparent) hysteria.  However, the hysterical reading is contestable by way of feminist theorizing.  Hysteria is typically derived from psychoanalytic readings of failed transfer, mislaid gender association, and/or penis envy.  This helps to explicate the implied association between Jeanne and Joey, whether Jeanne’s amputation is read as a castration or clitorectomy.  In fact, clitorectomy is rather analogous to castration in Freud’s construction, as the clitoris functions as a stand in for the penis up until the transfer phase where the adolescent girl is forced to abandon it.  Jeanne’s “hysteria,” then, is read as the psychoanalytic diagnosis that is criticized in this text.  On the one hand, Jeanne’s response to Joey’s violence and death is understandable.  On the other hand, it can be read as hysterical due to its extremity.  Finally, however, Jeanne is simply silenced by her elimination from the family.  This is in accordance with traditional methods of dealing with vocal women (who perhaps transgress gender boundaries) by silencing them.  Here the notion of medicalizing/pathologizing female behaviors is relevant.  Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s The Yellow Wallpaper and Virginia Woolf’s lived experience provide both textual and material examples of this phenomenon.

            Karen Lee Boren’s Girls in Peril utilizes the collective first person in conjunction with the central metaphor of the transcendental signifier to perform a feminist critique of traditional female roles in postmodern society.  The critique is particularly salient in this context because it foregrounds the dissonance between the traditional role expected of mature women, (even, as Kipnis explores in The Female Thing, in contemporary American society) and the possibilities they are taught to entertain in adolescence.  As Jeanne’s emotional breakdown demonstrates, the dissonance can prove psychologically crippling.

Works Cited

Cixous, Helen, and Annette Kuhn. "Castration or Decapitation?" Signs 7.1 (1981): 41-55. JStor. Web. 7 Mar. 2010.

Fulton, Dawn. ""Romans Des Nous": The First Person Plural and Collective Identity in Martinique." The French Review 76.6 (2003): 1104-114. JStor. Web. 9 Mar. 2010.

Gerhard, Jane. "Revisiting "The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm": The Female Orgasm in American Sexual Thought and Second Wave Feminism." Feminist Studies 26.2 (2000): 449-76. JStor. Web. 7 Mar. 2010.

Kipnis, Laura. "Something's Missing." Women's Studies Quarterly 34.3/4 (2006): 22-42. JStor. Web. 8 Mar. 2010.

Kipnis, Laura. The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability. New York: Pantheon, 2006. Print.

Lee Boren, Karen. Girls in Peril. Portland: Tin House, 2006. Print.

Lindenmeyer, Antje. "Postmodern Concepts of the Body in Jeanette Winterson's "Written on the Body"" Feminist Review 63 (1999): 48-63. JStor. Web. 6 Mar. 2010.

Morris, Adalaide. "First Persons Plural in Contemporary Feminist Fiction." Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 11.1 (1992): 11-29. JStor. Web. 8 Mar. 2010. 

Gramsci, Marx, Althusser: and Single-Payer Healthcare?

What do hegemony, capital and the wage-laborer, & ideology and the state apparatus have to do with single-payer healthcare?  Answer: lots.  Lots to unpack here.

Hegemony: right-wing wingnuts, talking point mouthpieces, religious institutions, and public schools.  FOX News, CNN, NY Times, and The Huffington Post.  Press releases, press conferences, sound bytes and photo ops. And so on...

Capital and the wage laborer: the very foundation upon which the US economy functions (disfunctionally).  Why is it that as a population we are so very willing to ignore the fact that a capitalist economy is structured upon the necessity for the working class to exist simply in order to create excess value via the exchange--or rather sale---of labor, which value in turn creates excess value in the commodities that are fetishized and purchased as a false representation of the wealth that they create?

Why, rather, do I need to phrase this very fact in such convoluted terms so that the proletarian that probably never will, but should possibly be influenced by this idea if she read this, will NEVER understand and so continue to elide the fact that class dissonance is a necessary condition for capitalism to exist?!?

Ideology and the state apparatus:  well, one things bears mentioning.  Althusser has a wicked sense of humor.  And good thing, because what he has to say is fairly dismal.  So, ideology is the substance upon which hegemony perpetuates itself.  Invisible, insidious, yes. Odious, impenetrable, perhaps? Perhaps not.  Marx alludes to the notion that a radical discourse is possible--presupposing, of course, the existence of a radical class.  And it follows, necessarily, that the penetration of hegemonic ideology is possible by virtue of this radical discourse.

But, man, it looks difficult!  Ideology is the sum total of the function of naturalization of itself, and perpetuation through the transmission of "obviousnesses" (Althusser 698) or, as the Flobots claim in their song Fight With Tools: "spread like a virus through accepted thoughts and proper manners". Ideology is at it worst the farcical appearance of free choice, even when it perpetuates contradictory claims.

There...I have arrived at the transition to the main point: Single Payer healthcare.  Which, it would seem, would be consistent with the ideology inherent in a supposedly "christian" nation.  I guess the ideology of christianity is at odds, however, with the ideology of capitalism.  And the goals of capital are at odds with the materials conditions of the lives of wage-laborers.   And yet, those very same professed christian wage-laborers parrot and promote the agenda of capital, which is completely inconsistent with the spirital agenda promoted by Christ.

hmmm...  yes. these thoughts are fragmented and incomplete. but the skeleton is there.

Displaced Sexual Objects/Horse-y Toys/and the Tagmemic Grid

Here I am supposed to blog about my contribution to this week's group presentation on Peter Shaffer's Equus.  Our group posted a group-authored blog here:

http://equus638.blogspot.com/

That chronicles our follies and foibles as we mucked through mountains of literary theory and one small two-act play.

My primary contributions are named in the post's title: the Tagmemic grid being the most significant.  Also, props.  And I'd like to think a bit of perspective/sanity/direction.  Ha! Like being the operative word.

More to say on this after this evening's shenanigans.

OK....the evening's shenanigans long since passed, and here are my reflections.

The tagmemic grid...hmmm...  I still like the grid.  However, due to my lateness and our group momentum I'm not sure it was adequately explained to the class.  In theory it would have helped groups to explore the issues in Equus on an escalating scale of complexity to arrive at certain conclusions.  In practice...I'm pretty sure it just served as a decoration-a garnish if you will-augmenting the "presentation" of our presentation.  I believe that some found it too complex.

And the horses...well, they were garnishes to begin with.  So perhaps I was the set decorator.

In terms of discussion I am happy with what happened.  I feel pretty strongly that our group distributed the task of analysis equally.  We were each very knowledgeable about the text of Equus and the application of a variety of theoretical approaches to the text.  My own analysis applied mostly psychoanalytic theory and poststructural theory to Equus.  I especially focused on the play as Dysart's narrative, wherein he arrives at certain conclusions about the erroneous nature of normativity and his role as an enforcer of social norms.

The Simpsons spoofs Trouble in River City

What If It Were Agreed that "Proper" Meant Wearing a Codfish on Your Head?"

In their essay "Introductory Deconstruction" from Literary Theory, An Anthology, Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan explain that one implication of Jacques Derrida's concept of differance is that it becomes very difficult to ground the notion of "truth" in any authority.  In Derrida's construction then, truth, as the authors explain, is a deferred presence grounded in representations.  Furthermore, its presence is "shaped by conventions regarding how those acts of representation work.  It must be haggled over and settled on through agreements" (261).

Tim Burton's recent adaptation of Lewis Caroll's Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass finds Alice pensively posing this post's titular question to her mother, while en route to a formal engagement party.  Alice's mother discovers that she (Alice) has failed to don the appropriate undergarments.  Angrily, she exclaims: "but you're not properly dressed!"

"What if were agreed" retorts Alice, "that 'proper' meant wearing a codfish on your head? Would you wear it?"  Pleased at her mother's befuddled nonresponse, Alice demurs "to me, stockings are like a codfish."

Burton's reproduction of Alice in Wonderland casts Alice in a role that contests the notion of what is proper and who has the authority to make such conventional agreements.  As such, she is a classically poststructuralist heroine who resists the meta-narrative of her proper gender role in three different but parallel strings.  First, there is the question of marriage--whether or not she will marry "Hamish," the effete aristocrat who proposes in the first scene.  Second, the notion of heroes and damsels in distress, which is turned completely on its head as Alice is called upon to be the White Queen's champion in battle against the Jabberwocky.  Finally, there is her deceased father's business which has been purchased by her would-be fiance's family.

Furthermore, there is the allusion to what amounts to a very queer,  (albeit heterosexual) attraction between the Mad Hatter and Alice.  Also Absolom seems somehow meant to signify Alice herself in her state of always "becoming".  This conflation of identities queers the gender narrative in the movie as well.

[Still in progress. Seems lately I finish nothing.]

Multiplicity and Semiotics: Testing Boundaries of Cultural Mythology.

This post combines some old work with some new work for me with semiotics.  In the older stuff I'm using a Peircian model rather than Saussure.  Although the two kind of blur and blend for me.  What was the difference again?  Someone thinks that there is no objective reality beyond the sign...Saussure, I think.  To be honest, I'm pretty vague on that notion myself.  Language is pretty darned powerful but I'm loath to make the broad claim that it is ultimately deterministic. At any rate...about Tara:

The following clip represents the opening credits of Showtime's award winning original series United States of Tara. Although Saussure's  Course on General Linguistics delimits the signifying medium as purely linguistic and thus temporally linear, I would suggest that the visual medium both signifies in a comparable manner to the linguistic, and expands the possibilities for semiotic analysis of the complex signifiers taking place in the show.  The use of a series of graphic images to introduce the show's foundational concepts illustrates this point nicely.  

As you will see, the show's title character, Tara, suffers from Dissociative Identity Disorder (more commonly known as multiple personalities.)  What is interesting about this disorder as represented in the show, semiotically speaking, are the ways in which Tara's various identities are constructed and performed by way of a complex of social signifiers. These signifiers include dress, vocabulary, behavior, and so on, and are simultaneously interpreted and judged both by the textual/fictional community in which Tara and her family are constructed, and meta-textually, by us, the viewing audience.

As the opening theme to United States of Tara suggests, Tara performs four semiotically constructed identities.  According to Umberto Eco, semiotic theory is implicit in all systems of interpretation, which is salient being that interpretation itself is the pivotal point on which semiotic analysis rests.  Other theories and critical viewpoints, however, provide the ideological lens by which an interpretation is made. The framework for this semiotic analysis of gendered ideology and performative identity in United States of Tara rests on the foundational semiotic theory of Charles Peirce, the body theories of Judith Butler, and Roland Barthes’s Mythologies. 

Peirce’s semiotic theory establishes the framework of sign systems, whereby a “signifier”—arbitrary in and of itself—suggests a “signified,” or an endowment of meaning; together, they constitute a complete sign.  Signs, then, accumulate to construct “sign systems,” which, in turn, compromise meaningful units of knowledge about larger concepts, phenomena, and so on.  One very significant aspect of Peircian semiotic theory is the notion that signfication, or the creation of meaning, is simultaneously interpretive, subconscious, and instantaneous. Peirce also gives us the notion that interpretation is accomplished through accessing the larger cultural consciousness, thus resulting in the creation of “knowledge” that is socially agreed upon. While important, this notion alone is problematic insofar as the phenomenon of interpretation is ambiguous and vague.  The “how” and “why” of that instantaneous interpretation remains largely evasive.[1]

Judith Butler’s “Gender Trouble” intersects with Peircian semiotics by applying the interpretive framework of socially constructed sign systems to the concept of gender.  Butler shows how gender is different than sex and encompasses a moray of social mores, behaviors and values that are constructed as masculine or feminine and enacted through the performance of socially agreed upon signifiers of masculinity and femininity.  Her work separates the concept of gender—a significant aspect of identity—from the body and deconstructs it, showing how gender itself is a semiotic construction reflecting communally agreed upon social signifiers.[2]  Still, Butler’s theory doesn’t explore in-depth the mechanism by which the interpretation of social signifiers occurs.

Roland Barthes’s Mythologies provides the link that explores the mechanism by which instantaneous, subconscious, and socially agreed upon judgments—in Barthes’s words, the “what-goes-without-saying”—that occurs in the interpretive process.[3]  These mythologies represent the cultural narrative constructed upon unspoken assumptions that are both the foundation for and the cause of the interpretations they produce.  They both constitute and enable a socially constructed interpretation of signifiers.  Finally, they embody the corpus of signifiers called upon to perform identity.  Mythology, perception, and performance interact perpetually to produce meaning.

Tara performs four semiotically constructed identities that explore alternative possibilities that are largely gendered and centered around the feminine ethic of care and the role of the mother. According to the premise of the show, Tara’s other personalities, or alters, compensate for Tara’s perceived deficiencies.  Clinically, the development of dissociative personalities is theorized to derive from trauma, particularly violent or sexual trauma.  The audience’s ready identification with a dissociative protagonist implies the correllation of trauma with socially imposed behavioral mores and proscribed roles—specifically those associated with gender and maternity. 

---

[1]
Bergman, Representationism and Presentationism

[2]
Butler, Gender Trouble

[3]
Barthes, Mythologies, 11

---

Nothing either good or bad, but Thinking makes it so...

this post is currently a placeholder.  holding spot for ingenious theorizing.  whence stricken by the muse.

(me: "oh, muuuu--uuuse...!!!!  masochistic student awaiting your puuuun-ish-meeent!!!!")

just to remind myself.  ingenious blogging was in reference to phenomenology. as a reaction to war, uncertainties and fear of dis-unity.  if a ghost visits the castle and demands vengeance from his son who vicariously then avenges his own oedipal urges...but that son isn't there to see it...does the ghost really appear?

mimetic musing: how far removed from reality
is a text-messaged blog post?

If Residency is Optional...Perhaps I'll Choose Exile

Something tells me that Plato would've seriously objected to these guys hanging out up

in the Republic. Commentary in progress...

What I'm interested in here--beyond the obvious coolness of Bad Religion in general-are the following lines:

"So have the told you how to think

Cleansed your mind of sepsis and autonomy?

Or have you escaped from scrutiny

And regaled yourself with depravity?"

I realize that Plato's Republic isn't so much about religion, per se, as it is a sort of military complex-y type thing. But Plato may just be the original instigator of this notion of religion being the opiate of the masses, what with his certainty that all the stories one young citizen will hear about the gods will irrevocably shape his/her worldview and morality. Can't have any contaminating elements in the mix. And no autonomy. A citizen couldn't possibly make an intelligent and well-considered evaluation of some fictional mimesis about the gods. The solution? Revisionist poesy, of course!

Mobile Blogging

Mobile Blogging...test 1 was a success. But it lacks one feature that I, personally, find Very Important: the ability to title one's posts! I must admit, I'm a bit of a title-whore.  Titles are a little peepshow preview into the mind of the text.  An opportunity to seduce the reader with promise of wit and wisdom.  The place for a proper bit of word(fore)play.  Like I said: Very Important.  So I'm not sure I'll be doing very much Mobile Blogging.

By the way, this post was originally posted via my iPhone.  I edited it later. To compensate for aforementioned shortcomings.

And the Supercilious Conceit Award goes to...???

Which is worse: Ion's naive hubris, or Socrates's passive-aggressive antagonism?  They're both arrogant jerks, IMHO.

P.S.  Yes, I get the point, Plato.  The ability to either create or interpret poetry is a divine intervention, a gift from the Muse...not a skill.  Was the whole song-and-dance really necessary?

Bad Etiquette?

Being new to the blogosphere I must ask, nay IMPLORE, my (perhaps non-existent) readers to tell me: is it Bad Etiquette to follow my own blog?  Manifest Narcissism, perhaps?

Hello. Nice to meet you.

This blog represents my official, active initiation into the blogosphere. Blogosphere being a term I bandy about only having heard it in others' conversations. And, to be perfectly honest, in a much more contentious sort of vibe than that I hope to foster here. I'll be posting about literary theory in the context of my journey through aforementioned course in the pursuit of my MA in English: Rhetoric and Composition. And whilst that may sound downright tortuous to many--though it's doubtful those masses have found their way to this description--I find this thing we call theory quite fascinating. In a brain-twisting, beat-your-head-against-the-wall, and epiphanous sort of way. And so, welcome, if you are so inclined. Enjoy.