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February 2, 2001, 5:45 p.m. || rethinking semantics

I used to think the popular anarchist spelling of "AmeriKKKa" was a bit much (you know, racisms are multiple, at once insidious and banal, and it does no good to conflate them under a single image of extremism) but with John "Up with the Confederacy!" Ashcroft confirmed at U.S. Attorney General, I may have to re-think that opinion.

10:43 a.m. || i was a tomboy

Edited 6:49 p.m., upon further reflection and cross-referencing. Er, I'll probably end up editing or adding to this later. Again.

L took "tomboy testimonials" from the young women as evidential -- as proof that the "I" uttering the words, "I was the biggest tomboy," harbored a nascent critique of gender regulation as a ten year-old climbing trees, besting the boys. The implication is that "authoritative" experience of being a tomboy is somehow the thing that gave these women their feminist leanings, but of course, these are the stories we tell ourselves in hindsight: the realization of first girl-girl love, the outrage of having to wear a dress to cover scabby knees. We review the events, the small details, of the past through a particular lens to create a narrative of our development, i.e., the coming-out story, the "tomboy to feminist" tale.

Listening to one woman after another testify to being told to behave and refusing, I worried, as I do (and as a former tomboy), about the value of relating personal experience in the classroom without a more complicated analysis -- and this time I also worried about the other girls, the girls who did not grow up tomboys but enjoyed their dolls and their dresses, the girls who had different experiences growing up, and yet also came to a critique of gender regulation.

That is, the assumed "evidence" of the experience of being a tomboy would seem to exclude (by elision or implication, if not deliberate shoving) other avenues of coming to feminist politics.

(Side note: Earlier in the semester I had already broken a rule of L's classroom-- I had critiqued "consciousness-raising" and the authority of experience in women's studies. I said, "Well, there are still some women's studies departments --not many-- that continue on operate with a C-R model of the 1970s. I have a friend, an avowed feminist, who took a women's studies class and was asked on the first day of class what men had done to her to bring her to women's studies. She was insulted by the idea that somehow she had to testify to some specific oppressive circumstance, and that her feminist politics was a result." L looked at me, and moved on. Eek.)

And though experience is (erroneously) seen as the valued mode of apprehension, as a reliable means of knowing, the experience of "being a girl" is never stable or singular, in meaning or lived reality (e.g., ask someone who is transgendered). Nor does the experience of being a girl or a tomboy or working-class or Asian American or any combination thereof, et cetera, guarantee a specific political position. (I feel certain I've said this about a million times elsewhere.) The meaning of any given "experience" is never inherent or fixed-- it must be articulated, it is itself based on representation. Or as Joan Scott writes, "Experience is at once always already an interpretation and is in need of interpretation....It is always contested, always therefore political."

And so of course, how we theorize "experience" is also always political.

I am admittedly over-suspicious of the value of "experience" as a (supposedly unmediated) source of knowledge in feminist politics. (The problematic formulation of a feminist agenda from "women's experience(s)" created the very narrow analyses of the white, middle-class women's movement of the 1960s and '70s, for instance.) I once chronicled the downward spiral of riot grrrl as the tranformative index of "the personal is political" became some other thing, a monstrous thing. The political become personal, and a policing phenom, and it tore girls up. The authority of experience became a mechanism of silencing other girls who might not be able to testify, score high on the oppression scale, cash in on "oppressed" identities (some girls and boys had lists) like commodities. Claims to be "working class" were trumped by those who claimed "poor" and then finally "criminal class" -- authority to speak was granted accordingly. Class was understood as "real" only insofar as it affected behavior, and capitalism as that which enabled class identities, but simultaneously political economy was denounced as "masculine" academic manuveuring and too abstract to be useful to "real people."

(I remember being horrified, at this and so many other things.)

It was a weird moment, like watching roadside accidents happening all around. It only lasted two years, at the most, but it was a bloody affair. The reductive psychologizing of experience and politics left so many reeling in its wake. (Now that it's over, we speak of it like a collective nightmare.)  

It's not that I want my students to not speak of their experiences. I realize that this classroom might very well be their first time in thinking through a political lens their own lives, and neither is this my classroom alone. (I would do this differently.) And I know too many (usually straight, usually white, and/or usually male, though not always) activists and/or intellectuals of realpolitick who could certainly stand to recognize that the lived realities of certain bodies cannot be flattened out with appeals to rational abstraction and the zero-sum sociality of a (Habermasian) public sphere.

But I don't want the lived experience of being a tomboy to be the authoritative experience of nascent feminist resistance, or the privileged narrative of childhood challenges to gender. This kind of argument --that a certain lived experience is the foundation, the guarantee, of a certain political position-- closes down a more critical inquiry into the ways in which subjectivity is produced, agency made possible or circumscribed, the ways in which race and gender and class intersect to create different meanings for "girlhood," and the ways in which politics organizes our lives and how we understand these experiences. And I want the other girls to say, "Well, I loved Barbie but I'm somehow still in this classroom. What does that tell you?" Or I want to be able to say (without feeling like I just stopped conversation short), "What counts as gender transgression, and why? Are there ways in which resistance might be invisible, or less obvious? How do we know what any given experience means, anyway?"

And I'd like "experience" to be taken as another kind of evidence, the evidence not of "truth" but of the workings of ideology, maybe, the evidence of how the personal is profoundly political. (It's a subtle but powerful difference.) I want somehow that this might lead to a critical recognition of discursive architectures, I want them to remember that the political is constituted in social and cultural forms outside of their own experiences.

some readings on "experience:" Joan Scott, "Experience," in Feminists Theorize the Political, eds. Judith Butler and Joan Scott. Diana Fuss, "Essentialism in the Classroom," in Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference.

9:32 a.m. || how to be horrified at what MTV believes about young black men

"They were trying so hard to market Save the Last Dance to young black men between 18-24," she said. "They had all these alternate titles they thought were less 'girly' and would appeal more to boys -- and they all had variations of 'booty' in 'em. Shake Your Booty, Booty Dance, Booty Call." J rolls her eyes expressively. "I told them the last one was already a movie."