#damonique

[cocks-and-chicks]

Pullet Huddle by RedDrgn056 Via Flickr: Kali, Victoria, and Tanglefoot

[performingwomen2016-blog]

Postmodernism allows for and maintains a sense of self separate from a collective group. It disorients one’s identity by hindering the ability to identify a subject through the experience of another. Brown references Fredric Jameson to understand this concept as a sense of disorientation, an incapability of locating the self and thus, getting lost, because the self exists only in or reference to the collective presence of others (34 - 35).

Identify the forces that influence Apenyo’s body and sense of space. How does she respond to these forces? (How) Do these forces influence her relationship to the space and herself...

[performingwomen2016-blog]

Our spaces, while requiring some definition and protection, cannot be clean, sharply bounded, disembodied, or permanent: to engage postmodern modes of power and honor specifically feminist knowledges, they must be heterogenous, roving, relatively noninstitutionalized, and democratic to the point of exhaustion

(Brown 50)

Think back to #ResentingReproduction, why might postmodern spaces refrain from being permeant, especially if they possibly hold the capacity to challenge traditional, narrow and dominant notions of identity politics?

[performingwomen2016-blog]

From Postmodernism to Feminism

“[F]eminist attachment to the subjects is more critically bound to retaining women’s experiences, feelings, and voices as sources and certificates of postfoundational political truth. When the notion of the unified self and coherent subject is abandoned, we not only cease to be able to speak of woman or of women in an unproblematic way, we forsake the willing, deliberate, and consenting ‘I’ that liberalism’s rational-actor model of the human being proffers, and we surrender the autonomous,, rights-bearing fictional unity that liberalism promises to secure” (40).

What claims does Brown make in this statement? How is she understanding feminism here, and throughout the essay? What’s feminism's relationship to postmodernism

[performingwomen2016-blog]

Samuel Verner and Male Ethics

Samuel Verner -- Prebystrian minister, teacher of morality “chided [Congolese natives] for immodest dress and sexual behavior” but had two children by an African orphan girl.

"[Male ethics] did not try to define a field of conduct and a domain of valid rules--subject to the necessary modulations--for the two sexes in common; it was an elaboration of masculine conduct carried out from the viewpoint of men in order to give form to their behavior" (Foucault 22-23).

What parts of his behavior is Samuel giving form to. How is he giving form to this behavior. (Just pretend periods are questions)

[performingwomen2016-blog]

Scientific American agreed: ‘The Congo pygmies [are] small, apelike, elifsh creatures [...] . They live in the dense tangled forests in absolute savagery...while they exhibit many apelike features in their body

(Washington 76)

How are Congolese people depicted? By whom? Why? Does primitivity sell? What do we imagine the people depicting the Congolese to be like?

[performingwomen2016-blog]

She was displayed nude or bedecked in animal skins with accoutrements--spears and bones--that her handlers thought fitting for a ‘Hottentot,’ as her people were disparagingly called by Europeans’

Washington 84

“Performance as a means of disappearing the self; allowing the performance to eclipse the appearance of the self. “ (Dolan 153)

What happens when the subject’s body is eclipsed by the narrative and performance of the imagined character? Using Dolan’s quote how do we locate Baartman in relationship the Venus Hottentot?

[performingwomen2016-blog]

Henry Moss as Told by Himself

“Proudly straddling a museum chair or slowly strolling the stage of a saloon, Moss peeled the linen from his variegated body in a tantalizing medical striptease while he unreeled his own story” (80)

How does Moss’s story compare to others? What does telling his own story provide him? (How) Does he perform agency in being a spectacle despite circumstances?