Am I too Canadian?

Okay so there may be no such thing to my fellow Canadians, but I wonder about it when I start getting responses back from US schools saying basically "thanks but no thanks" and yet all the Canadian schools so far are saying "please please come here!". I had thought that with my GPA, GRE scores, interesting professional background and all around scholarly potential (ahem!) that I would get some sort of a decent offer from one of the three US schools to which I applied.

Yes Georgetown accepted me, but not with funding and delving deeper into that program, I wonder now, in hindsight, if that is why they do all the flattering recruitment -- because they're hoping you'll pay the US$29K to attend. Emory was rude in their email followup (promising a refusal letter in the mail right away that hasn't arrived yet, three weeks later). Then today, the final rejection email -- UMass was polite but firmly refusing my potential for their program.

I'm so curious why I didn't make the US cut. I'll have to cultivate some US academic contacts, preferably on placement committees, so I can better understand what I did wrong in presenting myself to US schools. Given where I'm considering applying for my PhD in two years (yes I'm already looking to that), it would be good to get a game plan going on soon.

Amplifying our imaginations

Nice to find this article in Wired about videogames' positive effects on the human imagination. Written by the creator of The Sims, Will Wright, he suggests that the exploration, experiential learning and constant imagination stimulation provided by videogames fills a vital role in the lives of humans, especially children, in our world today. His point is that the daily lives of children are now so structured and controlled that they never have a chance to try out things and just play -- videogames offer that potential outlet. I find this a compelling statement, because it is a topic I've often brought up when talking about the everyday lived reality of today's youth.

While tangential to his overall argument, it was also nice to see someone echoing Kelly's dearly-held belief that watching someone play a videogame is never the same thing as playing one yourself. She's said to me more than a few times that the immersive aspects of gaming can only be felt and understood if you are participating fully yourself, firsthand, as a player. Wright seems to agree with this.

[Found via AL Daily ]

Must-attend lecture

I found out today that Sandra Harding will be giving a lecture at McGill on Tuesday, April 4 entitled "Women, Science and Modernity". I've read her stuff in methods and theory courses and she definitely seems to have an interesting mind. This might be an event that makes it worth missing an evening class.

Decision time

Just returned from a 6 day trip to Toronto, visiting friends and also doing the rounds of various students and faculty in the Communications and Culture joint programme at York/Ryerson. Met some amazing people there, who all seem to share at least some of my interests in digital culture, social theory, postmodernism and popular/consumer culture.

While everyone was super helpful, it was the city itself that is pushing me to make the decision in favour of Toronto. As I drove around, up and down the DVP on sunny spring days, and roaming throughout East York, the Annex, Leaside and Bathurst/St-Clair, I felt that ole tug at the heartstrings and flipflopping of my stomach. Oh yes, the love affair with that city is alive and well. Despite the changes I see everywhere, the increasingly rampant Americanization, it is still Toronto and still feels fundementally and viscerally like home.

The only thing holding me back is that York's offer is the smallest financially-speaking. Given how expensive Toronto is vis-a-vis accomodations, that does give me pause and makes Calgary and suburban Vancouver seem more attractive.

Tough choice. But it's decision time now.

What to do? What to do?

Digital qualitative methods

I attending an internal departmental seminar yesterday, in which the speaker, a post-doctoral fellow from the UK, presented "A sense of things". The point of his presentation was to use performativity and audio/visual methods to attempt to answer the questions:

• How do we become conscious of time (i.e. make time explicit)?
• How do we access the imagination?

In the Heideggerian sense, he suggested that the point of his research was not to arrive at an answer, but rather to find a new way to explore the original questions. I found his questions intriguing and I like the idea of using such methods to alter people's perceptions of their everyday mundane reality, by making their life "strange to them", in his words. I had issues though with the sparse way he fleshed it out for us and I question whether or not such performativity can actually allow any authentic access to the imagination in the sense of self.

His phenomenological bent aside, the idea of using visual methods to get beyond textual realities got me thinking of ways to do this when presenting digital experience. This seems to be a theme in my research these days -- I'm supposed to be doing a photographic assignment for my senior field research course.

Rather than only using photos of corporeal places, though, for this project, I think I might use screen snaps from a day in my life on the net and juxtapose them against past travel shots I've taken in Bermuda, Alaska, England and Norway to suggest the concept of travel as more than a corporeal activity. The underlying point, of course, is to show the net geist, the "there" that is there when on the net, the sense of place/space and environment that comes from being in the net 24/7. I expect this to juxtapose nicely with my other research project arguing against statistical data's notion and measurement of the Internet as a tool to be used.

And if I'm going to experiment with stuff like this, now is the time. I've only got four more weeks of undergrad study before I move on to the semi-big leagues...grad school, that is.....

Patriarchy and pregnancy

After having just finished writing a feminist theory in which I argue for the positive political ramifications for a woman to reject the patriarchal institution of motherhood and not be a mother, based on the writings of Adrienne Rich in her book Of Woman Born, I read this article in Foreign Policy magainze. It posits a causal link between patriarchy (which it claims comes and goes in cycles) and declining birth rates in the Western World. The claim is that it is the enlightened liberals who are not procreating and so the conservatives are bearing up to the challenge of replicating the world's population.

Grading goes online - but is it more objective?

The Chronicle of Higher Education published an article today called A New Way to Grade that deals with the computerized grading system devised by a Texas Tech professor. As someone who is fairly good at writing and who also likes to play with mechanics of style and grammar in papers, in order to work through possibilities or provide jarring emphasis on certain points, I'm not sure what I think about this type of system.

I'm thinking of a recent paper I wrote for an urban sociology course. In it, in order to answer the question about modern urban culture using Georg Simmel and Sharon Zukin, I deliberately aped their style when dealing with the issues close to their writing. Only at the end of the paper did I "speak" in my own voice, when talking about comparisons and contradictions and my own ideas. In my actual course here, the professor knows me, has graded me before and respects me, so he liked my experimentation with style/voice and gave me an A. Though I noted, somewhat subtly, at the outset of the paper that I would do this, something he caught on to as he knows my style now, it is a line that may have been missed in a system such as this Texas Tech one and I might not have done nearly as well.

I'm also curious about whether this application will catch on, which would mean that at some point in the next few years, as a grad student, I'll be required to use it to do my own grading.

This system may seem more objective, but the postmodernist in me wonders if the state of being objective should always be the goal?

Only 19 more assignments, reports and exams to go before the end of it all.

In a blatent attempt to imagine life apres the BA, an email from Land's End announcing their new SPF30 clothing got me thinking about summertime and summer sunshine. I suspect that this time will arrive sooner than I think, though probably not feel soon enough, given what I have left to do and read.

Piercing racial dichotomoy

Alternet does it again - this article illustrates why Crash was the right choice for Best Picture at the recent Oscars. It shows how race and discrimination cut both ways.

Uneasy feminism

I've started reading feminist theory from what is known as the "third wave feminism". It starts with the anti-racist movement and then moves into post-modern and post-structuralist feminism.

What bothers me though about the turn in this wave is the notion of embracing difference, not just of race, class and sexuality but also of differences of tactics and approaches. I get the sense from these readings that they are reifying the notion of women's nurturing as intrinsically female and therefore completely alien to men. The suggestion seems to be that this nurturing, supporting, emotional femininity is better than an apparently male logical analytical nature.

I keep wanting to ask in my class - why can't we both both? Why can't I use my cool head as much as my hot heart?

This article says as much too, better than I have put it here. When reading Audre Lorde's introduction to her book "The Master's tools will never dismantle the Master's house", I kept asking myself what's wrong with using the Master's tools against him? Why can't I be subversive AND inventive AND compassionate?

Seeking and discovering

I went looking for theories that would work into my feminist theory paper and instead found Audre Lorde's poetry. This one in particular spoke to me tonight.

All in a day's procrastination - Ch. II

The end of my final semester as a BA student is imminent... but will it beat the end of the world? [ flash required ]

...This is what you think about and look for on the net at this point in the semester.

Advancing the art

Oh the things you can find on the net when you're practicting the fine art of procrastination, in order to avoid the actual work that you know is due but which you're choosing to pretend doesn't exist....thereby playing the ostrich...

Example: Came across the Urban Dictionary tonight while attempting to pretend that I do not, actually, have to prepare to lead my class in my feminist theory course on Tuesday.

Also found this site full of cool t-shirts, linked through the UD site.

I'm running a straight 4.0 on procrastination this weekend!

Sourcing books

I can't count the number of times I've found a citation for a book that I would like to check out, but can't find it in my university library. Depending on the cost of the book, I'm often likely to buy it outright.

My online resources for sourcing these books have always been fairly limited in scope, however. I'd do the rounds of Indigo, Amazon.com and Amazon.ca, Alibris and Powells. If they didn't have them, I'd maybe check eBay but I'd probably just give up.

Then today, while looking for a book on discourse analysis, I stumbled across FetchBook. It is an inventory comparison system for booksellers and has over 160 or so different sources in its crawling system. It will even allow you to put in your country and then will give you a complete price quote for each seller, including shipping, in the currency of your choice. Nice!

This one will be going into my "Frequently used sources" folder in Mozilla.

Finding answers

"Spring break" as it is euphemistically called here, has started officially for me today. One week with no classes. But it is no true break, because while there are no classes, there is a lot of work to be done.

Case in point: I'm currently working on paper that asks me to respond to this question:

Critical Reflection: Are you Modern or a Postmodern?

For this assignment you may take a side in the Foucault/Habermas debate as long as you can make a claim as to what you think the debate is about. When taking a position be careful, consider what has been written, stay aware of the context, and try to imagine limitations and problems with your position as well as that of your “opponent.” Be aware of contradictions and ambiguities (hint: this is not a two-sided debate; beware of simple dichotomies).

I recognized immediately that I was far more post-modern than modern, but I'm not sure I fully appreciated how modern I was until I had a discussion with Kelly, who challenged me on some of my personal assumptions of my self and allowed me to see more clearly the fuzzy delineations between the two realms of thought.

Sadly we are only allowed to use the ten theorists from our coursepack of readings. I would have liked to do some background work using Baudelaire and Voltaire. I have a feeling I'd have had a strong affinity to Voltaire, who, according to the Wikipedia, is known for saying:

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities

...Meaning that if people believed in what is unreasonable, they will do what is unreasonable.

Considering world events of late, that remark seems to be still very much on the mark.

Credibility online

Reading this IHT story about endangered predators, I was struck not only by the old-fashioned and very un-weblike practice of laying out the story in four columns (a layout that almost guarantees people won't read it or like reading it online) but also the way in which the embedded auto-inserted paid advertising at the bottom undermines the credibility of the story itself.

It is rather grimly ironic that a story about the endangerment of marine predators like sharks, and that bemoans the catching and killing of sharks for trifles such as soup and jewellery, would feature advertisements below it for shark tooth pendants and necklaces.

Meeple is me

One of my professors claimed last night in class that you can tell the personality of someone by playing a few games of Risk with them. He argues that you'll quickly see if they're cowardly, collaborative, courageous or cut-throat. You'll know if you can trust them by whether or not they honour their bargains and allegiances and if they consistently win at the world domination variant, you'll have an idea of how ambitious and aggressive they are. He says that the best dating insurance, then, is to play a board game night with your potential beloved and pull out Risk. Play a few rounds. See how they play.

He was counselling this because he'd broken up with his girlfriend that morning and he argued that if he'd taken his own advice and played Risk with her, he might have known about all of her much earlier and saved himself quite a few months of effort.

This made me laugh rather hard...and then pause.

You see, I'm a boardgame geek. In fact, I'd have to confess they're a bit of an obsession for me. I blame it on my parents, who had an entire board game closet available to my brothers and I. Many an early Saturday morning was spent playing and fighting over Monopoly, Trouble, Battleship...you name it, we played it.

Since then, I've played literally hundreds of games. For those who know the 3D me, this is no surprise at all. And Risk counts among my favourite games of all time.

Parties and drinking be damned -- my favourite social evening involves a good dinner, a few nice beers and a half a dozen hours spent playing any of my current favourites like Puerto Rico, Settlers of Catan, Carcassone or any of the many silly but cutthroat versions of Munchkin. But I also like standard card games, including Wizard, Joker Rummy or Canasta

I even belong to a social club here in Montreal based on board games. We get together on Saturdays now and again and we play all kinds of games, though most tend to be the kinds of games you can only buy in stores like Montreal's Le Valet de Coeur or online. My biggest current obsession is Puerto Rico, and I'm finally grokking it. Though this past weekend, Kelly's 13 year old daughter trounced me rather badly. She's a very good player. Will have to schedule a few re-matches.

Apparently this obsession of mine means I'm a Meeple, an avid game player. And I now badly want this Meeple hoodie take on Settlers of Catan. *drool*

Oh! so..yeah..what kind of a Risk player am I? Put it this way...I'd rather play world domination Risk over mission Risk anyday. I've figured out how to win even without starting out in control of Australia or Africa. I've proven you can dwindle to a half dozen armies and still rally back to win the game. I honour my alliances but make them rarely. And I'm known for pursuing an ailing player hard to try to kill them off and grab their card sets.

It would be interesting to play Risk with my professor. Not sure I want him to see that side of me though. Cutthroat? That's me. Aggressive and enigmatic? Yes, check.

Think if I wupped him in Risk, he'd still give me an A+?

Questioning the Winter Olympics

I'll come clean here, as publicly as my tiny and marginal piece of the I-Space can be called public.

I am an Olympics junkie.

I admit it -- every year there has been an Olympics since I was old enough to understand what they were, I've plopped my butt in front of the TV and watched from beginning to end. From the parade of teams and flags to the extinguishing of the flame, I'm there, watching and cheering, not just for Canada but for any underdogs who attempt to compete with the powerhouses of the world.

And perhaps because of my childhood hometown of Winnipeg, colloquially often referred to as "Winterpeg", I've always been particularly partial to the Winter Olympics.

So it shouldn't be that surprising that I was all excited about the opening ceremonies today, for the Winter Olympics in Turin (Turino?) Italy.

Just as I was about to pack it up here at my laptop and move down to the TV, I read this article. And I paused.

And I questioned myself.

By watching, by participating in the spectacle and giving my eyes over to the commercials, am I contributing to the elitism of the Games?

Oh I'll probably go downstairs anyway now, but at the same time, now I'm wondering. Now I'm being self-critical.

Now I'm not so sure I should be fanning the flames.

Heroes and icons - possible or passé?

With the death of Betty Friedan and a few other iconic feminists in the last few weeks, this Alternet article asks what will happen now? Where are the future feminist icons?

That lament, along with this CFP for a book about superheroes, got me thinking about the whole nature of heroes and icons. Are they actually possible now? Given that most people understand that there is a small wizened cynical scared person behind the curtain of all the greater-than-life wizardry and wonder they see on screen, read about in the paper and consider buying in stores, can anyone emerge anymore with all the qualities expected of an icon or a superhero? Or are we destined to live in a world from herein where pop starlets and spoiled heiresses and jumping-on-couches movie stars act as second-rate substitutes?

I think through these things, too, in the context of my current Contemporary Cultural Theory course, which is setup as an ideological wrestling match between the great German moderns (Think Habermas, Luhmann, Adorno) and the great French post-moderns (think Foucault and Lyotard), all moderated and mediated by the Americans (Haraway and Jameson come to mind). It would seem to me that heroes and cultural icons belong to a world in which meta-narratives are alive and thrive and in which people are able to not only suspend disbelief, but to believe uncritically from the outset.

I don't see this world in existence around me today. Fractured consciousness, stunted attention spans and a deep cynicism for anything resembling Truth, Beauty and Freedom are what I see reigning instead. Short of the major prophets acting as heroes and icons in fundamentalist religious discourse, and the wanna-be hero that is US President George Bush, Western culture is no longer birthing great heroes.

In the feminist camp, young activist feminists are trying to nominate and raise up certain possible influential women to that status, through things like the Real Hot 100 list, but the sheer number of feminism-is-dying journal articles and newspaper pieces shows they have a long uphill battle ahead.

In a po-mo world, then, are heroes and icons possible or passé?

Women's double lives?

While I accept the possibility that social theory can affect a profoundly transformative effect on a person’s beliefs, ideas and preconceptions, it has been my experience that such theory is rare. Therefore, it was with no small amount of shock and awe that I found myself deeply moved by Adrienne Rich’s (1980) article, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Lesbian Existence”*.

The premise of Rich’s theory is deceptively simple: All women exist on a continuum of female intimacy and bonding. This continuum of “woman-identified experience” (p.648) is normal and natural for women, but it becomes stunted and thwarted by patriarchal systems of socialization. These systems and structures isolate women from each other and push them towards hetronormativity in the service of male power, as evidenced in procreation, property and security. Women, however, are not conscious of the oppression inherent to their sexual choice, however, and therefore deny themselves the full potential richness of a female-centric life.

Given my own preoccupation with ideas of choice, agency and power, I suppose it should not surprise me that I had such a reaction to her work. Because she deals with the issue of women’s awareness (or lack thereof) of the knowledge of their potential for alternate ways of being, her argument strikes me as having a rather Foucaldian slant. Akin to his twinning of the concepts of power/knowledge, Rich seems to be saying that the lack of knowledge of choice itself is what disempowers women. I see a link, too, between knowledge and consciousness in her writing, or a lack thereof in the lives of women. I find this argument persuasive – In the distractions of modern life and the multiple demands to which a woman submits, there is often, sadly, little to help her to understand the nature of her own subjective oppression.

I find that Rich muddies her theoretical waters through her use of the term lesbian, however. At times, she seems to want to reclaim the term from its subordination to an implication of sexuality, in order that she may use it as a sign for a deep and apparent asexual universal bond between women. Yet, at other times, she links it very directly with woman-woman sexuality and buts it up against the term “erotic”. Juxtapose this ambiguity or contradiction with her argument about a pervasive socially-ingrained revulsion towards sexual lesbianism in many people, and I can now better understand my fellow classmates’ strong initial reactions and widespread rejection of her central thesis in our classroom discussion of Rich’s work. I see now how and why it centred around the term lesbian.

Also, as provocative as Rich’s argument seems, and despite her token discussions of particular ethnicities and their experiences of womanhood, her argument still seems overly universalistic. In her desire to generalize her argument out to include all women, she ignores the other determinants at work in “sex colonization” (p644). Finally, at times, her argument has the texture and tone of a manifesto, evident whether she is calling women to bestir themselves to action against hegemonic heterosexuality, pointing out what is wrong with existing feminist theory or simultaneously exalting and bemoaning the courage it takes to be a self-defined lesbian in a patriarchal world.

Despite these criticisms, I still find myself profoundly affected by her ideas and argument. The article led me face-to-face, as it were, with the unconscious blindness inherent in my own apparent heterosexuality. While I found many passages noteworthy in this article, the passage that stuck out for me in particular was Rich’s discussion of the imposition of a female “double life”:

Nor can it be assumed that women…who married, stayed married, yet dwelt in a profoundly female emotional and passional [sic] world, “preferred” or “chose” heterosexuality. Women have married because it was necessary, in order to survive economically, in order to have children who would not suffer economic deprivation or social ostracism, in order to remain respectable, in order to do what was expected of women because coming out of “abnormal” childhoods they wanted to feel “normal”, and because heterosexual romance has been represented as the great female adventure, duty and fulfilment (p.654)

I see much of myself in this passage. And so I am left questioning myself. Given my own troubled background, given my long history of struggle between wanting to stop the bullying and just be normal versus wanting to be able to walk my own self-defined life path and normality be damned, between wanting to rejoice in being female and not trusting my femininity to get me what I want out of life, have I been living the double life of which Rich speaks? I have always prided myself on my own ability to live a conscious life and be aware of the reasons and factors that have influenced my being. But how conscious have I been, really? Where am I on the continuum? Given my life choices to date, am I even on the continuum?

Rich’s theory has affected me. In doing so, she has perhaps fulfilled her ultimate intent behind the article: to sound a clarion call to women everywhere that jolts them into awareness of the extent of their unconscious duplicity in their own sexual submission. I hear that call. I am aware now. If social theory is truly about affecting social change in any degree, Rich’s theory is a compelling example of just how possible that can be.

*Rich, A. (1980). Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence.
Signs, 5(4), 631-660.