Fashioning the Body: Versions of the Citizen, the Self, and the Subject

10/12 - Beauty Parlor Freewrite on Visibility

I felt that the part of Holmlund Elizabeth quoted was a bit off. I think that sex and gender are clearly displayed on bodies, sometimes more so than race. I think that, for the most part sex and gender can be apprehended by sight. This is because of the technologies of gender, perhaps. I don’t agree, first of all, that genitals are the true arbiter of sex, and everything else is a secondary characteristic. Even if it were, we have so many conventions that make gender visible. In a way, I think bodies that don’t visually express sex and gender aren’t tolerated. Clearly, there is a social need for sex and gender to be able to be visually apprehended.

10/16 – Life as Performance (Scott Turner Schofield Workshop)

(Obviously, I didn’t quite understand this prompt . . .)

What if every element of your day was a performance with an audience? I think it definitely can be seen that way. That way of thinking can make everything more fun, or it can make everything really difficult. This prompt makes me think of my friend Erin who spends a lot of time coming up with outfits. She calls them “elaborate costumes.” This can be a really fun way of playing with conventions of dressing and the meanings different clothes present to people, but it can also be difficult if you don’t have/can’t afford the clothes or only feel comfortable in a limited range of clothing. But isn’t that an important part of performance – what you’re comfortable performing?

I just noticed that Scott is writing categories on the blackboard, one of which is dialog. This is a particularly interesting one to me because I have a strong sense of the way I talk as dialog, probably because I can be very affected at times. One of my high school English teachers told me that if someone wrote down the way I talk in a novel, people would say it was unrealistic dialog. I think that the way I talk becomes dialog more consciously in certain spaces with certain people. At home with my roommates, we have a number of dialog frameworks that we shift between or combine in different ways, kind of like a game or competition. It’s very structured and very performative. We often communicate through saying things we don’t mean in certain ways,. And there’s an element of escalation, seeing how far we can go within a certain style of dialog. Throughout this, we are each others’ audience – we’re definitely performing for each other (in ways that resemble a contest) and with each other.