For those interested in the form of the form, specifically the form of the book, this is a great essay by a well respected critic in the field.

http://people.virginia.edu/~jrd8e/research.htm

Looking for:

-creative thinkers interested in the big ideas and the specifics which make them interesting, dedication, good communicators and collaborators who want to create a synergistic, dynamic, exciting, respectful learning experience.

-others who are interested in reading theory and experimenting with it (experimental critical writing), exploring and blurring the line between symbolic/real, creating and pairing art /music with theory/ideas/experimentation, liberation of meaning, constraints, and figuring out what that all means. Culminating in: the creation of The Book (using bookbinding, letterpress), and really expanding and being loose with the definition of "book." Hybridity = fabulous. Ideas: Analog-Digital, DVD, CD included, foldouts, popups, palimpsests, performative-happenings, prints (photography, printmaking etc), textiles, sound... lets do something that's never been done before... I'm thinking with grant money we could make a run of 100 copies. Of course this is all oh so flexible. If you like some of these ideas and want to incorporate your own skills and specific point of interest into this project- that's the idea.

Here's some ideas

Week 1-5

a)read texts: theory (gender, media, systems, semiotics/linguistics, author-reader dynamic), secondary texts explaining and riffing on theory, experimental fiction etc

b)talk about the text, ideas, and explain/learn with each other, watch films etc

c)"Fuck with shit"- S. Hendrics

-don't let the text read you

-liberate hidden possibilities of meanings hidden in the text

d) Make art, do whatever feels right for you in your artistic expression of these ideas/texts

Week 6-7/8

e) Make the book/books/art/stuff all come together as tangible objects

Original Quotation from "Order is Beauty" in The Body Has a Head by Gustav Eckstein:

"Breathing is affected from beyond the body, is affected from within the body, to the end that the body shall always have the exact molecules in the exact quantity. Attempt to change that...Better bow your head and admit you are driven by ancient law. Or, try to deny the law, to convince yourself of the law. Hold your breath. Keep oxygen out, keep carbon dioxide in, use up the one and pile up the other, and though you are firm in your resolve, a next breath will crash through."

constraint- Antonymic translation:

Stasis/suffocation is separate from the internal bodily structure, the origin being that the external will never have the lost, anonymous organs of the undefined quality. Languish in repetition. Best raise your feet and deny we aren't dismissive of modern/contemporary chaos/systems. And, ignore your interest in chaos to remain unsure of it. Inhale. Let carbon dioxide in, keep oxygen out, store down the two, or deplete up the one, and even if you are careless in our apathy, a previous suffocation will not reboot.

After Clinic, I studied up on Donna Haraway and Cyborg Feminism. I found this rad cartoon illustrating Cyborg Theory. It seems especially important for its concern about the state of the body in the technology/information age, and also its account of race, class, and gender in this emergent culture/era.

I've been thinking about how cartoons/comics and quizzes/personality tests have been gendered male and female respectively, at least in my own generation's upbringing. ("Boys" read comic books about male and female superheroes with "perfect" bodybuilder-like physiques who play gender-normative roles, and "girls" read magazines with tips on how to conform to impossible, standardized beauty ideals and sex-gender normative quizzes that sort them into acceptable categories for consumption of self-identification).

So, perhaps using the comic format to talk about feminism is subversive? Also, I've noticed that Fausto-Sterling uses the cartoon format to illustrate key concepts from her book as well.

http://barclaybarrios.com/courses/cyberlit/media/cyborg1.html

A Re-elaboration of the Theory of Power

    In framing his theory of power, Foucault looks beyond the questions of free will and authority, past questions that are central to the concepts of law and order in Western societies. Instead of merely asking “What is sovereign? What bond of obedience ties individuals to the sovereign?” questions reworked even by the Existentialists, he follows a course of analysis that asks different questions. These questions, he says also, “concern our bodies, our lives, our daily existences” (Gordon 187), but conceive of relations of power which are “not purely and simply a projection of the sovereign’s great power over the individual; they are rather the concrete, changing soil in which the sovereign’s power is grounded…and make it possible for it to function” (Gordon 187).

The Oxford English Dictionary includes these definitions for the word “sovereign:”

1. Of persons: Having superior or supreme rank or power 2. Of or belonging to, characteristic of, supremacy or superiority 3. A free citizen or voter of America. Sovereignty, then, has a duality in everyday meaning, being both supreme rank and independence or freedom, and is defined using the same slippery word- power - at which we are trying to grasp. If being sovereign can mean both subjugating others and the condition of being free, then perhaps the word “freedom” needs clarification. Some of the OED’s 30+ definitions of “free”: 1. Not in bondage to another. 2. Guiltless, innocent, acquitted. 3. Showing absence of constraint or timidity in one's movements. 4. Released or exempt from work or duty. 5. Of power or energy: Disengaged, available for ‘work’. Said of workmen who are not members of a trade union. Freedom can be both the exemption from work, and also the state of being ready for work.

Some topics discussed:

We started off by looking at the form of the form- If the form of the message can be conceived of as a part of the discourse we partake in, then what are the social, historical, anthropological, and biological conditions in which they were formulated and what effect do they have, including being gendered forms themselves?

We looked at the Quiz format utilized by Kate Borstein in "The Gender Workshop," and what it might mean to create/use an interactive theory workbook that plays with the teen magazine format. We got a common framework for discussing this format by looking at/filling out quizzes from Cosmopolitan, Seventeen, and Men's Fitness (in breakout groups and then all together).

We discussed Audre Lorde's concept of "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house," asking "Is it effective to use the quiz/personality test format, even ironically, to encourage deconstruction of categories and mechanisms of construction?"

some ideas/concepts we came up with:

-Borstein's Quiz as adapted to people who normally would be excluded from most quiz categories, not being the target market. Perhaps reversing isn't the answer, but a part of the process? A 1st step for everyone (for Gender Outlaws to be included in a conventional format, and for man/woman identified people to question their assumptions.)

-Women and Men's Magazine Quizzes often assumed a privileged status of the reader- prepared for heterosexual, binary gender comfortable youth with expendable income and minimal social concerns except how to get into the mind of or seduce the "opposite sex."

- Myers-Briggs personality tests, SAT tests- What/who are they designed for, for what function, usefulness? Who is excluded and from what? Do they really depict us and our changing senses of selves?

-History of the personality test (german jewish refugee post WWII designed to screen/address the characteristics that designate a person capable of being complicit in genocide, later used against the designer's will by the Nixon administration to screen cabinet members, aids, and currently employed as tools in the hiring process to screen for emotional and identity "abnormalities," and thievery-potential, especially by corporations.