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

Thinking about what sort of bodies are abject...

"Lakshmi before surgery to remove her 'parasitic twin' that stopped developing in the womb. A two-year-old Indian girl, born with four arms and four legs, is making a good recovery after a 27-hour operation last week. Doctors say her condition is stable and will decide later this week whether to move her from the intensive care unit."

 

It's also interesting that this girl had eight limbs, like some Hindu gods. While this may seem like a disability that would cause this girl a lot of hardship in her life, I wonder if she is treated with more dignity because her culture is more familiar with images of multiple limbs. I wonder if anyone thought she could be an incarnation of Lakshmi- while this little girl might really benefit from becoming "normal," and who am I to say she shouldn't get that chance, it's worth thinking about how she might have been thought of in a time before advanced surgery could transform her. It's kind of eugenic- and reminds me of sex-assignment surgery of intersex infants- isn't it worth asking -"what's wrong with being this way?"

Looking up the name Lakshmi on wikipedia, I found that it the name of a Hindu goddess:

Physically, goddess Lakshmi is described as a fair lady, with four arms, seated on a lotus, dressed in fine garments and precious jewels. Her expression is always calm and loving. The most striking feature of the iconography of Lakshmi is her persistent association with the lotus. The meaning of the lotus in relation to Shri-Lakshmi refers to purity and spiritual power. Rooted in the mud but blossoming above the water, completely uncontaminated by the mud, the lotus represents spiritual perfection and authority.

Lakshmi is the Hindu goddess of wealth, fortune, love and beauty, the lotus flower and fertility. Representations of Lakshmi (or Shri) are found in Jain and Buddhist monuments, in addition to Hindu temples. Analogous to the Greek Aphrodite and Roman Venus - who also originated from the oceans - she is generally thought of as the personification of material fortune, beauty and prosperity.

Maria
Fine Draft
Winter Project Proposal

This winter I would like to do two smaller projects. The first is to write a screenplay for a short film that will be 20 to 25 minutes long, and the second is to help Blythe and Mellissa as an assistant on their production of Genet’s The Maids. I have wanted to write and produce a film for a long time but don’t have much experience. Although film and theatre are different mediums and certainly have their own particular characteristics and challenges I think helping out with rehearsals, set building, and other technical aspects of the play will be helpful when it comes to directing and producing my own film.
The movie I want to write is going to be a comedy about free will. It involves two main characters, Cynthia and Evan, identified as a boy and a girl who are stuck in their lives and daily routines until a mystical experience happens and suddenly transforms the both of them into “extreme” (completely uninhibited and impulsive) versions of themselves.
The two biggest influences behind the idea for this film are the essay Theory of the Derive by Guy Debord in the Situationist International and the 1928 Film The Crowd by King Vidor. The spirit of the Derive and living life according to your inspiration in the moment is something which is embraced and exaggerated in the film in a hopefully funny and also hopefully interesting way, and it will explore what might happen if we were to fully live out the idea and how doing so might enrich or fulfill our lives and also how it could damage them. The movie The Crowd is an influence because of it’s themes of mechanization (and determinism) and especially because of how this was portrayed through the cinematography of the film. I would like to incorporate some aspects of the style of the film when I get to the process of storyboarding. Also I want to reference two particular ideas from the movie. The first is a scene where the main character first gets to the city and goes into an elevator and faces the wrong direction and gets corrected, and the second is a scene with a street performer and the hopelessness that this figure conveys and also it’s implications in terms of social class.

More images and things that I've been looking at. This time it's a little bit of a mishmash from the Communication Arts Photography Annual, some stragglers from the Design Annual, and a few other items.

Winter project proposal! Environmental Portraits on Identity. 

Timothy
Concept Rhyming Paper #3
Essay Questions


THE SELF


Question:
Through the destruction of the heart machine in the film Metropoilis, both upper and lower levels were deemed useless due to the loss of power. How could equality between the two classes of Metropolis be gained through the destruction of the heart machine?

My Answer:

Through the loss of the machine, the city was deemed useless. The lower levels were flooded deeming them useless as well. Yet at the end of the film, the head, heart, and body were united creating a triad. Through this triad, it would appear that equality was gained To create equality would be for both the lower and upper class to act like the machine they destroyed. For the machine they would have to create a democracy, a new form of government and organization. A new machine to power the city would have to be built, yet through this process might occur difficulties in equality, so it would have to be a cooperative movement, like a well oiled machine.


THE SUBJECT

Question:
How is identity evolving through gender and sexuality? How would Butler define identity? What is gender’s role in identity?

My Answer:
It seems that Butler isn’t interested in defining identity. It’s a constantly moving perception both within others and us. She’s interested in how gender plays into identity. Like identity, gender sometimes isn’t a set thing. Like identity, gender is moving. Shaping identity in numerous ways.

THE CITIZEN

Question:
How is gender an ideology? Is it? How Teresa de Lauretis talk about ideology in context with gender?

My Answer:
- Ideology: “visionary theorizing, a system of concepts about human life or culture,” (Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary).
- “Replacing ideology with gender in Athusser’s quote: “All ideaology has the function (which defines it) of ‘constituting’ concrete individuals as subjects,’ (Althusser, 171),” (de Lauretis, 7). Gives us a a parallel between gender and ideology.

I first fell in love the camera during high school. Wait, scratch that. I first fell in love with making images in middle school taking digital photographs and then altering them digitally. Years later in highschool, I found the black and white dark room and I was sold. Taking photographs since then has almost replaced writing for me. While before I used to write about everything, now I photograph it. Through this new mode of expression and creation, I used the camera to photograph people and to learn about them. Through the use of my camera I have a discussion with light, shadow, focus, and perception. This is my mode of communication. This is my prosthesis. 

 

Whoopie cushion

 

The whoopie cushion is here for my amusement. It makes me smile when I'm stressed. Like the camera it creates room for discussion. By blowing it up, and placing it on an unknowing subjects chair, it creates mode of humor. It's lung like shape allows air in silent and out rudely.  It's a simple and cheap way to make a room laugh or become uncomfortable. 

 

This is my project proposal.

I've been wondering how discourse is being shaped in this country, especially with words like "freedom" and "democracy"  losing and aquiring meanings. This is a cool essay on the subject. I think it's really quite readable and explains rhetoric, interpretation, and hermeneutics.

"The Discourse of President George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden: A Rhetorical Analysis and Hermeneutic Interpretation"

Forum: Qualitative Social Research

http://www.qualitative-research.net/fqs-texte/3-02/3-02cronick-e.htm#g562

I’ve watched two Jean Luc Godard films this quarter with my housemate who is doing a video contract based around Godard. I’ve watched Masculin/Feminin and My Life to Live.

 One of my favorite parts of Masculin/Feminin is the fake survey questions that Jean-Pierre asks throughout, combined with actual real-time interviews about love, love-making, and politics. This reminded me of the survey questions we came up with in class, and the discussion of the form of the form. Apparently, these are the questions that Goddard wants to ask “the children of Marx and CocaCola.” The questions are personal, political, sexual, philosophical, literary, and sometimes nonsensical. The film’s characters are in the condition of being young, curious about sex, and caught between communism and capitalism, revolutionary ideals and teen pop. Godard’s thoughts on the over-the-top masculinity and femininity of American Hollywood gender roles is seen in a film-within-a-film parody.

In My Life to Life, the main character is down on her luck and seems to not want to run back to the shelter of a man who bores her but loves her. Even though she has a job at a record store, she cannot pay rent, and becomes a prostitute. The film is a critique of liberal humanist idea of being responsible for all your own actions and things that happen to you. Even though her philosophy is that she is responsible for her own life, even the smallest things show that she has no control over her life at all actually. Eventually she is shot when she is being traded for money against her will- she has become a sex slave and is unable to get out of the system she thought was about supply and demand, with her in some degree of control over events, who she sleeps with, and how much she makes. It’s all a fascade. I don’t think Goddard is suggesting that we have no agency over our lives, but is instead showing how we can become trapped in a mindset, a mode of discourse that then actually does entrap us materially. (Before she becomes a prostitute, a prostitute friend tells her that she should leave and go to the tropics, which she thinks is totally ridiculous. It seems less ridiculous than becoming a sex slave.) There is so much more to say about this movie, but one of the reasons I wanted to talk about it is because of the theme of prostitution in our readings this quarter.

We are institutionalized to “know thyself” in which we form our lives chasing after ourselves.  Identity relates to the concept that a body can be segmented and known. Through the ascription of a label, we demarcate and produce the “other” who are unlike ourselves. It is in the individual sense that we compare and contrast, find our functions in society licit or illicit and thus justify our beings.  For my winter quarter project, I want to examine identity, to expose and explore the body strapped down by various categories.  I am not looking to make a succinct statement about identity but to problematize labels through blending techniques.  My challenge is to establish a space, which extensively looks at the concept from various angles.  The product of this inquiry will materialize as the ‘body on tape’.  The notion of a taped body highlights the concept of identity as a boundary of the body, identity taping down the body (holding it in place), and sealing the body as an idea. I plan to mess with (and blend) various forms, particularly through playing with points of view.  By using the style of experimental critical writing, I want to keep with the motif and not be limited by the alphabet, but use ‘sound’ language as well.  Not only through the use of sound will I break the flow of the writing, but also through playing with the space in and outside the distinction between narrative and expository writing.  Jenny and I plan to work closely and interact with each other’s manifestations, as we are both interested in this concept of identity.

        The idea for this project springboards from Scott Turner Schofield’s workshop.  He posited the sex/gender/sexuality inequation and questioned whether our use of labels along with the subsequent reinterpretation and coining of new labels was actually viable.  For the most part, we unconsciously conceive of and strap our bodies down to exemplify these labels, which we either internalize or ascribe to ourselves.  In this case, labels are normative for we cannot conceive of a world outside identity politics.  Moreover, we only have the notion of identity because we engage in and establish a certain form of discourse, which produces the individual commodity.  By exploring via the medium of experimental critical writing, it becomes possible to shift the language of identity politics.