Tuesday, April 2, 2013

yours, mine, ours? what is a femaleman across time, generations, and politics?


Tuesday, 2 April – Marked and Unmarked: female man
• read at least 1 /2 of The Female Man (published in 70s, but probably written in 60s, and with references to life in the 50s too)



REMEMBER THIS STUDY COVERS USAGE IN THE 1980s: 
From Gastil 1990: 640 (link here): "An interesting question that this study raises is which alternative pronouns function most effectively as generics. If he must go, which pronouns might replace it? Recall that for the college student population studied herein, they appears the most generic of the three pronouns listed above. Using they as a generic, however, does not solve the problem of males producing very few female images under any pronoun condition. Future research might compare the effects of he/she and they with more promising alternatives. Reversing he/she, writing it as she/he, might cause males to imagine more women. (A preliminary investigation, using a method similar to this study's sug- gests that she/he does evoke significantly more images of women than he, he/she, and they for both female and male European-American, Midwestern undergraduates.) One might use she to refer to some individuals and he in refer- ence to others. Or one might simply use she as a generic, counterbalancing the persistence of male bias. Even Strunk and White (1979), read literally, endorse this final suggestion: "If you think she is a handy substitute for he, try it and see what happens" (p. 61)."

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Quakers use female man: KK paper here.

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THINK AHEAD!! MAKE YOUR PLANS NOW!

Thursday, 4 April – (fe)MALE 
• finish up The Female Man
Tuesday, 9 April – Who sees which kinds of stories and why?
• read Merrick 1, 2 (& 3 if you can)
Thursday, 11 April – KATIE AT UVA – When it Changed – Irene will facilitate
• read a Bateson metalogue (link online here: Why a Swan?) & When it Changed (link online here in pdf) & if not already, Merrick 3
Katie will be out of town at a Bateson event and you all will run the class yourselves with the help of Irene our TA!
• work on Whileaway!
Tuesday, 30 April –  NO CLASS: WHILEAWAY PLANNING
Thursday, 2 May – NO CLASS: WHILEAWAY PLANNING
SATURDAY, 4 MAY -- WHIILEAWAY MEETS AT MULTIMEDIA STUDIO FROM 1-3PM! INVITE FRIENDS, AND THINK HOW TO ADD TO THE FESTIVITIES! TALK WITH MELISSA TOO! 

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QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER OVER THE NEXT TWO WEEKS! 
The Female Man: sex/gender? nature/nurture? how are these implicated?
Why and how has the Female Man been used for the last two decades in feminist theory?
How might we still use it, or how would we need to alter our appeal to it?
The Merrick book will help us think about these questions?

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some resources to use to consider this question along with Merrick: CHECK OUT LINKS!

•EPIGENETICS: the epigenetic spin on nature vs. nurture from Science

=What is epigenetics and how would knowledge of it have altered how Russ worked out her novel The Female Man
=Or would it have made any difference at all? how might that work? 


•IS NATURE ACTUALLY "VERSUS" NURTURE? WHY SHOULD WE REDO THAT?
=Evelyn Fox Keeler: who is she? how does she play a role in feminist theories of science?
=Her recent award winning book: 2010 The Mirage of a Space between Nature and Nurture. Duke
=what can you grasp from descriptions of the book?
=How does it shift feminist science interests in making nature and nurture mutually exclusive, opposites, or some kind of scale or proportion? What would Merrick say about it all do you think?

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