From: seid@popov.EE.CORNELL.EDU (Steve Seidman)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: a Women's Study lecture...
Date: 28 Dec 1992 02:16:18 GMT
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
Distribution: world
NNTP-Posting-Host: remarque.berkeley.edu
Originator: muffy@remarque.berkeley.edu

For what it's worth, I want to tell you a story of
a general audience lecture I went to.  It was part of
the Women's Study program.  The lecture was  titled:
Feminist Theory & Practice.

Now, I'm not experienced enough to start making generalizations
about this subject, I just want to relay my personal 
experience.

Ahem, well....I went to this lecture with a completley
open mind (I'm not kidding,  really! ;-)  but I *did* find
the whole thing to be an experience straight out of a Camille
Paglia essay (ref: Junk Bonds & Corporate Raiders) and until
actually seeing the lecture I had thought that maybe she was
just exaggerating about this sort of stuff for dramatic effect.

The philosphy proffessor read straight from her notes in a
boring monotone.  There was lots of highly polished and pretentious
sounding talk about deconstructionism, post-structuralism, semiotics,
Foucault etc.  (This was the theory section...and it was a general
audience, nothing was intended for specialists).  I couldn't
make any sense out of what was being said....but I really do
think that nothing was being said.  She merely put in a plug
for Foucault ("at last, a man who is willing to analyze sex/culture
through power structures, rather than looking at the history of 
culture as a conversation of talking heads"  No doubt this was a dig
at the "great books" idea of a canonical set of books).  Along with
a plug on the use of all the standard buzzwords...but everything 
was served up as self-evident.

Then came the second half of the lecture:  Feminist Practice.
Out came the slide projector with photos of appealing beauty
advertisments.  The professor then proceeded to "decontruct"
the photos.  Here she deviated a bit from the Paglia Paradigm:
she was midly humorous about the silliness of the messages behind
the advertisments, and she didn't display any sex-phobic bias.
But other than that *everything* in that lecture was straight out
of a Paglia essay....simply amazing.  I personally think that 
*anyone* can decontruct advertisments (it's not hard, jeeeeeesh)
and ultimately these guys are selling a product by associating
their product with an appealing message (it's not hard to figure
that out....gee whiz!!!!)

She talked about the Kenya doll and how it might help African American
girls escape from the negative influences of a white bias in beauty
images.  In the question and answer period someone got really up in
arms that she was saying that the white (dominant) always influences
the black (non-dominant) but was ignoring the Lesbian community
which now takes its fashion cues from African-American hairstyles
(golly???  is this true?)

Anyway, no one asked any questions afterwards, everyone just raised their
hands and made a little speech about this or that community that she
had ignored.  Someone put in a plug for Faludi's book and asked her why
she didn't mention it (only rhetorically).  I think that it is safe to
conclude that no one (vocal) in the audience was very interested in learning 
anything, as every comment at the end was *so* politically motivated
it was ridiculous.

I finally decided that maybe I ought to try to learm some-thing....so
I asked the *only* question "what *is* deconstructionism?"  Everyone
squirmed, and the professor's jaw dropped.  She then said "Um....too much
to go into...I just use it to mean "analyze"....well no more time to
explain"   Thanks for nothing!

Steve Seidman
seid@ee.cornell.edu
   


-- 
Post articles to soc.feminism, or send email to feminism@ncar.ucar.edu.
Questions and comments should be sent to feminism-request@ncar.ucar.edu.  This
newsgroup is moderated by several people, so please use the mail aliases. Your
article should be posted within several days.  Rejections notified by email.