sleepcamel.net : brad weikel

I just got out of my postmodernism course. I hadn't done the best job on the week's readings, and I was totally hopped up on coffee, so I said absolutely nothing during the discussion, but at the tail end my mind started making connections that I felt were worth recording...

The readings (by Haraway, Lovibond, and Fraser & Nicholson) all, in one way or another, considered postmodern notions of the body, gender, and feminism, and all represented their subjects--and subjectivity--as being increasingly destabilized and, to varying degrees, problematic. This perspective was echoed by the majority of the short papers and responses given by my peers, with a particular emphasis on the struggle between universal and local notions of identity.

In particular, my friend Edward said something along these lines: It's ironic that, at the very moment that identity politics allowed marginalized groups to claim a new position of power, it was immediately taken away by the destabilization of the subject. Put differently, just as feminism created a position of power for women to inhabit, the very category of "Woman" began to break down, replaced by a complex and highly individuated subjectivity.

Another student, Dan, later tried to describe a Postmodernism-for-Man and a Postmodernism-for-Woman, based on the idea that women were not allowed to experience or create modernism, and so they naturally experience postmodernism as newly liberated subjects. Not surprisingly, in light of the readings, several members of the class bristled at this sweeping generalization and emphasis on gender, and Dan, essentially, had to apologize for her statement by couching it in a bunch of rhetorical disclaimers about complex identities.

This is a point that I find rather frustrating about the current mode of discourse: categorical terminology is completely taboo, unless it is buffered by apologetics. For instance, in this case, everyone bristled at Dan's use of the words Man and Woman, even after she clarified the subtlety of her point.

The trouble, though, is that these words aren't going away--there is Man, and there is Woman, even if they are conceptually murky--so we need to be able to use them without the constant burden of explaining ourselves.

To bring in a bit of a social sciences perspective, it's useful to consider that Man and Woman certainly exist as demographic categories. It may be unclear how potent that demographic category actually is, and it is obvious that not all men and all women should be grouped as a cohesive unit, but those caveats should not prevent us, for instance, from talking about the potential power of the Woman's vote in the 2008 presidential election. That power is very real.

My hope, then, is that there comes a time when a person can invoke the word "Woman" (perhaps better written as "woman") in an academic setting, and it will be understood by all involved that this category is murky and problematic, but that caveats need not deter us from discussing it, nor bog down that very discussion.

As a model for how this might be done, I'm going to turn to Web 2.0 and the concepts of taxonomies and folksonomies.

On the old internet, a photographer who had taken a photo of a woman would upload the photo to a website and place it in some sort of categorical bin, possibly labelled "women." A browser directed to this particular photo would encounter backlinks to the categorical bin. So he might click on the "women" link, and expect that the resulting page would contain photos that not only relate to women, but are best defined by their relation to the category of women. This sort of design-side, top-down taxonomy is obviously fairly limiting.

In the era of Web 2.0, the process is quite different. The photographer uploads his photo to Flickr and describes it in folksonomical terms, meaning he inputs terms that describe or relate to his photo and may or may not already exist as categories on the site. So rather than placing it in a "women" bin, he assigns it a complex folksonomy: "women 'literary theory' narcolepsy trendy starbucks moonlight scarf dubai." A browser directed to this photo will not see a backlink to a particular category, but rather a set of links to each term in its taxonomy, none of which are privileged above the others.

This is the most important part: it is understood by both the photographer and the browser that these links are not authoritative, exclusive, or complete... it doesn't need to be explained. When the browser clicks on "women" they do not naively assume that the resulting page provides a clear representation of womanhood, but rather they know that it is a collections of images with highly subjective relationships to the concept of womanhood. There is more than adequate space for dissent, but that dissent does not need to be vocalized on every single click, because it is implicit in the very model of the website.

Likewise, every invocation of "Woman" in the classroom need not be accompanied by the vocalization of dissent over that invocation, if it can be understood by both the speaker and the listener that the problematic nature of the invocation is implicit in the conversation itself.

Go Hoyas!