January Haze

I've been spending quite a bit of time on facebook because I am "writing an essay and working on a presentation" which, these days, translates into five minutes of looking at something that is not academic work alternating with five minutes of looking at the academic work. The non-academic things are usually facebook and other people's blogs and my e-mail.

The start of this year has been marked by lassitude on my part and I was rather worried about it until I realised that this has been true of every early January I can think of going as far back as 1997. I think that at this point it would make sense for me to start expecting mental haziness in the New Year. The same goes for being disorganised. The same for New Year's resolutions.

Last year I resolved to lose all of the weight I'd gained while taking Seroquel, to graduate from college and to apply to grad school. I managed to keep each one of them, losing more than fifty pounds to be a healthy 140lbs (I'm 5'6"), graduated with honours and not only applied to grad school but gone to grad school. But I didn't get off to a good start with any of that during January - instead, I sat around spiritually if not physically, in my pajamas and read novels. I have been doing exactly the same thing this year. Now I just need to drag myself away from the duvet and hot water bottles and get back into real life. It will be a relief.

I have two resolutions for this year - one, to find a job that will let me stay here, which means it has to be a proper job (I've never had a proper job before - always art things that have a grand total of two or three women working for them except for the one time I worked retail at a local kitchen store with a grand total of twelve, including two men) and two, to make my life have more of the things I like in it. That is ill-expressed but I'm not quite sure how to put it.

For years now I have been concentrating on very immediate and necessary things, i.e. not killing myself, which moved on to making sure I slept and ate, then making sure that I got dressed every day, then making sure that I had enough social interaction, and then trying to help myself feel better than horrible, then trying to get to a point where I could say that I felt well instead of just 'not miserable'....and so on. That has been my focus since late February of 2007, which is when I started to lose my mind the most recent and most horrible time. By now, I have felt well without extraordinary interruption since September of 2008, I have my BA, I'll soon enough have an MSc and I feel like myself and likely to stay well for a significant period of time (for me, that means two or more years in the future.) The upshot of this is that I have started thinking more about what I want my life to be like because it seems worth trying to make myself happy rather than just trying to make sure I'm not miserable.

I am not a philosopher with an analytic bias for nothing, so I have been scratching out this train of thought in my journal and come to the conclusion that what I want out of life, what would make me happy to have in my life are more books, being around art (of any discipline) and people who make it (and also occasionally getting to help with it or make my own), public speaking (I don't know why I like it so much, it's a strange thing for a person as shy as I am, but I do), and love, in its many forms. Not all of these things can be forced, least of all the last on the list, but when I have to make a decision, I can try always to make the decision that most favours the possibility of these outcomes (and again, it's statements like these that make me realise that philosophy is always with me).

Oh bother. I meant this to be a shorter post because that essay and presentation I'm "working" on do actually have to be finished tonight. Anyhow, I was going to gracefully drag this back around to how I realised that I'm entirely out of it every New Year. I realised it while playing on facebook, of all things. I don't know how many of you that read this are on facebook but if you are then you are bound to have seen the application that will make a picture out of your status updates for the last year. Looking back at what I had up there (see pseudonymous but otherwise authentic version below), and looking back at the beginning of this blog* reminded me that I felt every bit as confused this time last year.





*This blog is now a year and seven days old! There will be a 'first year in review' at some point.

Continentalist Blithering - Feel Free to Practice Your Textual Hermeneutics

I feel obliged* to warn you all that this post has a high content of continental philosophy, pseudo-structuralism and a dash of queer theory tossed in for "funsies".

After the last post, I have Foucault's Madness and Civilisation on the brain. The question I keep returning to is how one might live out one's madness as a valid instantiation of being in the world whilst also not doing so in a manner that is alienating.

My reading of Foucault comes through the filter of the bias footnoted below and I make no claim as to it's being particularly the best reading. Because of this, I intend to stick to the ideas that reading Foucault has given me rather than trying to elucidate the text. Here endeth the disclaimer.

Rights talk is more than a little incoherent philosophically but it is a very useful way of talking about the privileged space that should be accorded the individual within a society. Because of the way human rights play into the way in which the mad are treated, it is perhaps the most appropriate way for me to approach this question of how to live out madness validly.

Oh God: It has just become stunningly clear and perspicuous to me that this is going to take much longer to write than I intended and it's late. I'm copping out.

I will stop with a question. Might the mad have a human right to be mad insofar as it is subjectively desirable and does not lead to harming others? If so, how would this work? The axiom I take for this is that madnesses are unique, that they are not total and as such are a valuable, non-fungible individual experience. Our current ways of treating madness implicitly devalue madness and deny that the content of madness has in it anything relevant to the human experience. Is this right? Does this infringe on the right to self-expression?

No, this is not going to be an anti-psychiatry rant. Psychiatry has done great things for me. But it's not perfect and it's worth using new ways to analyse it as a whole.

More soon and in the meantime, I welcome everyone's thoughts on the matter.

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*I am obliged by my increasing Anglo-American Analytic Philosophy bias - the LSE tends to entrench any such tendencies. In real life, these distinctions matter less and less but they do persist in that we study the philosophers who wrote when the distinction was more real.

Dolce Fa Niente

I have been sleeping hours upon hours each day since term ended. Usually nine hours at night and a few more during the day. I haven't been able to sleep like this since I was a teenager/very early twenties. It's lovely but I keep wondering whether I haven't taken on an illness of some kind.

I've been very scholastically useless so far. This will change, probably tomorrow, because it has to if I want to do well and I do want to do well. I have essays for conferences to be written and a big presentation at 10.00am on the first day of term and so must crack on a little now or end up having to work on Christmas Day, which I refuse to let happen.

I have been socially very useful so far. I have been to three Christmas parties (two involving the dread 'networking' - but with think tank people, at least, so not as bad), a birthday party, afternoon al fresco mulled wine consumption, a Progress event featuring a speech given by Tessa Jowell in Westminster (my first time inside the Houses of Parliament - so exciting I could hardly keep from bouncing up and down like a small child) and a surprisingly non-awkward and contentedly uneventful night at the pub with that girl I (possibly stupidly) kissed.

That has been my life of the past week: reading the whole paper and drinking the entire pot of coffee in my pyjamas, desultory tidying up, novel consumption hour, possibly an errand but nothing too strenuous, novel consumption extended afternoon edition, bath, get dressed, sit on the uncrowded tube for an hour to get to the other side of town and reading and listening to music, four hours' good conversation and the trip home, here by night bus, there by miraculous catching of the last train. At home, the hot water bottle and some tea and back to sleep.

It's blissful, really. Such a nice contrast to the chronically recurring insomnia of mine.

Time to be more active now though. Take the work back up and add in the Christmas baking, hurray! Advent Lessons and Carols on Tuesday and I can hardly wait for midnight mass. I hope I'll get to take the night bus home in the snow and sit up top and stare out at it. Either way, it's procession time and lots of singing.

At home, no one ever wants to go to Christmas mass on Christmas Day except for me, so I think I'll go this year and indulge myself. I'm a happy person to feel that going to mass is an indulgence...that's a desire that sits easy on the conscience and is easily indulged, unlike so many of my other ones that nearly always trouble on the latter score if not the former.

So this post isn't about much but I haven't done much but drink and talk and read my way through Orlando, All Passion Spent and Madame Bovary. But I'm happy right now and that seems worth recording.

Overwhelmed and Omphaloskeptic

There are too many things going on! I'm not sure that's really a complaint, as I quite like most of the things. However, they are myriad.

On the things I quite like side are parties; Monday night philosophy drinking; my new armchair that I lugged home in the box from Ikea over one bus route, the Overground and the Underground*, which was a rather painful thing to do but more than compensated for by having someplace to sit that isn't the floor or my bed; a new addition to my collection of favorite philosophy quips**; reading Tristram Shandy and its heroic 18th century punctuation - can't think why I haven't read it before nor why we no longer punctuate like that; all the arguments I've been able to make about infinite regress and infinites by addition; being back in London; the shocking - to me - way I've made friends so quickly and effortlessly; the general thrill of studying interesting things; seeing old friends that I haven't seen for years; reading the Guardian; my new shoes; having a clothes rail and hangers and my newsagent.

On the things that are not things that I like side very much are plumbing faults; owing medium to large amounts of money to various institutions; not having very much money to pay said institutions with and also buy food; that it takes four to six weeks for overseas cheques to clear and mine has been sitting in the bank for four weeks and still hasn't cleared; the reaction of various Anglicans to the Pope's recent announcement; the fact that somehow Rousseau's concept of the general will has gotten stuck in my head in the manner of an annoying song***; the fact that there is so much going on that I seem to miss at least half of it; that my feet hurt so much and so often and with such minimal provocation; the way this overwhelmed-ness makes my head too swimmy to concentrate and think properly; Boris Johnson; the way my hair hasn't gotten used to the hard water yet and sticks up in strange and disturbing ways in the morning; being tired all the time still and a very annoying virus/cold/cough thing that has been plaguing me for a week without actually making me properly ill or allowing me to be properly well****.

Things that I may or may not like (just not sure yet) side are the post-lecture drinking with the professors on Wednesdays because it makes me very nervous but the conversation is good; my inability to feel any emotion, positive or negative, about the ex-girlfriend which is a relief but does not bode well; the amount of Hackney Marshes closed off for development for the Olympics, which development may or may not be a good thing in the end*****; a weird crush I've developed on a new-friend girl at university that is not really a crush but something in between (and therefore not holy, see fourth footnote) that makes me uneasy and implies subtle and delicately strange things about myself and my ethical convictions; the unpredictable bursts of high-burning glittering bliss that might be the early warnings of hypomania - enjoyable when they occur but worrying afterwords and the way this post has footnotes with footnotes.

The world is all the things that are the case, and so it follows that this is the world I'm in for now******.
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*I feel very boring though to be buying furniture from the Ikea. Why did I lug it home? Please see paragraph three, thing I don't like number four.
** "That's not a counter-example, it's a monster." Imre Lakatos
***I wouldn't have thought that philosophical concepts were capable of this but it seems to have happened anyway.
****This virus is a thing partway between being and not being and is therefore not holy (Please see De divina omnipotentia++, a letter written by St. Peter Damian to Pope Gregory. Peter Damian was also in charge of reforming cannon law and is responsible for the formalisation of the law concerning priestly celibacy {somehow, the Catholic Church made it through 1,000 years without actually requiring it} and the regularisation of cannon law concerning homosexual behavior {I know we think of it as identity and not act now generally but it would be inaccurate to say that Damian condemned homosexuality itself rather than homosexual acts} that has led to the modern Catholic condemnation of homosexuality via Aquinas' natural law theory and thus forward to the present day to one of the things I dislike in paragraph three. These later accomplishments and the reasons behind them are discussed in Damian's Liber Gomorrhianus, which is a very interesting read. Impressing pagans is part of the reasoning behind the celibacy dogma and the restriction of the priesthood to men and priestly duties with regard to hearing confession are behind the condemnation of homosexual acts.
*****It was a great thing for my childhood stomping ground, Atlanta, but then look at Calgary - hard to predict.
******Blatantly stolen from the beginning of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
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++ De divina is found in vol. 6 of Damian's Opera Omnia, if memory serves. It's definitely in the Opera Omnia but it might not be vol. 6.

The Grand Mentalisms Reference Project

The Grand Mentalisms Reference Project is something I have had in mind for a while. At the moment of starting, I am stuck in omphaloskepsitis (navel-gazing-itis) and I am glad to have thought of something to offer up that's more in tune with the original purpose of this blog.

I am asking all of you who read to save up and share any and all references you come across in literature, journalism, blogs, television, magazines, movies, day to day conversation, scholarly articles, academically dubious articles and sources: in short, anything that reflects a popular conception of the nature of mental illness and especially the perceived nature or character of those who are mentally interesting, negative or positive. I would also welcome more selective contributions from older (pre-1970) psychiatric and psychological texts.

My aim is to build up a database of popular references to mental illness so that, in true pragmatist philosophy mode, I can gain a fuller idea of what exists in the minds of the living, the influences that shapes these perceptions and the historical discursive context of current understandings of mental illness in the popular social dialectic. With this understanding, I hope to be better able to address mentalisms philosophically in a more relevant way.

If you're not sure whether a reference you have come across is relevant to this project, just go ahead and stick it up anyway. I need your help and I welcome and appreciate any and all contributions.

When posting a reference, please try to give sufficient citation in whatever form. Sufficient citation for anything in print would consist of the date of publication, author, publisher, page number and title. For blogs, as much as can be gathered of the publication citation plus a link would be great. For conversational references, date, time, local and a brief description of the relationship between the participants (e.g. psychiatrist to patient, parent to child who is mentally interesting) would be appreciated. Names and personal details are not requested or necessary. If you do not have all of the information requested, don't worry, just give as much as you are able.

I am particularly interested in anything that strikes you as a recurring conception and particularly interested in anything that strikes you as unusual.

With your help, I hope to make a useful contribution to political philosophy and, eventually, public policy for the greater good of the mentally interesting and the benefit of greater understanding to the non-mentally interesting. Thank you in advance and know that I will faithfully give due credit to any aid you can afford me in this project.

Stuck

I keep trying to write a new post but I think I am too mired in quotidianity to write anything sensible. My critical faculties seem to have departed and so I cannot see anything about which to write. There is a distinct lack of significant form. Everything is a sort of mush. A greyish mush.

I'm back in urban Appalachia at the moment, trying to finish the packing. I have hurt my back, however, and have been lying on the couch with the hot water bottle all afternoon instead of getting anything done. I'm finding it very hard to keep still; there are too many anxiety provoking things to think about.

One thing that causes me great difficulty when I'm depressed is not being able to look forward to anything. I should be looking forward to grad school: it's something I have wanted and planned to do for almost five years. I don't seem to be able to muster much enthusiasm for it, nor for any other plan. This has bothered me not a little.

Then, last Sunday, I talked to my sister on the phone. She had just been to the beach, some friends of mine have just been to the beach, others have just gone camping. I have not had what I would consider a proper holiday in many years and I was shot through with discontent and envy on hearing that my sister had been out to the beach. I haven't done anything like that because I haven't been able to afford it or I couldn't get anyone to go with me or there wasn't time or I was too depressed or there was school; or, or, or.

However, I am now in a different position. I have a little money from graduation gifts, I have some time and I'm not depressed. After I get to London, I will have two weeks before term starts and I am going to take myself out to St. Ive's for a few days. I have found a B&B for L30 a night, the train ticket won't be too much if I book it in advance and it doesn't cost much to feed me. I'm going to have three days of walking and thinking and reading and looking at art and just being somewhere that isn't full of associations and sorrow where I won't have to talk to anyone if I don't want to. Three days of time entirely for myself.

This, I cannot wait to do. Of course, to do it, I will have to pack up my belongings, arrange my visa, move and so on. I am very glad to have found something to pin my thoughts on! Now if I could just get my back to stop hurting...

Goodbye House

Well, I've finally reached the point where my household is truly breaking up. I've taken three boxes of books out to sell, my kitchen is half empty and my desk is about to make its way to Knoxville. On Monday, my cat will go to his new home and on Tuesday I will be driving half of the things I plan to keep up to my parent's house. Nearly everything else in the house is promised to someone - oddly, no one seems to want any of my 'good' furniture, such as it is. (By good I mean the furniture that I have that did not come flat-packed). If I can't sell it, I will probably end up giving it to the arts non-profit that I volunteer for or donating it to Habitat for Humanity.

I'm going to miss this apartment. I've been really happy here. I've also been spoiled by its size. I've had, for two years, two enormous closets, a bedroom, a study, a good-sized sitting room, a large bathroom and a too-small kitchen all to myself. There are so many windows - six in the sitting room alone - and each of the rooms is painted a different color. I dread the thought of being forced back into living in a flat with magnolia-painted walls. All that white and blankness - it suits truly modern buildings but to my eye is rather dismal in a converted Victorian or Georgian terrace. Those buildings were not meant to have all-white interiors.

I think, though, that London will be sufficient compensation for living in a studio flat with white walls. Perhaps I'll finally do what I've often thought of and go to Brick Lane or Berwick Street and buy enough fabric to cover at least one of the walls.

But for now, who will help me pretend that I'm not talking to myself once my cat is gone?

Rereading The Well of Loneliness

I have been enjoying my week's holiday so far by reading novels, something I can't usually do in term-time. I finished 'The Secret History', an old favorite, on Saturday and then picked up 'The Well of Loneliness', which I had not read in a very long time, much longer than I thought.
I realised that it had been a while when I came to a protracted reference to St. Therese of Lisieux on pages 264-266 that I did not remember. My former roommate is very much devoted to St. Therese and I have, consequently, heard much about her, had her picture hanging in my hallway and seen the movie (yes really). If I had read Well of Loneliness since she and I started sharing living space back in 2004, there could be no way that that would have escaped my notice.

I read Well of Loneliness, as most people do, because it was the first novel about lesbians, much referenced in other literature and also the subject of legal prosecution. When I first read it, when I first came out, I was an atheist. Not only was I an atheist, but I was quite militant about it. I started down the merry path to losing my faith for several reasons but one that looms above the others is my first girlfriend. Referring to her as a girlfriend is somewhat overstating the case because it was all very virginal and inchoate and unnamed but the sense of it is true. She was Roman Catholic, and eventually broke things off between us because of it. Nothing that happened between us ever felt like a sin, much less a mortal sin, to me. I had first begun to suspect that I might be gay when I was thirteen and it, remarkably, hadn't troubled me one bit. I was confident (rightly, as it turns out) that my parents would love me either way and nothing in my upbringing had disposed me to think that being gay was wrong or bad. Then, just as it was all starting to become clear to me at the age of fifteen, it suddenly took on the quality of sin. It was horribly confusing, to the point that I just stopped thinking about it and assumed that I must really be straight. Indeed, all the external evidence pointed in that direction. I was a very serious ballet student (hadn't mentioned that before, had I? I even had a tiny little professional career) and what could be more girly and normal than ballet?

Time went by, I went rigorously through the motions of being heterosexual and assumed that my dissatisfaction was the result of my quite serious devotion, religious in its quality, to my vocation. Gradually it became clear that things were not going to work out for me professionally and, rather than resigning myself to teaching dance for the rest of my life, I decided to go to university and there I took an Introduction to Philosophy course, which has had a pronounced effect on my life. It was in that class that I first learned how to think and think clearly; I took great joy that summer in pulling apart and setting in order all the woolly concepts in my mind.

In this way, I ended the summer an atheist and newly questioning my sexuality. When I went back to university that fall, I came out to my friends and proceeded to fall profoundly in love, quite to my surprise.

I managed, of course, to fall in love with a very religious girl who had been raised in one of those bible-thumping non-denominational southern churches. In the course of time, she too split up with me for religious reasons. But this time, it had the opposite effect on me. Because I was so in love with her, I started to reconsider God. It was impossible for me, so enamored, to ignore or dismiss anything so important to her.

In the aftermath, I found that my faith had grown back. It took some years but after I ended up living in the US and sharing a roof with my friend who was devoted to St. Therese, I started going to church. A year or so later I was confirmed and so began my tussle with the lesbianisms and the church.

This is why re-reading Well of Loneliness was so interesting to me. It is the only novel I know of that deals both with lesbians and the church in a positive way. There is a great deal more subtlety in the novel than I remembered and more than many grant to Radclyffe Hall. For one thing, she is genuinely concerned about the reconciliation of heterosexist society with gay people. There is an unusual lack of simple xenophobia and classism. Class anxiety is a theme in the book but the common bond among those who share "the mark of Cain" causes the characters to band together. The distress that heterosexism and homophobia exert on gay people is carefully delineated and exposed as prejudice. It is what my ex would call a 'golf lesbian'* attitude toward the world; an attitude that assumes that the norms of heterosexist society have intrinsic and essential worth but that accommodation must be made for non-heterosexuals.

However, Hall's attitude toward this accommodation is unusual even for today. She makes no apology for gender variation. There is, at least in America, considerable hostility from some gay people toward other gay people who "flaunt" too much or look too different and thereby harm the cause of acceptance.** Hall, on the other hand, accepts visible gender variation as a natural part of homosexual orientation.***

Hall challenges the church and challenges God for forsaking gay people instead of rejecting them out of hand, in the facile way that some (certainly not all - there are definitely thoughtful atheists authors out there****) authors do. This alone is enough to make me re-value the Well of Loneliness, cheesy anthropomorphy and all.


*The term 'golf lesbian' originates with her and is meant to indicate that post second-waver, white woman, acommodationist, 'we're just like everyone else and lesbians who are not like us should learn to behave' attitude.

**I have little patience for this; after all, straight people have expensive weddings, announce their banns in church, have baby showers, wear wedding rings, have sex all over the telly all the time, a rigorous dress and behavior code wherewith to recognize themselves and so on. If that's not flaunting one's sexuality, I don't know what would be.

***I do, of course, resent her attitude that 'normal' looking women are not really as gay as gender queer women being as I am more than a little on the feminine side (not femme and really, really not a 'lipstick lesbian.' I think I might have worn lipstick about four times in my life. I hate that term.)

**** In a somewhat gratuitous aside, I would like to mention that Ian McEwan is not one of them - blegh - not even to mention that he is a full-fledged member of the gender and patriarchy police.

The first picture is a holy card of St. Therese that I have borrowed from the blog Holy Cards For Your Inspiration and the second is that well-known one of Marguerite 'John' Radclyffe Hall and her lifelong partner Una Troubridge. I sincerely wish that blogger would allow for captions and footnotes, don't you?

Sunday Snow and Biological Sex Dimorphism

I think that we will not have evensong tonight. It is snowing like mad and has been for hours. The roads were just starting to freeze while I was walking home. Perhaps we'll even have the day off school tomorrow. That would be a great help.

The weather has been very extreme lately: warmth and thunderstorms one day, snow and tornadoes at the same time the next, temperatures travelling from 14 F (-10C) in the early morning to 57F (14C) by 4.00pm. I didn't bother to take my coat with me yesterday, even though I was out late, but today I was bundled up in the coat, two scarves and a very ugly hat that was my mother's when she was at university. I love to wear the ugly hat, especially to church, because I get such odd looks. Anyhow, here is yesterday:













And here is today:




It has gotten even snowier since I took that picture. Crazy mountain weather, I tell you. I love it though. I just hope that the ex-girlfriend, who is travelling quite a distance to visit a university that has made her an offer for grad school, made it out of the mountains before the snow started.

Other things than weather have happened, of course. I'm no longer worried about my strangely acting friend because I understand the reasons why, now. (That sentence had very odd grammar.) I also found out yesterday that my paper has been accepted to an undergraduate conference. Hurray!

The paper is called "The Logical Invalidity of Biological Sex Dimorphism as an Exclusive Disjunction" and I had much fun writing it a year or so ago. It was for my philosophy of sex and gender class and my professor hated it. She doesn't believe in logic and thinks that it is only ever used to oppress people. I tend to think that that's throwing the baby out with the bathwater, to employ a cliche.

Anyhow, we read a fascinating book called 'Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex' by Alice Dreger*. Her explanation of the evolving scientific understanding of hermaphroditism/intersexed persons helped to delineate the categories of sex, sexuality and gender, which are now commonly separated but were once assumed to always hang together as either male or female but not both (which is an exclusive disjunction). The common contemporary medical practice dictates that at the birth of an intersex infant, that is, an infant with ambiguous genitalia, an emergency is declared and the infant is taken away before its parents can see it so that a group of doctors can evaluate and 'declare' the infant either male or female, determined nearly entirely on the formation of the genitals. The process is deeply phallocentric, with the main criterion being the formation of the penis. If it is hypospadic (the urethra located closer to the base of the penis rather than the tip), the infant is many times declared female because (and I am sadly not making this up) the infant, when older, would not be able to urinate standing up. The same declaration holds for penises that are deemed to be too small. Such genetalia are reclassified as clitorises. If a 'female' infant is born with a clitoris that is, in the eyes of a doctor, too long, it is often surgically altered in the first weeks of life to conform to a feminine appearance. There are no cases that I know of where a long clitoris has resulted in the sex assignment of male, as one might expect as the converse of the case of short penises.

If the genetalia are not ambiguous on the basis of gross anatomy as is the case in some forms of intersex, such as 5-alpha reductase, then further investigations are made later in life, often around the time of puberty. On occasion, the sex assignment is changed from female to male or, less commonly, male to female at this time. Sometimes the 'patient' is informed of the details of the intersexedness, sometimes not. Sometimes their testimony is taken into consideration, sometimes the doctors or parents or both make the decision. Fertility, unless it concerns the production of sperm, is rarely considered as a determinant of sex.

Now, having read about all the varieties of intersexedness and the way ambiguous sex is treated as a medical emergency, it seemed to me that it was impossible, even in the case of what are considered to be unambiguous genitalia, to declare that anyone was male or female exclusively. For instance, there is a great deal of freely acknowledged crossover between male and female secondary sex characteristics. Women may develop 'masculine' facial hair while men may develop 'breasts' that are female in contour (there is a technical name for this but I cannot call it to mind). This crossover of characteristics is also a locus of anxiety, though not an emergency. But I would contend that most women who develop dark hairs above their mouths would bleach them or pluck them. Would they not suffer a decrease of desirability and femininity if they did not?

Fertility is too capricious a condition to determine sex. (If it were used, would women not be women when menstruating? Before menarche? After menopause? Where could that line be drawn?) Sex is always declared, even if only implicitly, because there is no absolute characteristic or set of characteristics that is necessary and sufficient to serve as an indisputable marker of sex. So, even though I, personally, have an anatomy that is generally considered to be biologically female, and visually conform to the cultural conception of femaleness there is no way for me to prove that I am female or for anyone to prove that I am not male.

Having said that, none of this means that male and female are invalid categories. These two categories have meaning, positive and negative. If sex didn't in some sense truly exist, then no one could be transsexual or homosexual or bisexual. However, we are quite possibly making a mistake when we say that there are only two sexes and that no individual can be both male and female and that no individual can be neither male nor female. If we were to recombine sexuality and gender with anatomy in creative ways, we could decide as a culture that there were eight sexes, or five sexes or the the idea of a biological sex was altogether misbegotten. There have, in fact, been several cultures through the course of history, some that still exist today, that have three or four categories of sex. So much possibility so quashed, and quashed with so much violence. People are killed over it, raped over it, go through painful and not medically necessary surgery over it. It seems to me that it is worthwhile to re-evaluate or cultural notions of sex.

I'm surprised that it made it into the conference. So many philosophers think that the body is not an appropriate focus for philosophy and I had such a negative reaction from my professor over it. I'm glad it's in, though, and I can't wait to present it.



* Dreger, Alice Domurat. "Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex." Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.


I wonder if this post will drive up my hits from google?

Confessions of a Philosophy Scholar

I had quite the episode of what I have named "Histrionic Scholar Syndrome". I was in the library, wanting to get some work done. I had e-mailed myself the draft of the thesis and I was planning to borrow a laptop and grab two books I needed that are actually in our library.

I got the laptop from the circulation desk and took myself upstairs. I found one of the books I was looking for and the other was not on the shelf. 'Who,' I thought to myself, 'would have checked that book out of the library between 11.00 last night and 10.15 today?'

I went and hunted for an unpopulated place to sit because there was, outrageously, someone sitting in my usual spot. When I found another place, I opened the laptop and switched it on and while I was waiting for it to start, I opened up my book and flipped to the back to look in the index, only to find there was no index. Horrors.

'Oh well,' thought I, 'I can look up the page numbers I need once the computer switches on.' I put the book away and opened the browser, only to find that the computer was not connected to the internet. I tried disconnecting and reconnecting, restarting the darn thing, walking over to a different part of the library - nothing helped. After twenty minutes, I gathered my things together and went back downstairs.

At the circulation desk, they told me that the internet was only working on the ground floor. 'Fine,' said I. I went around looking for a spot to sit downstairs, which is difficult because the university writing center is down there and they make a lot of noise. I found somewhere rather dissatisfactory and tried again. Still nothing.

At this point, I was still relatively calm. I packed up the laptop and took it back to the circulation desk, whereupon a laconic young man informed me that the internet was only working on the ground floor by the periodicals. 'Okay,' said I.

I used to sit behind the periodical stacks quite often but I stopped when they put in a group study area because it became too noisy, so I hadn't been back in that part of the library in a while. I went over, with the aim of finding a seat and putting the computer down and then getting my things. To my extreme dismay, I found that they had taken out all the desks and tables and replaced them with beanbag chairs.

Yes.

So I returned the laptop, checked out my book and asked them about the one not on the shelves. I was informed that it was 'not checked out' and when I told them that it was not on the shelf or in any of the return carts, I was told that it might have been stolen or that it might be in somebody's study carrel without having been checked out. There was nothing they could do about it. 'Thank you,' I said, and stalked out of the library and into the cafe to get some coffee.

Coffee having been acquired, I went to sit in the glasshouse, which is by far the nicest place to sit on campus. There is a fish pond and many tall, green plants. It's always warm there.

I opened my book and started flipping through. I couldn't find the section on Jessie Taft. There was no index. One of the books I needed was missing. I had wasted an hour trying to get a laptop to connect to the internet. Some selfish student, probably one of the same ones who thinks that underlining library books in pen is an acceptable activity, had stolen or secreted it away for his or her exclusive use. The librarians at the circulation desk did not have the common courtesy to tell students borrowing laptops that the internet was down or even to put up a sign. I was sufficiently angry that I saw stars.

I took my coffee out to the nearest designated smoking area and flounced down on a bench. Partway into the cigarette, I realized that I was thinking 'I need to finish my research! My research is being compromised by the incompetence of others!'

It occurred to me that I was acting in a manner more traditional to dramatic sopranos than philosophy students. This made me laugh. I could just see myself giving the librarians a dressing down in a grand Wagnerian style. Thus, histrionic scholar syndrome was born.

I felt much better after that, although I still haven't figured out what to do about that lost book.


The book in question, pictured at right

Thesisizing

Hmm. . . I should look up the original Greek for thesis and make the verb form that way but I'll save that fascinating information for the next post.

I'm in thesis-land for the weekend. I'm writing my thesis on the non-fiction works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Most people know her from her short story "The Yellow Wallpaper," which is far and away the best piece of fiction she ever wrote, but hardly anybody reads her non-fiction anymore. I'm interested in placing her in the Pragmatist tradition alongside Dewey, James, DuBois and company. She is often claimed as a sociologist but she called herself a philosopher and due to her total lack of quoted statistics, I am inclined to think that she designated herself correctly. Those sociologists: they claim Durkheim and DuBois and Weber and almost any philosopher from 1850 on who wrote about social philosophy. Very naughty of them to poach so.

Gilman's major non-fiction work is "Women and Economics." In this book she puts forward the still startling idea that women have a right to specialized labor outside the home. A right, not a privilege. She supported universal kindergarten, early childhood education, and daycare. She, having been deprived of it herself, said that women must have the same opportunities for formal education as men and then the same employment prospects. She very strongly emphasized the importance of the nature of the work over the amount of pay.

Gilman thought it immoral that anyone should have to do work that they were not suited for because they needed more money. She thought it immoral that women were kept in the home to cater to the needs of its habituants exclusively, conducting endless undifferentiated labor (i.e. switching from cleaning to mending to teaching to cooking and back and forth all the day long.) Women, she thought, had as much right to be a part of the world, voting and working, as men did because they were human also. Too much emphasis had been placed on sex characteristics rather than human characteristics and we had forgotten that women were human before they were women.

This resulted in an excess of romanticism, poor female physiology, prostitution, disease (venereal) and the immolation of half of the world's abilities on the altar of the idea of home. To replace what Gilman considered to be an archaic idea of the home, she proposed the construction of apartment buildings with communal gardens, day care centers, exercise centers, restaurants and apartments with no kitchens. She thought that the kitchenless home would be a healthier place, freeing women from the labor of preparing food or having to fix two dinners, one for children and one for the husband, and also make the home easier to clean. Everyone must have a room of his or her own: privacy was essential to humanity and women, in particular, had been too long denied any such sanctuary.

Gilman was sufficiently well known in her time that several such apartment buildings were actually constructed and a few still exist in the Northeast. Her ideas were similar to those of Melusina Fay Peirce, a philosopher in her own right married to Charles S. Peirce the pragmatist philosopher, but she was more radical in that she suggested that women should be allowed to have the same kinds of work as men while Peirce took women out of the home to work co-operatively but also to work at women's labor (sewing, cooking and so on.)* Both put forward the idea of sharing the labor of the household communally in order to save expense and women's time.

I could go on and on, which I suppose means that I have done my research and that is a good, but I shall stop here for now and in the next post or so I'm going to dig in to the problem of work with reference to Gilman, having been inspired by this post of Kate's on the Agonies and the Ecstasies.

*See "Co-operative Housekeeping," Peirce, Mrs. Charles S. It's out of print but can be found on Google books. A fascinating read.

anyqueensway

Does anyone else remember when the Queen of Hearts tells Alice (in the book of course) that "all ways around here are [her] ways"? Thinking about that used to make me smile whenever I'd go to or through Queensway, a neighborhood in London. I miss it. London: not Queensway. It's hard to miss Queensway. Or the Central Line, for that matter.

Well, friends, I think I might have a touch of the euthymia. I was speaking to my ex on the phone earlier and she asked me had I been drinking? what had I been doing?

I haven't done anything but wash the dishes, said I, except that I came back in the living room and found two mugs and a plate and thought, oh well, I'll just do them tomorrow.

But you're making me laugh, says she. What's going on?

Oh dear. What a regular ball of sunshine I must have been being!*

I should probably crack on with the Greek homework. Nothing mixes better with an effervescence than Greek and I've got 42 lines of Homer to tran and scan. (Like the abbreviation? See, you can tell I'm so cool that I'm part of the app. crit. crowd. {which is an extremely dorky form of cool wherein classics students show off by referring to the apparatus criticus [critical apparatus - it explains variations and misreadings of other texts and manuscripts and helps with weird verb forms] as the app. crit.})

Needless to say, this is a variety of cool not recognised in the general taxonomy.


I am, however, very excited to be following the same educational syllabus as St. Augustine, which is probably not a form of excitement recognised in the general taxonomy. But then, I'm an anomataxic girl at heart, really.

Ah, the nonsense. But at least I found my Carmex this evening. Can't have been a total loss, then.


*(Ah, the past perfect participle. Nothing could make me happier, except for the timely use of the future perfect.)

Never again would birdsong be the same

I’ve been reading a rather interesting book: Mad, Bad and Sad, which was written by Lisa Appignanesi. The book is concerned with the evolution of psychology as a science and its relationship to women and vice versa. I haven’t finished it yet, so I can make no comment on the book as a whole but I was enchanted to learn that Virginia Woolf complained of hearing “birds singing Greek choruses, King Edward using foul language in the garden.”

I’m not so sure about King Edward (VII presumably?) but I really like the thought of hearing the birds singing Greek choruses. Obviously, that would be one thing if they were singing the Orestaia, but quite another if they were singing the chorus introducing Phaedra or the one about longing for escape from Hippolytus. I think that I would find those ones quite comforting.

But then perhaps I am a little odd in that.

(732-751)
Would that I were hid within the hollows of a mountain,
there would a god fledge me into a bird
among the winged flocks:
that I might soar over
the sea waves
of the Adrian shore
and over the waters of Eridanos,
where in the dark-gleaming swell
wretched maidens,
lamenting Phaeton,
let tears fall
from bright amber eyes.

That I might reach journey’s end at the apple-planted shore
of the Hesperides, the singers, where the sea lord
of the red-dark shallows
gives no farther passage to sailors,
where strikes the awful boundary
of the firmament, which Atlas holds:
and divine springs flow
by the place Zeus lay,
where, bestowing gifts,
most sacred Earth
increases the blessings of the gods.

(121-140)
There is a rock that drips, they say, with Ocean’s water,
where water is drawn up in pitchers
from its flowing cliffs:
there was a friend of mine soaking
russet robes
in the pure waters of the river,
stretching them across the warm backs
of the rocks in the kind sun: here
came first to me news of my mistress;

keeping her distressed body upon a bed of sickness
inside the house, fine cloth
covering her golden head:
I hear that it is now three days
that her mouth is unfed
and from Demeter’s
grain she has kept her pure body,
wishing, from a secret suffering,
to run aground at the terrible shore of death.

own translation