Louise Althusser may have killed his wife, but I'm going crazy!

Well, the midterm is now done, but the thing is after studying it I am starting to relate EVERYTHING I see to all the content in class. Every word I use, or random things I see relate to class; people think I'm crazy when I am telling them about the feminist theories I've learnt in 320. It has been a long time since I have picked up some good quality mind garbage such as Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire and the likes. I usually ignore that kind of 'opressive' garbage, however yesterday while in cue, I can't handle being idle so I, as directed by Fiske in Popular Culture, picked up the mass cultural product and created my own pop culture.

I sat in an unexplainable dumb-founded awe and disgust trying to relate the theory we've learned in class to the magazine pop culture. Cosmopolitan messes with my mind in so many ways as a Feminist. Going along with "feminist" ideologies I shouldn't be picking up this mind garbage, but rather I should be reappropriating, refunctioning (Kipnis), disarticulating the Cosmopolitan and rearticulating to challenge that hegemony. What screws around with me the most is that Cosmopolitan is woman driven in its reading audience AND production. On that note, I think the big question is, WHO is screwing with us? Althusser says it is an interaction of the elite and the base, however in the last instance the base will have the last call. It's this weird cyclical .....'fuck': we, women, can't stop screwing ourselves!

How to rearticulate Cosmopolitan and make a radical interruption? I already talked to the service individual I was waiting in line for about this craziness!!! - interrupted his day, but I am sure he learned a great deal of what I have learned in this class. But to fully use what is avaialable to us to make an interruption (Rhodes & Kipnis) I should rearticulate Cosmopolitan in my zine. However is that radical enough?? A zine (like a magazine) will use the hegemonic structure to throw something back in its face but how.......to rearticulate the content? It is hard to rearticulate half naked freaks of nature (yes, freaks of nature because not everyone is 6 feet tall and 115lbs). It is hard to think of radical ways (or maybe I am not creative enough), but we aren't taught to think 'outside' of the box all the time. I cannot just put scantily clad women in my zine and wite about how horrible it is, that's not radical enough although I am rearticulating hegemony. I am in conflict with myself over this stuff and it's driving me crazy. I have to be doing a multitude of things as a feminist to challenge the hegemony:

1. Don't ignore Cosmopolitan
2. Rearticulate Cosmopolitan
3. Refunction Cosmopolitan
4. Reuse what is given to you
5. significantly reflect
6,7,8...................nth number

The list goes on, and each point I have to ask "how am I going to do this", and its crazy because each time I have an answer on how to rearticulate, refunction and make an interruption, it conflicts with something else and I don't think it is effective in use any more. AH!!!!!!!!!! - or is this just anotoher manifestation of my obsession with perfection as Baudrillard asserts?

Well, at least the individual who was providing the service at the end of the line knows about this now, and maybe he'll make an interruption somewhere else? Who knows any more.

Interruption

Post-Feministeppin' on Thursday night, Dr. Tapley noted that we should think about how interrupted/powerful our steppin' would be parallel to black fraternities if we just stopped right in the middle of the day and started steppin'. Our Feministeppin' is an interruption, as defined by Rhodes in "Substantive and Feminist Girlie Action", of how we intervene on an dominant hegemony. Feministeppin is not written text in class or online, however it gave each of us a temporary, 30seconds -1minute, sense of agency, "to resist, and act" (128).
I can't see us splaying around tampons, walking around in underwear, and throwing bananas between classes however I felt , surprisingly, really empowered and not embarassed Thursday night. When I first heard "cheerleading" escape the mouth of our professor I didn't know how I felt about this project. Cheerleading to me is a very unfeminist type of activity to me. When I think of cheerleading an image [pre determined as discussed by Baudrillard] of blond fit girls who wear short skirts, and could be snobby - like the trio in Meangirls, pops into my head.

My questions now are, were we effective, or would we be effective to act as the change that Kipnis demands? Did we, as the 'proletariat' find a way to express ourselves in an ISA to attempt to overturn the dominant ruling power as expressed by Althusser? Were we only effective because we adopted some hegemonic ideas into our Feministeppin' and combined a lot of fragments and ideas into less than a minute like a commercial. Alternatively were our cheers so of fragmented that it would be meaningless unless someone seriously took time to reflect on our cheers like the judges? Did we successfully utilize hook's empowering nihilism to reappropriate the 'unfeminist' act of cheerleading? - If we were to do this just down on Jasper ave, would people take us seriously? OR like us giggle when we listened to "Pussy Eating 101"?

I think we were an initial attempt at repappropriating meanings, and an initial realization of Kipinis's call for aciton. However because we have to use hegemonic ideals, such as making our cheers into somewhat fragmented commercials packed with ideas, that without significant reflection no one would really take anything away from it. Then again, if we repeatedly did this on a day-to-day basis at school maybe people would start getting the idea, or just become desensitized and start to ignore it. So, although Feministeppin' was a fun filled night, I think it only scratches the surface of strategic action, whatever it may be, towards popular culture.

Springtime For The Populists?

The readings for this class bombard you with ideas, hence a proper reflection is required for clear significance and understanding because meaning according to Baudrillard is self-referential. We need to understand ideas within our own contexts just as I will attempt to display relating Kipnis’ ‘Refunctioning’ reconsidered: towards a left popular culture and Hitler.

Major political changes in history haven’t really happened without a “crisis”. I really mean major ones such as Germany (the masses/people) feeling all self-defeated after WWI looked upon someone who would create a new ideal; Hitler. Hitler illustrates Kipnis’ assertion that hegemony is always a process, and a class (in this case an individual) becomes hegemonic not through sheer domination, “but through its ability to interpellate both the members of its own class and members of the classes it seeks to dominate” (32). Hitler rearticulated German nationalism (admittedly with the help of some force) by “provoking a crisis of the dominant ideological discourse and a crisis in the ability of the system to neutralize its dominated sectors” (33). Hitler recognized the German people needed to reunite and called upon them to become the ideology with German nationalism (something that related all of them) because the previous dominant ideology and the loss of WWI caused moments of antagonism (as Tapley says: moments of ‘pissed-off’-ness). According to Kipnis these people are considered 'unassimilatable", however Hitler just moved the people from being assimilated from one ideology to the next despite this 'unassimilability'. Hitler recognized the antagonisms and articulated them with popular interpellation in a rough sense, “Hey you à we the people of Germany, we are the #1”. Thereby winning the ideological class struggle because he reappropriated “the same interpellations in antagonistic discourses” (33). Hitler rearticulated values, however he reinstituted the same hierarchy the previous ideology had before him. It goes in a cycle because there will always be an antognistic discourse to rearticulate, and once rearticulation happens for the next group of opressed a new hegemony has taken over.

At the end, Kipnis poses the question of how we should go about challenging ‘the system’ versus, “fostering critical strategies” (34). However, I find that she is in conflict with her own discourse on populism by expressing the need for action in academia. The academic population is an elite and definitely not the masses, nor does her article reach the masses. Albiet Kipnis argues for action, I think hegemony and new ideals are so privisional we just keep reproducing hegemony which marginalizes a new and different group each time; othering.

I'll think about it tomorrow

I'm not sure if I have the concepts down from the latest class, however I will blog about what I've taken away in the context the topics were presented in.

I find that Benjamin builds a binary with 'old' art and 'new' art in the way they are digested, and then acted upon by the mass (audience). I think we are sick human beings who need hyperboles because we are born and raised in a society of excess. This excess creates both a distraction AND absorbtion, for example Person X enjoys the show Survivor which is very fragmented(distraction; new art) YET is absorbed by(what old art does to you) Survivor because Person X purchases all merchandise, books, etc. Together, distraction and absortion both dictate to the mass (ie) how it 'really' is out in the wild of Surviving, AND can be used for mass movement. (Help me out on that one, I'm not sure if I am okay about the concept or just very mixed up) As suggested in lecture popular culture then becomes a reflection of us. This was displayed in the 9/11 dvd we watched with the Rudy Giuliani making ironic, depressing, hilarious statements regarding freedom, race and free will. The reflection?? --> We are really all just a bunch of racist bigots!

I was in SHOCK after viewing the clip from the L-word. Afterwards when asked if we considered the scene to exemplify rape, the little voice inside my head answered: YES. While watching the clip I thought of Gone With The Wind, when Rhett just carries Scarlett off as a right of marriage, or his 'right' as husband and wife. I thought of a heterosexual relationship, this is maybe because I have some male friends who have had unwanted sexual experiences. However I think the scene we saw from L-word in a sense romanticized rape like every other show or movie we see. Person A forces themselve upon Person B, Person B then fights back and then starts to....enjoy the situation? Is it being somewhat dictated to us that it is fun to have someone take sexual control of us? This royally screws up everyone's paradigms and blurs the lines as to when an individual should speak up about sex and violence. Can a man rape his wife? Rather in the L-word this translated to, can a partner rape their partner? CAN someone you're living with in an intimate setting, implying they care for you, rape .....you? I think the clipping deomonstrated Benjamin's idea of art as a revolutionary mechanism, and political practice. The lesbian rape, which is a hyperbole in a heteronormativity in society, is a political tool making us question ourselves. Questions such as: can rape happen in a lesbian relationship when it is historically and statistically reported as happening to females. Maybe...just maybe the clip is a reflection upon us to politically make us more aware that it CAN really happen to anyone?

And, now because just thinking about those paradigm limit questions, I feel lost and confused because.....do I then have a certain way of thinking (paradigm) about something that's solid enough for me to answer a question as, "Yes. Yes, Dr. Tapely, that was rape."