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.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Were we successful, and what would it take to create substantial change? This summer the organization I work for sent me to Washington, D.C. to get training from a group called Men Can Stop Rape. Although much of their approach uses several patriarchal sensibilities to get men to care (i.e. men should prevent rape because the women they care about might be raped), they asserted that change takes consistent effort over time, and thus, diverse interventions are necessary to catch the attention of those whose ideologies you are attempting to disrupt. The phrase they used was “seeds of change” and I think this relates well to Kipnis argument. She mentions the cracks and fissures that appear during a transition from one position to another (e.g. from a patriarchal framework to a feminist perspective). In between those cracks and fissures, I believe we are dropping seeds of change in the hopes that our antagonisms will grow into something more substantial. So, in response to your questioning of the level of substantial change we might create, I think we are busy taking advantage of those opportunities for producing antagonisms, even if they are only provisional. We have to start somewhere, right?
Post a Comment