Friday, October 8, 2010

Things that make me feel nice:

I am currently in a course on affect theory, werein we get to read all kinds of interesting texts on affects (I tried to find you a link to a definition of affect, but kept getting affect= emotion, which is not true. If you are actually interested I suggest Eve Kosofsky Sedwick's "Touching Feeling", or Sianne Ngai's "Ugly Feelings"). I came across this during my reading on envy the other day, and, as the titled text indicates, it made me feel nice:

"Let's say there is a certain model of femininity that I recognize as culturally desirable and invested with a certain degree of power. If from a feminist standpoint What I struggle with most is my having been acculturated into admiring and desiring that femininity, envy would seem to enable me to critically negotiate rather than simply disavow or repudiate this desire, which would entail positing myself as immune to acculturation. Moreover, envy would facilitate a transition from desire to antagonism that might enable me to articulate what I have been trained to admire as something possibly threatening or harmful to me." (Ngai 163)
(Ngai, Sianne. "Ugly Feelings." Cambridge: Harvard University Press; 2005.)

Yesterday I also had the pleasure of having two really amazing conversations about why it is not only okay but necessary for feminism to be open to all kinds of voices, experiences, and subject positions, even if they disagree with each other (as long as they're disagreeing in a manner that is still feminist, I am not suggesting that we let a bunch of anti feminists in to our club because they use the word "feminist" in their self description) because sometimes those disagreements are actually good for the movement. I still need some time to think about this, but will post some examples and more commentary when I come up with them, I just thought the realization was, for me anyways, a bit profound.

This also ties into my personal experience with self-identified feminist friends. When my husband and I announced our engagement I basically had a sector of friends that responded by saying things like "don't do it!" or "but you're a feminist!" No one had the ear to listen to our side of the story- that, while yes, there is a sketchy and unkind history of marriage, and that many people from a variety of political and personal stances have rejected it for some very good reasons that, well, we don't grow up in a vacuum. My husband and I had both lived with previous partners and neither of us wanted to do that again without some sort of long term commitment to the relationship outside of having decided to live together. We also both have families that would have been offended as hell if we had decided to have a civil wedding, or even to become common law: his family because they are culturally and religiously mennonite (well, most of them, my husband isn't religious), and my family because they are Ukrainian, and in that culture weddings= huge celebration with good food, dancing all night, and booze. That having been said, my experience of marriage has always been that way- I understand that historically it has not been, and would never deny anyone their right to decide that marriage= bad. But for us, we wanted to include family in our commitment, wanted to have a huge party to celebrate our future together (most of our anxiety was over how the mennonite half would take the drinking and dancing. It all turned out well). It made sense for us in this stage of our life (wanting to make that commitment, but also because I will be going somewhere else to do a PhD soon, and we wanted to be married before the hisband had to move his whole life and career (he has been in our city his entire life, and has been out of school for almost six years already). Is there privelige acting here? Yes. We could afford to have the wedding we wanted (we did a bunch of stuff the budget way, but even a budget wedding is super expensive). We could also afford to decide not to live together until we were married. Rent is expensive, living together can cut costs immensly. Does this make me less feminist? I hope not. I am still the same, radically thinking and acting person, still engaged with the same reading and writing and cultures (still examining my own choice through them, and ultimately feeling okay about it).

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