rhetoricat

This is a sad case of women v. women. I read Bitch, feministing, and Bust. I am a feminist, have been for a long time (possibly forever) and this just annoys me. Jessica Valenti, thank you for appointing yourself the enforcer of the feminist definition. We’re glad to know that you’re here to enlighten us.

Sound bitter? Mostly just annoyed by people who try to “brand” feminism and/or make it exclusionary.

Et tu, Jessica? “BUST not feminist?” Really?.

In the Fall of 2006 I received an email, filtered down through the chain of departmental command, regarding my course website from the previous Spring. The email regarded a comment exchange between two students from my Technical Writing class. Now I make it a practice to at least skim all of my students’ comments. Early on in the semester I read them more carefully to ensure that students are “getting” the appropriate content, style, etc of blogging. Once I’m assured that they understand the basic principles, the 100+ comments a week don’t get the same careful attention. Nonetheless, I read to catch the flow of the commentary and the basic ideas behind their comments. I also use that time to choose blog entry “conversations” to promote to the front page for further discussion. Clearly it would be difficult for an obviously inappropriate comment to escape my notice. So, when I received this email I felt certain that there must have been some kind of mistake. However, navigating to the comment location I did indeed find three student comments disparaging a professor, a clearly inappropriate exchange for a Purdue course website. They were there; they had been posted; and I had missed them. And then I looked at the date. The comments had been posted several days after I had tallied and recorded comments for the semester. Why then, did my students post comments that, even if they were posted prior to the due date, would obviously not receive credit? What compelled them to air their grievances on what I considered to be my site? Most importantly (to me), why would they create a permanent record of their disdain? What could be gained by posting them and is there any consideration for what might be lost? Finally, whose site was it?

Last night at Starbucks two students sat down next to me and began to loudly complain to one another about the instructor whose class they were preparing for. The instructor’s name was mentioned on more than one occasion along with several expletives. Here we have the “old school” version of inappropriate student comments. I don’t mean that students should not express their opinions; I do, however, question the propriety (and prudence) of doing so in a public space. And it wasn’t as though they had forgotten my presence or that there were others within hearing. They turned from their conversation and addressed me with (roughly) the following comment: “I don’t want you to think that we’re awful people, but our instructor is terrible.” This was followed by the usual specific complaints that we’ve all received: too much work, etc. I wasn’t surprised by what they were saying; inappropriate conversations abound in public spaces (especially one cell phones, but I won’t get into that now). But in the public space of brick and mortar and fleshy bodies words disappear as they are uttered. Unless you are recording or transcribing, it’s difficult to repeat, much less remember over time, spoken comments. On the web we have no such restrictions; you are accountable for your words in a very different way. There is no “you must have misheard me” or “that’s not who I was talking about” to disassociate yourself from the spurious comments.

These are fairly benign anecdotes. The web has a sadly large number of hateful comments and folks aren’t usually too embarrassed to express the same sentiments in the world of flesh and brick-and-mortar. Still, benign or not, these posted comments are public (and to a large extent permanent) and they don’t just expose private information about the individual poster. They expose and make inaccurate claims about another. How do we ensure that kind of privacy? (Especially if we are using Blogger?) Is it our responsibility to monitor our students once they are no longer our students.

While searching YouTube for short documentaries, I came across the following video “Rock Paper Scissors” . I was fairly convinced that this was a mockumentary, but to be sure, I searched for the Rock Paper Scissors Society mentioned on the site. It’s a relatively large website with quite a few posts, and as I went through the site, it seemed credible. Still, I wasn’t convinced. You all know how many seemingly professional websites lack real credibility. More research was necessary. A short google later, I’m listening to an excerpt from NPR’s Morning Edition and the topic of said excerpt? You guessed it. RPS. Or more specifically it was about the winner of the World RPS tournament.

I’m not sure what I can say about this from a theoretical point of view. If anyone else has any ideas, feel free to share. I mostly just thought that it was an interesting example of how one defines a game. I would never have considered “rock paper scissors” as a game; although I suppose it is. I just never thought carefully about it. It is, however, my preferred way to make a decision. (And I wish I was kidding; but I’m not.) Beyond using it to decide where to eat, who gets the front seat, and what to name my first born child, I haven’t given “rock paper scissors” much consideration. Obviously, some folks have. So, here’s what I wonder: there are folks who think that LARPing is pretty insane; I’m trying to be open minded but I find this to be pretty crazy; where do you folks stand on this topic? It seems that RPS is pretty much the simplest game that you can have (other than maybe thumb war?) and to me, it seems strange to have such an investment in RPS to the extent that you travel across the world to compete in a tournament. How does the complexity of a game determine its significance? I mean; are these folks gamers as we define those who LARP or play WOW or the Wii? (Oh, I thought of another simple one–flipping a coin.) Are these games? Is there some overarching characteristic that a game must have? I mostly asking because I’m thinking about the restrictions that many want to put on the definitions of writing and texts. Is this analogous? Am I just crazy to be even making this a topic of discussion?

Well, will you look at that? I guess I had something remotely theoretical to say (or ask).

Another post from my former New Media class. This one inspired my post on gender and documentation.

In my 2007 New Media class, I posted a blog entry that I felt compelled to repost here:

My grandmother never had her own social security number. When she was born they weren’t issued at birth and the only time a woman needed to/could attain one was if she went to “work.” Otherwise, a wife used her husband’s SSN with a digit added to the end. First of all, let me emphasize how very hard my grandmother worked. She grew up on a farm and married a farmer. They had a little bit of land and by the grace, a home to shelter them; that was pretty much it (even though it was much more than many people had). My grandmother worked out in the fields with my grandfather, sun up to sun down. And working in the fields on a farm is very different from working in your garden, especially when you are working without the farm machinery that we take for granted now. This one photo remains burned into my mind: my grandmother, scarf tied around her head, breaking up soil with a hoe. Even though this photo is taken later, after they were successful enough to say own a camera, for me this is the document that will always serve as evidence of my grandmother’s work. A social security card would tell me nothing about who my grandmother was, about the things that she did. That single photo contains a world of meaning for me that extends far beyond The documents that prove that she was born, that she married and that she died tell me tell me almost nothing about my grandmother, yet even without the stories that I can associate with this photograph, it would still tell me more about who she was as a person. I could see where she lived, a piece of her daily life, how she held her body, what kind of clothing she wore. All of these seem so much more important than knowing her exact date of birth or death. Yet it is our birth certificates that we place in safety deposit boxes. It’s not that these things are unimportant but if I had to choose between a record of when I was born and when I died and a moment in between that showed what I did, I’d choose the photograph that caught me between the birth and death certificates.

All documentation, all records are necessarily incomplete. Even the official documents that tell you when you were born. They give you a date, a place, and the names of your parents. They don’t tell you about the ambulance driver who got lost taking your mother to the hospital and the elevator that got stuck between floors as your mother was being taken to the maternity ward. The entire story of the day that I was born tells you so much more about the bizarre life that began that day than knowing what day it actually was. The date is important for lots of reasons but the story of that day is so much richer. So, my birth certificate tells you little about the circumstances of my birth. Similarly, my grandmother’s photo represents a piece of a moment and place in time, providing no knowledge of what cam before or after or of what was happening outside of the photo’s boundaries, yet that document makes her real to me in ways that a birth certificate never could. So why is it more likely that evidence of her death and birth will remain long after I am gone than will any evidence of the life that she lived between? How do documents get imbued with value? And what makes an official document more valuable than that photo? And what does it say about the ways that women and men are valued differently, when those official documents, the ones that make you “real,” are denied to women?

(A note on my grandmother’s SSN: several years after my grandfather’s death my grandmother had to apply for a social security number in order to get Medicaid. Already in her eighties, my mother helped her with the complex application process to obtain, for the first time, her own SSN. Until then, in the eyes of government assistance, she wasn’t “real.”)

And a comment on the photograph: I don’t know who took it, although I know from stories that it is reflective of my grandmother’s life. It was only in writing this that I considered the circumstances necessary to take a photograph. Did my grandparents own a camera early in their married life? Wouldn’t that have been a strange luxury for a struggling farmer? Could it have been a wealthier relative? And if so, why take such a photo? Why be a voyeur to another’s hard work? (I know that photographers do this all the time but it somehow seems stranger that a relative would photograph and look on without offering help.) What was the impulse that made the photographer want to capture this particular moment in time? I welcome any possible answers to these questions.