Category: Engaging

NO/yes

This Will Have Been: Art, Love and Politics in the 1980s is currently at the Walker Art Museum here in Minneapolis. I’m really excited to see it. My sister saw it in Chicago and said it was great. She recommended that I pay particular attention to two artists: Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger. While Kruger’s name didn’t sound familiar, I am familiar with Holzer. I briefly wrote about her awesome twitter account, JennyHolzerMom, a few months ago. In that post, I lamented the fact that Holzer didn’t seem to be tweeting anymore. I checked it just now, and she does have a few more, like this one:

and this one:

 

After doing a quick google search for Kruger, I realized that I had seen her work before–I think on a book cover? I like how she combines images with text, especially in this image to the left. I want to do so more research on her; I just requested a book from 2010 about her from the Minneapolis Public Library.

 

UPDATE: I decided to experiment with Pixelmator and create a response image to put beside Kruger’s “no” image. Here’s mine (which I put together really quickly—through the process of doing it, I learned a few new techniques):

Smile or Die, part 2: some inspirations

Yesterday I posted this image. It was inspired by some theories/ideas that aim to resist the demand to have a positive attitude and just be happy. In this post, I want to offer a few passages from these theories as a way to engage with and make sense of the image and my motivations.

SMILE OR DIE!

This phrase is a reference to Barbara Ehrenreich’s talk for RSA Animate (see transcript here). In this talk, she critiques “the ideology of positive thinking,” in which people are encouraged expected to have a positive attitude, act as if “there’s nothing wrong” and “just put a smiley face and get on with it.” The problem with this “delusion of positivity” is that it conceals or suppresses any dissent to or questioning of the larger structures that create conditions for our unhappiness. She says:

What could be cleverer as a way of quelling dissent than to tell people who are in some kind of trouble – poverty, unemployment etc – that it’s all their attitude, you know that that’s all that has to change, that they should just get with the programme, smile and no complaining. It’s a brilliant form of social control

So, the command to “smile or die!” is also a demand to not question, not worry and not think about why it might sometimes be good to not be happy. Now, Ehrenreich is not against joy or expressing/experiencing happiness. Instead, she’s against the larger ideology of positive thinking that demands that we suck it up, don’t complain, be cheerful and spread our good feelings to others.

KILLJOY

This idea of spreading good feelings and the ideology of positivity is one of the central themes in Sara Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness. This book and Ahmed’s critique of the “happiness industry” are big inspirations for my image. I’ve written about the feminist killjoy in past posts. Here’s one of my favorite passages from Ahmed about the feminist killjoy:

Say, we are seated at the dinner table. Around this table, the family gathers, having polite conversations, where only certain things can be brought up. Someone says something you find problematic. You respond carefully, perhaps. You might be speaking quietly, but you are beginning to feel “wound up,”recognizing with frustration that you are being wound up by someone who is winding you up. Let us take seriously the figure of the feminist killjoy. Does the feminist kill other people’s joy by pointing out moments of sexism? Or does she expose the bad feelings that get hidden, displaced or negated under public signs of joy?

The killjoy is someone who refuses to just smile and be happy. Who is willing to be angry or worried or unhappy. Or who will always necessarily fail at being happy in the ways that are demanded of them (ways that usually include a narrow heteronormative/capitalist future and that require living within and therefore reinforcing certain norms).

I JUST WANT YOU TO BE HAPPY

Throughout the book, Ahmed reflects on a phrase that she repeatedly heard as a child: “I just want you to be happy.” She’s particularly interested in the “just want” of this phrase and its implications for thinking through how we understand our own happiness to be tied to others and their willingness to go along with what we imagine to be the right kind of happiness. In describing how this phrase gets uttered, she writes:

We can imagine the speaker giving up, stepping back, flinging up her arms, sighing. I just. The “just” is a qualifier of the want and announces a disagreement with what the other wants without making the disagreement explicit.

To exclaim that you “just want” someone to be happy is not simply to disagree with their approach; it is to claim that their approach will only lead to unhappiness and is therefore bad or not the “right” way to live. And it is to ignore or actively suppress their vision of happiness and joy all for the sake of their “true” happiness.

In my lecture notes from a Queering Desire course that I taught in 2010, I discuss what it means to be happy in the “right” way:

the very hope for happiness means we get directed in specific ways, as happiness is assumed to follow from some life choices and not others” (54).

What life choices are supposed to lead to happiness and which are not? Who gets to decide what leads to happiness and how are those decisions made?

The face of happiness, at least in this description, looks rather like the face of privilege. Rather than assuming happiness is simply found in “happy persons,” we can consider how claims to happiness make certain forms of personhood valuable (11).

Promoting happiness promotes certain ways of living (over others) and certain types of families (11).

“Ideas of happiness involve social as well as moral distinctions insofar as they rest on ideas of who is worthy as well as capable of being happy ‘in the right way'” (13).

A GOOD GIRL?

In May, I wrote about the problems with being a “good girl” in my post, On assholes, douche bags and bullshitters:

In “A Response to Lesbian Ethics,” Marilyn Frye (rightly) asks, “Why should one want to be good? Why, in particular, would a woman want to be good? (56). Her short answer: you shouldn’t. Her longer answer: The demand to be a good girl is intended to keep women in line, to pit them against each other–the “good girls/ladies” vs. “the bad/rebellious women,” and to prevent them from challenging dominant systems of power and privilege.

Be Nice?

This question is inspired by one of my posts from February about Pinterest’s etiquette rule: Be Nice. I wish I had taken a screen shot of the rules; Pinterest has since changed the rule to “be respectful” (which is a much better choice, IMHO). The idea of being nice has specific gendered connotations. I could write a lot about the whole “mean girl” phenomenon (which I taught in my Pop Culture Women course back in 2007…I’ll have to dig up those notes; I don’t think I posted them on that blog, which was my first one ever).

I think I should spend a lot more time writing about why “be nice!” troubles me. It has something to do with how little “being nice” seems to do with expressing care or concern or respect for others. I think it also has something to do with my disdain for etiquette, especially as it relates to “proper” discipline/behavior for girls/women. This disdain for etiquette and manners reminds me of a recent problematizer that I posted.

On TED talks and being quiet

I don’t like TED talks. I’ve discussed my dislike of them here on the blog before. In writing about one of the reasons I am troubled by Brain Pickings I wrote the following:

Her love of TED, with its business self-helpy tone and its pedagogical model that idolizes Experts-who-enlighten, influences the overall tone of the blog. For a number of reasons, which I’ll leave for another post or a series of posts, I don’t like business self-helpy shtuff and my vision of pedagogy comes into conflict with the Expert-as-awesome model.

One of these days I might have to get around to writing a post/article in which I critique TED by drawing upon feminist and queer pedagogical tools. Has anyone done this yet? For now, I’ll use this post to mention a recent New Yorker article that critically discusses “how the conference has turned ideas into an industry.” Although I haven’t read the article yet, I’m intrigued and amused by the opening image which humorously breaks down the standard format of the TED talk (overly polished and formulaic) performance. I especially like the Head Tilt at 12 degrees. While searching for this article online, I also found a post the author did about the article for the New Yorker blog: Five Key TED Talks. In this post, he illustrates some of the features of the TED format through a description of five talks. One of these talks just happens to be about a book I’m currently reading: Quiet.

I have some misgivings about this book (and Cain’s broad generalizations), but I’ll suspend my critique until I finish reading it. Teaser: I’m troubled by her failure to consider how race, gender, class or geographical positioning complicates our experiences and understandings of being introverted or extroverted. And, I can’t help but wonder, in what ways is the introversion she wants to claim a privileged position (one that requires time + money + space) that many can’t afford? Maybe she addresses these questions in later chapters? I should stop writing and start reading…

The Chairs are Where the People Go

About 6 weeks ago, while in the process of doing some research on the history and critiques of self-help books, I came across an interview with Sheila Heti. In the interview she discusses two of her recent books, The Chairs are Where the People Go and How Should a Person Be? I immediately put The Chairs on my Pinterest reading list–I’m not sure why I didn’t add How Should at the same time, but I remedied that by adding it to the list this morning–and about a month later, I requested it from the Minneapolis public library. A few days ago, I finally had a chance to read it while sitting at Lake Nokomis and the Highland Park pool. Here’s a picture that I took at Lake Nokomis, right after finishing one of the chapters on manners:

I really enjoyed reading this book! Such a great twist on the usual advice/self-help book (on the back, it is described as a “self-help book for people who feel they don’t need help”). It’s a collaboration between writer Sheila Heti and her friend, Misha Glouberman, in which Heti interviewed and then recorded (almost word for word) Glouberman’s thoughts on a  wide range of topics that he cares most about. While Glouberman gives some advice on wide-ranging topics like, How to Make Friends in a New City (ch 2), How to be Good at Playing Charades (ch 5), Don’t Pretend There is No Leader (ch 6), Seeing your Parents Once a Week (ch 45) and Get Louder or Quit (ch 49), this book isn’t about advising you on how-to do anything in particular. Instead, it is about documenting one (very interesting and thoughtful) person’s ethos/approach to life. After reading (almost) all of the brief 1-2 page chapters, I feel that I have some sense of who Glouberman is–what he believes, what he does, what he cares about–and I feel inspired to both incorporate some of his ideas into my own ethos and to document some of my thoughts (and the thoughts of other interesting people) in a similar way.

As I was writing the line about this book not being about how-to do anything in the above paragraph, I began reflecting more on my own aversion to “how-to manuals.” I really don’t like giving advice to others, or telling them how exactly to do things (which sometimes gets me into trouble as a teacher, especially with students who expect demand that I give them explicit instructions/directions on how to do things). I like to help/encourage/inspire others by giving them tools to figure things out for themselves. Of course, this doesn’t always work; some people/students need more explicit guidance and strongly want to be told “this is how you do x.” I have a lot of difficulty fulfilling this need/want. Does that make me an ineffective (bad?) teacher or parent? I struggle with this question sometimes.

A few of Glouberman’s chapters really resonated with me. In chapter one–“People’s Protective Bubbles are Okay”–he talks about how people sometimes need to not be interacting with others. In response to those who view this non-interaction as a problem and who try to force people to interact in public spaces through public art projects, he says:

It’s necessary to screen people out. It would be overwhelming if you had to perceive every single person on a crowded subway car in the fullness of their humanity. It would be completely paralyzing. So don’t try to fix this. There is no problem.

Yes! As I read through this passage again I wonder, what does it mean to “perceive every single person in the fullness of their humanity”? And how does this differ (if, at all) from recognizing their humanity…or their right to be perceived as human? Also, what counts as interaction?

Another chapter I really enjoyed was #46, Asking a Good Question. This chapter focuses on the rules that Glouberman offers to people who wish to participate in the Q & A portion of his lectures. Here are a few that I’ve paraphrased: (Admittedly, I’m reluctant to paraphrase because I really like how he writes. However, for brevity’s sake, I’ve decided to condense/summarize here.)

1. A question has to be a question. You can’t turn a statement into a question by raising your voice at the end of your sentence. You’re not fooling anyone.

2. There are no two-part questions. They are 2 separate questions. Pick the best one and ask it.

3. Think about the feelings that motivate you to ask the question. Curiosity and anger are good motivators for effective/productive/engaging questions. Pride and a desire to look smart (or to make others look stupid/small) are not. 

I love how he provides these rules for participants. It would be wonderful if all academic conference attendees were instructed in this way! His statements here make me want to come up with my own list of rules for asking a good question. Sounds like a great project for my staying in trouble tumblr!

Trouble Role Model: Maurice Sendak’s Really Rosie

Sadly, Maurice Sendak died today. I would consider his character Really Rosie as a troublemaking role model for my daughter Rosie. In fact, she’s partly named after Sendak’s Rosie. In memory of Sendak, check out this blog post that I wrote last summer: Really Rosie! and Really, Rosie? When I have time, I’d like to think more about this quote from Sendak on the purpose of his work:

Children surviving childhood is my obsessive theme and my life’s concern.