spring break

“In 1981 Yale French Studies finally published a feminist issue, number 62, Feminist Readings: French Text/American Contexts. The volume is an interesting collection of work which successfully combines engaged feminist analysis with sophisticated literary and psychoanalytic theory. But the beginning, the first sentence, disturbs me. YFS 62 (as I will henceforth refer to it) opens thus: “This is a very unusual issue of Yale French Studies, in that its guest editor is a seven-headed monster from Dartmouth."
     A striking, somewhat troubling image. Of course the notion of a monster from Dartmouth is quite funny. As swiftly as it appears, the monster is domesticated...The seven-headed monster literally refers to the seven Dartmouth faculty women who edit YFS 62. The monster is a figure for the seven individuals working together as one body. The next two pages give a glowingly positive description of this collaboration, of collectivity as method. Since the image appears in the introduction, signed by the editors, it constitutes a self-portrait—an ironic one. The editors are saying: Look, we are horrifying, we are monstrous, we are inhumanly ugly. This turns out to be an ironic way of saying: Look, we are “very unusual,” we are beautiful, we are extraordinary.
     ...there are many possible ways of being monstrous, but the same type of abnormality that figures in the editor’s introduction also figures [throughout]—the monstrosity of a being whose boundaries are inadequately differentiated, thus calling into question the fundamental opposition of self and other. Such a being is terrifying because of the stake any self as self has in its own autonomy in its individuation, in its integrity.”

--Jane Gallop, The Monster in the Mirror: The Feminist Critic’s Psychoanalysis

m. & i went to disneyland for ten hours two weeks ago. roller coaster hair, twilight zone tower of terror, greasy popcorn, and throngs of little girls dressed in megawatt princess gear. i read somewhere that disneyland was specifically constructed so that the visitor feels like a participant rather than a dominated viewer. for instance, the buildings on main street are three-quarter scale. i also read that when leni riefenstahl visited america, walt was one of the only people within the film community who would receive her.

“We tend to think of American democracy as being somehow eternal, ever-renewable, and capable of withstanding all assaults...The Founders thought, in contrast, that it was tyranny that was eternal, ever-renewable, and capable of withstanding all assaults, whereas democracy was difficult, personally exacting, and vanishingly fragile. The Founders did not see Americans as being special in any way.”

--Naomi Wolf, The End of America: A Citizen's Call to Action