:: Sunday, February 08, 2004 ::

semantics humor solidarity and feminism

Apparently I am incapable of regularly scheduled blogging.....


I'm working on a project for my semantics class right now, using some classroom conversations that I recorded about five years ago. At the time I did a brief analysis of language, power and solidarity in a feminist classroom (the class was a graduate seminar in feminist political theory). During these recorded class sessions, one of my classmates made a humorous comment based on our readings of Catharine Mackinnon (feminist legal scholar/theorist). If you know anything about Mackinnon, you are probably asking yourself, "what could they have possibly found funny in Mackinnon." Well, we were discussing Mackinnon's assertion that all women are oppressed during sexual encounters with men, regardless of their level of consent, because, according to Mackinnon, the power dynamics of heterosexual encounters are inherently unbalanced. One classmate then whispered to another that she was going to "go home and get oppressed tonight" resulting in Coke-spewing laughter and requests to hear the joke from the rest of us. Using this humor broke us out of an intense discussion of female sexuality in which we were struggling with this depressing claim that implied that many of us in the room were either oppressed or oppressor in our sexual encounters. The joke that reappropriated the word "oppressed" and defanged it allowed us a much-needed respite from our discussion. In addition, it brought into question the "truth" of Mackinnon's claim. So, I'm hoping to use this event in the classroom to discuss the use of humor as a means of shifting power relations and as a means of establishing group solidarity. And that's about as far as I've gotten. I'm still scrambling for relevant research materials....so, I'd better get back to that.

:: Cat 4:11 AM [+] ::
...