Comfort in Awkward Silence

We still haven't really spoken about it.
I want to keep it this way. Awkward.


Meanwhile, I typed this to my department meeting:

Hello R,
I feel terrible! I thought the meeting was next Friday, the 11th. This week I am absolutely swamped. How did the time go by so quickly? I do feel rather strongly about our topic, and I wish I had the weekend to look up more texts. But in a nutshell:

From my perspective/field, I believe rhetoric, and language itself, must be approached insomuch that patriarchal ideologies are "built into" the very words we speak.

I use Audre Lorde's "Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference" (1978) as a springboard for examining ways she claims "Western European history conditions us to see human difference in simplistic opposition to each other: dominant/subordinate, good/bad, up/down, superior/inferior."
From there we try to examine all sorts of false dichotomies and how our culture gives value to one set of the binaries over the other, which of course creates hierarchies reflected in our language(s), with or without our explicit knowledge.

From this point, as you can imagine, the possibilities are endless (if not readily available in this email, ironically).

Let me know if no one else has approached the significance of language/rhetoric/writing as a foundation block. Because I have internalized much of this information, I may have to think about some accessible authors for students that center more on this idea itself. Texts that come to mind include: Dale Spender's _The Writing or the Sex_, Jane Tompkins' "Me and My Shadow," Joreen's "The BITCH Manifesto," and Amy Tan's "Mother Tongue."

Again, let me know if you need more information or if you would like the info in another format.

Best,
SQMojo

Why can't I write: Fighting with partner. Broke oven face plate. Life shattering around me (again--no worries--happens alot--big tub of Elmer's Glue on hand). Yet, need more time. Slow down.