Critical Response #2

Starting with Malea Powell’s, “Listening to ghosts: an alternative to (non)argument”, hooks’s idea of theory being used for discrimination and healing is connected to Foucault’s discourse/power theories. Learning the difference between strategy and tactics, tactical discourse has the power to give a space and voice to the oppressed. I was contemplating the objectivity of scholarly work, especially historical works – the salience of opinions, even unconscious, still regarded if properly researched – and that it must be a response to the pain or guilt one must feel when researching the history of colonization and systems of oppression.  Crying and feeling one’s work - a rebellious act. As most scholars come from a privileged background, it would make sense to protect their privilege, in fear that it can be taken away in this game, and pride in the immense work it – of course – took for them to get where they are. Language is a game too? To get reactions, to relay information, to manipulate, I never thought about it as such for it seemed too serious to be a game. But we do all take positions, our words and facial expressions are our moves – even operating on different frequencies depending on context and nuance. But as a just game. Powell makes it seem so simple! To be a modest speaker and an eager listener – what a concept! To be more accountable with this game is a world to imagine. Thinking of the “scholarly” work that would be done if the passion were palpable and the academic style changed. It would make the work come to life, much like the ghosts it would be speaking with.

Patti Duncan’s piece spoke of the importance of memory, generational, and it’s importance for ways of knowing and context. How could there be story and culture without the memory? With disease as a predicating factor for urgency, the feeling of responsibility as a child to take care of their parent is something I related strongly to. As a child who had a young experience as a caretaker, it is painful to imagine the intensified feeling of not being taken seriously via racist exoticism – being seen as even more infantile because of stereotyped domicility on top of the belief that Asian women can tolerate more pain. Forgetting can be a place of healing, memory a place of strength. But if the forgetting takes away the memories and theories to take the pain away, what then? I have no idea, but to rely on the collective consciousness of sharing stories - why ghost stories still need to be written. When the dominant narratives of white fathers can be subverted by mothers making dinner - there is more urgency than ever to remember those dinners. And if being a “good girl” is socializing well to expectations these expectations need to be discussed at an earlier age. I don’t know much about Korean history or culture, to my loss, but the girl’s rewritten history of her heroic grandfather reuniting the Koreas is a history I would cherish and nurture, because it opens up a world of possibility.

I don’t even know where to start with Cherrie Moraga’s work except to try to explain how much her experiences of having to earn love as a daughter, the mother trying to live through the son’s privilege, struck me to the core. The pain of sacrificing one’s achievements and nurturance for another because of sex, these unearned privileges in general, seem to be overarching cultural occurrences. Moraga spoke from a place of neither/nor, Chicana but more white, from lesbian to Catholicism. She connected the links between Eve and La Malinche, this paradox of distrust in women I have started to articulate in popular music, and the way it causes women to distrust one another – how it is perpetuated by the oppressed. Of course Moraga is talking in context of Chicano culture, but how can you not connect the Black superwoman with the Chicana superwoman – Moraga did. The more I hear white men speak more and louder than their peers, the more I see a man with women behind him drawing his bath, making his dinner, and doing his laundry with no praise. Again, Moraga addressed the need to rewrite history, rewrite the history of Malintzin to be more realistic, rewrite the history of women to make their identity more worth loving, to actually love women - is revolutionary.