habitus

My Footbinding history professor came to class with a sack full of shoes. We each get to take home (for rent) an authentic fin de siecle shoe that has possibly been worn more than a hundred years ago!! Being the leading scholar on footbinding, she has come to collect an array of little shoes differing in style and pattern. Our homework is to 'live' with the shoe for a semester, and let it be a part of our lives. I took some pictures just so you can get a sense of the size of things..

Mystique demythified

I just finished reading The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan today for my Feminine Text class next semester. I've heard about this book for a while but was really surprised to see how genuinely relevant it is for people, not just women, even today. It's about the "problem that has no name," namely, that 50s housewives seep into depression because they have never had the chance to develop as individuals and max out their potential human capacities. Trapped in a world of monotonous, mundane activities, housewives did not have any creative outlet to identify themselves as autonomous beings, which further made them latch on to being so-and-so's mother or so-and-so's wife. A lack of personal identity stunts personal growth, purposeful life direction, and creates a vacuum of a mind only to be frittered away at excessive cleaning and bridge games.

Friedan's solution is education and work, both crucial to the process of self-formation. This idea of work as identity-creation is echoed from Marx to current psychological research on the benefits of finding flow (that feeling of heightened engagement and attention when working on something and getting lost in it). Finding interesting, challenging activities that utilize as much of a person's mental and creative capacity as possible is the best way to start people on the path of individualism. These are activities that are built upon years of cultivation and knowledge, that extend to a wide array of possibilities future achievement and enrichment. It makes me think about how lucky I am to have cultivated since teenhood many activities/intellectual revenues to pursue for later life. Education has definitely sharpened my knowledge and interest for everything liberal arts while beautiful things like food, style, and relationships have always been in my life and will continue to be.

My only problem with Friedan is that she proposes women to embrace only one ability in depth---devote their lives to it and contribute back to society. As grand as that sounds, I feel like some of it is unnaturally human (who's curious about just one thing??) and just the cogs of capitalism churning out vertically-driven knowledge rather than valuing anything horizonal. Capitalism efficiency is at its best when you call a company and realize people only know one niche of their own department and have no idea what other departments/the greater company is about---it's a pain to be transferred on the phone a gazillion times. I wonder what Marx would say about this...how pigeonholed nicheing of knowledge and ability damages individual capacity for humanness/greater understanding in the long run. People may not be alienated from their work, but they are alienated from what's going on in the world besides their work.

I can't choose which single interest to pursue! And even if I did, it's at the cost of all the other things I could be learning/achieving/exploring. I hope that dedicating my life to relative breadth of knowledge and not intense depth will still be as rewarding, because that's what I'm intending to do, and so far it's working. Plus, breadth and a cross-disciplinary education offer something vertically driven exploration doesn't: that's the breathtaking beauty of seeing the bigger picture, with all the senses.

P.S. Friedan based her argument on several premises that still can be debatable.

1. It's mostly due to men's insisting that women are relegated to the home and not interested in greater societal work/politics.

2. WWII men came home yearning for soft femininity and homeliness, which was the primary factor in the conservative backlash of bringing women back into the home in the 50s. In the interwar period, women were actually much more liberated, working men's jobs, smoking, flappers, the New Woman...etc

3. The Family and Home are not enough for any human being---they have to have greater work within society for self-actualization.

4. Work is the most rewarding when it's valued by society (i.e. paid for)

5. Greater sexual satisfaction is contingent upon greater individual identity and freedom (she cites the Kinsey report, which shows statistically how womens' reported orgasms increased with more education and independent work?!)

What do you think about her premises?

Letters from Mexico

“The most important of these idols, and the ones in whom they have the most faith, I had taken from their places and thrown down the steps; and I had those chapels where they were cleaned, for they were full of the blood of sacrifices; and I had images of Our Lady and of other saints put there, which caused Mutezuma and the other natives some sorrow” (106).

“The figures of the idols in which these people believed are very much larger than the body of a big man. They are made of dough from all the seeds and vegetables which they eat, ground and mixed together, and bound with the blood of human hearts which those priests tear out while still beating. And also after they are made they offer them more hearts and anoint their faces with the blood” (107).

-Herman Cortes

Silencing the Past

"I want to reject both the naive proposition that we are prisoners of our past and the pernicious suggestion that history is what we make of it. History is the fruit of power, but power itself is never so transparent that its analysis becomes superfluous. The ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility; the ultimate challenge, the exposition of its roots."

-Michel-Rolph Trouillot

Story of Women

Loosely based on a true story, Story of Women (Une Affaire De Femmes) traces the tragic trajectory of a French housewife turned abortionist in 40s Nazi-occupied France. The movie successfully has all the aspects of a great historical film---personal struggle of love and drama against political backdrop, lushly local fashions and lifestyles, and memorable, moving characters and events. Picks you up and plants you in small-town 40s France of hand-milled soaps, fading floral wallpaper, and street prostitutes. There are heart-wrenching moments of physical and psychological struggles women have to go through that make you so grateful times have changed. The movie doesn't dwell on tragic happenings, but rather lets them silently happen and pass, deliberately adding to the ruthlessness of the events even time doesn't care to heal. Hubbert is on my list of most admirable actresses: she takes on the most psychologically complex, and at the same time, temporally and geographically distant characters that require an amazing amount of character intuition and empathy to truly act the part. Here's another (dark, very dark) movie of hers that left me shaking, disturbed, and mind-blown.

Godiva

Did you know that Lady Godiva rode naked thru the streets of England circa 1000 in order to protest unfair taxation? Also, Tom a voyeur in the crowd was struck blind/and/or/dead after sinfully viewing her--hence the birth of the Peeping Tom. Here's a gorgeous John Collier painting, of Lilith fame.