I went to the Green Festival today. I’ve been meaning to check it out for a couple of years now and i was able to drop some honey off with a friend while i was there. Since i didn’t want to spend too much time, i simply decided to walk through the exhibitor hall. I felt overwhelmed by the amount of stuff and people! I’ve been carrying a fork & spoon wrapped in a cloth napkin with me for a while now but apparently i should’ve bought these bamboo things in a carrying bag. And everyone tries to hand me … Continue reading »
Nov 122011
Sep 262011
I’ve been thinking and reading a lot about oppression. I am taking a feminist philosophy seminar and am part of a transforming oppression workshop series. It’s frustrating, tedious, often painful, and very important work. I can’t shake the sense, though, that we might be looking at all of this in a way that isn’t all that helpful to dismantle the oppressive structures. There is a lot of slicing and dicing. I get that our identities are multidimensional and very important to our sense of self. They define who we are. And these dimensions are often the very same dimensions along … Continue reading »
Apr 132011
Brené Brown talks about a culture of shame. I didn’t quite understand this. How does this culture shame us? Then, today, the juxtaposition of what i am studying – singlism and shame – and my personal experience helped me understand the mechanism. The primary shaming message of singlism is: You are not good enough because you are not married. And that message – “you are not good enough because you don’t meet standard x” – is all around us. We are not recognized as who we are. We are recognized as how well we conform to an external standard, whether … Continue reading »
In her 2007 essay “Gay Divorce: Thoughts on the Legal Regulation of Marriage,” Claudia Card argues that marriage is an evil institution. An evil institution consists of two foreseeable and causally linked components: “Culpable wrongdoing and intolerable harm” (30). Marriage, according to Card, meets these criteria. Spouses – predominantly women – are exposed to intolerable harm, including death, through domestic violence. The emergence of such violence was foreseeable and it is tied to the institution of marriage that the threat of violence can only be mitigate by abolishing the institution. And, finally, there are people who have the power to … Continue reading »
In “Five Faces of Oppression” (also in this book), Iris Marion Young argues that oppression is structural, part of the existing system. There might not be a clear oppressor anymore; no tyrant to point to. Instead the relations between groups are marred with oppression, even if that oppression is not administered consciously. Importantly, there are many groups in society that are oppressed. No group’s oppression has “causal or moral primacy” (42). (Page numbers refer to the text linked to above.) Young identifies five faces of oppression
Jun 112010
I have started to read a book on developmental systems theory (I’ve summarized a little on DST already). It is a fascinating read! And the themes raised are relevant to my recent musings on evolutionary psychology, so I thought I’d muse some more… The chapter I read was a reprint of an article by Daniel Lehrman originally published in 1953 critiquing Konrad Lorenz’s Theory of Instinctive Behavior (the link opens a PDF to the full article, which is excerpted in the chapter in Cycles of Contingency). I would like to touch on a couple of things in response to reading … Continue reading »
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