Jane Juffer’s “Single Mother: The Emergence of the Domestic Intellectual”

Jane Juffer’s article “Single Mother: The Emergence of the Domestic Intellectual” discusses the idea of single motherhood as a choice. Juffer puts forth ideas such as the “nuclear family,” and the “othering” of single mothers. Today, more than half of women under 30 who have children are unmarried, and a total 1/3 of children are born to single mothers. Becauese of this, the idea of single motherhood and it’s issues are rapidly becoming important for not just the many mothers who are having the children without partners, but to the children as well. Despite the large number of children growing up with single mother’s, being a single mother, specifically in America has many disadvantages. These disadvantages, and especially the one’s Juffer focuses on are political and disadvantages that have to do with working and child care.

There is a great lack of child care in the United States and it is very difficult for single mothers to be satisfied with their work as women in the workforce, and in their work as mothers, parenting their children. It is hard for women to be successful in work because of the lack in child care and it is hard for women to be successful in parenting because they must seek childcare while they are at work, creating a paradox that seems to now allow mothers to be successful at either when they aim to succeed and do well as employees and mothers. Political setbacks also exist such as the Welfare Reform Act, passed in the 1990s, placed many limits on what single parents can do. This combined with the lack of childcare in the U.S places stress on single parents and makes it almost impossible for them to succeed.

There are also differences between single mothers who are white, black or Latina because things like assumptions about them and incomes differ between them. Despite these challenges, some positivity exists in being a single mother, such as a newly changed media perspective, which has positivity about single mothers embedded in it. This is apparent in shows like “Gilmore Girls.” However, with single mothers must deal with more than providing and caring for their child, they may also be in school while working and caring for their children and their children may also have disabilities or any other number of special circumstances. Although the “othering” of single mothers has somewhat faded because of the sheer large amount of single mothers that keeps growing every day, political reform and childcare would greatly improve the quality of single mother’s and their children’s lives.

“The Iraq War Is Not Taking Place,” Soldiers, Virtual Therapy, and their relation to Baudrillard

Robert Mackey’s article in The New York Times, “The Iraq War Is Not Taking Place,” discusses new forms of virtual therapy being used to treat Iraq War veterans with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. This new therapy is innovative and is done with the therapists conducting a virtual reality that is controlled by a tablet like device. The solider or patient being treated wears headphones, and goggles and the therapist slowly introduces and simulates war using his tablet-based interface, activating or removing the sounds of gunshots or the sight of smoke, depending on a patient’s reaction. The idea of the therapy is “to re-introduce the patients to the experiences that triggered the trauma, gradually, until the memory no longer incapacitates them.”

This brings up the ideas of French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, who famously claimed that the “gulf war did not take place.” This therapy used and the idea that the Iraq War isn’t taking place is similar to one of Baudrillard’s better known theories that postulates that we live in a world where simulated feelings and experiences have replaced the real thing. This seductive “hyperreality,” we live in where shopping malls, amusement parks and mass-produced images from the news, television shows and films dominate, is drained of authenticity and meaning. So, what better way to compare this therapy to this theory right? Maybe, although the therapy could be useful to getting soldiers to deal with their feelings and confront their PTSD, maybe this virtual reality could really offer breakthroughs for them that traditional therapy wouldn’t offer. However, in reading the explanation of how this simulation works, it seems as though this is nothing more than a video game, youtube-like video that the patient is watching or participating in.

This kind of therapy also blurs the lines between reality and unreality, and makes us aware of our “misunderstandings,” as Baudrillard would say, that we have about life in general and ideas like this type of virtual therapy. Mackey states that the NPR report on this project concludes with the observation that: “early results from trials suggest virtual reality therapy is uniquely suited to a generation raised on video games. The gaming aspect of the treatment also helps to lessen the stigma associated with getting therapy.” Although it is true that this type of therapy may be “uniquely suited to a generation raised on video games,” it doesn’t mean that it is the right way. Isn’t there the common idea that video games are not good for kids and expose them to things like violence and death way to early while the play video games like “Call of Duty,” “Grand Theft Auto”? Although the soldiers are “of age” for this type of “game,” shouldn’t we ask the larger question that they are at first so tainted and stressed by war to the point of them getting PTSD that they shouldn’t be exposed to this type of virtual reality as “therapy”?

Angela Davis’s “Blues Legacies and Black Feminism”

Angela Davis’s thesis “Blues Legacies and Black Feminism,” is basically that Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, among other flamboyant women blues singers of the 1920’s and 30’s, helped not only to articulate black working-class consciousness but also to shape it. ”Women’s blues,” Davis writes, ”provided a cultural space for community-building among working-class black women … in which the coercions of bourgeois notions of sexual purity and ‘true womanhood’ were absent.” The songs performed by Rainey and Smith, in particular, served as ”historical preparation” for a kind of social protest of which Billie Holiday’s 1939 recording of ”Strange Fruit,” a song that condemned lynching, is a prime example.

Davis informs us that the blues has always been implicitly ”gendered” as male, and that the songs performed by Ma Rainey refused to ”privilege” marriage over nonmarital or extramarital relationships and that most accounts of how Billie Holiday came to perform ”Strange Fruit” have tended to ”foreground” the contributions of white males. Davis however does not give much of any background on the women singers and her failure to say much of anything about her subjects’ personal lives is especially telling in the case of Smith, whose exploitation by a philandering husband might undermine Davis’s image of her as a positive role model for black working-class women.

Davis also skips over another potential ambiguity by ignoring Smith’s and Rainey’s the rhinestone and feather that the performers’ (presumably) black working-class audiences identified with as much as with their songs. Davis chastises those black women’s clubs of the 1920’s whose efforts to uplift their race entailed virtually disowning free-spirited women like Rainey and Smith. But in attempting to recast these singers as working-class heroines Davis is practicing her own brand of social uplift and moral purification.

Judith Butler from “Gender Trouble”

Judith Butler’s 1990 book, “Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity” is a founding and influential document on queer theory and feminism. In the book, Butler explores how gendered identity is socially produced through repetitions of ordinary daily activities. Butler’s “goal is to uncover the assumptions that ‘restrict the meaning of gender to received notions of masculinity and femininity.’ In opening up ‘the field of possibility for gender,’ Butler aims for a feminism that avoids ‘exclusionary gender norms’ in its portrayal of acceptable identities.” Butler’s novel is credited with creating the seminal notion of gender performativity and is considered to be one of the canonical texts of queer theory and postmodern/poststructural feminism.   

Butler insists that nothing is natural, not even sexual identity, and that even anatomical differences can be defined only through categories and expectations set out by the culture’s signifying order, so that this in turn means they are not mapped out at all because they are mere expectations and generalizations created and enforced by social and cultural groups. These social and cultural expectations placed on anatomical differences and more specifically expectations about desire, posits that there are two sexes and that desire runs from one sex to another, in “compulsory heterosexual” cultures (a term Butler borrows from Adrienne Rich). Butler argues that American culture’s understanding of sexuality is ill-equipped, and therefore Americans cannot understand the bends that may exist in sexuality and gender because of their conformities and the “naturally” female, and “naturally” male roles that exist. 

Butler argues that these seemingly “natural” roles are actually socially constructed and, thus, dependent on one another, as the view of modern culture is, mistakenly, that sexuality and gender are what defines people. Butler tries to motivate that these established and conventional connections between anatomy and desire are open to revision, or “resignification,” although not easily achievable because these very roles and notions of gender are engraved into our psyches and furthermore institutionalized through political and social life. Humans grow into these gender roles and are taught to navigate gender through the specific lenses of “girl” and “boy,” and “woman” and “man.” For example, boys learn to aspire to masculinity and that crying is not socially acceptable for them as they should be masculine creatures, girls on the other hand learn that tomboy tendencies should be changed into feminine ones, therefore encouraging them to dress the part of “femininity.” This is because these roles are so engrained into people as they are slowly established throughout life. Humans experience this process as discovering their identities when Butler argues that in reality, they are merely discovering the singular and unwavering identity that has been picked out for them based on their gender. 

People who then diverge from these established gender roles, referred to “deviants,” are forced to pay the price for their desires and acts in the currency of guilt and exclusion from society. Butler calls for a fluidity of categories and a relaxation on the fixation on the identity that people are taught rather than learn. Through her arguments, Butler proves that she herself has adapted this relaxation because although her work grows out of feminism, she is against the “identity politics” that come along with the political grouping and belief of feminists that is ground in a shared identity, which is precisely what she wants to avoid. In this way Butler takes a revolutionary stance on feminism. Whereas feminism was viewed as revolutionary itself, Butler strives to show that the very institution of feminism is grounded in a shared identity that takes feminists further backwards than forwards in that they are then politically grouped, taking away the individuality in them. 

 

Friedrich Nietzsche and Simone de Beauvoir

    Although Nietzsche and Beauvoir can both be classified as having existentialist philosophies their focuses come from very different perspectives. While Nietzsche’s primary focus is on art, energy, individuality, ingenuity, and social reality through the lens of human perception, Beauvoir is mainly concerned with women and their social and literal purposes as the mysterious and enigmatic “Other” in society. Both philosophers however share a common existentialism in that both of their philosophical attitudes stress the individual’s unique position as a self-determining agent responsible for the authenticity of his or her choices.
    Nietzsche’s “On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense” (1873) focuses on the epistemological foundations of Western philosophy and its commitment to ascertaining the fixed and solid truth that exists independently of human minds. Nietzsche’s argument however is that we can never know anything except through the lens of human perception which is not removable. Humans are influenced by their own understandings of the subjectivity that exists in life and comes with being a human. Nietzsche places an importance on the role of language in human cognition which is specifically interesting from a literary perspective. He argues that humans assign a metaphorical sound to represent stimuli which eventually becomes the basis of language. This language is then considered a metaphor to the perception of a stimulus that can change between person to person and is completely subjective. Nietzsche says that this metaphorical process, along with the need to be social, is what eventually produced languages between humans and furthermore, gave us a sense of truthfulness and lies, which entails humans using the definition of something in the wrong way. Nietzsche argues that looking for the meaning of truth in nature is wrong because neither truth nor lies exist in nature, but are rather ideas created by humans themselves. Furthermore, Nietzsche argues that the fact that humans accept anyone who accurately describes something and shuns those who tell lies is completely subjective and frankly wrong. Nietzsche uses the artist as his prime example of an individual responding joyfully to the challenge of shedding the illusion of truth.
    In the selected chapters from “The Birth of Tragedy” (1872), Nietzsche returns to Greek philosophy and thought before Plato to discover the artistic form and worldview that he prefers to the Platonic and Christian traditions. His mantra in the text is that, “only as an aesthetic phenomenon do existence and the world appear justified.” He also explains that life is worthwhile only if humans experience strong feelings, and in turn that art is the pathway to this because it is the realm of heightened sensation in his opinion. In this way, Nietzsche seems to promote genius and individuality but in turn, shoots down authority, demanding control of the self, and one’s inalienable right to free will. Nietzsche urges humans to have the strength to love life even though suffering is inevitable because he believes that it is in the state suffering and intense feeling that the human is most alive. He explains that the murdered and resurrected god whose myth embodies this worldview is the tragic Dionysus, not the comic Christ.
    Nietzsche begins “The Birth of Tragedy” with the idea that “reproduction depends on there being two sexes which coexist in a state of perpetual conflict interrupted only occasionally by periods of reconciliation.” This thought leads us into Beauvoir’s writing, and more specifically into her multidisciplinary essay, “The Second Sex,” which uses and critiques history, biology, anthropology, literature, psychoanalysis, Marxism, and existentialist philosophy as a means of understanding the lived experiences of women. Beauvoir argues that throughout history women have been reduced to objects for men, and have been labeled the “Other.” The primary influence on “The Second Sex” is Sartrean existentialism, and other influences include phenomenology, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. In her work, Beauvoir discusses how men label women as “mysteries” for the simple reason that they cannot understand women and because of this, the proclaimed “mystery serves to excuse it all.” Beauvoir also discusses the opposites and antonyms associated with descriptions of women. For example she says, “ woman is depicted as the Praying Mantis, the Mandrake, the Demon, then it is most confusing to find in women also the Muse, the Goddess Mother, Beatrice.” More direct opposites also exist such as, “the saintly mother [who] has the correlative the cruel stepmother” … and that “it will be said sometimes that Mother equals Life, [and] sometimes that Mother equals Death …”
    Beauvoir also discusses love and relationships and how men occupy the privileged situation within relationships, in turn helping women with social standing and money. She explains her belief that men give women their time if they find profit in their love for them, while women find profit in the advantages they get from men because they do nothing, and fail to make themselves anything.
    Beauvoir makes the interesting connection between women as mysteries in real life to women as literary characters which demystify them. Literature is the “key” that could take the enigma away from women and allows people to see them more simply. For example, in a novel there is a very simple explanation for women’s actions such as them being a spy or thief.
    Beauvoir also argues that in order to be a “true woman,” a woman must accept herself as the Other. She says men are willing to accept women as a fellow being, an equal; but they still require she remain inessential, which are two destinies that are incompatible and therefore leave women unstable and lacking equilibrium.   
    Overall, the similarly existentialist philosophers Nietzsche and Beauvoir have similar methods in thinking but are concerned with different topics. Beauvoir is focused on women and their place in society, although she centers around a bias point of view of white, middle-class, well-educated, European women. Nietzsche, on the other hand, has the luxury of worrying about art, energy, and human perception as it exists in a more worldly view, for humans in general, although primarily men.