My KFA talk: Basic Gender Theory and Why You Should Care

[rax]

So my goal in giving this talk was to get through a coherent arc explaining gender theory and why you should care in 12 minutes and then have time for discussion. (KFA time slots are 20 minutes long.) I left out roughly a zillion things, which is OK, because that was sort of the point; I also think I actually did a good job, and got people thinking, and sparked interesting discussion, and hopefully encouraged people to do some further reading and/or conversing.

In giving the talk, I set myself the challenge of not using the words "discourse," "problematic," or "deconstruct." Obviously (or at least obviously if you talk to me a lot) this is not because I think those words have no value; I find them important in how I understand the world around me and if anything overuse them. Arguably, though, theorists and genderheads as a whole if anything overuse them, and it's something people have explicitly said turns them off to thinking about theory at all, and so I figured in a basic brief talk, I should avoid them. Another word I've been told is a major turn-off, although I didn't explicitly set out not to use it in this talk, is "oppression;" I've as a result been trying to think twice before using it. Unlike the others, which generally have less loaded (if also less usefully loaded) synonyms, not using "oppression" makes me nervous for calling-a-spade-a-spade issues. I'm torn, and I figure "thinking about it" is the right place for now.

You can watch the presentation video by clicking on this link. I'd embed it but I'm pretty sure LJ won't let me do that due to the recent security issue; just in case, here it is:

Gender Theory and Why You Should Care from maymay on Vimeo.

I'd really love to know what people think. I'd especially love to hear from people about what you think the most important things missing are; I have some thoughts but I want to hear other perspectives before I share them all. A bit of explanation (not that it necessarily negates potential criticism) --- I wasn't sure how to introduce myself because I wanted to avoid using identity labels but also wanted to express that it was worth spending twenty minutes listening to me talk about this topic. In general (and I blame circuit_four in part for this, as well as the whole ##crawl-offtopic gang) I've been trying to hold both "identity affiliations are powerful" and "identity affiliations reinforce things I don't like" in my head at the same time lately. It takes a lot of energy, but they do interesting things when put in the same place; I think that the end of this talk is one of them. If you have suggestions for things I should go read by other people who have been holding those ideas in their head together for much longer than I have, I'd love them; in particular I recently read Covering by Kenji Yoshino (Amazon link) and while he doesn't focus on that duality, he does touch on it. Really, though, that book should be its own post...

Anyway, I'd love criticism, and I'm also in a mood where I could really go for any praise you've got lying around, too. :)

Comments

[lhexa.livejournal.com]

Nifty! I laughed at the presentation even without the benefit of audience synchrony, particularly at the first line and the "not in my cat ears, but in my brain" line. For praise: You do seem to have a very good speaking voice, the presentation flowed smoothly without awkward pauses, you have a laudable lack of verbal tics ("um", "like", "you know"...), and as far as I could tell the audience remained engaged throughout.

The main criticism coming to mind is that there was a bit too much name-dropping, when instead you could have given the most significant concepts without citing their originators. Doing so would be deeply unfair in an academic context, but this wasn't such a context. I don't know for sure, but I do think that giving such references during a presentation disrupts its flow and makes it seem less accessible.

In giving the talk, I set myself the challenge of not using the words "discourse," "problematic," or "deconstruct."

Here's a standard I often apply to myself: If I cannot rephrase a point using different terminology, then I do not understand the point well enough to argue it. There are contexts in which this standard fails (what else am I going to call wave number, or angular frequency?), but these are always the contexts of professional discourse. (Heh.) The standard is a useful counterbalance to the tendency to rely too heavily on technical terms.

"Oppression" is a different case than the other words. It's no longer a case of when it's appropriate to use specialized language, but a case of whether or not it will be perceived as an exaggeration.

"Wait 'til you see what we do after that!"

...Marriage to a corporation! They count as people, after all. And mergers might as well be marriages, already. :P

[rax.livejournal.com]

Oh wow marriage to a corporation that's totally what comes next, you're right.

As far as the name-dropping goes... I think you're right. I just couldn't bring myself to not cite my sources; it feels dirty-plagiaristic, and it doesn't give people the tools to go look things up. But it's possible that it would be better to just hand out little strips of paper with book citations at the end saying "If you would like to read more about these ideas, here are the texts I used to assemble these ideas" and leave it at that. I may try that at some point in the future. Thank you for calling it to my attention. :)

(Actually, even in an academic context, when I gave the talk at MIT and pulled out printed papers and started citing them directly, everyone was sort of surprised; when I cited one of Roberts's footnotes, she said "Even my mother doesn't read those!" So maybe I am overcorrecting in one direction.)

[rivenwanderer.livejournal.com]

You might even (if you have the time before the talk) make notes on the little citation pages correlating which resources were influential on which ideas/topics in the talk. Sometimes I leave a talk and am like "OMG now I want to be a FOO-ologist in my other other other copious free time", but sometimes I just want to follow one or two of the tangents a little father.

[friode.livejournal.com]

I hear it's, like, already 1997 or something, and we have this ``web'' thing. Maybe you could give a URL of a page on your web server with all the citations?

[lhexa.livejournal.com]

I think the same impulse makes me more awkward in conversation than I need to be... I bring up some idea, then feel compelled to say who I got it from. On the inside, the act is a mark of humility. On the outside, it's tangential information at best, and a seeming sign of snobbishness, at worst. In the current context, your idea of little citation cards sounds best -- my idea had been to give the references to those who ask for them, but that would preclude shy people.

Nifty anecdote. :)