yew

so I was working away and thought of something I should put on my blog and logged on and saw the other blog updates and read them and now I cannot for the life of me remember what I wanted to post. Damned.

I know I want to find out if ALL public people, men and women, had a male gatekeeper (or gateopener)?


Oh oh - I remember - it was about how email and blogs are blurring the line between private and public and what looked like a linear development toward increased privacy has taken a different direction and the private era might just be a brief blip ... you can see that on stock price charts - how something that looks like a trend on a three month chart can be just a dip in a five year chart. A great example is Germany - when I grew up it was this nation that was one and then was split apart - of course then I learned that it had only been one nation for about seventy years and then of course the Germanies were united and kids growing up now think of east and west G as abberations.

Which leads to my next question - what did the eighteenth century look like to the nineteenth century?

Michael Warner "The Trouble with Normal"

A review of the book can be found here:
http://www.socialism.com/fsarticles/vol21no3/bookreview.html

the book does not contend that people should be able to be gay and conservative - rather the opposite, but it does present that argument as the struggle for normal - the desire to be accepted by the mainstream - and then goes on to explain why that is troublesome. Achieving the right to marriage moves the boundary of who is accepted a white (norm/al)- it does not change the inherently bizarre structure that divides the norm/al from the degenerate and it does nothing to fix the issues with the institution of marriage.

So the fact that my women were allowed to speak - or claim non-gendered positions to speak from - may not have been a weakness in the system or a sign that oppression was less serious. It could have worked as a vent, and a way to reinforce the structure. "You cannot speak as a woman, you can be either a woman or a public speaker - you have to renounce your gender to speak" sorta thing. Pretend you are not jewish and you can be part of the culture ... fight for gay marriage so you don't fight for gay culture ... hmm.

Hayden White

this is where I will post what I find about him when I find it!

Historiography

Darn it - Rachel wrote me with the information that there is this guy Hayden White - why did I not know about him?? Why did I not know that there was Collingwood and Hayden and so many others!!!

Oh well, here goes, the beginnings of a list:

R.G. Collingwood
The Idea of History

E.H. Carr
What is History?

Roger Chartier
On the Edge of the Cliff

Michel de Certeau
The Practice of Everyday Life

Raphael Samuel
Theatres of Memory Vol. 1: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture, (Verso, 1996)
Theatres of Memory Vol. 2: Island Stories: Unravelling Britain, (Verso, 1999) -the ground-breaking look at the way that we see the past.

Hayden White:
Metahistory
The Content of Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, 1987