She, the Rabbi, Speaks

She's reading "This week's portion, Bamidbar, [which] begins with instructions to take a census of the Israelites, head by head, each man attached to his ancestral household."

And the Velveteen Rabbi writes, "The tradition traces Jewishness through the mother, but this census takes note of men and their fathers -- no mention of the women at all."

And Rachel Barenblat speaks:

HEAD BY HEAD (BAMIDBAR)

Take a census
family by family
listing the names
every female, head by head . . . .

Listen: Who is "recording," and who is "the recognized head of her ancestral house," and who is "able to plant seed," and "who can teach the ways" usually given only to men?

feminine helicopters, sons, and men

- Regarde, c'est une hélicoptère.
- Non, non, c'est un hélicoptère.
- Mais, comment est-ce que tu vois ça?
~ a joke, HT Suzanne

In Mark's Greek
[Ἀληθῶς {ὁ ἄνθρωπος οὗτος / οὗτος ὁ ἄνθρωπος} υἱὸς {ἦν θεοῦ / θεοῦ ἦν}]
the centurion does not use an article before the word son [υἱὸς] (neither a son nor the son),
and Mark has still never told us what sense Jesus is that son.
~ Three Gospels, page 57, by Reynolds Price

all men are created equal
all men and women are created equal
~Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson
~Declaration of Sentiments, Elizabeth Cady Stanton

The epigraphs to begin this post illustrate what Aristotle despised in the lack of logic and, therefore, in bad language, especially the slyness of female-gendered language.

Aristotle taught that good Greek logic was never ambiguous. And good Greek language ought never to confuse categories, especially the masculine with the feminine. (In many of his writings Aristotle purported to show, in nature, the biological difference between males and females. He also seemed to want to teach how ostensibly, by the cold objective tool of logic, the observer could see females as mutilated males - as necessary freaks of nature that could dangerously pollute and further mutilate the superior sex of men.)

In his book called Rhetoric, Aristotle gives instruction on the logic of good Greek grammar, even with respect to agreement by the category of gender. He writes the following (in what we know as Book III, Chapter 5, sentences 5 and 6, on Bekker page 1407b). There are other examples, but here's one (and I'm giving you three different English translations of it):

A fourth rule is to observe Protagoras' classification of nouns into male, female, and inanimate; for these distinctions also must be correctly given. "Upon her arrival she said her say and departed (e d elthousa kai dialechtheisa ocheto)."
--translated by William Rhys Roberts

The fourth [rule is to observe] Protagoras’ classification of the gender of nouns: masculine, feminine, and neuter. There should be correct grammatical agreement: "Having come and having spoken, she departed."
--translated by George Alexander Kennedy

The fourth rule consists in keeping the genders distinct--masculine, feminine, and neuter, as laid down by Protagoras; these also must be properly introduced: "She, having come (fem.) and having conversed (fem.) with me, went away."
--translated by John Henry Freese

Now, before going further into Aristotle's argument, let me quickly just note with you how the three translators have followed Aristotle's argument (as if what Aristotle as the original author of this original text writes is all that counts). Notice how the translators are afraid to depart from Aristotle's categories.

Yes, they may be respecting us their English language audience; and they may not want to be unclear or unambiguous about what Aristotle wrote; . . . but however nonetheless . . . each of the translators misses the misogyny and gynophobia in Aristotle's writings. As if showing the phallogocentric bias of Aristotle will somehow make the translation a hardship on either Aristotle or his readers. (Do we not know that Aristotle never intended that any of us barbarians, or females, would ever read or hear what he wrote? He did not write for you. He considered you less than the elite male Greek student who may some day conquer the world.)

Translator Roberts is so careful, he actually transliterates the Greek for us. We can hear, perhaps, how Aristotle or one of his students might have read it aloud. We can be his audience.

Translator Kennedy gives us readers his 63rd footnote to explain exactly what Aristotle must mean: "In Greek, the participles modifying 'she' have distinct feminine forms."

Translator Freese marks the English translated text for us with his "(fem.)" twice. And he also gives a footnote to explain his translation of Aristotle's word σκεύη as our neuter, noting: "'inanimate things,' the classification probably being male, female, and inanimate, not the grammatical one of masculine, feminine, and neuter."

Roberts, Kennedy, and Freese participate in Aristotle's logic. And much gets lost in their phallogocentric translations. None seems to want to recognize Aristotle’s blatant sexism, his logical absolutism, and his elitist centrism in his writings in general and in this Greek grammar lesson here in particular. Each seems to insist on clear and unambiguous categories. "Either / or" logic works fine.

So let's look ourselves a little closer at Aristotle's language. Let's listen in (as Krista Ratcliffe suggests) with intent but not necessarily and only to his intent. Remember, his intent is to exclude you and me. His intent is to use logic that would classify any female as not a male and any barbarian as not a Greek, with females inferior to males and non-Greeks below Greeks. His review of the categories - the "canons" - of rhetoric was to exclude listening (notes Ratcliffe).

First, let's look at the supposedly troublesome issues in the language of the epigraphs above. Second, we'll return to what's going on in Aristotle's Greek-language lesson.

First, then, the categories in the three excerpts of language above are not so closed. Aristotle, however, wants categories in "nature" and in "logic" and in "language" to be purely one thing while absolutely not the other thing.

Women and females are troubling to Aristotle, in that regard; they are not men and are not males, not pure human beings. Likewise, as in the joke that Suzanne shares, French is troubling for many English speakers and readers (with the joke being clearly ambiguous for the French: not purely feminine-or-masculine and not the same spoken-vs-written).

Ancient biblical Greek - yes, Mark's Greek (a translation of a Latin speaker and maybe of the disciple Peter's Hebrew Aramaic remembering) is barbaric. It's barbaric because what the reader reads is not clearly a specific indefinite son (not necessary "a son"). But worse: it's barbaric because "sons" often refers to "daughters" in Mark's writings and also in the Jews' Hellene translations and writings of their scriptures. Mark's Greek uses a "both / and" logic.

And American English speakers (of the USA variety) want so badly for Thomas Jefferson, the original author of the extant Declaration of Independence, to be clear. The Declaration says one thing, and is not to be watered down into just anything. But "all men" must surely mean to Jefferson more than all men - because all men surely means more than blackslave-and-blackfemaleslave-owning males, who are irked at the King of England for not, among other things, helping them fight "the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare, is undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions." Is the English phrase "all men" inclusive of "women" and of "black men and women" and of "red women and men" and so forth?

Second, now, how about Aristotle and his would-be un-ambiguous Greek? What we may need to know is that Aristotle's notes on rhetoric are for his male-only, elite Greek students (being trained, among other things, for politics and world conquest).

Aristotle uses an example for these young men from the language of Protagoras. This is downright strange. Protagoras is a sophist, a slippery rhetorician, someone whose language and logic is about as polluted as a woman's, according to Aristotle. Historian Edward Schiappa says that "Protagoras used a both/and logic. . . . To him experience was rich and variable enough to be capable of multiple—and even inconsistent—accounts" (Protagoras and Logos: A Study in Greek Philosophy and Rhetoric, page 193). Aristotle, in contrast, taught directly against "Protagorean relativism"; Aristotle taught that one must "argue from an either/or logic" of dominant singularity so that "if two parties disagree about what-is and what-is-not, one of the parties must be mistaken ([Metaphysics] 1063a)" (page 191). On the very principle of non-contradiction, it is strange that Aristotle uses a quotation from Protagoras (who has bad writing and bad logos) to demonstrate the logic of grammatical gender agreement in Aristotle's own lessons of Good Greek by Good Logic.

What is not immediately clear is whether Aristotle is attempting irony when he says that Protagoras sets the good-Greek rules about grammatical agreement with respect to gender. Or perhaps his quotation is from Protagoras but the rule is Aristotle’s applied to the sentence. And maybe Protagoras creates the rule, which his sophism renders meaningless in its contradiction of Aristotle’s logic.

WHEW!

So, what if we translated a bit to show how Aristotle fails to be air-tight with his categories and with his logic?

Here's what Aristotle writes below what I've rendered into English language. Both the English and what Aristotle writes are playful (despite Aristotle's attempts to control and to eliminate the play - what he considers undesirable illogical barbarism and feminism):

Four, as Protagoras does:
the birth-family of the
naming-words by sex:

male and female and thing.

One ought, in fact, to give this out straight:

"having femininely arrived

having womanishly talked
so loquaciously

she left . ."

τέταρτον, ὡς Πρωταγόρας:
τὰ γένη τῶν ὀνομάτων διῄρει:

ἄρρενα καὶ θήλεα καὶ σκεύη

δεῖ γὰρ ἀποδιδόναι καὶ ταῦτα ὀρθῶς:

"ἡ δ' ἐλθοῦσα

καὶ διαλεχθεῖσα

ᾤχετο"

To be clear, all speakers and readers of Greek would not view Aristotle’s grammar problem to be any real problem at all. Very obviously the feminine parts (i.e., the suffixes) on each of the verbals imply a feminine subject so that the three verbals agree in gender. By Aristotle’s anti-Protagorean implication, the feminine gender cannot be both feminine and not feminine (i.e., either masculine or neuter). Thus, this sentence by Protagoras is hardly Aristotle's argument for good Greek grammar as much as it is Aristotle’s own rhetoric for non-contradictory logic. It's an unwittingly sly argument against being sly in language. Whoops, it's an aristotelian contradiction. Whoops.

In addition, since Aristotle is naming Protagoras to argue against the sophist's messy relativism, then Aristotle is doing something else. He seems to be arguing against Plato, Socrates, Pericles, and the woman Aspasia as well. Without too much of a stretch, the reader can see how the feminine verbal διαλεχθει̂σα (transliterated "dialechtheisa"), in Protagoras's sentence, falls within the same semantic range as the feminine nominal διαλεκτική (transliterated "dialektike"). And Aristotle parts ways with his teacher Plato on the point of dialectic, the very loquacious feminine method that Aspasia herself uses and teaches as good uses of logos and Hellene language, to men such as Socrates and Pericles and Protagoras. Aristotle's language plays with dialectic by (perhaps unwittingly and punningly) invoking dialectic--his intention presumably (and the intention of most of his logical English translators too) is to avoid feminine categories unless he can determine what they must be. Aristotle doesn't want listening and interactive talking. He wants no gendered play on words. No feminine helicopters, no feminine sons, no feminine men.

hidden English "man" of a woman's heart?

But
OOOO that Shakespeherian Rag--
It's so elegant
So intelligent
. . .
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or woman
--But who is that on the other side of you?

What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
(from T. S. Eliot, "The Waste Land")

Suzanne has another compelling post up: this one on the question of whether "the Greek word anthropos, when used for an individual, always refers to a 'male human being'." She quotes from and reviews and offers a counterexample to a statement in Michael Marlowe's "The Ambiguity of 'Anthropos'".

I want to draw attention to another troubling statement in Marlowe's essay, his conclusion:

The usage of words relating to gender and humanity in the Greek language are no less "sexist" than the ordinary English usages which feminists have been trying to abolish for 30 years now, and this may be seen clearly enough in the case of the word anthropos. It is also evident that [. . . writers] have confused the issue with specious arguments about Greek words and linguistics are merely distracting us from the fact that the "inclusive language" debate has to do not with Greek but with our English words and their meaning, and the recent attempts to reform our English usage along politically correct lines. On this question of English usage the professors of Greek have no more authority than any layman who is acquainted with the English language.

I'm so glad Marlowe tries to move the discussion away from "professors" to "any layman" and from ancient "Greek" to our shared "English." We should notice that he himself has a "bachelor's degree in English Literature" and in "the biblical languages. . . the MA degree." I wonder what he thinks of what the man T. S. Eliot is doing with our English language in "The Waste Land." Yes, let's get beyond this authority, this alleged sexism in common English.

So, if we just consider the English language that we all share as lay-men, then is the question of gender in our shared ordinary vocabularies really something that deconstructive "feminists" are abusing and are challenging only "along politically correct lines"? As I asked in my previous post, do men challenging a woman and her language really "hear her"? But do they actually "hear her feel"?

I'm challenging "any layman who is acquainted with the English language" to hear what the (woman) writer Nancy Mairs feels. This is from pages 86-87 of her voice lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer. In this conclusion to her chapter, "Essaying the Feminine: From Montaigne to Kristeva," Mairs starts a struggle, a stuttering adventure in communication with you using the language you know (ambiguous as it is) if you just stay with her:

As my groping here suggests, despite my instruction by a host of gifted feminist critics, I certainly don't yet have a clear vision of what woman's writing might be. Pace Jacques Lacan, I know the phallus is no transcendental signifier--nor transcendental anything else--but I don't know what my transcendental signifier is, if indeed there is any such thing, which I doubt, since the whole concept seems far too located to express my experience of the world. My "I" seems simply not to be the male-constructed "I.": It is more fluid, diffuse, multiplex (giddy, duplicitous, and inconstant, I think men have called it). Maybe we need another sort of signifier for the female self--the "O" might be a logical choice, or rather a whole string of Os: OOOOO. That's me.

The fact of the matter, though, is that when I sit down at my desk to tell a story, I can't begin, "OOOOO woke this morning to the song of a cardinal in the fig tree outside the back door." Radical feminist writers like Monique Wittig and Mary Daly experiment with techniques for reinventing reality by exploding patriarchal linguistic patterns. But in passages like this one--

The Powers to break the framers' frameworks are within women. Dis-Covering our Lust of Be-ing, we can easily swing open the doors to our freedom. We work to attain the Prudence of Prudes, the Courage of Crones, the Distemper of Dragon-identified Fire-breathing Furies. Furiously focused, we find our Final Cause.

--all those hyphens and capital letters and puns and alliterations give me a wicked case of intellectual indigestion, and after twenty pages I'm too dyspeptic to go on. If I want to speak plainly to you about particulars--and I do, more than anything else--I must use the language that I know you know.

I want a prose that is allusive and translucent, that eases you into me and embraces you, not one that baffles you or bounces you around so that you can't even tell where I am. And so I have chosen to work, very, very, very carefully, with the language we share, faults and all, choosing each word for its capacity, its ambiguity, the space it provides for me to live my life within it, relating rather than opposing each word to the next, each sentence to the next, "starting on all sides at once . . . twenty times, thirty times, over": the stuttering adventure of an essay.

Where the Wild Things Are

Maurice Sendak's book, Where the Wild Things Are, was banned by my son's Christian preschool in Virginia, once upon a time. (I guess it is just too wild. The language play certainly is.) It is absolutely one of our favorite books.

Now, one of my favorite bloggers, John F. Hobbins, speaks of "the metalepsis of Maurice Sendak's book." Hobbins is pointing to the children's book rightly to defend and explain his very own brilliant translation of Genesis 3:1 (in his post, "On the Importance of Taking the Bible Literally"):

The serpent was the shrewdest / most nakedly cunning / smoothest operator of all the wild things the Lord God made.

If you've read the Hebrew, then you can see just how wonderful the translating by Hobbins is. As he correctly notes, "A verse like this has to be taken literally in severally different interlocking ways before it can be grasped non-literally, which is, after all, its ultimate literal (genre-accurate) meaning." His is a "a translation that preserves metaphors and more generally, the vehicles of complex genres (genres to be read at more [than] one level, literal and so-called non-levels)." Hobbins is saying that language works on multiple levels.

Which reminds me of something linguist Kenneth L. Pike used to tell some of us. Pike used to say language is personal, that persons make meanings by language. Persons are above logic, always prior to its formalism for language and for translation. He used to call language "n-dimensional," which meant, for him and then for us, that "n" is "infinite," because our sloppy languages really are without (many) limits. (He'd struggle with that infinity thing, and would paraphrase Nelson Goodman in Ways of Worldmaking, saying "What we need is radical relativism within rigid restraints." He used to get upset with deconstructionists who would try to take authority away from authors, so he thought, and postmodern anthropologists who would question the work of missionary anthropologists. He was initially unhappy with the "materialist" anthropologist Marvin Harris, who coopted Pike's neologisms "emic" and "etic" and began using them in radically different, "wild" ways.) But, Pike was always a learner, teaching us to learn. And he told this wild story, a true one, of one of his own teachers. That teacher would, professorially, stand up in front of his pupils and declare: "What we need, really, is for each word of any given language to have one and only one meaning." Young Kenneth replied with a rather wild answer, a question: "How then, sir, would we ever learn language?" Now, in my dissertation, I'm calling the methods of my teacher Pike something that he himself never called his methods, something wild: "feminist rhetorical translating." (The astute observational method of Pike is itself a metalepsis! It's right where the wild things are! And my apologies for this paragraph being so jargony. Please keep going, and you'll get Sendak again, and Max, his wild things, and mamá, his mother too.)

If you don't as easily grasp Hebrew, like Hobbins does, and if you more readily understand English and Spanish and French and German and Finnish and Swedish and American Sign Language (ASL), then try something else. Get your copies of Sendak's book in these languages. And compare them.

A reader-reviewer at amazon.com has done just that (i.e., read Where the Wild Things Are in English and in Spanish and French translations). Notice the difference the astute reviewer notices:

I like this in English, LOVE it in Spanish and deplore the French translation.
The spanish moves along smoothly, neatly matching the english yet retaining enough of its own flavor so that it's not a painful literal translation of the original (see: Cat in the Hat for awful translation).
The french translation is so bad I couldn't get more than a few pages in before I lost it in crankiness. Results in a very different feel/flow.

Notice that some translations can, on the one hand, be "bad" and "awful."

But then there is the brilliant translation, on the other hand. The best translation "moves along smoothly," and the wonderful translation is "neatly matching" the original, and the really cool translation is one that is still "retaining enough of its own [other-language] flavor."

Researcher Riitta Oittinen looks at Sendak's book in translation "as rereading and rewriting: every time a book is translated, it takes on a new language, a new culture, and new target-language readers."

I've linked to Oittinen's fascinating, wild article, below. She examines the Finnish, Swedish, German, and English versions of Where the Wild Things Are. She confesses something subjective, something very personal (in contrast to Aristotle's impersonal logic): "The reasons why I take such a special interest in translating picture books are twofold: cultural and national as well as individual. In Finland, we translate a lot: 70-80% of all the books published for children annually are translations."

And, for my daughter who signs, there are Charles Katz's wonderfully textured versions, wild ones too, in ASL. And soon for all of us, there's a new film adaptation of the book.

Look, listen, enjoy on many levels (and then send those wild things off where they belong in the proper ways):

four different ASL translations by Charles Katz

"Where the Wild Things Are: Translating Picture Books" by Riitta Oittinen

the book transposed to film

su mamá le dijo: "¡ERES UN MONSTRUO!"
y Max le contestó: "¡TE VOY A COMER!"
y lo mandaron a la cama

his mother called him "WILD THING!"
and Max said "I'LL EAT YOU UP!"
so he was sent to bed without eating anything.
---

"¡Basta ya!" gritó Max y ordenó a los monstruos que se fueran a la cama sin cenar.

"Now stop!" Max said and sent the wild things off to bed without their supper.

Anne Carson and Anne Lamott on Resurrection

Listen to silly Anne Lamott and foolish Anne Carson, wanting hoping desiring so gullibly to keep open the historic and literary possibilities of resurrection, as women see it. The one Anne speaks of Jesus, the other Anne of another Greek-fabled drama, Alcestis in Alcestis by Euripides.

Euripides, of course, is that one of whom the Historian F. A. Wright, in his Feminism in Greek Literature from Homer to Aristotle says: “Euripides and Plato are almost the only [male] authors who show any true appreciation of a woman's real qualities, and to Euripides and Plato, Aristotle, by the whole trend of his [sexist, bigoted] prejudices, was opposed.” But I’m reading the “scholarship” of another “historian” (supposedly) who scoffs, like Aristotle, at true appreciation of a woman’s views. I’m talking about James F. McGrath and his newly published book The Burial of Jesus: History and Faith. McGrath is crying for reviews, but not this one here. In his book, again and again (on more than a dozen pages so far), McGrath feels like he has to pooh pooh the inclusion of women as credible witnesses to the resurrection of Jesus in the gospel of Mark. Not surprising. His historiography is straight phallogocentrism. What I mean by that is this. Hélène Cixous, in her book Stigmata: escaping texts, translates and quotes “Clarice Lispector, who did not think in terms of phallogocentrism.” Cixous points out that Lispector provides a definition of the term: “We have seen this before; it is the ‘phallocratic system’ . . . this is how she [Lispector] conceives of it: a ‘system of inflexible last judgment, which does not permit even a second of incredulity’” (123). Now the English translation of Cixous’s French translation of Lispector’s Brazilian Portuguese has yielded the term. The three together have made “phal-” from Aristotle’s φαλλικὰ (“ph-a-l-l-ika”); “logo,” from Aristotle’s λόγος (or “l-o-g-os”) which he himself makes (by) his λογική (or “l-o-g-ikē” aka LOGIC); and “centric” from Aristotle’s κεντρική (or “k-e-n-tr-ikē”). McGrath, like father Aristotle, does not permit even a second of incredulity. He redefines “faith” and “history” under the guise of “religion.” Enough of that then.

Here’s Anne Lamott in Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith:

I don't have the right personality for Good Friday, for the crucifixion: I'd like to skip ahead to the resurrection. In fact, I'd like to skip ahead to the resurrection vision of one of the kids in our Sunday school, who drew a picture of the Easter Bunny outside the tomb: everlasting life, and a basket full of chocolates. Now you’re talking.

In Jesus’ real life, the resurrection came two days later, but in our real lives, it can be weeks, years, and you never know for sure that it will come. I don’t have the right personality for the human condition, either. But I believe in the resurrection, in Jesus’, and in ours. The trees, so stark and gray last month, suddenly went up as if in flame, but instead in blossoms and leaves--poof! Like someone opening an umbrella. It’s often hard to find similar dramatic evidence of rebirth and hope in our daily lives. (140).

Here’s Anne Carson in Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides:

What does Alkestis' resurrection mean for the sacrificial contract that Admetos had negotiated with Death? This question is never addressed in the play. Mathematically Death is down one soul; common sense (what the Greeks call Necessity) tells us such a situation can’t last. But Herakles seems a character able to override common sense. He releases Alkestis simply by choosing to do so. As if to say, within every death a life stands waiting to be set free, should anyone have the nerve to do it. As if to say, try looking deep into a house, a marriage, or an idea like Necessity and you will see clear through to the other side. Death, like tragedy, is a game with rules. Why not just break the rules?

Rules broken by Euripides in Alkestis include the rule of closure. What are we to make of the ending? Can we be sure the veiled women is alive? that she is Alkestis? that she will live happily ever after with her husband and children? Critics have doubted all these. There is a kind of nuptial drama staged in the final scene--perhaps a parody of the ancient Greek wedding, which centered upon an unveiling of the bride before the eyes of her husband and some exchange of words between them--that stalls oddly at its peak moment. Here the bride is unveiled to her husband at 971/1121 (or so it seems to me; critics doubt this too) but she will not be permitted to speak for three days due to her death-polluted condition. An eerie silence carries her into the big dark house of her unconventional husband.

I find I want to say less rather than more about Alkestis. Not because there is less in this play but because the surface has a speed and shine that evaporate with exegesis, like some of [Alfred] Hitchcock’s plots. Or a trembling of laughter, terrible if it broke out. (248-49)

The Last 2 Posts

Fair enough.  I need to explain, perhaps, what I'm intending by the last two posts.

Here's the more general context, and then I'll get to my last two posts specifically.  With my pair of posts, I'm trying to respond to the suggestions of two different bloggers that God doesn't need gender.  Or, rather, that we, in our talk about deity and other such personal things, can go "beyond gender."  These blogger dialogues get to more than just the question of whether the God, or even a god or goddess, is "he or she" or just "it."  The conversations betray the fact that our frame for the conversations, our methods for knowing and for talking, are primarily male.  (Even feminist scholars--such as Carol Poster and Gesa E. Kirsch and Joy S. Ritchie--can unwittingly find themselves in male-framed "beyond-the-personal" arguments and conversations, trying ironically to oppose the impersonal oppositional male.)  I'm trying to respond to the following:  (1) John Hobbins' post "Is the biblical God a persona beyond gender?" in which he is joined by Rabbi David E. S. Stein, discussing the latter's article “On Beyond Gender: Representation of God in the Torah and in Three Recent Renditions into English”; and (2) David Ker's post "Holy Spirit: it or he?" in which he concludes (in a concluding comment):

I favor "it" except for when "spirit" is a synecdoche for God or counselor, advocate, etc. then I would choose "he."

"She" is way too controversial for me and in fact I don't think it is really addressing the "genderlessness" of the spirit as a component of a person. Are my feet feminine and my arms masculine if I am a speaker of Spanish? Is my soul feminine but my spirit masculine?

They've kindly responded to comments I and others have made on their respective blogs. But I wanted to try to say something, differently.

So my last two posts take two different songs I heard on the iPod of one of my children. Listening, I didn't know the band singing was Relient K. I was listening in, not invited at all to listen. I was eavesdropping, overhearing, being a fly on the wall so to speak. My son didn't know I was checking out his music. And the boys who make up Relient K didn't write their songs for me. I'm not even sure who the audience is, or whether I'm "interpreting" their original lyrics by the original author's intentions.

What I hear when listening to the one song and then the other is something that reminds me of my own relationship with my fathers. I have a birth father, a man I love who was not an easy Dad when I was a boy. Because I went off to boarding school as a kid, I have other fathers, and sometimes I hear and read the language of God as Father. I have friends, cousins, brothers and sisters, and a spouse who have and who have had similar kinds of fathers. Many of us are children of the Christian clergy, of pastors, and preachers, and missionaries. We hear and read stories such as the Prodigal Son and the loving Father, which has not always been our experience, at least the "loving Father" part. Some of us have been prodigal children--children who have left forever by committing suicide or by running away or by dwindling away in acts of "acting out" in different ways, and children or adults who have returned in various ways.

Some of us have walked through Twelve Steps. This is a different sort of "recovery" work than academics, especially feminist academics, must do. And yet "recovery" in many contexts gets one to acknowledge the body, and its pain, and how it was silenced, gendered, marked and unmarked. (Some feminist scholars, like Beth Daniell, are in recovery work both in the academy and "in meetings." Other feminists, like the grad student doing research on AA at a conference I recently attended, say that Twelve Steps--especially because God, the male, is the higher power and male-ish hierarchy--are patently anti-female). The Steps are very difficult in that they require safety, and anonymity, and feelings not necessarily analysis, and most of all community. They are also almost invariably indirect methods to something else.

This is some the indirectness I'm after in those last two posts. C. S. Lewis talks of deep change being the difference of a direct coat of paint and furniture stain. Kenneth L. Pike would tell a poem at the end of his monolingual demonstration and the subsequent lecture because poetry is as indirect. Eve Ensler writes the Vagina Monologues, translated now in forty five different languages and performed in more than one hundred different nations, to change the world? Yes, and to change the rapist and the men who have grown up after committing incest, and of course then to help the victims, (y)our sisters, mothers, wives, aunts, grandmothers, granddaughters, and daughters.

So my last two posts are monologic dialogues for indirect change, if possible somehow for recovery. At the end of her Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance, Cheryl Glenn talks about having to "share an incredible sadness, for the recuperation of past women's voices is a work of morning." And, she continues,

We survivors-scholars-women-men often grieve, especially if we are exploring periods or individuals for whom records are scarce. But we must experience and then move beyond grief over irrevocable loss and move beyond a yearning for the actual person whose remains will never adequately represent her.

Notice that in her moving "beyond" there can never be a moving beyond the personal, the pathos, the gendered. For it's the fuller gendered person who is being recovered.

I'm also playing, in my last two posts, with my own fictional/factual literal/figural contrasts: the father is prodigal, and abba is (m)othering. Sloppy ambiguous experiential in-progress human language helps.

Births, Babies, and Bastards: Just Words

Eliminating racism
Empowering women

--sign on the side of the ywca van west-bound on I-30 this morning in Fort Worth, Texas USA

The origin is a masculine myth. . . .
The question, ‘Where do I come from?’ is basically a masculine, much more than a feminine question. The quest for origins, illustrated by Oedipus, doesn’t haunt a feminine unconscious. Rather it’s the beginning, or beginnings, the manner of beginning, not promptly with the phallus, but starting on all sides at once, that makes a feminine writing. A feminine text starts on all sides at once, starts twenty times, thirty times, over.

--Hélène Cixous, “Castration or Decapitation?” tr. Annette Kuhn, Signs 7 (Autumn 1981): 53. fr. Nancy Mairs, “Essaying the Feminine,” Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer, 85

Around the blogosphere are signs of word birth, and questions of origins or of beginnings, with more questions about legitimacy or otherings.

• April DeConick has begun a new word for better work in history writing. So far, the begininngs are here, and here, and here, and here, and here.
• Some men (yes some of us men) are concerned about the origin of an old word. (Don’t ask us what haunts us, please; and you have to scroll down past the pics of one Mr. Bean to the real serious hauntings.)
• Othering men (yes that kind) used original words to dis-empower women through words
• Other othering men used others original words, not to eliminate, but to perpetuate the denigration of human beings of races "darker."
• Jonathan Tilove more than a year ago wanted to know the origins of one of Barack Obama’s phrases.