Lecture 8: Introduction to Feminist Theory

Log into googledocs and complete the activity listed here: http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dgfvwnr9_59dkcrr5f5

• Key Theorist: Donna Haraway - her term "god-trick" for the idea that we can be objective, i.e. "see all from nowhere" but we've learnt that we're all situated, becoming subjectivities.
• Donna Haraway, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva develop the idea of “situated knowledge”: race, history, culture, gender, class, location all play important roles because knowledge is always constructed through who we are
• Haraway: “the crucial political action that women and people of other marginalized groups must take is to 'refigure the terms of that story', to re-narrate, to 'produce a female symbolic where the practice of making meanings is in relationship to each other, where you're not simply inheriting the name of the father again and again.’”
• Haraway's model = new forms of narrative do not simply subsume the old, but "widen the number and kinds of stories that get told and the actors who tell them."
• “Cyborg writing" as a form of oppositional consciousness.
• Critical literacy work is fundamental to critical engagement with larger structures of ideology & discourse, & to applying lived experience to an examination of relations of power
• Situated knowledge is postmodern, i.e. remains resolutely dynamic
  
  

The links you'll need:

Rosi Braidotti's paper is here: http://www.let.uu.nl/womens_studies/rosi/cyberfem.htm

and I'd like you to choose one of the six born digital fictions from here: http://wetellstories.co.uk/

Any questions, remember to e-mail me: jlaccetti AT dmu.ac.uk

I'll look forward to reading your critical interpretations. Keep in mind these parts of the critical thinking process:


The image is from a presentation by University of British Columbia, Okanagan education professor Phil Balcaen. Have a read here for more information on critical thinking that adds to what we discussed in last week's lecture.