dialogism that matters
I've been indirectly reading up on Bakhtin's notion of dialogism--the double-voicedness or polyvocality of most language, most art, most human interactions--having been directed to Bakhtin in order to get a grasp on his work on the grotesque/carnivalesque body (which is rooted in medieval worldview and popular culture, hence relevant to my research on gender and the body in fairy tales, since fairy tales have some of their roots in medieval folklore).
Dialogism, like much of Bakhtin's work, is problematic for its lack of focus on gender roles. I mean, Bakhtin unproblematically wrote about the double/doubling pregnant female body as somehow universally applicable when he discussed the grotesque bodies in Rabelaisian worldview. For all his critical commonsense, Bakhtin does not seem to be the most gender-sensitive of theorists, and so in addition to reading Bakhtin, I've been reading feminist responses to Bakhtin.
This stuff is fascinating. It's written mostly by female academics who, like me, struggle with a masculinist legacy along the lines of "this theory is really neat, except it is written by/for men, hence it doesn't really apply to my life experience, or my topics of research, or the theoretical/methodological models I use to understand the world, as a scholar and as a person... so where does this leave me as an academic female?" The desire to be included is one of the central drives of academic feminism, and I feel its pull strongly as well. The essays in Feminism, Bakhtin, and the Dialogic were especially fascinating in this regard. The emphasis on dialogism led to a nuanced understanding of various power relations, which is more subtle than a lot of feminism that tends to be more aggressive and more polarized (hence turns off more people who aren't 100% on-board with those kinds of messages).
As I type up my notes from this book (which is due back soon, curse you interlibrary loan!), I'm reminded of the relevance of academic theories to lived experience... when you're not doin it wrong, that is. These essays grapple with the meanings of women's art, with literary genres, with how exploited/non-mainstream voices can be discerned through all of the layers of bourgeois identity we're force-fed through the media.
One particularly interesting essay--in an area I don't work in, but wish I did--covered African-American feminist literature. I actually really want to develop a course on this topic, someday; diasporic topics have intrigued me for a while, but I've yet to act on the impulse.
The author writes:
"The Bakhtinian dialogism is not a strict binary opposition between, for instance, the marginal woman's voice and the central dominant male voice. It is rather, in these books, the exploration and activating of the unvoiced exiled world of women--that other place in all its variety. It defines and redefines the subject with multiple heroines, multiple stories, themselves in constant struggle to ferret out the voices of the past and present ... If there is any trace of idealism left, I would say it is in the persistent call for love between women, a love seen as a healing of the wounds created in our patriarchal world. Perhaps this is the new ethos of our age--a carnivalesque one in as much as the fact that this love has been forbidden by the male authority and is seen as a premise for changing the world, for turning it upside down."
-Mary O'Connor, "Subject, Voice and Women in Some Contemporary Black American Women's Writing," 214-215
I found this paragraph really compelling, even though I haven't read much of the literature that the author was describing. I think this is part of the power of art (and scholarship thereon): art has the potential to be universally understood (and those of you who know me, know that I reserve the word "universal" for a few limited applications, not including the bashing of those who use it poorly). My experience of my femininity has been very different than the author's, or the authors she analyzes, but there are enough common threads, and the art conveys so much expression, that I feel a strong sense of empathy.
This is one reason I adored Nalo Hopkinson's book The Salt Roads. The narrative weaves in and out of the lives of three women over large spans of time, but they are united by experiences of diaspora and slavery. One woman--a Parisian dancer, mistress to Charles Baudelaire--has a heart-wrenchingly difficult life trying to survive in a world that does not let women work, unless they sell themselves to men in one sense or another. Despite my life experience being so far from that era, her story struck a chord with me. It's hard to explain exactly why... but in her story, I recognized some of my story, in that it was only a few generations ago that otherwise-privileged white women were almost wholly dependent on men to get by. The discomfort of being a non-person, in a dependent or childlike state at best, resonates with me since I've studied women's history and feminist issues. I don't see how it could fail to resonate with people--the knowledge that if you (if you're female, or a person of color) or your mother (if you're male, and unsure how this applies to you) were born in a different time or place, you would not have the full rights and freedoms of a person. Blows my fucking mind every time I think about it.
Stories express and communicate life experiences; people who've had different life experiences, drawn from various places and times, can understand something of how other people live, love, work, eat, make do, and die from stories. We assemble these stories, we talk about what gives them meaning, and scholarship is born, except it always feeds back into stories, since scholars come with stories and we want to make our own meanings as well. We see our lives reflected in story and theory alike, and some of us gravitate more towards one than the other, sometimes both...
I just read Stephen Benson's Cycles of Influence: Fiction, Folktale, Theory so the idea of cyclical influence is on my mind. But so is dialogism. And women's experiences/art/theories. And African-American/diasporic women's fiction. And I haven't even finished typing up my notes from the Feminism/Bakhtin/Dialogic book yet!
Dialogism, like much of Bakhtin's work, is problematic for its lack of focus on gender roles. I mean, Bakhtin unproblematically wrote about the double/doubling pregnant female body as somehow universally applicable when he discussed the grotesque bodies in Rabelaisian worldview. For all his critical commonsense, Bakhtin does not seem to be the most gender-sensitive of theorists, and so in addition to reading Bakhtin, I've been reading feminist responses to Bakhtin.
This stuff is fascinating. It's written mostly by female academics who, like me, struggle with a masculinist legacy along the lines of "this theory is really neat, except it is written by/for men, hence it doesn't really apply to my life experience, or my topics of research, or the theoretical/methodological models I use to understand the world, as a scholar and as a person... so where does this leave me as an academic female?" The desire to be included is one of the central drives of academic feminism, and I feel its pull strongly as well. The essays in Feminism, Bakhtin, and the Dialogic were especially fascinating in this regard. The emphasis on dialogism led to a nuanced understanding of various power relations, which is more subtle than a lot of feminism that tends to be more aggressive and more polarized (hence turns off more people who aren't 100% on-board with those kinds of messages).
As I type up my notes from this book (which is due back soon, curse you interlibrary loan!), I'm reminded of the relevance of academic theories to lived experience... when you're not doin it wrong, that is. These essays grapple with the meanings of women's art, with literary genres, with how exploited/non-mainstream voices can be discerned through all of the layers of bourgeois identity we're force-fed through the media.
One particularly interesting essay--in an area I don't work in, but wish I did--covered African-American feminist literature. I actually really want to develop a course on this topic, someday; diasporic topics have intrigued me for a while, but I've yet to act on the impulse.
The author writes:
"The Bakhtinian dialogism is not a strict binary opposition between, for instance, the marginal woman's voice and the central dominant male voice. It is rather, in these books, the exploration and activating of the unvoiced exiled world of women--that other place in all its variety. It defines and redefines the subject with multiple heroines, multiple stories, themselves in constant struggle to ferret out the voices of the past and present ... If there is any trace of idealism left, I would say it is in the persistent call for love between women, a love seen as a healing of the wounds created in our patriarchal world. Perhaps this is the new ethos of our age--a carnivalesque one in as much as the fact that this love has been forbidden by the male authority and is seen as a premise for changing the world, for turning it upside down."
-Mary O'Connor, "Subject, Voice and Women in Some Contemporary Black American Women's Writing," 214-215
I found this paragraph really compelling, even though I haven't read much of the literature that the author was describing. I think this is part of the power of art (and scholarship thereon): art has the potential to be universally understood (and those of you who know me, know that I reserve the word "universal" for a few limited applications, not including the bashing of those who use it poorly). My experience of my femininity has been very different than the author's, or the authors she analyzes, but there are enough common threads, and the art conveys so much expression, that I feel a strong sense of empathy.
This is one reason I adored Nalo Hopkinson's book The Salt Roads. The narrative weaves in and out of the lives of three women over large spans of time, but they are united by experiences of diaspora and slavery. One woman--a Parisian dancer, mistress to Charles Baudelaire--has a heart-wrenchingly difficult life trying to survive in a world that does not let women work, unless they sell themselves to men in one sense or another. Despite my life experience being so far from that era, her story struck a chord with me. It's hard to explain exactly why... but in her story, I recognized some of my story, in that it was only a few generations ago that otherwise-privileged white women were almost wholly dependent on men to get by. The discomfort of being a non-person, in a dependent or childlike state at best, resonates with me since I've studied women's history and feminist issues. I don't see how it could fail to resonate with people--the knowledge that if you (if you're female, or a person of color) or your mother (if you're male, and unsure how this applies to you) were born in a different time or place, you would not have the full rights and freedoms of a person. Blows my fucking mind every time I think about it.
Stories express and communicate life experiences; people who've had different life experiences, drawn from various places and times, can understand something of how other people live, love, work, eat, make do, and die from stories. We assemble these stories, we talk about what gives them meaning, and scholarship is born, except it always feeds back into stories, since scholars come with stories and we want to make our own meanings as well. We see our lives reflected in story and theory alike, and some of us gravitate more towards one than the other, sometimes both...
I just read Stephen Benson's Cycles of Influence: Fiction, Folktale, Theory so the idea of cyclical influence is on my mind. But so is dialogism. And women's experiences/art/theories. And African-American/diasporic women's fiction. And I haven't even finished typing up my notes from the Feminism/Bakhtin/Dialogic book yet!