Learning from Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles by Paula M. L. Moya "

Book Description In Learning from Experience, Paula Moya offers an alternative to some influential philosophical assumptions about identity and experience in contemporary literary theory. Arguing that the texts and lived experiences of subordinated people are rich sources of insight about our society, Moya presents a nuanced universalist justification for identity-based work in ethnic studies.

This strikingly original book provides eloquent analyses of such postmodernist feminists as Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, Norma Alarcón, and Chela Sandoval, and counters the assimilationist proposals of minority neoconservatives such as Shelby Steele and Richard Rodriguez. It advances realist proposals for multicultural education and offers an understanding of the interpretive power of Chicana feminists including Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Helena María Viramontes. Learning from Experience enlarges our concept of identity and offers new ways to situate aspects of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation in discursive and sociopolitical contexts.

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DISCUSSION

I find it difficult to write about Learning from Experience, especially given the expertise and eloquence Moya commands of the English language. I am humbled by her argument and recognize that I may never have the words to express as succinctly the experience of what it means to me being Chicano/a.

I recall in class this past week the difficult I had in expressing my understanding of Moya’s writing about experience shaping identity. In her introduction she writes about Joan Scott’s position that experience prevents, rather then allows “critical analyses of the constitutive working of the discursive system through identities (and experiences) are produced” (p. 6). I have not been exposed to Scott's work so I plan to visit the library and see what she has to say about Experience but it sounds like she discounts it. Moya states “thus, in her efforts to establish the correct causal (and historical) relationship between discourse, experience, subjectivity, and identity, Scott, effectively delegitimizes experience as an authroitave source for knowledge. Supposedly, this position reinforces postmodernism that would have us believe it’s all about the power of langue and systems of discourse that create a relative experience of reality. It follows then that actions, accountability and responsibility become meaningless. This was illustrated in a footnote about Butler’s analysis of the New Bedford rape case at the end of “Contingent Foundations. In her deconstruction of a question of the defense attorneys asked of the rape victim, Butler concludes that the real culprit of the crime is the ‘category of sex.’ She writes: ‘Here sex is a category, but not merely a representation; it is a principle of production, intelligibility, and regulation which enforces a violence and rationales it after the fact. The very term by which the violation is explained enact the violation, and concede that the violation was under way before it take the empirical form of a criminal act…As a category that effectively produced the political meaning of what it describes, ‘sex’ here works its silent ‘violence’ in regulating what is and is not designatable (19).” Moya counters by exposing two problems “the first is that by focusing on the relationship between the rape and discourse (‘the very terms by which the violation is explained enact the violation…’), Butler misrepresents the causal nature of the crime. She presumes, but never shows, that the categories she exocoriates (sex and identity) determine that such violations will inevitably occur. It is the unsupported presumption that underlies her claim that ‘the violation was under way, before it take the empirical form of a criminal act.” Meanwhile, the agency (not to mention responsibility) of the men is erased; she represents them as mere ‘effects’ of discourse, as subjects mobilized thorough the grammar of the discourse that has ‘produced’ them.’ The second problem is that by focusing on the words spoken by the defense attorney, Butler unwittingly silences the victim and ignores her experience of the rape.

In class I shared a persona experience of living in a men’s homeless shelter, when I moved to Massachusetts. On a toss of a coin, tales was east coast, and heads was west, I ended up in Boston. I arrived with less than $40 in my pocket. I didn’t know any one but I knew what it was to be homeless from a previous experience, so I immediately searched for available resources. I found myself at the Salvation Army in Cambridge. I recall seeing men who also had that look on their face “how did I end up here?” I recall having to be in by 7:00 p.m. or risk loosing my space in the shelter. In the hall, I sat at a table drinking coffee, not feeling like I really belonged there. Inside, I felt a deep sense of shame and abandonment, which has more to do with the back-story that had me here in the first place. I shared that I tied my boots around my wrist to insure that no one took them in the night. The next morning, I got up and was assigned the cleaning of the restrooms. My military service reinforced the idea that the “head” should be cleaned right, so I was in there with bleach and Ajax scrubbing out the urinals and toilets. I enjoyed cleaning away shit and piss stains as if it was a cathartic cleansing of my sins. One of the regular guys came in and said to me, “Hey dude, this is not the Taj Mahal.” Feeling sheepish, I put away the cleaning supplies and started my day in search of a job and a more stable living arrangement. I only spent one night in that shelter, I moved to the Harvard Men’s Shelter located in the basement of a Lutheran Church. Within three months I had my own apartment in Somerville and a year later I started my MSW program at Boston College. After sharing this story, one of my classmates asked “What’s your point”? I felt embarrassed because I was not sure how to articulate the point.

After reading Chapter 1, I feel I’m better able to express my point. While reading this chapter, I understood Moya on many different levels and was grateful for helping me to finally understand the writing of Moraga and Anzaldúa. Like my colleague, I always wondered what the point of their stories and metaphors and how that related to me. The theory in the flesh has captured my experience in a way I was never able to articulate before. I am a Chicano/a - I know some would ask why I’m putting the “a” at the end of Chicano (which indicates a male gender) those who truly know me, know that as a child I thought of myself as a girl. As such, I was beaten, raped, humiliated and shared in the right of passage that many young girls in our culture experience. I’ve always said, I know what it is to be raped in more ways then physical. Talk about embodied knowledge. It is this experience that has made me acutely aware of the social dynamics that include use of language, social roles, and expectations of normal and deviance. Even as a young child, I observed the agreed upon reality where perpetrator was able to define reality, creating an illusion that we all get along, while simultaneously being aware that an alternative reality was taking place, unseen to most of the people in the social situation. I learned at an early age not to speak of these incidents, silenced, because they revealed a dark world of human oppression. It has been my life long journey to understand this by studying theory of social life and how to give voice to this silenced experience in order to create a better world. Like Moraga’s interview, I know (1) the family as the primary instrument of socialization (2) the need for theory to be grounded in emotional investment (3) the link between social location and experience (4) the body as a source of knowledge and (5) the cerntrality of struggle to the formation of her political consciousness. (p. 49)

Multiliteracies for a Digital Age by Stuart A. Selber

Book Description Multiliteracies for a Digital Age serves as a guide for composition teachers to develop effective, full-scale computer literacy programs that are also professionally responsible by emphasizing different kinds of literacies. Stuart A. Selber also proposes methods for helping students move among these literacies in strategic ways.

Defining computer literacy as a domain of writing and communication, Selber addresses the questions that few authors of other computer literacy texts consider: What should a computer literate student be able to do? What is required of literacy teachers to educate such a student? How can functional computer literacy fit within the values of teaching writing and communication as a profession? Reimagining functional literacy in ways that speak to teachers of writing and communication, he builds a framework for computer literacy instruction that blends functional, critical, and rhetorical concerns in the interest of social action and change.

Multiliteracies for a Digital Age reviews the extensive literature on computer literacy and critiques it from a humanistic perspective. This approach, which will remain useful as new versions of computer hardware and software inevitably replace old versions, helps to usher students into an understanding of the biases, belief systems, and politics inherent in technological contexts. Selber redefines rhetoric at the nexus of technology and literacy and argues that students should be prepared as authors of twenty-first-century texts that defy the established purview of English departments. The result is a rich portrait of the ideal multiliterate student in a digital age and a social approach to computer literacy envisioned with the requirements for systemic change in mind.

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DISCUSSION

I just finished reading Selber: 1/Reimagining Computer Literacy. Rather then wait to come together in class and discuss this issue, I thought I’d use a little technology to generate discussion about the reading now that it’s fresh in my mind. J

Initially, I was going to save this reading for last but as I started looking over the chapter I became intrigued with Selber’s ideas about technology literacy and practice, the next thing I know I was finished with the chapter. As I recall, we were not reading beyond chapter 1 this week, which Ann will be facilitating in the discussion on Thursday.

What I found most interesting about the first chapter was his discussion about myths of technology. Just because we invest in our technology infrastructure dose not necessary mean that students or instructors will be able to use it use the technology in a meaningful way. Just this week, I had an adjunct professor tell me that one of her students was unable to cut and paste in MS Word. I found it surprising that a master’s level student did not have basic computer skills. In my own class, I have seen a number of students wrestle with posting assignments on blackboard via the digital box. I’m also in the process of grading papers on the “Who am I?” assignment and feel irritated at the superficial level that most students answer the questions (and this is an advance standing class). In some cases, there is poor sentence and paragraph structure and most use terms without connecting them to meaning. So they will throw in the word “culture” a few times as if that answers the question, but don’t provide a definition or other information that indicates they understand the concept. For that reason, this chapter was particularly interesting.

As I read the chapter, I also found myself thinking back about my work at MetLife as a teleservice representative in their pensions department. Each morning, we arrived at 7:45 (to accommodate EST) and become a Borg. I would put in my ear phone and mike to take phone calls. I would boot my computer and bring up the required programs as well as enter secured databases with my appropriate passwords. At precisely 7:45 the calls were released to a pool of 15 representatives and each of would average 120 calls per day. In our department meetings, I recall conversations about average time per call, how long clients were on hold, number of key stroke made by the representative and time away from our cubes. As we walked through the building, we would enter codes to access copy machines or send faxes, some doors were secured so we had to swipe them with our id badges, not to mention the video cameras that monitored the floor and the supervisor who walked around trouble shooting and making sure we were available. At the time, I had just finished reading 1984 by George Orwell and could not help but feel that I was under constant surveillance. I developed a deep resentment toward the technology and shared the opinion that “computers are evil, tools of the devil” (p. 11) at the same time, I was reading Kaczynski’s (a.k.a. Unabomber) manifesto Industrial Society and Its Future, about the consequences of technology on the human race. I became aware that I needed use technology so that technology is not always using me. So I worked hard to understand new technological advances (I believe I would score pretty high on the computer literacy student evaluations as described in the book) but I still hold deep resentment for the intrusiveness of technology. By the way, I left MetLife because I could not tolerate Snoopy always breathing down my back. Corporations align themselves with a warm fuzzy mascot to camouflage their corporate fascism.

While at Boston College, I had the honor of studying policy with John McNutt who has done a great deal of writing about Social Work and technology. As a profession he claimed that we lagged in our ability to effectively use technology to assist in our work (e.g. PDA, Laptops, Nonprofit infrastructures, access to current research, etc). Consequently, we lack the ability to organize and engage in community practice. He would discuss the demonstrations against the G-7 meetings in Seattle and Washington and how the internet and other forms of technology helped to organize those activities and how Social Work was noticeably absent. We as a profession also suffer from being on the wrong side of the digital divide, like people of color, the poor, and other marginalized groups, feeling that we do not need to incorporate technology in practice. But as Selber discusses, we need to be “users of technology’ as well as “questioners of technology” as well as “producers of technology” which is part of reflective praxis.

I was particularly impressed with the way he structured his argument with principals of critical realism. I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the book.

Cyborg Manifesto

I started thinking about the use Borg, a Star Trek reference of organic beings that are also made up of technological mechanisms that create a collective consciousness, where individuality is obsolete and assimilation into the collective is the comfort of belonging to the group. I recall Walter suggesting we do some quick research on Cyborgs, and so I came back and found this link to a chapter by Donna Haraway, "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, which offers a nice introduction to these ideas. I just finished reading it and recall an early class in SW Theory where I was told that I had commited blasphemy. I suppose I am a cyborg…so I think I’ll need to do more reading on this so I can find a way to resist and become more fully human.

I also thought of Maureen, with some of your comments about feminism and animal rights. It will be interesting to hear what you have to say about this artile. ;)