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capri0mniSuch a variety of things I meant to post today. But this is what my mind kept returning to.
Still reading... still seeing links between Monster Theory and Disability ... Something.
Today's half-paragraph:
(Quote)
Similarly, Cohen has argued that the monster refuses “to participate in the classificatory “order of things”” and provides a significant challenge to binary systems of hierarchy, creating a need to re-evaluate concepts of order. He states that “the monster’s destructiveness is really a deconstructiveness: it threatens to reveal that difference originates in process, rather than in fact (and that “fact” is subject to constant reconstruction and change)” A keyword in this quotation, however, is ‘threatens’, since a monster such as the medieval dragon maiden may point towards artificial boundaries and ideas of order but she is never allowed to break them down. This limitation on her monstrous character is brought on by the context in which she features, as some medieval thinkers may have doubted the waythe world was ordered but they did not doubt that there was an order to the world. The truth was, as it were, out there and it was up to the human to try and understand it.
(Unquote)
{Meanwhile: the Chorus in my Head makes the following comment}
Of course the Human is the only one allowed to decide what Right and Proper Order is: It's whichever Order that puts that Human on Top.
(In the meantime, I'll be in the back, rooting for the monster. One of these days, she's bound to break through!
Still reading... still seeing links between Monster Theory and Disability ... Something.
Today's half-paragraph:
(Quote)
Similarly, Cohen has argued that the monster refuses “to participate in the classificatory “order of things”” and provides a significant challenge to binary systems of hierarchy, creating a need to re-evaluate concepts of order. He states that “the monster’s destructiveness is really a deconstructiveness: it threatens to reveal that difference originates in process, rather than in fact (and that “fact” is subject to constant reconstruction and change)” A keyword in this quotation, however, is ‘threatens’, since a monster such as the medieval dragon maiden may point towards artificial boundaries and ideas of order but she is never allowed to break them down. This limitation on her monstrous character is brought on by the context in which she features, as some medieval thinkers may have doubted the waythe world was ordered but they did not doubt that there was an order to the world. The truth was, as it were, out there and it was up to the human to try and understand it.
(Unquote)
{Meanwhile: the Chorus in my Head makes the following comment}
Of course the Human is the only one allowed to decide what Right and Proper Order is: It's whichever Order that puts that Human on Top.
(In the meantime, I'll be in the back, rooting for the monster. One of these days, she's bound to break through!
no subject
Date: 2012-04-04 02:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-04-04 04:52 pm (UTC)This is the poem I was trying to write yesterday, and it was giving me fits, because a) I want to trying writing all my poems in this series with the same form (Italian Sonnet, with a six-line preamble), and b) I've also been trying to make the narrator of each poem a PWD confronting the Normative Oppressor.
... And writing down the internal dialogue that happens when you recognize that the stranger beside you sees you as a threat, and then makes him/herself feel safe again by turning you invisible* is hard (especially to be clear to a reader in such a tight form). So I may have to abandon one of those two rules.
*It's "The monster is allowed to threaten, but never actually change anything," that really pisses me off.
...But Cohen's book Monster Theory, which the student is citing, has just gone onto my wishlist...
no subject
Date: 2012-04-04 10:01 pm (UTC)Yes, not having read the thesis I had the luxury of writing my sequence in the order it arrived: birth (Creates Anxiety), boundary-crossing (Boundaries), exploring "civilisation" (Questions), being acknowledged by "civilisation" as an attempt at assimilation and control (Identity Formation). It feels as if there ought to be a fifth poem but I'm not sure where my monster would go from here. I think my third, Questions, is the best, then Boundaries, then Creates Anxiety, then Identity Formation (unless I manage to improve it: it works as part of the story but not as a poem at the moment imo).
I've also been trying to make the narrator of each poem a PWD confronting the Normative Oppressor.
::nods understanding::
It's "The monster is allowed to threaten, but never actually change anything," that really pisses me off.
Yeah, one of the reasons I think my sequence needs a fifth poem, bah. Oh well, if I've repeated at least a few truths then I'll allow myself not to have to change the world here and now too.
Good luck, bb!
no subject
Date: 2012-04-04 11:00 pm (UTC)5 gives you room for a denouement that 4 does not?
(BTW, I want to make a new version of the icon above... it's one of my favorite quote about why fantastic fiction pleases me more than "realistic" fiction)
no subject
Date: 2012-04-04 11:31 pm (UTC)Or maybe we have to trust readers to construct a fifth part (their reaction?) after they've finished reading our contributions?
I dunno.
Your icon-quote always makes me twitch.
no subject
Date: 2012-04-05 12:20 am (UTC)OOh, sorry. Did not know.