To start off this trip, we have all been enrolled in an intensive gender studies summer school program at Universeit Utrecht called NOISE (I have no clue what it stands for so don't ask me). In this program, which we do 5 days a week for two weeks, we hear two lectures in the morning, have a discussion session with our tutor groups (mine is the yellow group. Go team yellow!) and then reconvine to bring everything to a close. All said and done, it's about 6 hours a day of classes, not including readings.Very draining but very cool stuff. I like the complete emmersion in feminism. When I hang out with other NOISE students, we can just be chatting, and then very easily fall into a feminist discussion and then back to casual banter. There are people from all over Europe (and a couple, like us in the WGSE program that aren't) in the program, which adds a really cool dimension. Everyone's always asking one another about cultural differences and such. In conclusion, I have yet to meet a truly assy individual in this program, they're just all very chill people and I really like that.
Our first week, we concentrated on the idea of Postcoloniality, as the title to this entry aptly states. We spent some time talking about the significance of the category of whiteness and aspects of the colonial memory, but for the most part all we discussed was the media representation and political reaction and theoretical implications of the veil. Lots and lots of talk about the veil. People got pretty fed up with it. I did too, not because we were talking about it, because I think it's important to explore the ways in which the west reacts to this marked difference and uses it to demonize muslim men, but because there was such a uniformity to the discussion that there was no way to really argue and parce out the ideas. It felt like one big cirlce jerk of "media coverage of the veil is bad" If there had been some opposing viewpoints to this, that perhaps our discussion would have movied beyond this to address larger issues of European identity and masculinity and orientalized hypersexualization of muslim women, but alas, there were none. It gave me the distinct impression that European postcolonial feminism may perhaps be stuck in the rut of this issue. Then again, as evidenced by France's outlawing of religious emblems in schools, this might just be a bigger issue in Europe and I, an outsider, am just not getting the full picture here.
This week we're studying posthumanism and I am all kinds of excited about this. I'll explain exactly what posthumanism is as soon as I figure that out :P
Cheers all
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It is wrong for any institution, be it government or religious organizations, to prohibit forms of self-expression. It is especially wrong for governments to do this, because they have the police power. In the US, certain forms of self-expression, are prohibited, such as nudity, but religious expression is protected. In Europe, the opposite seems to be true. They are more tolerant of sexual self-expression and intolerant of religious self-expression.
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