Ugh. I'm going through a sort of crisis with Howard's article. Not because I disagree with anything she says, but because postmodernists (typically the theorists/friends I'm drawn to and love) absolutely delight in jarring me out of complacency. And sometimes, even as a self-proclaimed
queer, I just want life to be easy; this is one of those times that I'm feeling very resistant to the idea that something is simply a social construct that we can only make sense of through our own rhetorical designs.
I want, in this case, for things to be "cut and dry" as Josh said in
his post; whenever I run into one of these crises caused by pomos, I immediately get flustered--
What? How can I be a feminists if women don't exist! Well, then I'll just have to quit everything! Of course I eventually come to terms, understanding that, just because something is a social construct, doesn't mean very real, lived experiences don't develop from them.
But I'm still in
crisis mode.
How do we teach students to write their own-original-but-heavily-influenced-and-perhaps-not-original-at-all-but-that's-ok sentences rather than being "gatekeepers" of a gated community to which we don't even belong?