[Xmca-l] Re: The manologue

[White, Phillip]

Everyone: 

crunching eggs, nice image Rod, here are my thoughts on how male dominance plays out on xmca.  this is rushed an inchoate, i'm really just now focused on making gefilte fish for this evening's seder.

So, to ground my perceptions, I would start out with Jean Lave’s and Etienne Wenger’s 1991 “Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation”.  Akin to Foucault, they very briefly trace how learning is embedded in the doing of activities through several social activities: and how newbies become part of the group working with the old timers.  This includes the old timers monitoring and disciplining the newbies so that their participation is deemed ‘legitimate’.

I think about who the ‘old timers’ are in xmca, and based on my observations monitoring and disciplining of newbies is achieved through the texts that they reference.  This is not unlike the way texts are references in a mosque that Lave references in an article that she had published in an xmca journal.  

Most commonly texts held as anchor texts are Hegel, Marx, Lenin, Herder and Vygotsky.

Texts by critical theorists, feminists, queer theorists, critical race theorists are rarely if ever mentioned.

I grabbed six texts that are important to me so see how the topics of gender and sexuality were dealt with.  These texts are:
“Vygotsky’s Education Theory in Cultural Context” edited by Kozulin, Gindis, Ageyev & Miller, 2003.
“Understand practice: Perspectives on activity and context” edited by Chaiklin and Lave, 1993/96.
“The Guided mind: A sociogenetic approach to personality” Valsiner, 1998.
“Identity and agency in cultural worlds” Holland, Lachicotte Jr., Skinner & Cain. 1998.
“Learning identity: The joint emergence of social identification and academic learning” Wortham. 2006.
“Cultural psychology: A once and future discipline” Cole. 1996.

In “Cultural Psychology” and “Understanding Practice”, there is no mention of gender or sexuality.
In “Vygotsky’s Educational Theory in Cultural Context”, ‘gender’ is in the phrase “race, class, gender and their cultural and ethnic affiliations”.

Valsiner, Holland etc., and Wortham all discuss gender and sexuality.  Their reference points regarding gender and sexuality are theorist pretty much from the last twenty-five years of the 20th century.

It seems to me that for a Vygotskian based CHAT theorist to explore the topics of gender and sexuality, particularly the activities and performances within these arenas of human behavior, then those theorists need to be immersed in, again, texts by critical theorists, feminists, queer theorists, critical race theorists.

At present I don’t think that that is the case, based on the dominate mode of discourse within xmca.

To paraphrase Eugene Matusov, these my initial half-baked ideas.

phillip