[Xmca-l] A Gender Gap in CHAT

[David Kellogg]

"Politically correct" is really incorrect, politically. I don't just mean
that it has long since gone from being an inside joke on the left to being
a bugaboo-boogaloo of the right and now an excuse for the overt,
shameless propagation of racist filth, even on this list. I mean that the
issues we are discussing under this heading are often sub-political, or
only very subtley political, and reducing them to political stance taking
means ignoring their real roots: economic, social, and cultural. That's why
I really resisted the idea that my graduate student can fight patriarchy by
refusing to teach a lesson in which two boys arm wrestle for a trophy
girlfriend. It really makes a lot more sense to trust in teachers to teach
the lesson critically, and trust in learners to learn skeptically. Besides,
what's the point of saving your own soul if it costs you the rest of the
world? (There is a feminist novel making the rounds here in Korea that
refers to sexual harrassment, marriage, childbirth and almost every
imaginable form of gender gap and somehow manages not to refer to female
desire at all--understandably, the kids prefer K-pop, even though some of
the K-pop stars have actually started reading it!)

I just read Perezhivanie, Emotions, and Subjectivity, which is the first
volume of the Perspectives in Cultural Historical Research series that
Nikolai and I are contributing to. There is much to commend, and even more
to object to, but what really struck me is that we have a kind of gender
gap within CHAT itself: the empirical classroom data is almost always
supplied by younger women, and the theoretical, philosophical musings are
heavily gendered towards older men. This tendency goes from the editors
of the volume right down to the references and even the bibliography. Of
course,  this gender gap--our own gender gap--is a reflection of the
societies that we live in (from the early USSR right up to our present
day). Of course, the editors and the authors and even the learners in the
volume are all doing what they can to overcome it in various ways. But
instead of going away, it tends to create a noticeable gap between theory
and praxis. there is always a slight rumble and grinding of gears, a jump
cut, when the article switches from "Theoretical Background" to
"Study".  There is nothing quite comparable in, say, systemic functional
linguistics. (Interestingly, systemic functional linguistics has a lot
of intellectual "power couples", where both husband and wife are both
theorists and practioners....) :

David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

New Article: Ruqaiya Hasan, in memoriam: A manual and a manifesto.
Outlines, Spring 2020
https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://tidsskrift.dk/outlines/article/view/116238__;!!Mih3wA!X2yy_83lDbgqTtDKl6EQm_VPddo4jocP4TDbY--02qSkAUMpyOSyWkVYnIRX4_dWtz5QLw$ 
New Translation with Nikolai Veresov: *L.S. Vygotsky's Pedological
Works* *Volume
One: Foundations of Pedology*"
 https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9789811505270__;!!Mih3wA!X2yy_83lDbgqTtDKl6EQm_VPddo4jocP4TDbY--02qSkAUMpyOSyWkVYnIRX4_cJdgJlIw$ 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ucsd.edu/pipermail/xmca-l/attachments/20200708/a318d3d3/attachment.html