twisting appropriated concepts

Robert Serpell (serpell who-is-at umbc.edu)
Thu, 18 Nov 1999 11:20:37 -0500

Thankyou, Leigh, for prompting me to wade through Jay's lengthy
contribution that ended with the following:
>
>Do you know of research that looked seriously at the antagonistic twists
>of the learned curriculum? at the queered and monstrous versions, or less
>dramatically and from the dominant viewpoint, the merely bizarre and
>hapless ones? I do not mean here what students do in schools instead of
>learning; there is a lot of research on that. Nor the ways in which queer
>students learn by different kinds of doings, we also know a bit about
>that. But about what we make of the learnings themselves? how the doings
>we learn get twisted so that they become anomalous ways of talking,
>thinking, drawing, performing, relating ... no longer suited to their
>original functions, and with considerable potential as antagonists to
>those functions and the systems they support?
>
>JAY.
>
>---------------------------
>JAY L. LEMKE

As you point out, one motive for favoring appropriation over
internalization is the affordance of the concept for the outcome being
different from its origin.

A historically important set of cases, I believe, that are relevant to
your question (even if they do quite meet your criteria for " research
that looked seriously at the antagonistic twists") is the deployment of
concepts such as democracy, equality, universality in the revolutionary
struggles by slaves, colonial subjects, and women to rationally convince
their masters of the logical necessity of their emancipation.

Robert

Robert Serpell tel: ( 410 ) 455 2417
Psychology Department 455 2567
University of Maryland Baltimore County
1000 Hilltop Circle
Baltimore MD 21250 fax: ( 410 ) 455 1055