Re: RE: more myopia

From: Diane Hodges (dhodges@ceo.cudenver.edu)
Date: Mon Mar 06 2000 - 05:41:53 PST


ematusov@udel.edu writes:
>Hi Diane--
>
>Can you elaborate on the following please,
>
>> In the Butler/Scott edited "Feminists theorize the political" - one of
>the
>> authors there (afraid the name has escaped me lobes) wrote that the
>model
>> of community
>> belongs to a patriarchal ideal, a way of keeping control by creating
>> myths of utopias where none can exist so long as a community is based
>> on some sort of faux shared practice/identity.
>
>Why? Can you give an example, please? How was "shared" understood?

hi eugene - in larger urban areas, a lot of white middle class folks are
creating their own "communities" within the larger neighbourhoods as a way
to protect
particular values: this pretty much comes down to eliminating the sight of
the homeless folks, busing homeless youth miles out of the area being
protected as the "community"
and ensuring that hetero-values dominate in social activity for kids, and
so on;
it is a form of policing, protecting their community, it is much like the
"gated community" practice that is burdgeoning in north american cities;

the agenda of these communities is to protect the dominant groups
(whites/middle class/hets) from those who threaten the dominant values
(which is where i felt obliged to laugh to at the idea of a majority
protecting the intereests of any minority) -

what is "shared" in these contexts, and in the article by Murdoch and the
book by Frazer and Lacy, is an ideology about values:
communities of practice seem to me to function along the same lines,
that certain ideologies must be accepted in order for the community to
maintain its
status/history of a community - it is the dominance of "traditions" that
are
designed to preserve practice, and so resist/prevent change to practice.

>
>It sounds very interesting! Did the author provide an alternative notion
>of
>community?
>
i wish i had the book, i could refer to Murdoch's text more closely, but i
think her interest was more in explicating how community functions best as
an ideal
and how it fails in the everyday - i think at the heart of these critiques
is the ideal of homogeneity - and how this is is provoked through concepts
or "shared practice/activity" -

something that concerns me is the question of belonging, that a community
is a site where people seek to belong; however if the underlying success
of any community's function is through normativity and homogeneity, then
belonging
becomes a work of conforming, not joining, and the sharing-in-practice
becomes

a work of contorting, not engaging.

i am not sure an alternative addresses the overarching acceptance of the
ideal of community, so much as there is aneed to consider more closely
what is being applauded in the ideal.

thanks eugene, and nate, for your nudges.
diane
>
>

   **********************************************************************
                                        :point where everything listens.
and i slow down, learning how to
enter - implicate and unspoken (still) heart-of-the-world.

(Daphne Marlatt, "Coming to you")
***********************************************************************

diane celia hodges

 university of british columbia, centre for the study of curriculum and
instruction
==================== ==================== =======================
 university of colorado, denver, school of education

Diane_Hodges@ceo.cudenver.edu



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