> To ancient greeks and some african tribes (even urban tribes)show us
> that sexualitty is much more cultural than biological.
>
> We must not forget that frogs and street dogs have homossexual relations
> very frequently, without any shame.
>
> Shame to have homossexual relations/feelings and to be homossexual is
> culturally determined.
Ricardo, these comments, along with Mike's earlier question about
forms of resistance ..... have brought to mind several texts that i've
read within the last few months.
"The women" - Hilton Als, 1996, Noonday Press. Als describes his
journey/path/trajectory/progess in becoming a Negress. "Being an auntie
man enamored of Negressity is all I have ever known to be." Als' story is
one of multiple forms of resistance to a wide variety of
ethnic/racial/socio-economic norms.
"Saying no to a man" - Susan Krieger, in "The family silver;
essays on relationships among women" 1996, University of California Press.
in this text, Krieger's multiple ways of resistance are primarily
practiced in academe - as lesbian, feminist & separatist -
"Mema's house, Mexico city; On transvestites, queens and machos" -
Annick Prieur. 1998. University of Chicago Press. A student of Pierre
Bourdieu, Prieur uses his theories to understand a community of vestidas,
living in a world of mayates, jotas, tortillas, bugas, bisexuales, and
heterosexuales. one of Prieur's interesting observations is how a local
culture - in this case set in Mexico City - is threatened as well as
marginalized through international media information from english-speaking
north america as well as western europe, in which the 'proper' homosexual
is presented as a white-middle-class-professionally educated 'gay' who
looks quite mainstream.
"Sometimes I can be anything; Power, gender and identity in a
primary classroom" , Karen Gallas, 1998, Teachers College Press.
Gallas as a teacher researcher follows her first and second grade
students for two years (i think it's two years), documenting their
multiple attempts and practices to appropriate social power through gender
and identity constructions.
"The invisibles; a tale of the eunuchs of India" - Zia Jaffrey,
1996, Pantheon Press. not an academic text, like the Als' text, but
still, a great topic on resistance - particularly through
self-castration.
Finally, Jose Limon's "Dancing with the devil" don't know the
rest of the necessary data. but a great ethnography in which one outcome
is how latina/mexican women in south texas use sightings of the devil as
as form of resistance against male dominance . . . a great read.
so, yes, Ricardo, homosexuality et. al. are great cultural
constructions, and also, as Foucault has pointed out, arenas of
contestation and resistance.
and, i realize, Mike, that you wondered about forms of resistance
in education, and Krieger's and Gallas' work comes the closest here - but
forms of resistance in other arenas can help us identify forms of
resistance in education.
phillip
phillip white pwhite who-is-at carbon.cudenver.edu
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A relation of surveillance, defined and regulated,
is inscribed at the heart of the practice of teaching, not
as an additional or adjacent part, but as a mechanism that
is inherent to it and which increases its efficiency.
Michel Foucault / Discipline & Punish
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