Rather than making such horrid actions pathlogical, I would rather see it
as an opportunity to look at what it is about our schools/society that make
such actions possible. Personally. I have a difficult time with the logic
that if we make schools more like prisons, lie dedectors, security guards,
our schools will become a safer place to learn. But this is from someone
who working at a gas station tried to counsel someone out of robbing him.
Nate
----- Original Message -----
From: Ricardo Ottoni <rjapias who-is-at ibm.net>
To: <xmca who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, April 21, 1999 10:12 AM
Subject: Re: Krupskaya
Phillip,
Thank you for your comments and bibliographic references.
On resistance and contestation arenas... I beguin thinking about
the last terrorist neo-nazi action at Denver... about explicit
violence in schools.
Here, in Brazil - specially in Sco Paulo - every week at least one
student is killed inside, or in front of, their school by fire arms
shoots. Personal disputes, rivallity of urban tribes (gangs), futille
motives... This brings to surface the question of population disarm...
arms sellers... arms industry... and we, teachers and education workers,
cannot be in silence in front of this.
I'd like hear your comments on this, if possible.
Phillip Allen White wrote:
>
> On Wed, 14 Apr 1999, Ricardo Ottoni wrote:
>
> > 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
>
> /////////////////////////////////\
>
> 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
>
> \///////////////////////////////////////
>
>