Sunday, November 10, 2013

Discussion Questions for 11/13


“Not You/Like You: Postcolonial Women and the Interlocking Questions of Identity and Difference” by Trinh T. Minh-ha

1. “How am I to lose, maintain or gain a female identity when it is impossible for me to take up a position outside this identity from which I presumably reach in and feel for it?” (pg 930)
  • We have talked about all these different women writers and how experience shapes their writing. Minh-ha is contradicting this. Does this change your perception of our past women writers? Or do you still believe that experience shapes writing?

2. “The moment the insider steps out from the inside she’s no longer a mere insider. She necessarily looks in from the outside while also looking out from the inside. Not quite the same, not quite the other, she stands in that undetermined threshold place where she constantly drifts in and out. Undercutting the inside/outside opposition, her intervention is necessarily that of both not quite an insider and not quite an outsider. She is, in other words, this inappropriate other other or same who moves about with always at least two gestures: that of affirming ‘I am like you’ while persisting in her difference and that of reminding ‘I am different’ while unsettling every definition of otherness arrived at.” (pg 932)
  • While reading, how did you interpret this quote?
  • Can this be compared to Virginia Woolf’s idea of an androgynous mind in “A Room of One’s Own?”

3. “Identity, thus understood, supposes that a clear dividing line can be made between I and not-I, he and she: between depth and surface, or vertical and horizontal identity; between us here and them over there… The search for an identity is, therefore, usually a search for that lost, pure, true, real, genuine, original, authentic self, often situated within a process of elimination of all that is considered other, superfluous, fake, corrupted, or Westernized.” (pg 929)
  • When thinking about the identities of women in terms of this quotation, what/who do you think “other” refers to?
  • We have discussed transgendered individuals with previous passages.When she's says identity supposes a clear divide between he and she, is she eliminating them in the discussion of identity? Is this an accurate way to define the identity process?

The Politics of Fiction-Elif Shafak

4. “If you’re a woman writer from the Muslim world, like me, then you are expected to write the stories of Muslim women and, preferably, the unhappy stories of Muslim women.”
  • This also goes back to women writing their experience. Do you think that women should stick to writing their experience or should they branch out into what they don’t know and write about what they want?
5. “From her, I learned, amongst many other things,one very precious lesson --that if you want to destroy something in this life, be it an acne, a blemish or the human soul, all you need to do is to surround it with thick walls. It will dry up inside. Now we all live in some kind of a social and cultural circle. We all do. We're born into a certain family, nation, class. But if we have no connection whatsoever with the worlds beyond the one we take for granted, then we too run the risk of drying up inside.”
  • Do you think that this correlates with what Trinh T. Minh-ha was talking about in her piece? Do we need otherness in our lives to be strong individuals?

6. “We tend to form clusters based on similarity,and then we produce stereotypes about other clusters of people.In my opinion, one way of transcending these cultural ghettos is through the art of storytelling. Stories cannot demolish frontiers,but they can punch holes in our mental walls. And through those holes, we can get a glimpse of the other, and sometimes even like what we see.”
  • Do you agree with Shafak that stories allow for the reader to catch a glimpse of others? Why or why not?  

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