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This post is a test!! What's happening!! (and you can edit later)

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I was struck by Ahmed's discussion of political subjectivity and its relationship to self-care and survival. In the attached essay, feminist Teresa Ebert illustrates a different model of feminist political praxis that contrasts in interesting ways with Ahmed.   

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I was struck by Ahmed's discussion of political subjectivity and its relationship to self-care and survival. In the attached essay, feminist Teresa Ebert illustrates a different model of feminist political praxis that contrasts in interesting ways with Ahmed.   

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Ludic Feminism, the Body, Performance, and Labor: Bringing “Materialism” Back into Feminist Cultural Studies on JSTOR

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Teresa L. Ebert, Ludic Feminism, the Body, Performance, and Labor: Bringing “Materialism” Back into Feminist Cultural Studies, Cultural Critique, No. 23 (Winter, 1992-1993), pp. 5-50

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I really loved Ahmed's referencing to Audre Lorde's texts today, so I selected one of my favorite poems by her; one that especially put into perspective temporality and context. Please read if you had time! :)

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Never to Dream of Spiders by Audre Lorde | Poetry Foundation

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Time collapses between the lips of strangers

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Ahmed refers to a time she talked to a lecturer about sexual harassment and how once you make a complaint about sexual harassment, that's what you become, a complainer. I felt like this resonated with me as this is often in the back of my mind when thinking about speaking up about something, that I'll be known as a complainer or a problem child. But I also realized when reading this that it can also be empowering when thought about in the right way, as once you take the action to address what's happening, you're then able to identify what's happening to you.

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Something that I found striking from today's chapter is the section where Ahmed writes on being stopped and questioned because of how you appear, resulting in an interrogation that not only isolates you but deems you as a stranger. Questions like "where are you from" are formed, which is, unfortunately, a frequent occurrence in border towns. The attached poem is entitled "To Live in the Borderlands" and is by Gloria Anzaldúa, whose words I think resonate with the feeling of being deemed a stranger in the town you call home.

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BY GLORIA ANZALDUATo live in the borderlands means youare neither hispana india negra espanolani gabacha, eres mestiza, mulata, half-breedcaught in the crossfire between campswhile carrying all five races on your backnot knowing which side to turn to, run from;To live in the Borderlands means knowing that the india in you, betrayed for 500 years,is no longer speaking to

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Nussbaum concludes her article by pointing to (what she views as the ambiguous) relationship between objectification as wage labor, commodity feitishism, etc. and the objectification of women under patriarchal domination. The attached chapter by Rosemary Hennessy deals with this connection in an interesting way. Unfortunately no longer free access through the library..... 

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Nussbaum concludes her article by pointing to (what she views as the ambiguous) relationship between objectification as wage labor, commodity feitishism, etc. and the objectification of women under patriarchal domination. The attached chapter by Rosemary Hennessy deals with this connection in an interesting way. Unfortunately no longer free access through the library..... 

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Queer Visibility In Commodity Culture | 4 | v2 | Profit and Pleasure |

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Visibility in commodity culture is in this sense a limited victory for gays who are welcome to be visible as consumer subjects but not as social subjects. The

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Our discussion today reached a level of depth that I am so excited about. The slight shift in our discussion to define the subject-object experience as it relates to the self was incredibly fascinating to me - and something I have been thinking about for a while. At this point, the relationship between subject, object, and the self should very well be included as one of the examples of conceptual application. To dig into this idea a bit more, here is a link to an article published in Frontiers that delineates between the existence of "me" and "I" within consciousness. Very, very fascinating if you have time to breeze through it and see what sticks out!

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Cognition and Philosophy Lab, Department of Philosophy, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

James (1890) distinguished two understandings of the self, the self as "Me" and the self as "I". This distinction has recently regained popularity in cognitive science, especially in the context of experimental studies on the underpinnings of the phenomenal self. The goal of this paper is to take a step back from cognitive science and attempt to precisely distinguish between "Me" and "I" in the context of consciousness. This distinction was originally based on the idea that the former ("Me") corresponds to the self as an object of experience (self as object), while the latter ("I") reflects the self as a subject of experience (self as subject). I will argue that in most of the cases (arguably all) this distinction maps onto the distinction between the phenomenal self (reflecting self-related content of consciousness) and the metaphysical self (representing the problem of subjectivity of all conscious experience), and as such these two issues should be investigated separately using fundamentally different methodologies. Moreover, by referring to Metzinger's (2018) theory of phenomenal self-models, I will argue that what is usually investigated as the phenomenal-"I" [following understanding of self-as-subject introduced by Wittgenstein (1958)] can be interpreted as object, rather than subject of experience, and as such can be understood as an element of the hierarchical structure of the phenomenal self-model. This understanding relates to recent predictive coding and free energy theories of the self and bodily self discussed in cognitive neuroscience and philosophy.

Introduction

Almost 130 years ago, James (1890) introduced the distinction between "Me" and "I" (see Table 1 for illustrative quotes) to the debate about the self. The former term refers to understanding of the self as an object of experience, while the latter to the self as a subject of experience. This distinction, in different forms, has recently regained popularity in cognitive science (e.g., Christoff et al., 2011; Liang, 2014; Sui and Gu, 2017; Truong and Todd, 2017) and provides a useful tool for clarifying what one means when one speaks about the self. However, its exact meaning varies in cognitive science, especially in regard to what one understands as the self as subject, or "I."

TABLE 1. Quotes from James (1890) illustrating the distinction between self-as-object ("Me") and self-as-subject ("I") and a quote from Wittgenstein (1958) illustrating his distinction between the use of "I" as object and as subject.

The goal of this paper is to take a step back from cognitive science and take a closer look at the conceptual distinction between "Me" and "I" in the context of consciousness. I will suggest, following James (1890) and in opposition to the tradition started by Wittgenstein (1958), that in this context "Me" (i.e., the self as object) reflects the phenomenology of selfhood, and corresponds to what is also known as sense of self, self-consciousness, or phenomenal selfhood (e.g., Blanke and Metzinger, 2009; Blanke, 2012; Dainton, 2016). On the other hand, the ultimate meaning of "I" (i.e., the self as subject) is rooted in metaphysics of subjectivity, and refers to the question: why is all conscious experience subjective and who/what is the subject of conscious experience? I will argue that these two theoretical problems, i.e., phenomenology of selfhood and metaphysics of subjectivity, are in principle independent issues and should not be confused. However, cognitive science usually follows the Wittgensteinian tradition by understanding the self-as-subject, or "I," as a phenomenological, rather than metaphysical problem [Figure 1 illustrates the difference between James (1890) and Wittgenstein's (1958) approach to the self]. By following Metzinger's (2003, 2010) framework of phenomenal self-models, and in agreement with a reductionist approach to the phenomenal "I" ( Prinz, 2012), I will argue that what is typically investigated in cognitive science as the phenomenal "I" [or the Wittgenstein's (1958) self-as-subject] can be understood as just a higher-order component of the self-model reflecting the phenomenal "Me." Table 2 presents some of crucial claims of the theory of self-models, together with concise references to other theories of the self-as-object discussed in this paper.

FIGURE 1. An illustration of James (1890) and Wittgenstein's (1958) distinctions between self-as-object ("Me") and self-as-subject ("I"). In the original formulation, James' (1890) "Me" includes also physical objects and people (material and social "Me") - they were not included in the picture, because they are not directly related to consciousness.

TABLE 2. Examples of theories of the self-as-object ("Me") in the context of consciousness, as theories of the phenomenal self, with representative quotes illustrating each position.

"Me" As An Object Of Experience: Phenomenology Of Self-Consciousness

The words ME, then, and SELF, so far as they arouse feeling and connote emotional worth, are OBJECTIVE designations, meaning ALL THE THINGS which have the power to produce in a stream of consciousness excitement of a certain particular sort ( James, 1890, p. 319, emphasis in original).

James (1890) chose the word "Me" to refer to self-as-object. What does it mean? In James' (1890) view, it reflects "all the things" which have the power to produce "excitement of a certain particular sort." This certain kind of excitement is nothing more than some form of experiential quality of me-ness, mine-ness, or similar - understood in a folk-theoretical way (this is an important point, because these terms have recently acquired technical meanings in philosophy, e.g., Zahavi, 2014; Guillot, 2017). What are "all the things"? The classic formulation suggests that James (1890) meant physical objects and cultural artifacts (material self), human beings (social self), and mental processes and content (spiritual self). These are all valid categories of self-as-object, however, for the purpose of this paper I will limit the scope of further discussion only to "objects" which are relevant when speaking about consciousness. Therefore, rather than speaking about, for example, my car or my body, I will discuss only their conscious representations. This limits the scope of self-as-object to one category of "things" - conscious mental content.

Let us now reformulate James' (1890) idea in more contemporary terms and define "Me" as the totality of all content of consciousness that is experienced as self-related. Content of consciousness is meant here in a similar way to Chalmers (1996), who begins " The conscious mind" by providing a list of different kinds of conscious content. He delivers an extensive (without claiming that exhaustive) collection of types of experiences, which includes the following: visual; auditory; tactile; olfactory; experiences of hot and cold; pain; taste; other bodily experiences coming from proprioception, vestibular sense, and interoception (e.g., headache, hunger, orgasm); mental imagery; conscious thought; emotions. Chalmers (1996) also includes several other, which, however, reflect states of consciousness and not necessarily content per se, such as dreams, arousal, fatigue, intoxication, and altered states of consciousness induced by psychoactive substances. What is common to all of the types of experience from the first list (conscious contents) is the fact that they are all, speaking in James' (1890) terms, "objects" in a stream of consciousness: "all these things are objects, properly so called, to the subject that does the thinking" (p. 325).

The self understood as "Me" can be understood as a subset of a set of all these possible experiences. This subset is characterized by self-relatedness (Figure 2). It can be illustrated with sensory experiences. For example, in the visual domain, I experience an image of my face as different from another person's face. Hence, while the image of my face belongs to "Me," the image of someone else does not (although it can be experimentally manipulated, Tsakiris, 2008; Payne et al., 2017; Woźniak et al., 2018). The same can be said about my voice and sounds caused by me (as opposed to voices of other people), and about my smell. We also experience self-touch as different from touching or being touched by a different person ( Weiskrantz et al., 1971; Blakemore et al., 1998; Schutz-Bosbach et al., 2009). There is even evidence that we process our possessions differently ( Kim and Johnson, 2014; Constable et al., 2018). This was anticipated by James' (1890) notion of the material "Me," and is typically regarded as reflecting one's extended self ( Kim and Johnson, 2014). In all of these cases, we can divide sensory experiences into the ones which do relate to the self and the ones which do not. The same can be said about the contents of thoughts and feelings, which can be either about "Me" or about something/someone else.

FIGURE 2. A simplified representation of a structure of phenomenal content including the metaphysical "I," the phenomenal "Me," and the phenomenal "I," which can be understood (see in text) as a higher-level element of the phenomenal "Me." Each pair of nodes connected with a yellow line represents one type of content of consciousness, with indigo nodes corresponding to self-related content, and black nodes corresponding to non-self-related content. In some cases (e.g., pain, emotions, interoceptive, and proprioceptive sensations), the black nodes are lighter and drawn with a dashed line (the same applies to links), to indicate that in normal circumstances one does not experiences these sensations as representing another person (although it is possible in thought experiments and pathologies). Multisensory/multimodal interactions have been omitted for the sake of clarity. All of the nodes compose the set of conscious thoughts, which can be formulated as "I experience X." In normal circumstances, one does not deny ownership over these thoughts, however, in thought experiments, and in some cases of psychosis, one may experience that even such thoughts cease to feel as one's own. This situation is represented by the shape with a dashed outline. Moreover, in special cases one can form meta-delusions, i.e., delusions about delusions - thoughts that my thoughts about other thoughts are not my thoughts (see text for description).

Characterizing self-as-object as a subset of conscious experiences specifies the building blocks of "Me" (which are contents of consciousness) and provides a guiding principle for distinguishing between self and non-self (self-relatedness). However, it is important to note two things. First, the distinction between self and non-self is often a matter of scale rather than a binary classification, and therefore self-relatedness may be better conceptualized as the strength of the relation with the self. It can be illustrated with an example of the "Inclusion of Other in Self" scale ( Aron et al., 1992). This scale asks to estimate to what extent another person feels related to one's self, by choosing among a series of pairs of more-to-less overlapping circles representing the self and another person (e.g., a partner). The degree of overlap between the chosen pair of circles represents the degree of self-relatedness. Treating self-relatedness as a matter of scale adds an additional level of complexity to the analysis, and results in speaking about the extent to which a given content of consciousness represents self, rather than whether it simply does it or not. This does not, however, change the main point of the argument that we can classify all conscious contents according to whether (or to what extent, in that case) they are self-related. For the sake of clarity, I will continue to speak using the language of binary classification, but it should be kept in mind that it is an arbitrary simplification. The second point is that this approach to "Me" allows one to flexibly discuss subcategories of the self by imposing additional constraints on the type of conscious content that is taken into account, as well as the nature of self-relatedness (e.g., whether it is ownership of, agency over, authorship, etc.). For example, by limiting ourselves to discussing conscious content representing one's body one can speak about the bodily self, and by imposing limits to conscious experience of one's possessions one can speak about one's extended self.

Keeping these reservations in mind two objections can be raised to the approach to "Me" introduced here. The first one is as follows:

(1) Speaking about the self/other distinction does not make sense in regard to experiences which are always "mine," such as prioprioception or interoception. This special status may suggest that these modalities underpin the self as "I," i.e., the subject of experience.

This idea is present in theoretical proposals postulating that subjectivity emerges based on (representations of) sensorimotor ( Gallagher, 2000; Christoff et al., 2011; Blanke et al., 2015) or interoceptive signals ( Damasio, 1999; Craig, 2010; Seth et al., 2011; Park and Tallon-Baudry, 2014; Salomon, 2017). There are two answers to this objection. First, the fact that this kind of experience (this kind of content of consciousness) is always felt as "my" experience simply means that all proprioceptive, interoceptive, pain experiences, etc., are as a matter of fact parts of "Me." They are self-related contents of consciousness and hence naturally qualify as self-as-object. Furthermore, there is no principled reason why the fact that we normally do not experience them as belonging to someone else should transform them from objects of experience (content) into a subject of experience. Their special status may cause these experiences to be perceived as more central aspects of the self than experiences in other modalities, but there is no reason to think that it should change them from something that we experience into the self as an experiencer. Second, even the special status of these sensations can be called into question. It is possible to imagine a situation in which one experiences these kinds of sensations from an organ or a body which does not belong to her or him. We can imagine that with enough training one will learn to distinguish between proprioceptive signals coming from one's body and those coming from another person's (or artificial) body. If this is possible, then one may develop a phenomenal distinction between "my" versus "other's" proprioceptive and interoceptive experiences (for example), and in this case the same rules of classification into phenomenal "Me" and phenomenal "not-Me" will apply as to other sensory modalities. This scenario is not realistic at the current point of technological development, but there are clinical examples which indirectly suggest that it may be possible. For example, people who underwent transplantation of an organ sometimes experience rejection of a transplant. Importantly, patients whose organisms reject an organ also more often experience psychological rejection of that transplant ( Látos et al., 2016). Moreover, there are rare cases in which patients following a successful surgery report that they perceive transplanted organs as foreign objects in themselves ( Goetzmann et al., 2009). In this case, affected people report experiencing a form of disownership of the implanted organ, suggesting that they may experience interoceptive signals coming from that transplant as having a phenomenal quality of being "not-mine," leading to similar phenomenal quality as the one postulated in the before-mentioned thought experiment. Another example of a situation in which self-relatedness of interoception may be disrupted may be found in conjoint twins. In some variants of this developmental disorder (e.g., parapagus, dicephalus, thoracopagus) brains of two separate twins share some of the internal organs (and limbs), while others are duplicated and possessed by each twin individually ( Spencer, 2000; Kaufman, 2004). This provides an inverted situation to the one described in our hypothetical scenario - rather than two pieces of the same organ being "wired" to one person, the same organ (e.g., a heart, liver, stomach) is shared by two individuals. As such it may be simultaneously under control of two autonomous nervous systems. This situation raises challenging questions for theories which postulate that the root of self-as-subject lies in interoception. For example, if conjoint twins share the majority of internal organs, but possess mostly independent nervous systems, like dicephalus conjoint twins, then does it mean that they share the neural subjective frame ( Park and Tallon-Baudry, 2014)? If the answer is yes, then does it mean that they share it numerically (both twins have one and the same subjective frame), or only qualitatively (their subjective frames are similar to the point of being identical, but they are distinct frames)? However, if interoception is just a part of "Me" then the answer becomes simple - the experiences can be only qualitatively identical, because they are experienced by two independent subjects.

All of these examples challenge the assumption that sensori-motor and interoceptive experiences are necessarily self-related and, as a consequence, that they can form the basis of self-as-subject. For this reason, it seems that signals coming from these modalities are more appropriate to underlie the phenomenal "Me," for example in a form of background self-experience, or "phenomenal background" ( Dainton, 2008, 2016), rather than the phenomenal "I."

The second possible objection to the view of self-as-object described in this section is the following one:

(2) My thoughts and feelings may have different objects, but they are always my thoughts and feelings. Therefore, their object may be either "me" or "other," but their subject is always "I." As a consequence, even though my thoughts and feelings constitute contents of my consciousness, they underlie the phenomenal "I" and not the phenomenal "Me."

It seems to be conceptually misguided to speak about one's thoughts and feelings as belonging to someone else. This intuition motivated Wittgenstein (1958) to write: "there is no question of recognizing a person when I say I have toothache. To ask 'are you sure it is you who have pains?' "would be nonsensical" ( Wittgenstein, 1958). In the Blue Book, he introduced the distinction between the use of "I" as object and as subject (see Table 1 for a full relevant quote) and suggested that while we can be wrong about the former, making a mistake about the latter is not possible. This idea was further developed by Shoemaker (1968) who introduced an arguably conceptual truth that we are immune to error through misidentification relative to the first-person pronoun, or IEM in short. For example, when I say "I see a photo of my face in front of me" I may be mistaken about the fact that it is my face (because, e.g., it is a photo of my identical twin), but I cannot be mistaken that it is me who is looking at it. One way to read IEM is that it postulates that I can be mistaken about self-as-object, but I cannot be mistaken about self-as-subject. If this is correct then there is a radical distinction between these two types of self that provides a strong argument to individuate them. From that point, one may argue that IEM provides a decisive argument to distinguish between phenomenal "I" (self-as-subject) and phenomenal "Me" (self-as-object).

Before endorsing this conclusion, let us take a small step back. It is important to note that in the famous passage from the Blue Book Wittgenstein (1958) did not write about two distinct types of self. Instead, he wrote about two ways of using the word "I" (or "my"). As such, he was more concerned with issues in philosophy of language than philosophy of mind. Therefore, a natural question arises - to what extent does this linguistic distinction map onto a substantial distinction between two different entities (types of self)? On the face of it, it seems that there is an important difference between these two uses of self-referential words, which can be mapped onto the experience of being a self-as-subject and the experience of being a self-as-object (or, for example, the distinction between bodily ownership and thought authorship, as suggested by Liang, 2014). However, I will argue that there are reasons to believe that the phenomenal "I," i.e., the experience of being a self-as-subject may be better conceptualized as a higher-order phenomenal "Me" - a higher-level self-as-object.

Psychiatric practice provides cases of people, typically suffering from schizophrenia, who describe experiences of dispossession of thoughts, known as delusions of thought insertion ( Young, 2008; Bortolotti and Broome, 2009; Martin and Pacherie, 2013). According to the standard account, the phenomenon of thought insertion does not represent a disruption of sense of ownership over one's thoughts, but only loss of sense of agency over them. However, the standard account has been criticized in recent years by theorists arguing that thought insertion indeed represents loss of sense of ownership ( Metzinger, 2003; Billon, 2013; Guillot, 2017; López-Silva, 2017). One of the main arguments against the standard view is that it runs into serious problems when attempting to explain obsessive intrusive thoughts in clinical population and spontaneous thoughts in healthy people. In both cases, subjects report lack of agency over thoughts, although they never claim lack of ownership over them, i.e., that these are not their thoughts. However, if the standard account is correct, obsessive thoughts should be experienced as belonging to someone else. The fact that they are not suggests that something else must be disrupted in delusions of thought insertion, i.e., sense of ownership over them. If one can lose sense of ownership over one's thoughts then it has important implications, because then one becomes capable of experiencing one's thoughts "as someone else's," or at least "as not-mine." However, when I experience my thoughts as not-mine I do it because I've taken a stance towards my thoughts, which treats them as an object of deliberation. In other words, I must have "objectified" them to experience that they have a quality of "feeling as if they are not mine." Consequently, if I experience them as objects of experience, then they cannot form part of my self as subject of experience, because these two categories are mutually exclusive. Therefore, what seemed to constitute a phenomenal "I" turns out to be a part of thephenomenal "Me."

If my thoughts do not constitute the "I" then how do they fit into the structure of "Me"? Previously, I asserted that thoughts with self-related content constitute "Me," while thoughts with non-self related content do not. However, just now I argued in favor of the claim that all thoughts (including the ones with non-self-related content) that are experienced as "mine" belong to "Me." How can one resolve this contradiction?

A way to address this reservation can be found in Metzinger's (2003; 2010) self-model theory. Metzinger (2003, 2010) argues that the experience of the self can be understood as underpinned by representational self-models. These self-models, however, are embedded in the hierarchical representational structure, as illustrated by an account of ego dissolution by Letheby and Gerrans (2017):

Savage suggests that on LSD "[changes] in body ego feeling usually precede changes in mental ego feeling and sometimes are the only changes" (1955, 11), (...) This common temporal sequence, from blurring of body boundaries and loss of sense of ownership for body parts through to later loss of sense of ownership for thoughts, speaks further to the hierarchical architecture of the self-model. ( Letheby and Gerrans, 2017, p. 8)

If self-models underlying the experience of self-as-object ("Me") are hierarchical, then the apparent contradiction may be easily explained by the fact that when speaking about the content of thoughts and the thoughts themselves we are addressing self-models at two distinct levels. At the lower level we can distinguish between thoughts with self-related content and other-related content, while on the higher level we can distinguish between thoughts that feel "mine" as opposed to thoughts that are not experienced as "mine." As a result, this thinking phenomenal "I" experienced in feeling of ownership over one's thoughts may be conceived as just a higher-order level of Jamesian "Me." As such, one may claim that there is no such thing as a phenomenal "I," just multilevel phenomenal "Me." However, an objection can be raised here. One may claim that even though a person with schizophrenic delusions experiences her thoughts as someone else's (a demon's or some malicious puppet master's), she can still claim that:

Yes, "I" experience my thoughts as not mine, but as demon's." My thoughts feel as "not-mine," however, it's still me (or: "I") who thinks of them as "not-mine."

As such, one escapes "objectification" of "I" into "Me" by postulating a higher-level phenomenal-"I." However, let us keep in mind that the thought written above constitutes a valid thought by itself. As such, this thought is vulnerable to the theoretical possibility that it turns into a delusion itself, once a psychotic person forms a meta-delusion (delusion about delusion). In this case, one may begin to experience that: "I" (I ₁) experience that the "fake I" (I ₂), who is a nasty pink demon, experiences my thoughts as not mine but as someone else's (e.g., as nasty green demon's). In this case, I may claim that the real phenomenal "I" is I ₁, since it is at the top of the hierarchy. However, one may repeat the operation of forming meta-delusions ad infinitum (as may happen in psychosis or drug-induced psychedelic states) effectively transforming each phenomenal "I" into another "fake-I" (and consequently making it a part of "Me").

The possibility of meta-delusions illustrates that the phenomenal "I" understood as subjective thoughts is permanently vulnerable to the threat of losing the apparent subjective character and becoming an object of experience. As such it seems to be a poor choice for the locus of subjectivity, since it needs to be constantly "on the run" from becoming treated as an object of experience, not only in people with psychosis, but also in all psychologically healthy individuals if they decide to reflect on their thoughts. Therefore, it seems more likely that the thoughts themselves cannot constitute the subject of experience. However, even in case of meta-delusions there seems to be a stable deeper-level subjectivity, let us call it the deep "I," which is preserved, at least until one loses consciousness. After all, a person who experiences meta-delusions would be constantly (painfully) aware of the process, and often would even report it afterwards. This deep "I" cannot be a special form of content in the stream of consciousness, because otherwise it would be vulnerable to becoming a part of "Me." Therefore, it must be something different.

There seem to be two places where one can look for this deep "I": in the domain of phenomenology or metaphysics. The first approach has been taken by ( Zahavi and Kriegel, 2016) who argue that "all conscious states' phenomenal character involves for-me-ness as an experiential constituent." It means that even if we rule out everything else (e.g., bodily experiences, conscious thoughts), we are still left with some form of irreducible phenomenal self-experience. This for-me-ness is not a specific content of consciousness, but rather "refers to the distinct manner, or how, of experiencing" ( Zahavi, 2014).

This approach, however, may seem inflationary and not satisfying (e.g., Dainton, 2016). One reason for this is that it introduces an additional phenomenal dimension, which may lead to uncomfortable consequences. For example, a question arises whether for-me-ness can ever be lost or replaced with the " how of experiencing" of another person. For example, can I experience my sister's for-me-ness in my stream of consciousness? If yes, then how is for-me-ness different from any other content of consciousness? And if the answer is no, then how is it possible to distil the phenomenology of for-me-ness from the metaphysical fact that a given stream of consciousness is always experienced by this and not other subject?

An alternative approach to the problem of the deep "I" is to reject that the subject of experience, the "I," is present in phenomenology (like Hume, 1739/2000; Prinz, 2012; Dainton, 2016), and look for it somewhere else, in the domain of metaphysics. Although James (1890) did not explicitly formulate the distinction between "Me" and "I" as the distinction between the phenomenal and the metaphysical self, he hinted at it at several points, for example when he concluded the Chapter on the self with the following fragment: "(...) a postulate, an assertion that there must be a knower correlative to all this known; and the problem who that knower is would have become a metaphysical problem" ( James, 1890, p. 401).

"I" As A Subject Of Experience: Metaphysics Of Subjectivity

Thoughts which we actually know to exist do not fly about loose, but seem each to belong to some one thinker and not to another ( James, 1890, pp. 330-331).

Let us assume that phenomenal consciousness exists in nature, and that it is a part of the reality we live in. The problem of "I" emerges once we realize that one of the fundamental characteristics of phenomenal consciousness is that it is always subjective, that there always seems to be some subject of experience. It seems mistaken to conceive of consciousness which do "fly about loose," devoid of subjective character, devoid of being someone's or something's consciousness. Moreover, it seems that subjectivity may be one of the fundamental inherent properties of conscious experience (similar notions can be found in: Berkeley, 1713/2012; Strawson, 2003; Searle, 2005; Dainton, 2016). It seems highly unlikely, if not self-contradictory, that there exists something like an objective conscious experience of "what it is like to be a bat" ( Nagel, 1974), which is not subjective in any way. This leads to the metaphysical problem of the self: why is all conscious experience subjective, and what or who is the subject of this experience? Let us call it the problem of the metaphysical "I," as contrasted with the problem of the phenomenal "I" (i.e., is there a distinctive experience of being a self as a subject of experience, and if so, then what is this experience?), which we discussed so far.

The existence of the metaphysical "I" does not entail the existence of the phenomenal self. It is possible to imagine a creature that possesses a metaphysical "I," but does not possess any sense of self. In such a case, the creature would possess consciousness, although it would not experience anything as "me," nor entertain any thoughts/feelings, etc., as "I." In other words, it is a possibility that one may not experience self-related content of consciousness, while being a sentient being. One example of such situation may be the experience of a dreamless sleep, which "is characterized by a dissolution of subject-object duality, or (...) by a breakdown of even the most basic form of the self-other distinction" ( Windt, 2015). This is a situation which can be regarded as an instance of the state of minimal phenomenal experience - the simplest form of conscious experience possible ( Windt, 2015; Metzinger, 2018), in which there is no place for even the most rudimentary form of "Me." Another example may be the phenomenology of systems with grid-like architectures which, according to the integrated information theory (IIT, Tononi et al., 2016), possess conscious experience. If IIT is correct, then these systems experience some form of conscious states, which most likely lack any phenomenal distinction between "Me" and "not-Me." However, because they may possess a stream of conscious experience, and conscious experience is necessarily subjective, there remains a valid question: who or what is the subject of that experience?

The question of what exactly is the metaphysical subject of experience can have different answers. There has been a long history of theories of the self ( Barresi and Martin, 2011) and some of them directly address this issue. Platonic or Cartesian notions of the soul are good examples of an approach providing one answer to this question: conscious experience is subjective, because there exists a non-material being (self, soul) which is the subject of this experience (see Table 3). Other solutions tend to either define the self in less metaphysically expensive ways ( Johnston, 1987; Strawson, 2000; Dainton, 2008), define it as a formal feature of consciousness ( Searle, 2005), or deny the need to postulate its existence ( Metzinger, 2003). What is crucial here, however, is that the problem of the metaphysical self is a different issue and requires a different methodology, than the problem of the phenomenal self.

TABLE 3. Examples of theories of the self-as-subject ("I") in the context of consciousness, as theories of the metaphysical self, with representative quotes illustrating each position.

What sort of methodology, then, is appropriate for investigating the metaphysical self? It seems that the most relevant methods come from the toolbox of metaphysics. This toolbox includes classical philosophical methods such as thought experiments and logical analysis. However, methodology of metaphysics is an area of open discussion, and at present there are no signs of general consensus. One of the most debated issues in this field, which is especially relevant here, is to what extent the methodology of metaphysics is continuous with the methodology of natural sciences (see Tahko, 2015, Chapter 9 for an overview). The positions span the spectrum between the claim that science and metaphysics are fully autonomous on the one side and the claim that metaphysics can be fully naturalized on the other. Discussing this issue goes way beyond the scope of this paper. However, if these two areas are at least to some extent related (i.e., not fully autonomous), then one may argue that scientific methods can be at least of some relevance in metaphysics and consequently for investigations of the metaphysical "I."

One example in which empirical results seem to be able to influence theoretical investigations of the metaphysical self is through imposing constraints on philosophical theories. For example, because the metaphysical self is inherently related to consciousness, we should expect that different theories of consciousness should place different constraints on what a metaphysical self can be. Then, if one theory of consciousness acquires stronger empirical support than the others, we can also treat this as evidence for the constraints on the self that this theory implies.

Let us look at an example of IIT to illustrate this point. According to IIT ( Oizumi et al., 2014; Tononi et al., 2016) the content of conscious experience is defined by the so-called informational "complex" which is characterized by maximally integrated information (which can be measured by calculating the value of Φ max). This complex then defines the stream of conscious experience. However, what happens if there is more than one such complex in one person? In this case, as Tononi et al. (2016) wrote:

According to IIT, two or more non-overlapping complexes may coexist as discrete physical substrates of consciousness (PSCs) within a single brain, each with its own definite borders and value of Φ max. The complex that specifies a person's day to day stream of consciousness should have the highest value of Φ max - that is, it should be the "major" complex. In some conditions, for example, after a split-brain operation, the major complex may split. In such instances, one consciousness, supported by a complex in the dominant hemisphere and with privileged access to Broca's area, would be able to speak about the experience, but would remain unaware of the presence of another consciousness, supported by a complex in the other hemisphere, which can be revealed by carefully designed experiments. ( Tononi et al., 2016, p. 455)

This fragment suggests that in IIT the metaphysical "I" can be understood as tied to a complex of maximally integrated information. In this case, a split-brain patient would possess two metaphysical selves, because as a consequence of an operation her or his brain hosts two such complexes. On the face of it, it seems to be a plausible situation ( cf. Bayne, 2010). However, in the sentence which immediately follows, Tononi et al. (2016) suggest that:

An intriguing possibility is that splitting of the PSC may also occur in healthy people during long-lasting dual-task conditions - for example, when driving in an auto-pilot like manner on a familiar road while listening to an engaging conversation ( Tononi et al., 2016, p. 455)

The implications of this possibility are much more severe, because it postulates that in a matter of minutes or seconds a complex can dynamically divide into several complexes, and individual complexes can merge into one major complex. How do the complexes understood in this way then relate to the metaphysical "I"? Unfortunately, IIT is silent about this issue, but there seem to be at least two responses to this question. First, one may argue that the self does not need to be limited to one complex, but that the same metaphysical "I" can be present in all of the simultaneous streams of consciousness (complexes). However, this solution is at odds with both common-sense intuition and IIT itself. It would presuppose not only an extremely disunified view of consciousness, but even lead to self-contradictory consequences. The metaphysical "I" can be thought of as the metaphysical fact that any given stream of consciousness is subjectively experienced by some "self" (regardless of what that self might be). However, in a disunified view of an organism's consciousness this metaphysical "I" would at the same time a) be the subject of experience of all of the complexes within this organism, and b) be the subject of experience of only one of these complexes while being blind to the others (as claimed by IIT: two complexes are not "co-conscious" with each other). It presents a contradiction and strongly suggests that the metaphysical "I" cannot be underpinned by multiple independent complexes. It leaves us with the second option, which is to bite the bullet and accept that IIT implies that the metaphysical "I" persists either as long as a given complex, or for an even shorter period of time, for example for just up to a few seconds, as suggested by Strawson (2000, 2010). It means that if IIT (and the analysis outlined above) is correct then the metaphysical "I" turns out to be radically different from our intuitive understanding of subject-of-experience as persisting continuously life-long stream of consciousness. However, if empirical evidence in support of the current version of IIT becomes strong enough, it may suggest that our common-sense intuitions about self-as-subject may be mistaken. On the other hand, different theories of phenomenal consciousness (and even different versions of IIT) may imply different constraints on the metaphysical "I," and the extent to which they are supported by empirical evidence may suggest a way to say something about what the subject of conscious experience is.

Overall, assuming that metaphysics is not fully independent from science, the relevant methodology for investigating the metaphysical "I" is a combination of toolboxes of metaphysics and empirical science. This contrasts with the phenomenal "Me," where the relevant toolkit includes methods from phenomenology and science. The second point, which has been illustrated with an example of IIT, is that it is important to explicitly spell out the implications of different theories of consciousness in regard to what is the subject of conscious experience, as it may provide the best way forward towards solving this issue.

Understanding Predictive Coding Theories Of The Self

Recently, there has been a huge number of attempts to explain the self through the framework of predictive coding (PC) and the free energy principle (FEP). In this final section of the paper, I will use PC theories of the self as a working example demonstrating practical consequences of implementing the Jamesian distinction between "Me" and "I." I will suggest that PC theories of the self target different dimensions of self-as-object, understood as a hierarchical structure of self-models ( Metzinger, 2003, 2010), and as such provide a valuable framework to understand the self. However, I will also explain why PC and the FEP do not allow us to say much about self-as-subject (the metaphysical "I").

According to PC, the brain can be understood as an inference machine which hosts and continuously updates a probabilistic model of the world, which it uses to infer hidden causes behind the sensory data (for a more detailed introduction see: Friston et al., 2006; Friston, 2009, 2010; Friston and Kiebel, 2009; Hohwy, 2013; Clark, 2016). It accomplishes this by continuously issuing predictions and comparing them with sensory data, with the discrepancy between predictions and data being propagated further up the hierarchy as prediction errors. As such, PC postulates that the brain can be seen as a hierarchical structure of generative models (which are responsible for issuing predictions). Prediction errors which arise at lower levels serve as data to be compared with predictions at the higher levels. This view of the mind inverts the classical feedforward view in which perception is a predominantly bottom-up process. In PC, instead, perception is mostly driven by top-down predictions, with bottom-up prediction errors serving the function of feedback helping to choose model with the most explanatory power. Moreover, in an extension of PC, which is known as active inference, action is also understood as a way of maximizing the fit of one's internal models to reality. The main idea behind active inference is that rather than changing the model in order to better fit the data, one can act on the world and change it according to predictions issued by the currently dominating model. As a consequence, the whole perception-action cycle can be understood as driven by one overarching goal, i.e., long-term minimization of prediction errors.

The FEP is a further generalization of PC. It postulates that all living organisms operate under the principle to minimize the so-called "variational free energy," which is an information theoretical measure which roughly can be understood as a measure of uncertainty ( Friston et al., 2006; Friston, 2009). One of the main claims of this theory is that organisms which act according to FEP (i.e., they act in a way to minimize free energy in the long term) will, in effect, implicitly approximate Bayesian inference. It means that they will combine their prior knowledge (represented by their model of the world) with the incoming sensory input in a mathematically optimal way.

Both PC and the FEP have recently gained huge popularity and motivated a number of theories attempting to explain various aspects of cognition within this framework. It includes numerous attempts to understand different facets of the self, such as sense of bodily ownership ( Apps and Tsakiris, 2014), sense of self in agency and perception ( Hohwy, 2007), the influence of interoception on self-consciousness ( Seth et al., 2011; Seth, 2013), social aspects of the self ( Moutoussis et al., 2014; Friston and Frith, 2015), the relationship with minimal phenomenal selfhood ( Limanowski and Blankenburg, 2013), and even psychodynamical interpretations of the self ( Carhart-Harris and Friston, 2010; Fotopoulou, 2012). The most comprehensive treatment of the self from the PC perspective ( Hohwy and Michael, 2017) also exemplifies most of the crucial points made by other PC theories of the self. At the beginning of their paper Hohwy and Michael (2017) describe the self in the following words:

We use a general computational framework for brain function to develop a theory of the self. The theory is that the self is an inferred model of endogenous, deeply hidden causes of behavior. (...) we discuss why such a set of hidden endogenous causes should qualify as a self. ( Hohwy and Michael, 2017, p. 363)

The self, as seen from this perspective, is essentially a hierarchical model of endogenous hidden causes of sensory input. Or, in more classical terms, it can be said that it is a hierarchical representational structure ( cf. Clark, 2016; Williams, 2017) which allows one to distinguish between endogenous causes (what is caused by me) and exogenous causes (what is caused by something else). This distinction can be illustrated with an example of a comparison between seeing a movement of my virtual hand and of a virtual hand of someone else. If adequately prepared, in both cases the image of a hand and its movement may be identical. However, in one case I can realize that the movement of the hand is congruent with my intentions (manifested through my actions performed using a computer controller) and, as a consequence, infer that the cause of the hand's movement is me. On the other hand, I may fail to notice any congruence between my intentions and the movement and hence infer that the hidden cause behind the movement I observe is some other person. According to Hohwy and Michael (2017), the self is just a set of such hidden endogenous causes. Although not necessarily in full agreement with this picture in regard to the details, all other PC theories of the self listed above also speak about the self as underpinned by hierarchy of generative models, which are preoccupied with conducting probabilistic inference aimed to infer hidden causes of observed data patterns. This inference is then postulated to underlie specific types of conscious self-experience, i.e., different facets of the sense of self.

As such, one common theme among all PC theories of the self is the following: aspects of conscious experience of the self are underpinned by a representational structure in the form of hierarchical generative models. In its core, it is the same idea as the one introduced earlier by Metzinger (2003, 2010), i.e., that our phenomenal experience of the self is underpinned by a representational structure of unconscious self-models (see also: Crane, 2003; Chalmers, 2004, for a discussion about the relationship between representational and conscious content). Once an unconscious self-model enters conscious awareness, it generates a corresponding self-related conscious content (see: Metzinger, 2006, 2014, for an explicit distinction between the levels of representations and conscious content in regard to the bodily self). The same mechanism is at work in PC theories - the dynamic process of model selection leads to suppression of some models but allows other models to enter awareness in the form of conscious content. This mechanism allows PC to explain self-related content of consciousness, which is essentially nothing else than the James' (1890) self-as-object of experience. This is how PC and the FEP help to understand the phenomenal "Me" - by describing the structure and dynamics of the underlying representational architecture.

To what extent PC and FEP can provide us with any help when confronted with the task to explain the metaphysical "I"? Here, I will argue that in contrast to the phenomenal "Me," the issues pertaining to the metaphysical "I" are outside of its reach. The reason for this is a consequence of the fact that PC is in principle agnostic in regard to the issue of what brings representational content into the scope of conscious experience. In general, this can be regarded as an advantage, because this way PC accounts of self-experience can avoid the burden of being hostage to any specific theory of consciousness, and stay in principle compatible with most of them (e.g., see Hohwy, 2013, Chapter 10 for an attempt to combine PC with ideas from Global Neuronal Workspace theory: Dehaene and Changeux, 2011; Dehaene, 2014). However, it also makes PC fundamentally underspecified when treated as a theory which is used to explain issues related to consciousness. While, as suggested before, PC is a valuable framework to describe the representational structure underlying conscious content, it runs into problems when used to explain why certain content is conscious in the first place. One way in which PC and FEP can attempt to retain relevance is by aiming to explain access consciousness ( Block, 1995) - a functional mechanism which allows that "some of the attended information eventually enters our awareness and becomes reportable to others" ( Dehaene, 2014). However, the problem of the metaphysical "I" becomes a relevant issue only when approached in the context of phenomenal consciousness - the type of consciousness which is loaded with the burden of the so-called "hard problem" ( Chalmers, 1996).

This is where PS and FEP encounter a dead end, as the problem enters the area which belongs more to metaphysics than empirical science (at least in the light of the current state of affairs). In order to provide an account of the metaphysical self, one needs to begin with at least some form of a theory of phenomenal consciousness and its place in physical reality. At present FEP (and PC) does not provide such a theory. Recently, Friston (2018) suggested that FEP can be used to understand consciousness, although the fact that he discusses consciousness in functionalist terms (consciousness is related to counterfactual inference) suggests that his proposal aims to explain access consciousness, making it irrelevant for the problem of metaphysical "I."

To summarize, the fact that PC and the FEP are not theories of phenomenal consciousness, and seem not to impose any constraints on these theories, has important consequences for what type of self they can explain. As I argued, they have the potential to substantially contribute to the issue of different levels of the phenomenal "Me" (self-as-object) by describing the structure and dynamics of the level of representational content, which are reflected at the level of conscious experience. However, they are not suited to explain the metaphysical "I" (self-as-subject) because they do not address the issue of the place of consciousness in nature. Hence, the main claim is that while PC can be seen as a useful framework to investigate phenomenology of "Me," it is in principle unsuitable to provide answers to questions about the metaphysics of "I."

Conclusion

I placed the debate of the self in the domain of consciousness (as opposed to the self understood as e.g., a representational structure, a physical object, or a spiritual entity) and argued that (1) conceptually, the distinction between "Me" and "I" may reflect the distinction between theoretical problems of the phenomenal self and the metaphysical self, respectively (although the notion of for-me-ness may complicate this picture), and (2) that what is described in the literature as the phenomenal "I" can be regarded as just a higher-level part of the phenomenal "Me" [which can be understood as Metzinger's (2018) phenomenal self-model].

The first claim draws attention to the distinction between "I" and "Me," which suggests that these two theoretical issues should be investigated independently, using two different methodologies. While "Me" can be investigated using phenomenology and scientific methodology, "I" is typically a metaphysical problem (perhaps with the exception of non-deflationary understandings of for-me-ness) and it is arguable to what extent it can be approached using standard scientific methods. Therefore, it is important to clearly state which problem one approaches when discussing the self in the context of consciousness (see Tables 2, 3 for some examples).

The second claim, the postulate to treat what is usually described as phenomenal "I" as just a part of the phenomenal "Me," has two implications. The first is constructive. Investigating issues which are typically regarded in cognitive science as "I" from the perspective of "Me" may contribute towards better understanding of self-consciousness by emphasizing that these two research areas may have much more in common than it appears. Rather than using two distinct terms, which suggest that we are dealing with two fundamentally different problems, we may approach them as just two facets of the same multidimensional research problem. One such approach is to treat both of them as just different levels in the hierarchical structure of the phenomenal self-model ( Metzinger, 2003, 2009, 2010), an approach which can be (and implicitly is) shared by recent theories of the self, especially within the framework of PC.

The second implication is pragmatic. Refraining from using the term "I" when speaking in the context of phenomenology and using it only in the metaphysical context may reduce conceptual confusion in regard to this term. However, it will also mean forfeiting an important distinction ("Me" versus "I") which has already gained traction in cognitive science. As such, the choice to eliminate the term "I" in the context of phenomenology is a repelling option, but may be beneficial in the long term. Alternatively, one may use more specific terms, such as "sense of ownership over an experience" to reflect what is meant by "I" in the Wittgensteinian tradition, or, e.g., "sense of ownership of interoceptive signals" when discussing the role of interoception. A second option may be to recast the distinction used in cognitive science in different terms. One proposal is to explicitly speak about it as the distinction between the experience/sense of "Me" versus the experience/sense of "I" (rather than just "Me" and "I"). The task here would be, however, to prove that there is a qualitative difference between them, and to demarcate the exact border.

Author Contributions

The article has been solely the work of MW.

Funding

This article was supported by the Australian Research Council Grant No. DP160102770.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Jakob Hohwy, Tim Bayne, Jennifer Windt, Monima Chadha, and the members of Cognition and Philosophy Lab at Monash University (especially Julian Matthews) for discussions about the issues described in the paper. The author also wants to thank the reviewers and the editor for helpful comments on how to improve the manuscript.

Footnotes

1. Therefore, whenever I use the term "I" I mean self-as-subject (of experience), and whenever I use the term "Me" I mean self-as-object (of experience). This assumption reflects James' (1890) understanding of these terms (see Table 1). I also assume, following James (1890), that these two categories are mutually exclusive, i.e., if something is an object of experience then it cannot simultaneously be a subject of experience, and vice versa.

2. Wittgenstein (1958) himself did not discuss the issue of phenomenology of the self. However, his approach to the distinction between the use of "I" as subject and "I" as object can be seen as a starting point for contemporary discussions of phenomenology of the self-as-subject.

3. Whenever I use the prefix "phenomenal" I mean "the conscious experience of." For example, when I write phenomenal "I", I mean: the conscious experience of self as subject of experience ("I"). In a similar fashion I use the prefix "metaphysical" when I mean "the metaphysical entity of."

4. Chalmers (1996) also lists "sense of self," although it is highly controversial whether it can be treated as a distinctive type of conscious content.

5. Sometimes referred to as sense of authorship.

6. "IIT allows for certain simple systems such as grid-like architectures, similar to topographically organized areas in the human posterior cortex, to be highly conscious even when not engaging in any intelligent behavior" (Tononi et al., 2016, p. 460).

7. For example, he writes: "So where does consciousness emerge? The proposal offered here is that conscious processing has a temporal thickness or depth, which underwrites inferences about the consequences of action. This necessarily lends inference a purposeful and self-evidencing aspect that has the hallmarks of consciousness" (Friston, 2018, p. 1).

References

Windt, J. M. (2015). Just in time-dreamless sleep experience as pure subjective temporality: Open MIND. Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group.
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Frontiers | "I" and "Me": The Self in the Context of Consciousness

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James (1890) distinguished two understandings of the self, the self as "Me" and the self as "I". This distinction has recently regained popularity in cogniti...

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A point that stood out to me is Nussbaum's argument that the difference between an "objectionable and a benign use of objectification will be made by the overall context of the human relationship in question" (271). Nussbaum's argument made me think of the painting At the opera (1879) by Mary Cassatt, which is a painting that represents how women were subject to the male gaze in the 19th century, especially when women were in public spaces alone (for instance, the woman in the painting is unaware that the man is watching her). Both the woman and man in the painting are strangers, but the simple act of being in public objectifies the woman as, powerfully phrased by Nussbaum in reference to an example, "an object for the enjoyment of the male gaze" (272).

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Kurdish guerrilla fighters photographed by Joey Lawrence 

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I just read the article assigned for yesterday (oops) and I just wanted to share some thoughts. In Staci K. Haines’ book “The Politics of Trauma” she posits that slavery, domination, hierarchy, and so on are predicated on the Cartesian mind-body split in which one sees the body as separate from the mind and subordinated to it. It seems that our concept of objectification is a product of disintegrated thinking and was certainly perpetuated by the Industrial Revolution so it is apropos that Nussbaum mentions Marx in this article. It dawns on me that the experience of objectification is what Marx would call “alienation”.

In some pre-colonial societies all matter was imbued with a sort of animism or spiritual properties that made them sacred. This extended to what we would now consider objects. The process of objectification became acute with civilization seeing nature as separate from society and then treating it as an object. All of the criteria Nussbaum describes for objectification (instrumentality, denial of autonomy, inertness, fungibility, violability, ownership, and denial of subjectivity) are all systematized and accelerated in this newly emerging industrialized way of thinking about things as separate from us and allowing us to use objects (and people as objects) as private property.

Murray Bookchin proposed that domination (which meets all of the criteria of Nussbaum’s definition of objectification) of the natural world started with humans dominating other humans. Kurdish philosopher Abdullah Öcalan drawing on the work of socialist archaeologist V. Gordon Childe took this analysis a step further and believed that the first colony in history was women and therefore a feminist praxis must be the guiding principle of any revolutionary movement.

In the Middle East in the Kurdish region in North and East Syria known as “Rojava”, an armed movement lead by women guided by these ideas has emerged over the past 40+ years. They are united against patriarchy, colonialism, capitalism, ecocide, genocide/ethnic cleansing, and other forms of domination. I have known a number of friends and comrades who have went there from anywhere between one and four years to learn from the women’s movement.

Attached is a photo from the revolution that has been happening since 2012 and includes the Women’s Protection Unit (YPJ) which is made up of women and genderqueer people, the village of Jinwar that is comprised of only women escaping patriarchal violence, and women revolutionaries who have sacrificed so much in the fight against patriarchy and fascism.

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Butler is difficult. I've found this short video very helpful ever since I watched it a while back. 

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Butler is difficult. I've found this short video very helpful ever since I watched it a while back. 

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Judith Butler: Your Behavior Creates Your Gender | Big Think

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A point that really stood out to me is Butler's claim that “desiring the conditions of one’s dependency even when that dependency takes the form of subordination is required in order to persist as oneself” (83) because it made me think about elderly people. Remembering conversations I have had with my grandparents, something that bothers them is their increasing dependency on others because they would do everything themselves if they could; although the claim could be made that they need to depend on others to “persist,” they do not desire that because there was a point in their lives — when they were younger — that they did not have to depend on others to the degree that they do now. This point in the reading made me think of the song “Time” by Pink Floyd; although the song does not directly mention depending on others in older age, I think the song still captures that feeling of getting older and reflecting on how life is not what it once was — which depending on how you may interpret the lyrics, could allude to the topic of dependency.

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In the introduction of The Invention of the White Race, Theodore Allen outlines two philosophical schools of thought on the origin of whiteness. The first, the "psychocultural" approach, argues that inherent phenotypic traits in people of Anglo descent predispose them to behaviors like domination, repurposing scientific racism through a liberal academic lens. The second, the "socioeconomic" approach, asserts that whiteness was deliberately created by the white ruling class in the 1690s to divide European indentured servants and African slaves to maintain the system of slavery, a theory Allen supports with extensive historical research and evidence in his 700+ page tome.

Based on the body of evidence I believe that research linking larger amygdalas to conservative ideology is not phrenological or psychocultural because it is based on modern neuroscience, which uses empirical methods like brain imaging to study neural activity and structure. Phrenology, in contrast, was a pseudoscience that inaccurately tried to link skull shape to personality traits without any scientific evidence. Current research on the amygdala focuses on its role in processing fear and emotion, using measurable brain functions rather than outdated theories about physical skull features predicting behavior or beliefs.

Furthermore, the directionality of cause is important in distinguishing phrenological or psychocultural associations from those based on empirical evidence. If we were to claim that large amygdalas cause conservative ideologies, it would echo phrenology by implying a fixed, inherent biological basis for complex beliefs. However, if the relationship is framed as correlational—with environmental and cognitive factors shaping both brain structure and ideology—then the explanation remains grounded in modern neuroscience rather than outdated, deterministic views.

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this quote on page 83 of the pdf stood out to me. "that the subject would rather attach to pain than not attach—leaves open the possibility of an attachment to painless or nonsubordinating (or, at least, less
painful and less subordinating) modes of subjectivity."

Maybe it is just the psychology major in me coming out, but I immediately thought of different attatchment styles and the assocaitions between self perception. Heres a really interesting study done by the NIH on this topic!

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The Mediating Role of Self-Concept and Coping Strategies on the Relationship Between Attachment Styles and Perceived Stress

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The aim of this study was to examine the role of attachment style, self-concept, and coping strategies, in order to explain the differences in perceived stress factors and stress symptoms, in a mediation model. Participants were 515 university students…

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A point that stood out to me from Alcoff’s reading is the point of hermeneutics. Although figuring, imagining, experiencing and accepting elements that constitute female horizons depends on culture, elements — such as pregnancy, childbirth, nursing, etc. — are carried throughout childhood and adult life because the “ways in which we are embodied” allow them to exist in the female horizon (p. 21 on the PDF). As I was looking for examples that are representative of this point, I came across a painting entitled “Little Girls Will Mothers Be” by Greg Olsen; although the painting is symbolic of the love between a mother and child, I think this painting visually depicts some elements that constitute female horizons, particularly the one surrounding the future possibility of reproduction, because they will be carried throughout the little girl’s childhood (depending on culture), which is symbolic of the child's action in the painting, until adulthood.

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I found Alcoff's comparison of the social constructedness of race and gender very helpful for understanding her broader philosophical project. I attached an interview with Barbara and Karen Fields who both write extensively about the historical, sociological, and theoretical construction of race. Their arguments contrast with Alcoff's argument that "sexed identity" is an objective type in an interesting way (they, of course, do not think race is an objective type).

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The Dig, a podcast from Jacobin magazine

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Revisiting Racecraft with Barbara and Karen Fields

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A less sexualized depiction of Paleolithic women hunters

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What stands out to me about Alcoff’s reading is that she omits a significant amount of data from her analysis. That said, I particularly appreciate the thinkers she references whose work opens possibilities for queering gender.

My primary criticism of Alcoff is her omission of gender expressions in pre-capitalist and pre-colonial societies. In many of these societies, gender roles were either almost non-existent or vastly different from how they are now.

For example, in Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch, she writes, “[w]ith the demise of the subsistence economy that had prevailed in pre-capitalist Europe, the unity of production and reproduction which has been typical of all societies based on production-for-use came to an end, as these activities became the carriers of different social relations and were sexually differentiated [emphasis mine]” (p. 74).

Federici hints at much less differentiated gender relations, and this quote specifically highlights that gender and gender roles were not particularly integral to pre-capitalist Western Europe. The ruling class introduced gender difference as a mechanism to create and enforce the emerging gender binary to subjugate the lower classes, and especially women, under their authority.

Additionally, other literature points to Indigenous societies where gender was understood as fluid or more than a binary. Even the roles of men and women in these societies differed significantly from the constructions imposed by colonial powers.

Moreover, there is a growing body of evidence suggesting that women in some prehistoric societies did not perform the gender roles later projected onto them. This reflects a bias in popular interpretations of prehistory, which tends to impose presentist, patriarchal views.

Anthropologists Sarah Lacy and Cara Ocobock have published research based on archaeological and physiological evidence, showing that women—despite distinct phenotypic characteristics—did not assume passive roles in society based on physiological differences. On the contrary, individuals with XX chromosomes likely hunted and defended themselves and their communities, much like their XY counterparts.

My question to Alcoff would be: If we are to believe that biological sex differences create gender, then why don’t we see consistent expressions/interpretations of sex and gender across all societies throughout history?

DOI: 10.1111/aman.13914

DOI: 10.1111/aman.13915

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A point that stood out to me in particular and I think resonates with the overturn of Roe v. Wade is Koyama’s encouragement for transfeminists to “join reproductive choice organizations and demonstrate for choice” because a “society that does not respect women’s right to make decisions regarding pregnancy is not likely to respect [trans women/men] right to make decisions about medical interventions to make [their] bodies congruent with [their] gender identity” (Koyama 256). Following Koyama’s argument here and applying it to the overturn of Roe v. Wade, I understand why Koyama argued the policing of women’s bodies impacts the policing of trans men’s and trans women’s bodies because, apart from homophobia and transphobia factoring into the negative stigmatization of trans men and women undergoing medical interventions, we live in a society that continues to deem abortion and sex reassignment surgery as unnatural. I think that the short news article I attached resonates a lot with this particular section in Koyama’s manifesto.

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Monday night was like any other for Alexis Rangel.

"I was at home doing my best to relax and, you know, have a nice dinner," she said.

Then the news broke that a majority of Supreme Court justices were poised to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade decision on abortion, and suddenly Rangel's evening plans changed.

"Abortion rights and reproductive rights in this decision are about trans rights," she said.

Rangel is a policy counselor at the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) where she organizes in legislative offices at the federal and state level to advocate for transgender rights.

"We have to recognize that this decision will impact trans folks," she said. "Particularly trans men and nonbinary folks who need access to reproductive healthcare and abortion specifically."

A sense of urgency brought Rangel near the steps of the Supreme Court for a midnight protest on Monday, and she said she planned to keep up the momentum.

Activists and supporters of the LGBTQ community say any decision to overturn Roe v. Wade could have significant consequences on vulnerable groups if privacy-related rights like access to contraception or gender-affirming care are threatened.

Notion of privacy 'thrown into question'

It is a concern that President Joe Biden has repeatedly raised since the draft opinion was first published by Politico, saying the issue is "a lot bigger than abortion." He named LGBTQ rights and contraception rights as those specifically at risk.

"What are the next things that are going to be attacked? Because this MAGA crowd is really the most extreme political organization that's existed in American history - in recent American history," Biden said on Wednesday.

On Tuesday, he said he believed the reasoning in the draft decision "would mean that every other decision related to the notion of privacy is thrown into question."

The leaked draft refutes this idea.

"To ensure that our decision is not misunderstood or mischaracterized, we emphasize that our decision concerns the constitutional right to abortion and no other right," wrote Justice Samuel Alito. "Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedent that do not concern abortion."

Still, rights activists aren't convinced and are now energized to take action across the country.

When states like Texas began stripping access to abortion, Maryland resident Mickey Goldberg decided to change her protesting strategy. She started giving more money to Planned Parenthood.

"And it helps, but it's not enough," she said. So she went a step further.

"I'm now giving to Texas Planned Parenthood, specifically to a fund that enables women to leave the state and get an abortion when they need one," Goldberg said.

She was one of hundreds of people who protested at the Supreme Court this week, where D. Ojeda also rallied.

Ojeda is a senior national organizer for NCTE and said they felt the attacks on other rights were already starting.

"The same tactics that we're seeing on the attacks of abortion care, are the same tactics we're seeing with gender-affirming care, and access to gender-affirming care, the attacks are on our health care providers, and then our vital body autonomy," Ojeda said.

The 'violence' of forced pregnancy

The NCTE is mobilizing at the local, state and federal level, speaking to lawmakers about the impact a reversal could have for the transgender community. They are also calling on the Senate to pass the Equality Act, a bill that would expand protections for the LGBTQ community.

"Mobilization is actually working in solidarity with each other," Ojeda said.

"There's a level of violence that comes from forcing people to be pregnant. There's another layer when you're trans, you know, issues of gender dysphoria."

Cathryn Oakley, senior counsel at the Human Rights Campaign argued the stakes are as high as they are clear.

"The court is opening the door to having things like contraception be put at risk," Oakley said, adding that there were many people having legal recognition of their constitutional rights stripped away.

The Human Rights Campaign is calling for advocacy at the local and national level.

"What we really need now is outrage, anger and action for those among our community who are about to see the most destructive attack on our civil rights in a generation," Oakley said. "And we need to fight back by showing up by being in the streets by protesting for ourselves and the LGBTQ-plus community, and in solidarity with other folks who are having critical civil rights protections stripped away."

On Tuesday, Chief Justice Roberts confirmed the authenticity of the draft opinion published by Politico Monday night. The court is expected to issue its ruling later this summer.

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How the reversal of Roe v. Wade could impact the transgender community

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Monday night was like any other for Alexis Rangel. "I was at home doing my best to relax and, you know, have a nice dinner," she said. Then the news broke that a majority of Supreme Court justices were poised to overturn the landmark Roe v.

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Towards the end of the class I saw the discussion pivot towards the notion of economic inhibitions, particularly ones that restrict members of the trans community from speaking out out of fear of being silenced by neoliberal and capitalist outlets that reject the more radical view that activists like Koyama may hold. I think it MAY be disingenuous and counterintuitive to cite this imagery in this class in particular, but I thought of this idea with relation to Lacan's notion of castration, in which the economic benefits of an object may distract from the reality that you lack the actual thing you may desire. If I could, I would rephrase Lacan's idea because I understand that the phallic imagery might lean too hard into heteronormative and essentialist ideas (iirc Butler critiqued him for this), but I think the economic parallels between the ideas hold true.

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A question that came up for me while reading Koyama's manifesto was, "Is Emi Koyama trans?" especially when I reached the postscript where she talks about how her engagement with the Portland trans community served as a motive for her exploration/inspiration to write a manifesto. A quick Google search led me to her Wikipedia page stating, "Koyama uses she/her pronouns, but does not identify with any particular gender." The answer is elusive, but I think it's fair to say that Koyama does not have embodied experiences of being a MTF trans person, the population she largely focuses on in her text.

At first, I thought that Koyama had written her text in a way that is easy to digest simply for accessibility reasons, and while I do think this is true, I think that it mainly has to do with the fact that she does not have the MTF trans experience to draw upon. I think that recognizing this about the author's identity clarifies how one ought to read her manifesto. While I do share similar feelings regarding the critiques of this text, such as failing to provide an adequate intersectional analysis, Koyama aimed to connect trans issues to feminist discourse as a push towards inclusivity rather than provide a surface-level overview of an experience that isn't her own. With that, I think it was impossible from the get-go for Koyama to produce a 'complete' manifesto, but I also think that is a strength of this text because it invited other voices and ideas into a conversation that was, at the time, relatively limited in its diversity and representation. Overall, I do think she displays well how an ally can engage in identity-specific discourses without overstepping and simultaneously expand the scope of an important dialogue in a meaningful way.

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Regarding the Kelley reading, I wanted to mention an important point that Kelley argues against throughout the reading: the treatment of women is universal. That notion dismisses the different intersectional realities of women, which is clearly visible in motherhood: second wave feminists understood motherhood as oppressive because it "doomed women to a lonely life as suburban housewives," whereas black women had to work and actually wanted more time to spend with their families (Kelley 145). The reading that I attached is by Kimberlé Crenshaw and expresses a similar point to the one Kelley makes of women having different intersectional realities, challenging the notion that women's treatment is universal.

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Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color on JSTOR

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Kimberle Crenshaw, Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color, Stanford Law Review, Vol. 43, No. 6 (Jul., 1991), pp. 1241-1299

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After reading the Kelley reading, I thought it had a lot of connections to the book Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico by Laura Briggs. The book as a whole presents a lot of the same debates over birth control and sterilization that Kelley does but focuses more specifically on Puerto Rico. The chapter I have attached is what I initially thought about while reading, as the idea of black matriarchy enabling oppression is seen as mapping onto oppression for Puerto Ricans. Kelley mentions this briefly, but this chapter allows a more in-depth and expansive analysis of the topic. I think that looking at the impact of this on Puerto Rican women also ties in with the Black feminist goal of fighting the oppression of all people, including globally.

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When reading hooks, particularly the section on pg. 171 that reads, "The power of this speech is not simply that it enables resistance to white supremacy, but that it also forges a space for alternative cultural production and alternative epistemologies..." It made me think about the slang and speech patterns found in LGBTQIA+ communities, specifically drag communities. Though there is overlap in origin as many of the slang words used by those in that community fall under AAVE and were coined by Black queer people, the produced effect is different ways of being that embody a counter-hegemonic nature. The attached reading by Nathaniel Simmons gives an interesting overview of how language functions in RuPaul's Drag Race, and beyond the show, which communicates a specific mode of being in the drag community that is valued and serves as an example of how a marginalized community finds power and a collective presence by having a shared mode of speaking.

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Abstract

Employing Speech Codes Theory (Philipsen et al. in Theorizing about intercultural communication. Sage, Thousand Oaks, 2005) as my theoretical framework, I examine communicative practices and beliefs as to what it means to speak like a drag queen as portrayed within the reality TV show RuPaul's Drag Race (RPDR): Season Four. Examining this particular population increases knowledge on how marginalized populations use talk to construct rules of conduct for a coherent identity. Members uphold drag queen speech codes by revealing what it means to speak like a queen. Such items include to look like a "fish," don't be "hungry," be humble, resist negativity, don't complain, and exude professionalism. These are qualities and characteristics of communication that a drag queen must perform, uphold, and repeat in order to uphold drag family values, thus fulfilling the code of sisterhood that comes with the performance of drag. These are evident within beliefs and everyday talk as portrayed within RPDR.

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References

Barrett, R. (1994). "She is not white woman": The appropriation of white women's language by African American drag queens. In M. Bucholtz, A. C. Liange, L. A. Sutton, & C. Hines (Eds.), Cultural performances: proceedings of the third berkeley women and language conference (pp. 1-14). Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Women and Language Group.

Barrett, R. (1995a). The markedness model and style switching: Evidence from African American drag queens. In P. Silberman & J. Loftin (Eds.), SALSA II: Proceedings of the second annual symposium about language and society Austin (pp. 40-52). Austin, TX: University of Texas Department of Linguistics.

Hymes, D. (1968). The ethnography of speaking. In J. Fishman (Ed.), Readings in the sociology of language (pp. 99-137). Paris: Mouton.

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Navarro, A. (2012, April 23). Why RuPaul's drag race is the best reality show on TV right now. Retrieved from http://www.tv.com/news/why-rupauls-drag-race-is-the-best-reality-show-on-tv-right-now-28454/.

Philipsen, G. (1990). Reflections on speaking 'like a man' in Teamsterville. In D. Carbaugh (Ed.), Cultural communication and intercultural communication (pp. 21-26). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Philipsen, G. (1997). A theory of speech codes. In G. Philipsen, & T. L. Albrecht (Eds.), Developing communication theories (pp. 119-156). Albany: State University of New York Press.

Philipsen, G., Coutu, L. M., & Covarrubias, P. (2005). Speech codes theory: Restatement, revisions, and response to criticisms. In. W. B. Gudykunst (Ed.), Theorizing about intercultural communication. (pp. 55-68). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Shumaker, J., & Slane, J. (2011a). Halleloo! "RuPaul's Drag Race" returns to Logo for a new season of outrageous reality competition in January 2012. Retrieved from http://logo.to/s6k7Wu.

Shumaker, J., & Slane, J. (2011b). "RuPaul's Drag Race" fourth season premier sashays onto Logo Monday January 30th. Retrieved from http://logo.to/u2CIv1.

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Ohio University, Athens, OH, USA

Nathaniel Simmons

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Correspondence to Nathaniel Simmons.

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Simmons, N. Speaking Like a Queen in RuPaul's Drag Race: Towards a Speech Code of American Drag Queens. Sexuality & Culture 18, 630-648 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-013-9213-2
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Speaking Like a Queen in RuPaul's Drag Race: Towards a Speech Code of American Drag Queens - Sexuality & Culture

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Employing Speech Codes Theory (Philipsen et al. in Theorizing about intercultural communication. Sage, Thousand Oaks, 2005) as my theoretical framework, I examine communicative practices and beliefs as to what it means to speak like a drag queen as portrayed within the reality TV show RuPaul's Drag Race (RPDR): Season Four.

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When I was reading the dialogue today that featured Omeasoo Wāhpāsiw and Louise Halfe, I couldn't help but notice a deeply profound awareness that came with their conversation with one another. When I have previously read Indigenous resistance/ writing - I have always learned so much when thinking about the temporality of their ideas. To this post I have attached a brief mind map of the temporality that I noticed on pages 215 and 217 of the reading. Have a great weekend!

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When reading Weems and her discussion of how the term feminism is rooted in a dominant Eurocentric perspective, it reminded me of a reading I had to do recently for one of my sociology classes. I've attached a link to an Op-Ed where the author talks about how Western and/or U.S. feminists have the perception of wearing burqas as solely oppressive and a discourse that argues how Muslim women need to be "saved" from their religion and culture. She highlights the various reasons why this is not necessarily true, specifically noting how wearing a burqa can allow for social mobility in academic and professional spaces. I think it's an important example of how feminism seeks to create an umbrella for all women to fall under, particularly in that it has an idealized version of what types of women qualify as "free" or as "feminists." As Weems notes as the reason for creating an entirely separate philosophy (womanism), feminism continuously fails to take into account women of color who have different experiences and traits of survivability that inform how a non-white woman/feminist navigates her reality. While many women want a world in which they are granted more opportunity, safety, equality, etc., that is going to translate differently for different social groups who are resisting ideologies other than sexism and patriarchy.

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The Western crusade to rescue Muslim women has reduced them to a simplistic stereotype

A moral crusade to rescue oppressed Muslim women from their cultures and their religion has swept the public sphere, dissolving distinctions between conservatives and liberals, sexists and feminists. The crusade has justified all manner of intervention from the legal to the military, the humanitarian to the sartorial. But it has also reduced Muslim women to a stereotyped singularity, plastering a handy cultural icon over much more complicated historical and political dynamics.

As an anthropologist who has spent decades doing research on and with women in different communities in the Middle East, I have found myself increasingly troubled by our obsession with Muslim women. Ever since 2001, when defending the rights of Muslim women was offered as a rationale for military intervention in Afghanistan, I have been trying to reconcile what I know from experience about individual women's lives, and what I know as a student of the history of women and of feminism in different parts of the Muslim world, with the stock images of Muslim women that bombard us here in the West. Over the past decade, from the girls and women like Nujood Ali, whose best-selling memoir I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced was co-written, like so many of the others, by a Western journalist, to Malala Yousafzai, they have been portrayed as victims of the veil, forced marriage, honor crimes or violent abuse. They are presented as having a deficit of rights because of Islam. But they don't always behave the way we expect them to, nor should they.

( MORE: Forbidden to Drive: A Saudi Woman on Life Inside the Kingdom)

Take the veil, for example. We were surprised when many women in Afghanistan didn't take them off after being "liberated," seeing as they had become such symbols of oppression in the West. But we were confusing veiling with a lack of agency. What most of us didn't know is that 30 years ago the anthropologist Hanna Papanek described the burqa as "portable seclusion" and noted that many women saw it as a liberating invention because it enabled them to move out of segregated living spaces while still observing the requirements of separating and protecting women from unrelated men. People all over the globe, including Americans, wear the appropriate form of dress for their socially shared standards, religious beliefs and moral ideals. If we think that U.S. women live in a world of choice regarding clothing, we need to look no further than our own codes of dress and the often constricting tyrannies of fashion.

As for Malala, she was subjected to horrible violence by the Taliban, but education for girls and Islam are not at odds, as was suggested when atheist Sam Harris praised Malala for standing up to the "misogyny of traditional Islam." Across the Muslim world girls have even been going to state schools for generations. In Pakistan, poverty and political instability undermine girls' schooling, but also that of boys. Yet in urban areas, girls finish high school at rates close to those of young men, and they are only fractionally less likely to pursue higher education. In many Arab countries, and in Iran, more women are in university than men. In Egypt, women make up a bigger percentage of engineering and medical faculties than women do in the U.S.

A language of rights cannot really capture the complications of lives actually lived. If we were to consider the quandaries of a young woman in rural Egypt as she tries to make choices about who to marry or how she will make a good life for her children in trying circumstances, perhaps we would realize that we all work within constraints. It does not do justice to anyone to view her life only in terms of rights or that loaded term, freedom. These are not the terms in which we understand our own lives, born into families we did not choose, finding our way into what might fulfill us in life, constrained by failing economies, subject to the consumer capitalism, and making moral mistakes we must live with.

( MORE: Brides Before Bombs: Nigerian City Fights Terrorism With Mass Weddings)

There is no doubt that Western notions of human rights can be credited for the hope for a better world for all women. But I suspect that the deep moral conviction people feel about the rightness of saving the women of that timeless homogeneous mythical place called Islamland is fed by something else that cannot be separated from our current geopolitical relations. Blinded to the diversity of Muslim women's lives, we tend to see our own situation too comfortably. Representing Muslim women as abused makes us forget the violence and oppression in our own midst. Our stereotyping of Muslim women also distracts us from the thornier problem that our own policies and actions in the world help create the (sometimes harsh) conditions in which distant others live. Ultimately, saving Muslim women allows us to ignore the complex entanglements in which we are all implicated and creates a polarization that places feminism only on the side of the West.

MORE: Saudi Cleric Says Driving Hurts Women's Ovaries

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A moral crusade to rescue oppressed Muslim women from their cultures and their religion has swept the public sphere, dissolving distinctions between conservatives and liberals, sexists and feminists.

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Todays discussion made me wonder about the differences between Feminist Theories and Queer Theory, and what things does Fem Theory leave out that Queer Theory includes? McRuer's piece combines Disability and Queer Theory really beautifully and its an amazing and short read!!

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I found Gardlard-Thomson's argument compelling, but, like Joyful, I was unconvinced by her concluding prescription of market-centered transgression. I do not view Gardlard-Thomson's turn toward the apparently liberating forces of the market as a unique aberration. Rather, I think it is symptomatic of the broader postmodern tradition to which she is indebted (I would argue Gardland-Thomson's article is largely an expansion of Foucauldian principles). Above I have attached a critical lecture from Cathrine Liu on the subject of postmodernism.

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Why Postmodernism Was a Huge Intellectual Step Back

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Frida Kahlo painting a portrait of her family

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A point from Garland’s piece that I really liked is her argument on disability perhaps being the “essential characteristic of being human” because we are all going to “evolve into disability,” so instead of arguing that individualistic autonomy is the key to liberation, feminist disability theory argues we should “collectively accommodate bodily limits and evolutions than trying to eliminate or deny them” (Garland 21). Immediately, this passage made me think of artist Frida Kahlo, who after enduring a near death accident that left her with forever altering injuries that, consequently, left her bedridden in several intervals of her life, she did not let that defeat her and accommodated to her limits by painting and unraveling her artistic journey. The attached image shows Frida’s strength and determination of not letting her circumstance stop her from making art.

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Further Relevance to today's discussion!

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Further Relevance to today's discussion!

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I work with kids and young adults diagnosed with autism 4 days out of the week and I wish there was more time to discuss the Garland-Thomson reading! I really appreciated the lens that was applied to disability studies that both compared and connected it to feminist studies. When thinking about disability and feminist studies together—a painful picture becomes transparent. The harsh urge from society to divide every person into a binary such as disabled or non-disabled or even man or woman. Reading this text made me want to highlight and be weary of the question: "who are we to tell someone else that their way of perceiving with and interacting with the world is the wrong way?". In working with those diagnosed with autism, I find myself imagining the ways my clients might think more abstractly and more vibrantly than I ever could—that perhaps there is a reality somewhere where people with autism would flourish and the greater population would struggle. Additionally, I also think a lot about how this binary urge creeps into the work that I do. Imagine the levels of neurodiversity across every human being ever—there are most definitely varying levels of cognition and perception. Yet, we assume that a majority of people interact with the world a certain way, and those diagnosed with a disability interact with it completely differently. I so much wish that society welcomed a gradient of awareness for the diagnosis and treatment of mental health rather than making such harsh divisions in a similar way that gender is divided.

To this post I have attached an article that dissolves common misconceptions about ABA therapy in modern-day practice for your reference if you are interested! Cheers.

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A point that really stood out to me is Haraway’s reference to Cherríe Moraga’s language, “a chimera of English and Spanish,” not being whole because English and Spanish are conqueror’s languages, “[b]ut it is this chimeric monster, without claim to an original language before violation, that crafts the erotic, competent, potent identities of women of color” (Haraway 56). Although Moraga may not speak the pre-colonized language, Malinche’s survival by speaking the colonizing language has resulted in subsequent generations building a new identity from her survival. This section reminded me of an essay I read last quarter by Gloria Anzaldúa called “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” which addresses the emergence of a branch of Spanish called Chicano Spanish; Chicano Spanish is often thought of as improper Spanish, but Anzaldúa argues against that by stating there are multiple ways to speak Spanish and Chicano Spanish is a border language that constitutes one’s identity (Chicano Spanish emerged after years of colonization and is part of survival). You can access the essay in the attached anthology (the essay is on pages 357-365).

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Haraway and relationships to science/machines

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Haraway and relationships to science/machines

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One aspect of Haraway that I was interested in was the quote “The machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped, and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. We can be responsible for machines; They do not dominate or threaten us. We are responsible for boundaries; we are they.“ While I’m still not entirely sure I understand Haraway, I felt that this quote helped reinforce her idea that science should be somewhat monitored to prevent harm. Going back to ideas of domination of the environment that were seen especially during the Scientific Revolution, this quote seems to dispute that. While moving away from a more naturalistic view, Haraway ensures that the issues of hierarchy and domination are not repeated. In identifying humans and machines as connected, Haraway seems to create an idea of both humans and machines that is no longer constructed around a battle for hierarchy.

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While I misinterpreted the assignment for reading for class, I was incredibly thrilled to listen in on the presence of Kristeva's ideas of feminist motivation in relation to mother/ masculinity. Having read Kristeva last quarter, to this message I have attached a brief outline/ visual that allows one to better understand her theory. Have a great weekend everyone. Cheers!