Roundtable on teaching Work as an interdisciplinary first-year college seminar

This past year’s theme, “Work,” (2009-2010) asked students to interrogate the cultural construction of work from the early industrial revolution to our current economic moment, and to question how the new economy, as it develops, shapes the future conditions of work. Over the course of the year, we considered a number of overarching themes as we attempted to theorize “work” and its place in culture. For instance, we looked at terms we use to describe work (labor, career, job), personal and collective identities associated with work (unions; corporate culture; social and economic class positions; race, gender and ethnic identities), representations of work (photography, film, maps, music, literature), and theoretical interpretations of work (alienation from systems of production, gift economies)

Armenian American Women Inhabiting Our Bodies: Gendered and Embodied Ethnicity in Carol Edgarian\u27s Rise the Euphrates

The subject of my paper is Carol Edgarian\u27s recent novel, Rise the Euphrates, which I believe can tell us much about the current condition of Armenian-American women... In keeping with literary and cultural theory of the past twenty years, I favor a more complex model, in which the text and the culture in which it is written are part of a larger system of knowledge called a discourse. I am using a Michel Foucault\u27s widely known definition of discourse here: a set of rules, conventions, and practices which both enable and set limits upon knowledge and which permeate a wide array of cultural institutions. For instance, when we talk about the female body we might talk about such topics as the differences between femaleness and maleness, the relationship between the body and the mind, or the similarities and differences between the human body and machines. The conventions of the discourse guide us toward these topics and away from others. In other words, the discourse makes some things visible and others things invisible. The most basic premise underlying this interpretive strategy is that all forms of identity are culturally constructed, rather than innate, and that they are always being produced and reproduced by cultural institutions, art forms, relations of power, and language

Becoming White: Contested History, Armenian American Women, and Racialized Bodies

This essay traces the historical process by which Armenians became legally white in the United States, demonstrating how arguments for Armenian whiteness were used as part of a larger strategy to exclude other Asian immigrants from nationalization in the early twentieth century. For late twentieth-century Armenian Americans, the conditions of racial whiteness include the erasure of Armenian history and the assimilation of Armenian bodies into European gender norms. Through a reading of Carol Edgarian’s Rise, the Euphrates, the essay argues for an Armenian American female subject that resists race and gender assimilation as well as historical erasure

Lentils in the Ashes: Excavating the Fragments of Ancestral Feminism

In this paper, I have argued that the family can sow the seeds of feminism through the lived feminism of its members, even when tho se members are not activists . I also argue that it is essential for us to tell our mother line stories if we are to fully comprehend where we wish to stand as feminists. Narrative is always political, and narratives of the past-our individual pasts and our collective pasts-require a theoretically grounded reader in order to be fully understood. Fredric Jameson put s it thus: Only a genuine philosophy of history is capable of respecting the specificity and radical difference of the social and cultural past while disclosing the solidarity of its polemics and passions, its forms, structures, experiences, and struggles, with those of the present day . Jameson contends that only Marxist philosophy is adequate to the task of excavating the political unconscious in order to uncover its socially symbolic acts . He emphasizes that the public/private distinction is important in such an analysis, as any analysis that maintains a public/private distinction in fact clouds the underlying politics that shape and produce behaviors in the private realm. But I would suggest that feminists have long understood a similar logic by virtue of the recognition that the personal is political. For Black women this knowledge was always present due to their lived experience (Collins 9). For many white Second Wavers, this critical reading ability was developed via consciousness-raising groups-they learned to decolonize their consciousnesses and frame their stories in a way that would be most beneficial to themselves and the women who shared their political aims. The earned result of such excavatory work is clarity about who we are, where we stand, and what strengths we may draw upon. In my case, the ashes covering my great-grandmother\u27s life are thick and have yielded but a few lentils for me to find. But they have been fruitful lentils nevertheless. The lived feminisms of my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother cleared the ground for me to stand upon. I\u27m standing on that ground, from which I\u27ve swept away as much ash as I can, and I can feel the lentils like pebbles beneath my feet

Armenian Women In a Changing World: Papers presented at the First International Conference of the Armenian International Women\u27s Association

We live in the age of what is called multiculturalism in the United States. To be white and ethnic, sometimes even to be a person of color, is fashionable. This is true not only in the culture at large, but also in the academic fields of American literary and cultural studies, where the intersection between race/ethnicity and the female body is a popular subject for research. Most scholars who write about this topic, however, have focussed on what it means to be a woman of color in the United States. It is only recently that research is beginning to pay attention to white women\u27s bodies