(2) RESOURCES / TEACHING MATERIALS
Featuring
- Some current parallels, like #femfog in the Medievalist community
- Older post on here
- Collected bits and pieces via Facebook and Twitter over the last week
- And some more verbiage
OR: AN IMMODEST PROPOSAL FOR AN ANTI-RAPE EDUCATIONAL TOOLKIT
CAVEATS…
This post is not going to contain many words. [ED. Famous last words; but then again I am half Irish so what do you expect.] It will mostly be images, some of which will contain words too. These images are mostly intended to be of a nature that comments, commentates, and is intended to poke readers into contemplation, consideration, comment, and further conversation.
That “poking” may be “triggering” in many ways.
Some material here may be offensive, to various individuals and sorts of individual, for various reasons and in various ways. That may include offending some persons who would categorise themselves as “feminist” and also some who would consider themselves as “anti-feminist.”
Some material may, if I am really lucky, simultaneously offend contrary positions… including offending by being blander than expected.
There is “triggering” and “triggering.” Know your limits, play within them. If you don’t, or are not sure, or think you might be fragile and feel scared (about fragility or uncertainty or both): bring a friend and read and work with them. Actually, bring a friend into this teach-in thing anyway: it’s about mutual support and solidarity after all, and about talking and thinking and intellectual-working with others; so the more the merrier. Bring in anyone else too, family, friends, colleagues, random passers-by. We’re going to be thinking through some essentially human stuff, so obviously that’s open to all humans and should indeed include other sentitive intelligent life too—actual or potential—why not?
Provided that what happens next is talking about stuff and asking questions and conversing—even if it’s to rip poor old moi a new one—that’s cool. Beyond cool, it/I will have served A Good Purpose.
There are many things to say about #UBCSAAM’s topics, many ways to say them, many angles of approach and points of view to take into comsideration. There are things that I won’t say or talk about or even mention here. It’s not necessarily because I’m ignorant or reckless or don’t think they matter or don’t care. Or because I don’t know how to talk about them. Though it might be. I am human and have limits, and the basic flat-footed one here is that I can’t possibly talk about everything, nor do so in a way that does due justice to everything.
ACKNOWLEDGING MY OWN PREJUDICES
I assume that all readers are responsible intelligent adults.
I also assume that all readers are compassionate sentient imaginative beings.
Sensitive and capable of critical distance.
Possessed of common sense, which is I know a tall order being as it is that most uncommon of things.
And have some sense of fun and play, and have not lost sense of their inner child. That’s really a caveat rather than an assumption, as there may be puns and groaning.
My own gender, sexual preferences, and past history are none of anyone else’s business and are part of my private life. They should not matter; or rather, they should be immaterial to the matters under discussion: rape, a rape culture that encompasses all that surrounds rape including after-effects including institutional policies, and how to act against these things because they are inhuman iniquities.
OK, here goes…
SOME MORE STUFF ABOUT THE STUFF THAT’S COMING UP
The following are intended as teaching and learning materials. For discussion, debate, writing, role-play, whatever specific types of activity and forms of expression are appropriate to any given class, course, field.
One of the best ways to explore stereotypes in a non-confrontational way is to place them into a fictional space: like any other ideas. This is why literature is an important and useful thing to study (besides being beautiful and making life better and happier). One way to explore stereotypes is to play with them, including playing with them from inside them: exercises in parody, pastiche, playing with point of view, playing devil’s advocate.
I would suggest adding some game-tools to the tool-set:
- Cards Against Humanity
- StoryCubes
- “Just a Minute“
- “25 Words Or Less“
- and a range of Surrealist games; here’s a rough start on them: Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction
- Oulipoetics, Oulipoétrie > Ou-x-po (Ouvroir de x potentielle)
Why?
(It’s fun.)
(It allows you to make comments in dubious taste and to let ideas flow in a way that would not be possible in a non-fictional non-hypothetical space.)
(Medieval educational theory, including pre-Renaissance humanisms: the idea of “serious fun.” Sentence and solaas in Chaucer. Laetitia et delectatio in Aquinas.)
See here for an early sketch of the idea that playing with ideas in a hypothetical space is good and useful, and how that kind of imaginative activity might constitute one if those in/famous “safe spaces”:
- “Next up: work in progress, #femfog” (2016-01-18)
See here for why satire—encompassing many other forms of image-and-word-combo triggering of conversation and comment—is A Great Good. (My colleague HC and I worked with pertinent satirical images in a French class after 13 November 2015.):
- “On Vancouver’s silent vigil […] for Charlie Hebdo” (2015-01-08)
- “A quick note on why reading satire is good, and medievalist, and medievalistically-good” (2015-01-13)
IN OTHER RECENT RAPEY MISOGYNIST NEWS
- #femfog
- #astroSH
- France Culture series on violence against women, starting for example with this
AND FINALLY, SOME ACTUAL STUFF
Here goes.
Storified because chronology was the closest thing to order. There’s occasional organisation by collage, but there’s neither coherent thematic progression nor consistent narrative sequence; just whatever caught my eye along the way. Raw wild magpie-ing.
Use, reuse, reorder, and remix as you will; in analogical, creative, poetic educational play.
Blue Monday: bearing in mind that while violence is never socially, politically, ethically acceptable; in order for it to be understood and prevented, all angles and a bigger picture should be taken into consideration:
Link #1: psych article: http://static1.squarespace.com/…/ParkInPressPSPB.pdf
Link #2: movie: http://freedonsplum.com
Link #3: Another bit of FB juxtapositioning suggests a possible answer: idiocracy and my shiny happy new Word Of The Day, “agnotology.” http://www.bbc.com/…/20160105-the-man-who-studies-the…
Further relaxing weekend reading:
HERE ENDETH THE SPECIAL EDITION SUPPLEMENTARY SET OF CARDS AGAINST HUMANITY
AND
HERE ENDETH THE LESSON
