Who We Are & Practicing Curiosity

Welcome to the class!

I am your teacher, Katie King, and I will begin this post with an introduction of myself. Next, it will be your turn!

Add an introduction of yourself as a comment to this Post as soon as possible. Then, add another comment here again when we shift the blog from public to private. That doesn't mean you have to add private details, although you should be savvy about what you want to be public in any web venue; instead this is an opportunity to take into account having met others and having read their introductions as you add to your introduction, making it more interactive and companionable.

Practicing Feminist Curiosities

Some of you know me already or have met me socially, and others I look forward to meeting for the first time!

Interdisciplinary feminist theory is always humbling. I always come right up against the edges of my knowledge and understanding, usually sooner than later!

I imagine you will too. Still, remember that each of us in the class has great expertise of many kinds, and I hope the class will be a place to generously share what YOU know about with others. Such work also requires great friendships! Yes! How could we know it all? We have to rely upon and help each other out. I hope this class will be a place for you to make new friends and for us to create intellectual community.

When you read the syllabus you will see that the course has an argument to it. It won't become totally clear until the end probably, but you will get different glimpses of it at points in the semester. Try to figure out what it looks like now, at the very beginning. Charting how we experience the course over time gives us insight into how things, people, ideas move and change over time across communities of practice.

In the early 70s when I came to college a particular mobilization of so-called "interdisciplinarity" was occurring historically. All my undergraduate education was under this rubric, and I got degrees in literature and anthropology, studying classical Greek and medieval literature and culture, and southeast asia, especially Thailand. But I was also absorbed by math, biology and cybernetics as well as languages. I wrote my
undergraduate thesis on Beowulf (and read it in Old English).

At the same time I was an activist in the women's movement, the anti-war movement, the gay liberation movement, the children's liberation movement and the mental patient's liberation movement. Yes! These were all intertwined for the gay young people's communities I belonged to thirty odd years ago.

I grew up as an Army brat: I was born at Ft. Benning, Ga. I lived in Japan shortly after the end of the post-WWII U.S. occupation, in Ankara, Turkey at the height of the Cold War as the Berlin Wall went up, and in Thailand just as the Vietnam war was "winding down." My undergraduate years were full of transgression against my upbringing, but strangely also coextensive with it in a million ways.

I got my Ph.D. at my undergrad institution, UC-Santa Cruz, in the History of Consciousness Program where I studied with Donna Haraway. You will see her name throughout my books and even in our syllabus and class! I've always been playing with what she now calls technoscience, or what in my undergrad days we studied as cybernetics or systems theory, putting these ideas about thinking together with interests in culture and cultural products. I started putting everything I liked together in one great interdisciplinary amalgam I called "feminism and writing technologies." And that's what I've been working on in various ways ever since.

But that's an idiosyncratic "interdiscipline." Others I have worked in that have more collective status are Lesbian and Gay Studies, Women's Studies, Cultural Studies and now Cyberculture Studies and the History of the Book. These are all relatively recognized "interdisciplines" with virtually the status of disciplines today. They differ sharply from "Feminism and Writing Technologies" in this.

So how can we talk about such crazy intellectual patterns? That's a little bit of what this class is about. I've found vocabularies like "communities of practice," "boundary objects," "flexible knowledges" to be useful in thinking about where we find ourselves in 2007, making knowledge as feminists, inside and outside of the academy.

Part of the point of the class is to reflect upon and maybe change what Lucy Suchman calls the "working relations" of the academy, maybe of women's studies itself. So consider this question as a piece of such a process:

How do we come to be curious about each other's projects, languages, politics and practices? And what will doing this mean for our own class community specifically?