The Minority Vote

I have to admit that I was fairly disappointed with Alexander's piece. Gaming and writing sounds really cool, and I'm rather fond of Gee, but having recovered from the "WoW addiction" after a three-year bender, I really don't see how this could be any more than a specialized pedagogy.

First, I'd like to declaim a few assumptions that Alexander makes:

1) 50% of college students play video games (36). This is probably true. However, Alexander focuses in on WoW as the basis for his article, and I would say that the number of college students who have played WoW is about 25% of the 50% of gaming college students; in fact, I'd say only about 5% of college students are the type of serious WoW players that "Mike and Matt" are. Really.

2) People who play WoW or other MMORPGs utilize five different literacies--literacy reflectivity, trans-literacies, collaborative writing, multicultural literacies, and critical literacies (45).  Not IMHO--that's netspeek for no fucking way. Having been a player like Mike and Matt, I recognize all five of these literacies and admit that some players do use most or all of them. However, Mike and Matt use all of these literacies because they are the leaders of a guild; most members of a guild do not, or at least do not use many of them. Furthermore, very few players are actually members of guilds that utilize these literacies; most players are not active guild raiders like Mike and Matt.

3) People who play WoW are collaborative (41-2). This one's kinda implied, but it's there nonetheless, and is only true to a limited extent. Again, Mike and Matt are not typical; by now the process of "levelling up" to 80 (maximum level, where all the content that Mike and Matt engage in is located) is largely done through "solo play." The process of levelling up involves repetition of quests that are themselves quite repetitive (kill 8 monsters, turn in quest, repeat for three months), and there are very few rewards for collaborative play--unfortunately, until very high levels, collaborative play is too time-consuming (and requires too much organizaiton or coordination) to be practical for most players. This is ironic, considering that most people join with the intent of playing with other people; however, in my experience, friends who buy the game together often find that they cannot play at the same time, or one player levels-up too far ahead for the other player to catch up, or one of any other myriad of barriers crops up to prevent collaborative play. True collaborative play does occur at max level, if the player commits to a raiding guild, and if that guild makes a serious committment in time, energy, and patience to actually killing the big bosses.

I could make many more points, but this is enough for the sake of some semblance of brevity. Anyway, my point is that Alexander spills a great deal of ink to outline the literacies that Mike and Matt demonstrate--which are great--but are unrealistic when applied to most student gamers, or even most WoW players.

Of course, I missed Alexander's most basic assumption--my bad: "incorporating a strong consideration of gaming into composition courses may not only enliven writing instruction for many of our students, but also transform our approach to literacy" (37). I'll agree to the last point--Alexander wrings a great deal out of Mike and Matt's interactions--but due to my comments on assumption #1, I don't believe that working gaming/MMOs into our syllabi is going to help most students; there's just too few students who play MMOs or WoW, fewer that play at Mike and Matt's level, and a plethora of students who will actively resist such activities. Also, again in my experience, most players are loathe to admit to their classmates that they're gamers--there's too much of a social stigma associated with game-playing (yeah, I know that we love to challenge those types of cultural taboos, but promoting acceptance of gamers is down the list on the causes I care about--there's bigger issues to tackle). Furthermore, it'd be too problematic to try to arrange; I know Shawn LameBull likes to hold the occasional class session in Mulgore, but many students simply don't have access to gaming computers or accounts, and some students are always excluded.

So, I guess I'm probably the black sheep in that I just don't see the value of using video games, especially WoW, in FYC. I could see Alexander's approach as being a great proposal for a new course (Engl 4XX/5XX--Video Games and Composition), which would consist of students who are very interested in studying gaming, literacy, and writing, but I stand firm that it would be an absolute disaster for a FYC course.

Bitch Shop!

3rd-wave Feminism (essentially)

I decided to take a page outta Tim's blog and visit Bitch and BUST for a look at what all of Helmbrecht & Love's fuss was about, and the image above was, literally, the first thing I saw on Bitch's homepage. Considering that H & L point out that shopping and consumerism are part of both magazines (why are H & L calling them zines? Both identify as magazines, and appear far different in form and content than zines), I felt that the title and above image were an appropriate criticism of 3rd-wave feminism (160). More on this in a moment, but first a personal declaration (again responding to Tim's need to identify his own context vis a vis feminism).

I actually do consider myself a "good gauge of this kind of thing"; as I'm sure everyone has heard me say ad nauseum, I grew up in a counter-cultural mix of 3rd-wave feminism and queer culture, with an incredible dose of what H&L (snobbishly) call "the casual and hedonistic approach to sexuality" thrown in for good measure. And I consider myself a part of these movements, so the following criticisms and analyses (as well as the previous) are offered from love.


So Barbara offered us a challenge in an email from last Friday by asking us to "tease out what the third wave is all about," and it was with that in mind that I approached H&L's article. I came up with some key features of 3rd-wave feminism, fished out of examples from H&L:

• A focus on agency and individualism: as H&L note, both magazines feature articles that encourage women to make their own choices about their lives, especially in areas that have been traditionally verboten to feminists (such as sewing and cooking, shopping, blunt expression of sexuality, etc.) (156-8, et. al.)
• A focus on the individual rather than the institutional: this one kinda overlaps with the last one, but is more marked by the absence of the institutional criticism that was a big part of 1st and 2nd wave feminism. H&L point this out when analyzing one article's stance on cooking and cleaning, stating that "this reader fails to acknowledge the social conventions and oppressive institutions that compel women to cook for a household in the first place" (158). 3rd-wave feminists just tend to overlook, avoid, ignore, or sometimes refuse to discuss institutional structures of oppression, possibly as a reaction to 2nd-wave's focus on equalizing institutional opportunities.
• "Domesticity is uber-cool": H&L seem to view this aspect of 3rd-wave feminism with at least suspicion (if not disgust), but note that Bitch and BUST (especially) both seem to promote housekeeping, cooking, crafting, fashion, shopping, and other activities associated with patriarchal women's roles (160). I would go even further than H&L do to assert that the fashionably-domestic 3rd-wave feminist extends even to homemakers and stay-at-home moms; many of the "hardcore" lesbian feminists I grew up with--women who definitely epitomized the anger, intellect, and sass that is exemplified in Bitch (and particularly praised by H&L)--are now happy, married, heterosexual, domestic moms. Assimilation? I don't think so--it stays tied into the agency and individualism of the movement.
• Appropriation of derogatory terms: H&L also mention the trend, most notably in the name of the magazine, towards taking back terms like "bitch" (as queer-studies has done with "queer") and turning them into a positive ethos (161-2). 3rd-wave feminism is rampant with the flipping of traditional epithets aimed at women, and probably the most successful and mainstreamed example of this is the contemporary use of the word "douchebag" (or more commonly, "douche"). Formerly a term, originally associated with the Italian-American street lexicon, to refer to women, it is now used so frequently in the popular lexicon that it can be heard weekly or daily on South Park, The Daily Show, and even the nightly news; however, its contemporary usage is limited strictly to men. Its mainstream usage is quite recent (only the past five years or so), but in my experience has been in use by 3rd-wave feminists for at least fifteen years.
• One important one that I didn't find much example of in H&L is sexuality. The closest example is when H&L criticize a BUST editor, Tracie Egan, for promoting a "casual and hedonistic approach to sexuality" that "is audacious sexuality" (157). H&L conclude that "the interruption of mainstream discourses on women's sexuality is significant and encouraging, yet this sassy and sexy ethos is not necessarily smart." The problem is that H&L overlook this as a key feature of 3rd-wave feminism--the ability to bluntly express one's personal sexuality; while H&L acknowledge the agency in Egan's article, they characterize Egan's response as young, foolish, and problematic for teachers. In other words, H&L dismiss Egan because of her apparent unconcern for STDs, and in doing so they dismiss the ethos of her sexuality. For 3rd-wave feminism, which is mostly dominated by young women, sexuality is something that should be above criticism. While 1st and 2nd-wave feminism advances womens' sexuality significantly, these movements still left plenty of room to criticize some women for their sexuality; for example, in Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics, George Carlin comically remarks that "I  also happen to like it when feminists attack these fatass housewives who think there's nothing more to life [than having a baby] every nine months." If even George Carlin is noticing feminists attacking other women for their sexuality (which does definitely include the reproductive phase of womens' lives), it seems clear that women's sexuality was not above reproach in earlier feminist movements. Again, 3rd-wave feminism seems to take many reactionary stances to 2nd-wave feminism, and one of those positions is to value sexuality as a topic where criticism tends to be taboo.

I've covered a lot of shit in this blog, and I think I've already written way more than I needed to. Hopefully this will make for good discussion on Tuesday.

Sarah Palin, Gameplaying, and the Three-Legged Fool

In the interest of irony (even the abridged Ong was a long read :D ), I've decided to make my comments on this week's readings fairly brief. Of course, this is not to say that there ain't a lot to say about them, but rather to provide some interesting talking points for Tuesday.

First, I've always been intrigued by Ong's Orality and Literacy, and in fact I've found bits of it quite useful in explaining sentence structure to Engl 102 and GenEd 302 groups--for students who often write the way they speak (which occurs often, regardless of whether they come from a culture of orality/secondary orality), the "additive vs. subordinative", the "aggregative vs. analytical", and the "copious" sections make for quick, easy, and helpful reading (I sometimes summarize) when discussing things like redundancy, flow, and clauses (37-41).  Often, my favorite examples of redundant, aggregative or formulaic speech/writing come from Sarah Palin--consider her response to David Letterman's description of her as having a "slutty flight attendant" look:

"Pretty pathetic, good old David Letterman, that old David Letterman, what a commentary there ... very sad not to recognize what this trip was all about [...] Just doing some good things here for some good people in New York... such a distortion." [my italics]

 Notice the repetition and use of adjectives; granted, this is from speech, not writing, but in the press release for her resignation (which used to be on Alaska's official website), written by Palin herself, the same features keep popping up.

Next, Ong's comments about "the dozens" (Ong's description always makes me chuckle a bit--so academic!) and his description of oral culture as being close to the "human lifeworld" brought to mind another game that parallels the agonistic features of "the dozens" while maintaining that connection to the world around us (42-44). Back in Olympia, people on the street play a game where two or more participants compete to demonstrate their awareness of their surroundings. When one participant sees someone strange, ugly, stupid, etc., they will say to their companion, "Your team." The point of the game is to associate the odd-acting person with their companion, and is obviously highly judgemental and often quite crude. However, the game serves another purpose, one well suited to life on the street: by pointing out unusual people to their companions, participants remind each other to be mindful of their surroundings and to maintain a keen awareness of the people around them. While I am now a graduate student in one of the safest suburbs in all of Washington, I still teach my friends the game and continue it because, aside from amusement, it teaches a valuable lesson.

Finally, what stuck most in my mind about Barbara's piece is her description of the three (+1) trends in composition (W337). While Barbara describes herself as having "one foot" in two different "camps," I left the passage feeling like a fool stumbling through a three-legged race; I've got one leg in acculturation, one in hybrid discourse (the dominant one, of course), and one in multimedia composition, and I feel as if it won't be long before I trip. While I dislike the acculturation perspective (reminds me too much of the Borg from Star Trek--"You will be assimilated. Your cultural and biological distinctiveness will be added to our own."), I have to respect that students will need to be able to produce traditional academic discourse upon demand simply for their own survival. So now I've got to figure out how to run with this extra leg without letting it trip me up.