Fueled by Bach

Alone in the grad lounge, listening to Bach on internet radio, I am an article-reading, notating, interlibraryloaning machine. I have three articles to go, at which point I will have gotten through today's 200 pages.

Somewhere, Sartre wrote about the problem with promises. The problem is, according to him, that a promise has to be re-made every time one can unmake it. Over the long-run, lacking powerful external stimuli, it becomes desperately difficult to keep the promise intact. I'm thinking of this right now in terms of resolutions (as in promises to yourself). I'm resolved to use the extra time I have this year, because I don't have to teach, working systematically on French. It's almost assured that I'll do so tonight. Tomorrow there's a potluck. Who's to say what's going to happen on Thursday or Friday?

Fortunately for me, I have the reliable powerful external stimulus of abject terror working for me. And now, baroque music.

My gender seminar is going well. The basic idea behind gender theory in writing history is that the meanings of gender are always historically constructed. It makes absolutely no difference that most of us think of men and women as basically physically constituted as different; those differences are nothing more than signposts on which meaning is ascribed (21st century example: women's brains register stronger emotional reactions when presented with a variety of stimuli, dictating that they are better suited in some areas for managing interpersonal tasks, while men are better at focusing on the task at hand without getting distracted. 18th century example: women have a womb, so they are destined for the domestic sphere and are physically precluded from political enfranchisement. Medieval example: women's humors tend toward the damp and cold, which prevents them from thinking clearly or accurately.)

It's a wonderful excercise studying gender history systematically. For me, it shores up my faith in universality. "Science" has never told anyone anything useful about (mental/emotional/social) differences between the sexes; the most objective facts are quickly overtaken and invested with social meaning. Simply put, studying this stuff makes me more hostile to any ascribed differences between the sexes. I just don't buy it; we're all capable of precisely the same things (except for child-birth, which also has no inherent meaning.)