FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2007
Translocalities/Transmodernities: Thinkspace
2:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. Polycentric Session, UC-Berkeley, Townsend
Center for the Humanities
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Participant Bio:
I am alarmed at how rapidly bodies like mine have been alternatively
positioned, repositioned, and further disposition-ed and further dispossessed.
My caregiver body which so willingly and graciously provided warm, consoling,
and deliberate caring touch (es) and compassion to those in my charge
now appears to be a body with “unruly subjectivity,” a body
that Holiday and Hassard (2001) would suggest is:
…coded as in need of (physical) control
[and] this coded body is reflected back
on the subject’s mind, as in need of (psychological) control.
This process is at the
heart of imperialist and patriarchal imperatives that sought to keep
unruly
subjects in their place (p. 9-10).
How did it get to be that way? I’m struck
then with considering my body’s newfound, altered status, that
active placement in a particular subjugated position whereby it has
been conquered, dominated under the control of another. In her historical
work, Mary Douglas noted (1966/9) that “which is ‘in-between’,
which crosses conceptual boundaries, is dealt with by societies as impure,
contaminated and risky to their integrity” (1966, p. 36). To me,
when I look at the photographic evidence and place that alongside another
body, that body of personal evidence-memories I’ve shared here
and elsewhere, I’m dumbfounded about my newfound foreign stature,
stature reminiscent of Kristeva’s (1994) notion of “that
which does not fit.” The few images I’ll share in my talk
are offered here as they’ve proven helpful in assisting me with
visualizing important aspects of my identity and subjectivity, about
critical clinical practices as a teacher and parent. They help me to
deconstruct how I’ve located myself within this complicated–because
I choose to make it so, narrative. By critically engaging and deconstructing
several images, by (re)looking critically, questioning, re)positioning
my own subjectivity and identity, by “employing an active, constructive
gaze” (Dykstra, 1995, p. 7) I’ve been able to make better
sense of images that heretofore were of no intrigue or interest to me
or the field of early education. My intent here is to incorporate visual
cultural inquiry in “an exploration by the visual, through the
visual, of human sociality, a field of social action which is enacted
in planes of time and space through objects and bodies, landscapes and
emotions, as well as thought” (Banks, 1998, p. 19). The theoretical
underpinnings that the overwhelming majority of early educators are
familiar with ground us pragmatically in the visual and assist me personally
in theoretically critiquing notions of the impact of visual culture
theory on the field of early childhood education, both historically
and currently. In much of my recent theoretical work (Johnson, 2005;
Johnson & Moniz, 2006) I’ve incorporated critical visual culture
perspectives in an effort to assist me in critically understanding the
vast extent to which the world we live in is an “increasingly
image-saturated society where paintings, photographs, and electronic
images depend on one another for their meanings” (Sturken &
Cartwright, 2001, pgs. 10-11). The cultural formations we inhabit have
become intensified, saturated by visual images with a multitude of purposes
and intended effects. After initially engaging a moderate amount of
visual culture theory (e.g., Johnson, 2003), I now more clearly see
and understand the personal links to visual culture in my professional
work across time, again, not unlike most of us in the early childhood
education field. Much like Spence’s (1988) critical work, Putting
myself in the picture, (1988) I too wish to “reconfigure…[so
that] out of the broken pieces of the self will come a subjectivity
that acknowledges the fragmentation process, but [that] encompasses
and embraces the parts and brings them into dialogue with each other"
(Spence, 1988, p.66). My interests here and elsewhere are very much
aligned with critically engaging “constructions of the body in
a variety of other discourses and analyze the construction of my own
identity through photographic images” (Dykstra, 1995, p. 7)