Bright and early Sunday morning I'm eating breakfast and thinking about Foucault. I can imagine a range of responses: "Who?" wonders the lucky person who's not familiar with this 20th century philosopher; "Why?" wonder others, who are.Before a couple of weeks ago my only exposure to anybody named Foucault was in reading a novel called Foucault's Pendulum while I was pregnant with my first child, a book that so annoyed me that I mostly abjured philosophy thereafter. (She's 21 years old now, that baby.)
Never mind the Foucault in Umberto Eco's title is a different man–a physicist and not a philosopher. The author of the novel was a philosopher. If philosophy could be so obtuse and impenetrable in fiction, why on earth should I subject myself to it otherwise?
Years later, encouraged by my then-colleague Kim Johnson, I attempted to read Jostein Gaarder's novel Sophie's World, a young adult book on the history of philosophy. I got about halfway through it. I found it tough going–and this was a children's book, mind you. I settled for the intellectually lazy compromise of at least knowing the names of famous classical philosophers–though I stopped short of dropping those names in conversation.
I tend to stick to contemporary philosophers like Garfunkle and Oates, Kat Williams, Chris Rock, and of course Dave Chapelle. That's the kind of philosophising I can get behind. I occasionally read some Alice Walker and bell hooks (sic), maybe some Nancy Friday and Gloria Steinem too, just to keep things interesting.
Now I'm reading for my master's–and as my friend Sterling pointed out, it really is reading for a master's, as one spends all one's time reading–I'm being forced to go beyond a nodding acquaintance with those by and large dead white men of classical philosophy and their ideas about the world.
Michel Foucault, for instance, is considered one of the foremost theorists on sexuality. The text I'm reading for Thursday's class is his History of Sexuality Vol I: An Introduction. Apart from having to look up words about every other page ("asymptotic", "concatenation", "phthises", for example), I also find myself annoyed at his generally smug attitude to history, the Church, psychology, medicine and everything else he associates with our attitudes to sex and sexuality.
Additionally, I find myself annoyed with myself for an entirely different reason: now that I've started reading philosophy–even if it is obtuse and scary–I can't unsee it. Moving through the world for the past two weeks since I started my studies towards this master's in gender, I've found my vision coloured entirely by the feminist theory and traditional philosophy I'm reading.
Watching TV I note Foucault's confessional as well as feminist interventions in shows like The Mindy Project and The Mysteries of Laura.But Mindy is too intellectual, and Laura is done too soon. I change to watching Dancing with the Stars–for the first time in my life, I might add. I thought it was the ideal counteragent to Foucault.
But no. Instead, I am fascinated by the gender roles played out in the couples' dances. In a rhumba a woman slaps a man and I'm taken straight to considering the NFL couple Ray and Janay Rice and how it is socially okay for a woman to hit a man but never okay for a man to hit back. I think about the politics of abuse, and about commentators who have criticised the media for showing the video of the brutal knockout in the elevator. They say it impinges on Janay Rice's privacy and ought not to be shown.
I think about power and strength and choices and traps and the allure of "the bigger picture" of keeping a marriage together at all costs.Thinking about gender inequity is something I routinely do. But I wished I was able on Saturday night to take off those gender x-ray glasses to be able to just mindlessly enjoy some celebrities of dubious origin waltzing and tangoing without trying to analyse their every step as a gender performance.
I suppose this will be my fate for the next two to three years as I read through a mountain of theory, both classical and contemporary. I might as well reconcile myself to it now: this is what academics do. If I'm going to be one, this is what is going to happen. I just hope I never use the word concatenation in this column.