Positionality and Rats

The point is that the packaging of an idea should not dismiss it, rather than that packaging alone might justify an idea.

You may be noticing that I enjoy using Disney movies to pepper my writing. It's because I totally love watching Disney. Also, illustrative examples with cute animals = yes.



Remy, the rat, prepares amazing cuisine in the movie Ratatoulle.  The moral of the movie as presented by third wave feminists would be that we should accept opinions and frameworks because of the disadvantaged position of those who speak them.

However, that's not actually the moral of the movie.

Remy is not allowed to present trash as cuisine simply because he is a rat. Nor is he allowed to skip basic hygiene in the kitchen. Remy's disadvantaged position doesn't gain him respect in the kitchen.

Linguini (the main human with a large nose and very red hair) doesn't have his cooking respected just because he's a lowly kitchen boy who has just lost his mother. In fact, Linguini is chastised for getting self important and believing that his opinion should be respected simply due to his reputation.

Rather the injustice is that Remy's passion and talent at preparing complex delicious food are not recognized because of who he is. Opinions, viewpoints, and - in this case - food, have to be held up to rigor and standards before being accepted and consumed. Remy's food needs to be judged by the harsh food critic, held up to a rigorous standard outside of Remy's disadvantaged status. The narrative arc isn't complete until the critic has both analyzed Remy's cooking and accepted him despite his rat-status.

I often find an insult buried in the third wave suggestion that disadvantaged people shouldn't be held up to this sort of heavy critique we expect of academics or other privileged people. Our work and our intellect are just as capable and honestly our work can stand up to honest and academic criticism. Suggesting that our ideas will flop over at the measliest criticism seems to underestimate the strength and integrity of marginalized people's minds and theory. In fact, I've found that the grounding of struggle leads to much better theory than ivory tower navel gazers.

We can all learn a little from rats that teach themselves to cook.

Art Commissions

I'm opening myself up to do art commissions!



If you'd like to see my general art style you can view multiple pieces at my tumblr art blog, ariapluscat.



I'm a college undergraduate taking an extra semester to graduate due to medical issues. Commissions would support my living costs as a student at MIT. I'm hoping to work as a conservator once I graduate, pursuing a secondary degree.

[caption id="attachment_623" align="alignnone" width="225"] Oil Painting[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_784" align="alignnone" width="224"] Full Color Illustration[/caption]

Aria Plus Cat
Art Commission Price List				Summer 2015
Label	Type	Description	Flat Cost	Price per Hour
S1	Pencil Sketch	Sketch on sketch book paper sized 8 x 11 sheet, pencil	$10	$10.00
S2	Inked Sketch	Sketch on sketch book paper, sized 8 x 11, pencil with Micron archival ink	$20	$10.00
S3	Colored Sketch	Sketch colored on sketch book paper sized 8 x 11, pencil with colored pencil	$20	$10.00
F1	Ink and Flat color Illustration	Illustration, on heavy paper sized 8 x 11 (or as requested), Micron archival ink with either Prisma color or colored pencil	$30	$15.00
F2	Ink and Full color Illustration	Illustration, on heavy paper sized 8 x 11 (or as requested), Micron archival ink with either Prisma color or colored pencil	$40	$15.00
PA	Acrylic Painting	Acrylic painting on flat canvas	$50	$15.00
PO	Oil Paintin	Oil painting on mounted and stretched canvas	$100	$200.00

If you would like to order a commission over the summer, please let me know. Comment or email me at ariapluscat@gmail.com.

I would ask you a few questions, mainly if you had an idea for the composition, any references you wished to provide, your expectations for price and time for the project.

Once we had agreed on taking on the project, I would let you know how long to expect for the project to complete - most likely a week from when I begin with a queue in order of contact.

Dorm Advice: Summer Storage

Are you moving out for the summer? If it's your first year, it might be difficult to know what to do with your room full of stuff. Or you may want advice as a senior on how to get your things to your new home.

Read more for advice on summer storage!

Sorting

First, sort you things into three piles: "Things you take with you," "Things to leave here," and "Things to get rid of."

"Things to take with you"

Make sure that you have all the clothes you need for the summer with you along with any things you use regularly. Sort out your expensive electronics along with their chargers.

These are the sorts of things that I start to pack into my luggage: expensive, irreplaceable items and items I will need immediately. I try to limit myself to one checked bag and one carry on. I place the expensive or irreplaceable things in the carry on.

The other run over items in this pile goes into large cardboard boxes which I mail to my home. You can either purchase large boxes or ask the post office for free ones.

"Things to get rid of"

Offer your "Things to get rid of" pile to friends. A good end of the year get together is clothes swap. You can also have an event like this for your floor.

If you're looking for some extra cash, see if you can sell any old things to a consignment shop. Consider holding on to old textbooks until the start of the next term since there's higher prices and more interest then.

Take the left over items from "Things to get rid of" to a Goodwill or other donation center.

"Things to leave here"

Ask your dorm or house manager if there's storage space in your dorm or on campus.

If you have friends or family in the area, see if they can store your things.

The final option is professional storage. Check with upperclass men to find out which storage centers are reputable. Also, see if there is a student discount or coupon available.

Choice

But the authoritarianism of this tradition is cloaked most effectively in the power of the marketplace to make it seem freely chosen. Choice is an American article of faith (as the vocabulary of the abortion debate shows; even antiabortion activists use the rhetoric of choice); and we exercise choice, or enjoy the illusion of it, primarily in the marketplace. We choose from myriad brands of toothpaste and paper towels in the belief that they differ and reflect our own desires. We choose personal development experts, absorbing their maxims and techniques and making them our own. (via)

The question here is how we can both a) believe in choice as an inherent good and additionally b) whether one can be fooled into believing that choice exists when it does not?

Let's tackle these questions separately.

Is choice an inherent good?

[caption id="attachment_741" align="alignnone" width="300"] Asuka making a choice via[/caption]

Choice is not an inherent good. I think this seems most obvious when people are asked to choose between two negative outcomes. Commodification is encouraged when making these decisions.

The choice maker is asked to measure the value of one person's suffering against another person's.

Of course, such a measurement is impossible. To attempt to quantify suffering is an exercise that devalues the strength of the relationships between the person making the choice and the people who face the outcome of that choice. Emotions and harms cannot be balanced against each other, certainly not by fallible human agents.

Let's apply this to a feminist issue.

Sex selection during pregnancy

Societies value male babies over female babies, as they value males over females throughout all levels of society. Due to this, societies have allowed parents to utilize technology to peer into the womb to determine the sex of the fetus. Once the sex is determined, couples may choose to terminate female fetuses.

In determining the sex of the fetus, the ability to make a choice is not an inherent good. Determining the sex of the fetus propagates the commodification of the child as an object-commodity that the father-patriarch may exert control over. The choice is enabled by the father-patriarch's control over the female body and reproductive labor with the assistance of patriarchal medical institutions.

Even attempting to determine the sex of the child before birth allows the family to prepare greater lengths of socialization into the sex-ascribed role of masculine or feminine.

In the standard view, rational choice is defined to mean the process of determining what options are available and then choosing the most preferred one according to some consistent criterion. In a certain sense, this rational choice model is already an optimization-based approach. (Into to Choice Theory)

Choice is not an inherent good. Feminists need to move beyond neo-liberal choice ideology and the traditional rational-choice theory founded by Adam Smith. Choice is not an article of faith for feminists: our sisters and mothers realized the efforts campaigned against us to circumscribe and delimit our choices.

Can one be fooled into believing a choice exists when it does not?

Yes, of course.

Enjoy the illusion of [choice], primarily in the marketplace. We choose from myriad brands of toothpaste and paper towels in the belief that they differ and reflect our own desires. We choose personal development experts, absorbing their maxims and techniques and making them our own. (via)

First, we must consider how the marketplace comes to exist. Are we able to exist outside of the marketplace? Are countries coerced into entering capitalistic free-market exchanges? How does the history of colonialization affect the degree of choice nations have in the market place relationships?



Secondly, we must consider the individual choices. Colonialization, slavery, and economic disenfranchisement pull back the veneer of choice from economic relationships.

Even those who own enough economic capital to make choices will quickly find that the choice between brands is itself an illusion.

Brand: Illusion of Choice

Although there appear to be hundreds of brands in the supermarket aisle, the reality is that these are the many arms of a few large entities.

And finally, the absorption of these choices from preset options is a rejection of identity development.

The self-help tradition has always been covertly authoritarian and conformist, relying as it does on a mystique of expertise, encouraging people to look outside themselves for standardized instructions on how to be, teaching us that different people with different problems can easily be saved by the same techniques. It is anathema to independent thought. [...] We should worry about the willingness of so many to believe that the answers to existential questions can be encapsulated in the portentous pronouncements of bumper-sticker books.

A harsh reality is that these answers cannot be encapsulated. Even if the could, part of the value of these answers is found in the process of discovering the answer.

Summer Goals

[caption id="attachment_762" align="alignnone" width="352"] Look at my happy summer time face with Prilla![/caption]

I can't believe that summer is actually here. Finally, the snow is gone and the sun is coming back up! I finished packing up all of my winter clothes. Very late in the year for the temperature shift, but here we are at last. My plants are growing faster, full leaves and thirsty roots.

With summer and good weather brightening my day, I feel refreshed and rejuvenated to do more. There's something about things growing for the first time in months that makes me want to grow as a person too. Not to mention that I have far more free time without semester work taking up my time. Homework somehow manages to take up an infinite number of hours - just expands to take as much time as you'll give it or spend procrastinating. Without the extreme stress and yo-yo of responsibility, I want to lay out a few goals for the next couple of sunny months. 





I want to work on some of my side projects. Throughout the semester I've been thinking and turning over ideas, ruminating really on what I want to do as creative outlets. Now is the time to take action on those goals! Planning means nothing if you don't put the ideas into action.

1. Improve blogging


2. Promote blogging


3. Begin Youtube (again)


4. Paint more

I don't want to put too much pressure on myself as far as creative projects. Often that ends up stymying me and putting me at a complete stand still. But also, I need to force myself to continue working on these aspects of my skills. Without external pressure or motivation, I struggle to complete projects. Learning to apply myself for my own sake is a really important skill.

As far as my summer work, I'm continuing the project from last summer on Japanese prints.

1. Data Analysis


2. Edit previous writing


3. Complete thesis work


4. Cultural Anthropology component

I hope that you too can have a lovely and productive summer! Especially in working on yourself and your creative impulses and projects! We can share our progress as the months go on.

Disease in Dorms: How to stay healthy

Dorms tend to be vectors of disease. MIT dorm Next house recently had to email out about several cases of food poisoning/stomach bugs. Mono is a common disease in colleges, not just because of kissing but also due to the sharing of unwashed (or insufficiently washed) eating utensils. Colds, flus, stomach bugs: these sorts of viruses love the life of a barely washed underfed overstressed college student. Most dorms will have mice. Many of the MIT frats have issues with bed bugs. I hope that you're beginning to get the idea:

• It's easy to get sick in a dorm because things are dirty and gross

I've also written about dorm pests in the kitchen and how to store your food safely in a dorm.

Not only that but people don't take care of themselves:

• stressed


• under fed


• few fruits and veggies


• lots of junk food/ take out


• sleep deprived


• lots of travel


• exposure to lots of people

i think we all know the trope of the student during finals week who hasn't showered and barely subsists on redbull and ramen.



But!

I'm really going to encourage you to eat well and rest well while at college. All of those items in the list are risk factors for getting seriously sick. 

Trust me when I say that taking care of yourself will provide exponential returns.

Homework: Border Patrol Piece

So this is basically documentation on a homework assignment I had for an MIT class. I figure that some people are probably curious about what classes at MIT are like, espcially non-engineering classes since people don't talk about them as much.

21A.445/WGS.272  Slavery and Human Trafficking is a Women and Genders Studies class as well as an Anthropology class, making it a social sciences class.

[caption id="attachment_731" align="alignnone" width="365"] 21A.445/WGS.272 Slavery and Human Trafficking[/caption]

The assignment description was as follows:

Weekly Memo Topic: What is border policing? In addition to your written response, produce a creative response: drawing, poem, music, Vine, Storify, photos, etc. The creative response should be something you can produce in under 15 minutes.

Basically I wanted to make our teacher have to 'enforce' a border. I really don't know what the experience of patrolling or enforcing a border would be like. So I wanted to make someone else have that experience, maybe the discomfort of it or even being desensitized from the violence inherent.

[caption id="attachment_726" align="alignnone" width="225"] Making of[/caption]

So I took a piece of water color paper and made a kind of earth painting with water colors. I tried to use a little salt but I don't think it went very well. Then I cut the paper along a diagonal and sewed the piece back together with a green embroidery thread. This probably took 5 minutes.

I turned the piece it self into my teacher along with brining a pair of scissors. She had said that an image of the piece would've been sufficient which no.

the image of the object is not the object

[caption id="attachment_727" align="alignnone" width="225"] What I turned in: Piece + Scissors. Instructions: "Cut the string."[/caption]

I gave this to her - piece and scissors - and told her to cut the string. The instructions were also on the back of the piece. She asked me a couple of questions and I kept repeating the instruction. I didn't want to give her any extra information or reassurance about enforcing the border.



Once she started cutting the string, she asked me fewer questions. She hesitated a couple times when she first started cutting the string, but she ended up cutting all of the string. At the end, there were the two pieces of paper separated with the cut string bits still in each piece.



And that's what I turned in! While she completed the piece I took photos of the process.

We met in small groups and discussed our creative pieces.

Disucssion

I feel pretty satisfied with what I made. I think that I gave her an experience. I also had the experience of sewing the piece together which made watching her cut the piece a little saddening.

[caption id="attachment_732" align="alignnone" width="273"] Interviews with Border Patrol Agents - Chet Wilson and Jim Runyan[/caption]

I think that it would've been more helpful if I'd framed the piece, took the framing apart in front of her, and then asked her to cut the string. The finished piece would be to turn in the whole de-assembled piece in her care.

Alternatively, including her comments about participating would've added something to the piece. This was while we were reading interviews with border patrol agents. Including an interview with her in a similar formatting seemed a bit excessive at the time, but I think that it would've been an illustrative capture of the moment to include with the piece.

As a performance piece, I don't think you could really replicate the piece. I do think that you could replicate the experience and the learning involved in being asked to enforce a border. More participants would've complicated the piece and opened more possibilities.



I'm including this as the class is ending since I didn't want to "spoil" anyone for it who might be in the class. Do people enjoy hearing about MIT classes or the work I do for them?