IDEAL WOMEN?

As my "Women in Literature" class draws to an end and I collect and read final papers, I keep thinking how much I love it when--to quote the A-Team of long ago--a plan comes together. I especially love it when the "plan" comes together in unexpected ways, as it did this summer. As I told the class, I see teaching as JAZZ--there's a basic melody there, but as good musicians improvise and you get the call and response thing going, share the stage, etc. something intricate and beautiful happens, and we all get a perspective--a syncopation--unique to that particular gathering of individual voices. I have never used the Carol Gilligan retelling of the "Cupid and Psyche" myth before, so it amazed me when Venus reappeared in a Lennard Davis disability studies essay, just as I was pulling together all the threads for my final lecture. Davis points out that art critics gloss over the flaws of the Venus de Milo statue, yet we avert our eyes from suggestions of eroticism in the life of a real woman with disabilities, much as a student panel noted about a character with a mutilated face in the novel Invisible Monsters. Davis sets up a binary between Venus and Medusa. So I added their pictures to my blog, along with one of Rosie the Riveter. Maybe I need to link one of the 19th Century African American Sojourner Truth, too, who asked when told that women needed to be taken care of by men, "Aren't I a woman?" baring her muscular arm. Judith Butler, Susan Bordo, et al. write from a woman's perspective about issues of the body, similar to those Davis considers. So as I move into planning for the Fall Semester, which starts sooner than we are ready, I start with all these ideas in mind, and we'll see where the JAZZ takes my theory classes!