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Personal Poetics and Perceptual Filters
May. 12th, 2008 | 09:15 am
People consume what feeds needs. There's a theory of natural food that I can't attest to the truth of, or contest, but flies like this: your body will say eat until you get the nutrition. High carb, high sugar food rebounds you into more desire for more food because these tend to be low-nutrient food. If you eat high nutrition food, you body senses that and turns off or down the appetite and hunger. You don't need volume necessarily. You need roughage but that's another issue.
To bring to poetry, people seem to cleave poetry apart from communication. As if one could make good poetry without making good communication. Good communication is not the same as good oratory, clear, persuasive, leading, verbal, articulate. Communication is broader, and poetry is broader than these simple rules of on the table narrative with social aims.
Communication is as much as words to share physical postures, breathing rates, focus of attention, is to dump so much data that there is no way to pick thru one narrative thread. This overload can also be good communication. The brain stores all. Unconsciously we pick up on the emotional intent, the thick data.
Good communication narrowly defined as unambiguous purpose and connotations, Plain English, simple amount of data, is well intentioned but not complete.
To bring from food and communication to poetry, the crux of irritation (the crotch of irk from OE?) is this dividing into camps of what constitutes good poetry and good communication.
Good is always self-referential. i.e. good as defined according to the opinions and needs of the speaker. I know. It needn't be unpacked. Anything spoken is an opinion of the speaker. Yet.
The background binary absolutes lurk in there. Unqualified "bad" makes me antsy. Even tho I can train myself to say, there's something which absolutely missed the mark of my heart, so that I sputter of its vacuousness, or whatever. Or good rant how its bullseyed me. Still I want to bring myself back to the purpose of the poetry's creation. It is not a speech act in isolation to be tied to a measuring tape. It did something internal for the poet and is completed, if not with me, then maps to someone else's incomplete map to evoke completion.
I suppose I'm an infernal relativist, still fleeing by knee jerks my own history of fundamentalism and youthful absolutism.
Where I'm aiming to go with this is finding the underlying. What internal and external drives bring a poet to feel fulfilled by a poem? What itch is scratched for the reader who appreciates it? That would have to be answered by imagination and/or by projecting motivations.
My bias is that poetry is done a) psychologically to counterbalance inner and outer forces b) sociolinguistically c) to close an information gap.
First c) If everyone gets "it", "it" is not said. I suppose if one feels something is utterly critical and pivotal and exciting and those immediately around find it blase, one could use poetry to outlet the scale of fervor in a more satisfying way. Basically, if some angle is perceived not to get enough attention, poetry could be used to draw attention to this facet of life.
b) If something is perceived to be commonly understood, one doesn't tend to try to also reinforce the idea in poetry unless one is not speaking except to reinforce tribe, as phatic speech, as in-group reinforcement.
If one can freely say something (how and what one wants, to the level of elaboration and exploration one wants) in daily normal conversations, there would be no need to formalize into written verse, unless one wants to reiterate for wider dissemination. Then poetry is oratory, a different kind of speech act, a different kind of sharing. It is for broadcast not in order to think or provoke critical thought nor to record personal or general or natural history.
With this last aspect, a) we return to the idea of feeding on what nourishes, sating and comforting what itches. People write to comfort or excite themselves. To say this, overgeneralizes the practice of the world what I do but also is an observation. Those who are too emotional for their own comfort, write to wrestle control. Those who are tense, try to cultivate their own flow. Poets tend to be "into" self-development, self-discovery, not stasis.
You have to watch to know which direction a person is going. Self-agitating further, self-calming further or moving from agitated to calm or bored to agitated. Which requires observation and judgement and leaps from the opposite direction of faith into observing without deciding.
When overwhelmed with emotion and life, write to calm. When most anxious, write of trees, in simple closed forms, like haiku. The constraint adds balance of controllable finite measurable. It does not come from a mind that is calm and bored. A mind which is calm and bored and overly ordered seeks to balance itself in poetry that is random, chaotic, emotionally pushing.
Poetry is in effect a coping mechanism. Those are dangerous things to meddle with. Or perhaps holy.
If someone says to me, god healed my child, I do not reply, you poor deluded sap, there is no god and your child is not normal still. That would be cruel and ineffective, or worse, effective as kicking someone's cane away, crushing to that soul, and because to cause pain injures the person who causes, self-inflicting a wound at the same time.
We each have our own canes and our own infirmities and the parent of the child may as validly turn to me with as much pity and say to me you are the lost one who complicates life with torment preparing for hell torment when instead you could give up restlessness and meaningless thrash and trust in God.
Mutual pity gains for neither. Mutual disrespect and the idea that each has mutually exclusive worlds does not gain either. A sense of not passive compassion but to get into that which underlies the other and truly see the other is not the end of communication but the beginning.
From that idea of opposing world views, I take away the idea that to criticize another person's angle of poetry as too staid, or too chaotic is to criticize, not only the style, and choices of the poet, but to avert one's eyes from the other side of the drama mask, that which one can imply.
To say a kind a poetry is bad, is to not see the person and purpose for the poetry. Yes, we want to strive to make art and each is at a different stage in dexterity. But before the level or art or artistry there is communication. If I get or don't get the poetry, that is one thing but more important than receptivity, or having the hooks I need to catch what yarns were looped, is to be receptive to the person behind the words. What is the intent. What systems formed and informed the person that these words would convey what needed to be conveyed? What is behind and between the lines?
If there is a uniform mandate for peace, that does not speak of peace. That speaks of self-talk attempting to create peace. Silence speaks of noise as any binary makes its opposite exist.
Kelli related how Mary Oliver said
It reminds me of Normal Rockwell's statements on himself.
Rockwell is dismissed as saccharine or commercial and he recognized that he was doing a profitable performance to the machine of manufactured innocence that people wanted to consume. Why did they? Because they had too much innocence? Or too little? All is always a response. Mapping what responds to who gives a fuller understanding.
Rockwell's sanitized views were also a coping mechanism, a disavowal that is psychological protection.
To take that spin is to stand where it is raw. It is a disappointment really, just as everyone believes their family may have problems but out there, there is a family with no issues and one is deprived of that platonic ideal. To find more examples of "them too" is a sad thing and yet grounds one into a sense of community that allows one to not feel oneself so precious and separate but come to an adult place where others, even those you respect and those you think less than youself, if you get enough data, average out to be your equal. It is the diappointment of everyone putting on pants, one leg at a time. It breaks the illusion of tribe. It challenges one to have to care for more people when already one cares for too many. It forces the position of not trying to paternalism one another. It flattens the flatteries and hierarchies and dramas. But since we love our drama, the sand castles and kingdoms of territories begin again.
It is easier to think of places one should not or cannot go than to embrace complete freedom. One wants to be led to right or wrong and to be in the right, which by nature of binary forces the construction of someone in the wrong. It is a by-product of the structure of our monkey brain.
To play in the sandbox and move from sandbox to beach and back allows the reinforcement of the humbling idea that absolutes exist, relatively. Loyalties exist. Logics exist. And are local and informed by pattern and chaos. Underneath the teem, there are teams and there are real visceral reactions and there is fluff. Either may be taken seriously or lightly and to interpret either way is to be accurate because all things are in all things. This is humbling and sometimes to be humbled is counterproductive and breaks momentum to poor effect. Sometimes to be aware is to understand and sometimes one awareness blocks another essential thing.
Disavowal allows a distance of coping with one another. To be with one another at the point of source of need is intimate, unsustainably intense. The dance back to obscure in beauty or in cleverness, in polish, in folksy, is to give each other and ourselves a break from the real issues that underlie and underline the words.
To loop back to that book on Norman Rockwell by Richard Halpern,
We don't need to fill in the drama when we make a poem of peace because the context of these times is what is being responded to. It is already in the context of daily pains and tumult. It is a counterpoint not an isolated point which denies its own background. Likewise, by extension, a poem that directly engages with "Political" does not deny there is a place by the weeping willow, even if it does not mention it. It does not deny the bird flight by neglecting or insisting on not referencing it. We naturally draw in what is not there. Or I do.
If one takes a pencil and draws the negative spaces of around a chair, a chair appears, not in detail, but in form. If one takes a text that never references women, their absence says something of the role and value. To one person that absent weight may be taken for granted as too blissful non-issue, to make note of, and another may fill in the gap with denigration and dismissal.
Rockwell’s era seems like a more innocent time than ours, however, this has a good deal to do with the innocence industry, which disseminated its products on a massive scale and spawned a subsulture that reacted against the prevailing, or felt itself to be rebelling by asserting the normalacy of subversion of its own existence.
What is the industry of manufactured themes, preselecting now? Of danger, of change, of flux, of differences, of news, in itself a overstatement of one aspect of reality as much as the prevailing good old days. Would not to speak of peace and nature pastoral be the shape of subersion now? It is a reaction against he contemporary with an attempt to grasp the timeless when being timely is heavily played. A standard is that we must be clever. We must not reiterate anything that came before. We must not be derivative, but instead exist in after a gap, like the Jetsons of poetry, rigorously new as the Flintstones, keeping the functions by new mechanisms to do the same things.
To follow a trend is to game, or game against. That can only last as amusement so long. One must respond not to what is external, in society or, in poetics, but to inner needs.
What is it that one wishes to balance? There is no gain or remuneration except what pleasure one gives oneself. The rewards are psychological.
If one is whittling away at pastoral or gesturing in cutting edge in any number of pointed knives directions, one ultimately serves oneself. What is it that one wants to say. If people who are around to receive the style of saying and support that, it would be heard in the time of speaking. If people are closed, by mismatch of psychological needs, or lack of parallel reading to understand a stylistic, then the poetry is self-talk exclusively. Which is also fine. Progress towards refinement may be harder since any refinement is towards one of the multiple models of what refined looks like, the perfect balanced amount of unpacking meaning into the consensual length of explicitness and control and length and density.
Without a community of consent or debate, one still has the fixed set of communications of what is recorded, but the not the social set of thick data of layers of years of debate of how that communication was understood. Still, one can not help but attempt to react, respond, cause action and pondering. It is the human condition.
To bring to poetry, people seem to cleave poetry apart from communication. As if one could make good poetry without making good communication. Good communication is not the same as good oratory, clear, persuasive, leading, verbal, articulate. Communication is broader, and poetry is broader than these simple rules of on the table narrative with social aims.
Communication is as much as words to share physical postures, breathing rates, focus of attention, is to dump so much data that there is no way to pick thru one narrative thread. This overload can also be good communication. The brain stores all. Unconsciously we pick up on the emotional intent, the thick data.
Good communication narrowly defined as unambiguous purpose and connotations, Plain English, simple amount of data, is well intentioned but not complete.
To bring from food and communication to poetry, the crux of irritation (the crotch of irk from OE?) is this dividing into camps of what constitutes good poetry and good communication.
Good is always self-referential. i.e. good as defined according to the opinions and needs of the speaker. I know. It needn't be unpacked. Anything spoken is an opinion of the speaker. Yet.
The background binary absolutes lurk in there. Unqualified "bad" makes me antsy. Even tho I can train myself to say, there's something which absolutely missed the mark of my heart, so that I sputter of its vacuousness, or whatever. Or good rant how its bullseyed me. Still I want to bring myself back to the purpose of the poetry's creation. It is not a speech act in isolation to be tied to a measuring tape. It did something internal for the poet and is completed, if not with me, then maps to someone else's incomplete map to evoke completion.
I suppose I'm an infernal relativist, still fleeing by knee jerks my own history of fundamentalism and youthful absolutism.
Where I'm aiming to go with this is finding the underlying. What internal and external drives bring a poet to feel fulfilled by a poem? What itch is scratched for the reader who appreciates it? That would have to be answered by imagination and/or by projecting motivations.
My bias is that poetry is done a) psychologically to counterbalance inner and outer forces b) sociolinguistically c) to close an information gap.
First c) If everyone gets "it", "it" is not said. I suppose if one feels something is utterly critical and pivotal and exciting and those immediately around find it blase, one could use poetry to outlet the scale of fervor in a more satisfying way. Basically, if some angle is perceived not to get enough attention, poetry could be used to draw attention to this facet of life.
b) If something is perceived to be commonly understood, one doesn't tend to try to also reinforce the idea in poetry unless one is not speaking except to reinforce tribe, as phatic speech, as in-group reinforcement.
If one can freely say something (how and what one wants, to the level of elaboration and exploration one wants) in daily normal conversations, there would be no need to formalize into written verse, unless one wants to reiterate for wider dissemination. Then poetry is oratory, a different kind of speech act, a different kind of sharing. It is for broadcast not in order to think or provoke critical thought nor to record personal or general or natural history.
With this last aspect, a) we return to the idea of feeding on what nourishes, sating and comforting what itches. People write to comfort or excite themselves. To say this, overgeneralizes the practice of the world what I do but also is an observation. Those who are too emotional for their own comfort, write to wrestle control. Those who are tense, try to cultivate their own flow. Poets tend to be "into" self-development, self-discovery, not stasis.
You have to watch to know which direction a person is going. Self-agitating further, self-calming further or moving from agitated to calm or bored to agitated. Which requires observation and judgement and leaps from the opposite direction of faith into observing without deciding.
When overwhelmed with emotion and life, write to calm. When most anxious, write of trees, in simple closed forms, like haiku. The constraint adds balance of controllable finite measurable. It does not come from a mind that is calm and bored. A mind which is calm and bored and overly ordered seeks to balance itself in poetry that is random, chaotic, emotionally pushing.
Poetry is in effect a coping mechanism. Those are dangerous things to meddle with. Or perhaps holy.
If someone says to me, god healed my child, I do not reply, you poor deluded sap, there is no god and your child is not normal still. That would be cruel and ineffective, or worse, effective as kicking someone's cane away, crushing to that soul, and because to cause pain injures the person who causes, self-inflicting a wound at the same time.
We each have our own canes and our own infirmities and the parent of the child may as validly turn to me with as much pity and say to me you are the lost one who complicates life with torment preparing for hell torment when instead you could give up restlessness and meaningless thrash and trust in God.
Mutual pity gains for neither. Mutual disrespect and the idea that each has mutually exclusive worlds does not gain either. A sense of not passive compassion but to get into that which underlies the other and truly see the other is not the end of communication but the beginning.
From that idea of opposing world views, I take away the idea that to criticize another person's angle of poetry as too staid, or too chaotic is to criticize, not only the style, and choices of the poet, but to avert one's eyes from the other side of the drama mask, that which one can imply.
To say a kind a poetry is bad, is to not see the person and purpose for the poetry. Yes, we want to strive to make art and each is at a different stage in dexterity. But before the level or art or artistry there is communication. If I get or don't get the poetry, that is one thing but more important than receptivity, or having the hooks I need to catch what yarns were looped, is to be receptive to the person behind the words. What is the intent. What systems formed and informed the person that these words would convey what needed to be conveyed? What is behind and between the lines?
If there is a uniform mandate for peace, that does not speak of peace. That speaks of self-talk attempting to create peace. Silence speaks of noise as any binary makes its opposite exist.
Kelli related how Mary Oliver said
First question "How did you come into writing poetry? " The answer was that her life wasn't perfect and "I needed another world than what I was living in...the world of nature, the world of poetry...
It reminds me of Normal Rockwell's statements on himself.
If there was sadness in this created world of mine, it was a pleasant sadness. If there were problems, they were humorous problems. The people in my pictures aren’t mentally ill or deformed [Rockwell’s wife Mary was suffering from clinical depression, and his mom alcoholic and a "slattern" Halpern relates]. The situations they get into are commonplace, everyday situations, not the agonizing crises and tangles of life.
Rockwell is dismissed as saccharine or commercial and he recognized that he was doing a profitable performance to the machine of manufactured innocence that people wanted to consume. Why did they? Because they had too much innocence? Or too little? All is always a response. Mapping what responds to who gives a fuller understanding.
Rockwell's sanitized views were also a coping mechanism, a disavowal that is psychological protection.
To take that spin is to stand where it is raw. It is a disappointment really, just as everyone believes their family may have problems but out there, there is a family with no issues and one is deprived of that platonic ideal. To find more examples of "them too" is a sad thing and yet grounds one into a sense of community that allows one to not feel oneself so precious and separate but come to an adult place where others, even those you respect and those you think less than youself, if you get enough data, average out to be your equal. It is the diappointment of everyone putting on pants, one leg at a time. It breaks the illusion of tribe. It challenges one to have to care for more people when already one cares for too many. It forces the position of not trying to paternalism one another. It flattens the flatteries and hierarchies and dramas. But since we love our drama, the sand castles and kingdoms of territories begin again.
It is easier to think of places one should not or cannot go than to embrace complete freedom. One wants to be led to right or wrong and to be in the right, which by nature of binary forces the construction of someone in the wrong. It is a by-product of the structure of our monkey brain.
To play in the sandbox and move from sandbox to beach and back allows the reinforcement of the humbling idea that absolutes exist, relatively. Loyalties exist. Logics exist. And are local and informed by pattern and chaos. Underneath the teem, there are teams and there are real visceral reactions and there is fluff. Either may be taken seriously or lightly and to interpret either way is to be accurate because all things are in all things. This is humbling and sometimes to be humbled is counterproductive and breaks momentum to poor effect. Sometimes to be aware is to understand and sometimes one awareness blocks another essential thing.
Disavowal allows a distance of coping with one another. To be with one another at the point of source of need is intimate, unsustainably intense. The dance back to obscure in beauty or in cleverness, in polish, in folksy, is to give each other and ourselves a break from the real issues that underlie and underline the words.
To loop back to that book on Norman Rockwell by Richard Halpern,
"Repression therefore involves, for better or worse, a genuine renunciation. In disavowal, however, consciousness both retains and banishes something. It thereby allows itself to enjoy that forbidden thing on the sly while denying that it enjoys or knows it."
We don't need to fill in the drama when we make a poem of peace because the context of these times is what is being responded to. It is already in the context of daily pains and tumult. It is a counterpoint not an isolated point which denies its own background. Likewise, by extension, a poem that directly engages with "Political" does not deny there is a place by the weeping willow, even if it does not mention it. It does not deny the bird flight by neglecting or insisting on not referencing it. We naturally draw in what is not there. Or I do.
If one takes a pencil and draws the negative spaces of around a chair, a chair appears, not in detail, but in form. If one takes a text that never references women, their absence says something of the role and value. To one person that absent weight may be taken for granted as too blissful non-issue, to make note of, and another may fill in the gap with denigration and dismissal.
Rockwell’s era seems like a more innocent time than ours, however, this has a good deal to do with the innocence industry, which disseminated its products on a massive scale and spawned a subsulture that reacted against the prevailing, or felt itself to be rebelling by asserting the normalacy of subversion of its own existence.
What is the industry of manufactured themes, preselecting now? Of danger, of change, of flux, of differences, of news, in itself a overstatement of one aspect of reality as much as the prevailing good old days. Would not to speak of peace and nature pastoral be the shape of subersion now? It is a reaction against he contemporary with an attempt to grasp the timeless when being timely is heavily played. A standard is that we must be clever. We must not reiterate anything that came before. We must not be derivative, but instead exist in after a gap, like the Jetsons of poetry, rigorously new as the Flintstones, keeping the functions by new mechanisms to do the same things.
To follow a trend is to game, or game against. That can only last as amusement so long. One must respond not to what is external, in society or, in poetics, but to inner needs.
What is it that one wishes to balance? There is no gain or remuneration except what pleasure one gives oneself. The rewards are psychological.
If one is whittling away at pastoral or gesturing in cutting edge in any number of pointed knives directions, one ultimately serves oneself. What is it that one wants to say. If people who are around to receive the style of saying and support that, it would be heard in the time of speaking. If people are closed, by mismatch of psychological needs, or lack of parallel reading to understand a stylistic, then the poetry is self-talk exclusively. Which is also fine. Progress towards refinement may be harder since any refinement is towards one of the multiple models of what refined looks like, the perfect balanced amount of unpacking meaning into the consensual length of explicitness and control and length and density.
Without a community of consent or debate, one still has the fixed set of communications of what is recorded, but the not the social set of thick data of layers of years of debate of how that communication was understood. Still, one can not help but attempt to react, respond, cause action and pondering. It is the human condition.
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Gestural Observations and Gender
May. 12th, 2008 | 11:21 am
When would I know enough to say I am informed enough to say?
There are cases where I'd like to strip back individual histories, hierarchies based on mentorship of respect, length of time in field, purpose on the oratory thrust, and say hold on a minute, what just happened there in that speech act?
Can I get a replay there?
The words "I disagree with person Y" came from 2 different presenters.
In one case the words were spoken with a smile, chin up, shoulders moving back and downwards.
In one case the the words were spoken the presenter shrugged on the word disagree and put chin and eyes downwards, as if in apology.
Want to guess the genders of each person?
Is that unfair?
--
It's hard not to think in terms of team. I flared at that (presented second here and occurred in linear time second). She negated what she just said, the disagreement of body language is heard stronger than words.
One is not one's gender. It may be a "personality" thing, not related to gender and yet, how bang-on-characteristic is that behavior of a female?
I would have to do some hard number counting instances to correct or prove to my mind that I am not just confirming my bias.
Likewise with hand gesture. What happened there? Did it fall along gender lines?
--
I was not watching for gender but explicit content, but then that is how such things perpetuate, never being "the real subject", things not "being about" gender. The subconscious judgements are there at the back giving some weight.
--
Even if a male and female utter the same words, with the same body language, is the imposed perception of intent and weight the same? Can a male and female utter the same? Or pitch is enough of a shift to change idea of meaning? Or intonation? Written syntax can sidestep the gender of the author to a greater degree.
--
What existed in my perception? What distracted as a pattern?
For the gesture "open" a male opened his hands and they stayed at rest, the gesture formed and firm. A female flapped open, wrists loose and fingers waggling in a sort of stutter of emphasis.
Both effectively conveyed open.
What else did each convey? Only the gender of the speaker? Not that, but some emotional quality that was derived from the rhythms of speech of the larger utterance?
Are they variants that are gender neutral? Products of practiced performance versus nervousness? Some people when fatigued get more streamlined, more tight in body, others more frayed and ambiguous. Is this observed thing more a product of my fatigue than something about gender as practiced?
--
When doing the 3-4 poems a day in April I noticed more feminist themes coming out, more bitter angles. I have 3 explanations of sources for that.
1) that I had nothing to say so relied on easy junk society stuffs one with of generalizations of victim oppressions of female
2) as I scrape away the superficial, the core anger of being excluded and systemically minimized as female is what remains as most potent
3) when I push myself I get cranky and take a dark view of what is innocuous, forming angry patterns that cause adrenaline surge to create a quick energy to feel better by harvesting own hormonal cascades
This may relate to perception skew or perception accuracy.
--
Rather late in the game I noticed male and female presenters being introduced, with line of credits, but for males, the final word being and now, here he is: or here is Dr. so-and-so. The bios were consensually agreed on. By all means, say what you have achieved.
And yet, what to make of a couple females, unconsciously or consciously being introduced not just by that final gendered pronoun (of segue and further priming that our grammar does) nor by title of achievement, but by first name. Huh.
Wish I'd run the numbers over the nearly 40 introductions to get hard numbers on how that all broke down. Was it a very skewed pattern or did it just stick out in that case because I'm hypersensitive?
First name, it's friendly, it's approachable. It's what one is comfortable with. It in one case was because, I'd guess the presenter and host were colleagues and that is how they thought of one another, as first-name basis, equals. But, in formal introduction of papers, as the final words, even if all the earlier run down lists books and titles, the final word, what weight does that set up?
--
As I said, it's hard to not think in terms of team. Remembering the terms of male privilege as set out by B. Deutsch
It is sexist of me, and reinforces the sense of gender weight to even see another female's performance as impinging on what others will expect of me, yet, yet, yet.
People are not exclusively gendered, nor exclusively perceived at gendered but it modulates perception and display. We can't bow to it as the only factor. It may or may not be a swing vote in any case.
What I saw could coincide with or be causal to gender.
I wasn't watching for gender, just noticed it by the continual opposition to the one major female theorist and the general respect given to the various major male theorists. It's an idea thing, not related to the gender of the person behind the idea yet, yet, at least the female's ideas and name were being nearly as common as verbs in sentences. (yet, yet.)
--
I was primarily looking to grasp concepts and meanings and examples of the literal subjects.
There was essentially no interruptions to count. That is often a quick, handy measure of power dynamics, of who is permitted to interrupt who. Still, I wish I could have another accountant mind that was watching and running accurate tallies of
- What are the ratios of female: male speech?
- Does it fit into reckoning of presentation the amount of skin shown by each by gender?
- What is the body language attentiveness when male versus female speaks?
- What is the success of female in getting message thru, even acoustically, compared to male?
When one speaks with confidence as a female, there is still the baggage of being haughty. But so much moderates and modulates that general statement. In an academic environment, the norms of gender or released more. One is expected to speak the register that is not male or female but a stylistic or information before individuality. One is a genderless conduit.
--
Many male speakers used a larger box for communication, gesturing wider and higher and more in front than females who made smaller, abdominal flutters. The younger the female, the smaller the gestures. But, the younger the male, the smaller the gestures as well. Is it a matter of length of career? Or coloring of body language from communicative world outside academia?
The older the speaker, the more batonic the gesture to conduct meaning. The older the speaker, the more likely the person was to pause on grammatical syntax to parse breaks instead of on emphatic such as "such", "so" "exactly". Women and men seemed equally likely to use gesture that acted out the meaning, whether counting out sequences, showing travel from place to place or time to time or act out concepts like "inside" of fingers going into a cupped palm, or "showing" with a fingertips together flowering into open palm.
--
There were elements which were utterly gender neutral. The females who spoke, I got the impression of being able to hold their own on panels, being asked equal number of questions, being as engaged. In the audience females were as likely to speak as males. Were as likely to moderate questions. Were as likely to silence a room to start, although so far as presence, males were more likely to get a silent room by just standing behind a podium and females had to speak there to get silence. But I have no counts. Perhaps that's my impressionistic bias, and a matter of individuals. (who exist in gender).
--
Am I to quibble? Am I responding to present?
--
My own speech and postural habits are informed by what I feel I should do as a female. And doing the opposite on the continuum.
I spent time training myself to unlearn how to sit, walk, meet eyes. By religion and family and class I am to lower myself, take up minimal space. Quiet voice was praised because it is becoming to a female and the other roles of class and hierarchies. Voice coincides with gender and to a degree is related to gender as well. I could have taken that in any number of directions of obedience or resistances. My goal was to not be under the gun, but under the radar.
The rules and needs shift. Body habit shifts fairly slowly. It is a retraining of posture. I have traditionally braided my arms and legs to stand or sit. People with closed postures are hard people to communicate with. It is a good way to know when I feel insecure. My posture is my body talking to itself. Sometimes it snaps at itself as I suddenly groan and unfold all the crossed parts of body again. I have tried to minimize my space and insisted on sprawling. Both are the same dynamics. My box of speaking tends to be small. I have tried to widen this to mute the apology that smallness is.
--
I am not terribly conscious most of the time of how I present.
I can sometimes forget I am female, a delightful thing since so much of my baggage about females is not a Jane-in-the-Box bearing truffles and diplomas.
--
I have largely given up apologies littered thru my speech, and the default preamble of assuming I am bothering someone by speaking. It imposes a burden this habit.
--
Still my body language has self-consciousness and self-cancelling and statements that denigrate my own statements even as I speak. It makes my meanings cluttered and subtext is don't listen to me. Then I wonder why I am not heard.
--
Many women preamble with qualifying statements such as I don't know if this is important but...and weasel words that undercut their simple statements. Or women add more emotional loading, overstatements and spin to be more heard, but in effect gives a little boy blue effect so the subtext of threat is heard and the message of please listen to this thing which matters to me, is lost.
Instrumental speech then, is that inherently male? And richer thick text is more female or gender stereotypes and misjudgements inform the paragraph before.
--
When I have seen photos I'm often surprised by my default hunch.
I feel defensive and reactive when I set out to walk alone. Not during the walk itself, but the conceptualizing of it. In part because family, friends, strangers have warned me for years against going out after dark. Or offered to walk me. Why? What informs that? Something personal about me as mousy and unaware, that I took as particular offer given to any woman?
--
As a touchstone I remember in winter in Ottawa where walking an icy path by Craig Henry Drive, I scrambled out of the way of children and a dog. Likewise falling, tearing pants. Do I set myself so low that not only strangers who are adult but even dogs and children are higher than myself? I chastised myself in that moment and since.
If that memory doesn't serve enough, there is a counterpart walking in Joshua Tree National Park in California and stumbling off path to make way for people coming, falling and splitting the knee of jeans, assuming that the other needed me to move, that all the accommodation needed to be on my side.
--
When driving, driving tight with tight fists and shoulders makes for less motor control and less control of car. Oversteering causes accidents as well. To try to fit everything to a gender dynamic flattens data and write-off conceptual traffic that could could get us somewhere.
There are cases where I'd like to strip back individual histories, hierarchies based on mentorship of respect, length of time in field, purpose on the oratory thrust, and say hold on a minute, what just happened there in that speech act?
Can I get a replay there?
The words "I disagree with person Y" came from 2 different presenters.
In one case the words were spoken with a smile, chin up, shoulders moving back and downwards.
In one case the the words were spoken the presenter shrugged on the word disagree and put chin and eyes downwards, as if in apology.
Want to guess the genders of each person?
Is that unfair?
--
It's hard not to think in terms of team. I flared at that (presented second here and occurred in linear time second). She negated what she just said, the disagreement of body language is heard stronger than words.
One is not one's gender. It may be a "personality" thing, not related to gender and yet, how bang-on-characteristic is that behavior of a female?
I would have to do some hard number counting instances to correct or prove to my mind that I am not just confirming my bias.
Likewise with hand gesture. What happened there? Did it fall along gender lines?
--
I was not watching for gender but explicit content, but then that is how such things perpetuate, never being "the real subject", things not "being about" gender. The subconscious judgements are there at the back giving some weight.
--
Even if a male and female utter the same words, with the same body language, is the imposed perception of intent and weight the same? Can a male and female utter the same? Or pitch is enough of a shift to change idea of meaning? Or intonation? Written syntax can sidestep the gender of the author to a greater degree.
--
What existed in my perception? What distracted as a pattern?
For the gesture "open" a male opened his hands and they stayed at rest, the gesture formed and firm. A female flapped open, wrists loose and fingers waggling in a sort of stutter of emphasis.
Both effectively conveyed open.
What else did each convey? Only the gender of the speaker? Not that, but some emotional quality that was derived from the rhythms of speech of the larger utterance?
Are they variants that are gender neutral? Products of practiced performance versus nervousness? Some people when fatigued get more streamlined, more tight in body, others more frayed and ambiguous. Is this observed thing more a product of my fatigue than something about gender as practiced?
--
When doing the 3-4 poems a day in April I noticed more feminist themes coming out, more bitter angles. I have 3 explanations of sources for that.
1) that I had nothing to say so relied on easy junk society stuffs one with of generalizations of victim oppressions of female
2) as I scrape away the superficial, the core anger of being excluded and systemically minimized as female is what remains as most potent
3) when I push myself I get cranky and take a dark view of what is innocuous, forming angry patterns that cause adrenaline surge to create a quick energy to feel better by harvesting own hormonal cascades
This may relate to perception skew or perception accuracy.
--
Rather late in the game I noticed male and female presenters being introduced, with line of credits, but for males, the final word being and now, here he is: or here is Dr. so-and-so. The bios were consensually agreed on. By all means, say what you have achieved.
And yet, what to make of a couple females, unconsciously or consciously being introduced not just by that final gendered pronoun (of segue and further priming that our grammar does) nor by title of achievement, but by first name. Huh.
Wish I'd run the numbers over the nearly 40 introductions to get hard numbers on how that all broke down. Was it a very skewed pattern or did it just stick out in that case because I'm hypersensitive?
First name, it's friendly, it's approachable. It's what one is comfortable with. It in one case was because, I'd guess the presenter and host were colleagues and that is how they thought of one another, as first-name basis, equals. But, in formal introduction of papers, as the final words, even if all the earlier run down lists books and titles, the final word, what weight does that set up?
--
As I said, it's hard to not think in terms of team. Remembering the terms of male privilege as set out by B. Deutsch
4. If I fail in my job or career, I can feel sure this won’t be seen as a black mark against my entire sex’s capabilities.
It is sexist of me, and reinforces the sense of gender weight to even see another female's performance as impinging on what others will expect of me, yet, yet, yet.
People are not exclusively gendered, nor exclusively perceived at gendered but it modulates perception and display. We can't bow to it as the only factor. It may or may not be a swing vote in any case.
What I saw could coincide with or be causal to gender.
I wasn't watching for gender, just noticed it by the continual opposition to the one major female theorist and the general respect given to the various major male theorists. It's an idea thing, not related to the gender of the person behind the idea yet, yet, at least the female's ideas and name were being nearly as common as verbs in sentences. (yet, yet.)
--
I was primarily looking to grasp concepts and meanings and examples of the literal subjects.
There was essentially no interruptions to count. That is often a quick, handy measure of power dynamics, of who is permitted to interrupt who. Still, I wish I could have another accountant mind that was watching and running accurate tallies of
- What are the ratios of female: male speech?
- Does it fit into reckoning of presentation the amount of skin shown by each by gender?
- What is the body language attentiveness when male versus female speaks?
- What is the success of female in getting message thru, even acoustically, compared to male?
When one speaks with confidence as a female, there is still the baggage of being haughty. But so much moderates and modulates that general statement. In an academic environment, the norms of gender or released more. One is expected to speak the register that is not male or female but a stylistic or information before individuality. One is a genderless conduit.
--
Many male speakers used a larger box for communication, gesturing wider and higher and more in front than females who made smaller, abdominal flutters. The younger the female, the smaller the gestures. But, the younger the male, the smaller the gestures as well. Is it a matter of length of career? Or coloring of body language from communicative world outside academia?
The older the speaker, the more batonic the gesture to conduct meaning. The older the speaker, the more likely the person was to pause on grammatical syntax to parse breaks instead of on emphatic such as "such", "so" "exactly". Women and men seemed equally likely to use gesture that acted out the meaning, whether counting out sequences, showing travel from place to place or time to time or act out concepts like "inside" of fingers going into a cupped palm, or "showing" with a fingertips together flowering into open palm.
--
There were elements which were utterly gender neutral. The females who spoke, I got the impression of being able to hold their own on panels, being asked equal number of questions, being as engaged. In the audience females were as likely to speak as males. Were as likely to moderate questions. Were as likely to silence a room to start, although so far as presence, males were more likely to get a silent room by just standing behind a podium and females had to speak there to get silence. But I have no counts. Perhaps that's my impressionistic bias, and a matter of individuals. (who exist in gender).
--
Am I to quibble? Am I responding to present?
--
My own speech and postural habits are informed by what I feel I should do as a female. And doing the opposite on the continuum.
I spent time training myself to unlearn how to sit, walk, meet eyes. By religion and family and class I am to lower myself, take up minimal space. Quiet voice was praised because it is becoming to a female and the other roles of class and hierarchies. Voice coincides with gender and to a degree is related to gender as well. I could have taken that in any number of directions of obedience or resistances. My goal was to not be under the gun, but under the radar.
The rules and needs shift. Body habit shifts fairly slowly. It is a retraining of posture. I have traditionally braided my arms and legs to stand or sit. People with closed postures are hard people to communicate with. It is a good way to know when I feel insecure. My posture is my body talking to itself. Sometimes it snaps at itself as I suddenly groan and unfold all the crossed parts of body again. I have tried to minimize my space and insisted on sprawling. Both are the same dynamics. My box of speaking tends to be small. I have tried to widen this to mute the apology that smallness is.
--
I am not terribly conscious most of the time of how I present.
I can sometimes forget I am female, a delightful thing since so much of my baggage about females is not a Jane-in-the-Box bearing truffles and diplomas.
--
I have largely given up apologies littered thru my speech, and the default preamble of assuming I am bothering someone by speaking. It imposes a burden this habit.
--
Still my body language has self-consciousness and self-cancelling and statements that denigrate my own statements even as I speak. It makes my meanings cluttered and subtext is don't listen to me. Then I wonder why I am not heard.
--
Many women preamble with qualifying statements such as I don't know if this is important but...and weasel words that undercut their simple statements. Or women add more emotional loading, overstatements and spin to be more heard, but in effect gives a little boy blue effect so the subtext of threat is heard and the message of please listen to this thing which matters to me, is lost.
Instrumental speech then, is that inherently male? And richer thick text is more female or gender stereotypes and misjudgements inform the paragraph before.
--
When I have seen photos I'm often surprised by my default hunch.
I feel defensive and reactive when I set out to walk alone. Not during the walk itself, but the conceptualizing of it. In part because family, friends, strangers have warned me for years against going out after dark. Or offered to walk me. Why? What informs that? Something personal about me as mousy and unaware, that I took as particular offer given to any woman?
--
As a touchstone I remember in winter in Ottawa where walking an icy path by Craig Henry Drive, I scrambled out of the way of children and a dog. Likewise falling, tearing pants. Do I set myself so low that not only strangers who are adult but even dogs and children are higher than myself? I chastised myself in that moment and since.
If that memory doesn't serve enough, there is a counterpart walking in Joshua Tree National Park in California and stumbling off path to make way for people coming, falling and splitting the knee of jeans, assuming that the other needed me to move, that all the accommodation needed to be on my side.
--
When driving, driving tight with tight fists and shoulders makes for less motor control and less control of car. Oversteering causes accidents as well. To try to fit everything to a gender dynamic flattens data and write-off conceptual traffic that could could get us somewhere.