Am I alone in thinking that my words are my action? How many millions of people around the world are spending their time blogging or writing letters to their congressional representation? Are they in taking those steps not working to solve the problems with which they are concerned? I would say they most definitely are, and so are you…those people who spend their time and resources seeking out information are taking part in these discussions.

I am in no way trying to argue that we should all join in a worldwide debate and nothing more, but that debate, those discussions are a critical part of any further local or global activism. Creation is action. Consumption is action. Thought is action. The strict dichotomy between thought and action which create a world wherein we, as everyday individuals, cannot accomplish anything to help in international humanitarian initiatives. Those separations and strict categories have to be rethought—and thinking about such issues is the first step toward each of us finding a niche and a course of action.

Your thoughts, words, participation, communication…IS your action. In realizing that, there can be more optimism shown toward activism, and consequently, more motivation to act where once grassroots movements toward global problems haven’t existed.

As some of you might know, I have been working on an independent study and several courses geared toward writing my undergraduate thesis. In this process, I have been bombarded with works of gender theory, philosophy of the mind, political philosophy, and almost anything else that could be construed as having to do with the gender binary, hegemony and silencing. Just like any other student with too much on my plate, boys, sorority life and generally anything other than my work seems far more pressing at any given moment than actually being productive.

When I do buckle down and get something done, though, I keep coming up with the same dilemma again and again: Why is it every time I get excited, thinking that I finally figured something out, that I finally have something of note to contribute to the field, I find out someone else already wrote it?

I am not sure if it is because I am but a young student, who is just starting out in academia, or just because everything has been said, but I have been finding it hard to keep up hope that I am going to have anything to say that has not already been said and published by someone far more qualified than myself, in a far more eloquent manner. So, what is there left for us…this newest generation to add?

It’s interesting how so many people have theorized answers to our gender problems, yet they have yet to be solved. There is still homophobia. There is still transphobia. There are still people both straight and gay who will not accept bisexuals, and there are still millions who have been “fixed” at birth because they did not exhibit the “acceptable” and “definite” sexes.

What is it that we’re missing?Well, I guess if I knew, we’d be living in some all-accepting, poly-gendered (or ungendered) utopia by now. I guess all I can offer at this point is encouragement. All those who are trying to figure out societal problems far bigger than themselves, those trying to find their niche and see how they can contribute to this chaotic mess of a world, keep trying. There have to be answers somewhere, and if we stop looking, we’ll never find them. Thank heavens for those who have come before us and read as much as you can, because only by knowing the ideas of the past can we move passed them and be of any additional help.

I know it’s a hard job, but somebody has to do it, right?

Hierarchy always creates tension between those who are up and those who are down (an inevitable fact within the nature of hierarchical organization), Burke calls these tensions guilt. We then use language as a tool to decrease that guilt, or “redeem” ourselves. As much as some would like to think this guilt-redemption cycle is some sort of theoretical and mystical thing that real people don’t really think about or deal with in a practical way, it is. It is a part of every instance of interpersonal communication.

In those communications, we create a sense of group identity or commuity by using Burke’s ideas of identification and division, focusing on ways someone (or a group) is the same or simmilar to the audience (or whomever you are communicating with). This strengthens relationships between ‘us’ can redeem out guilt by knowing that we are not ‘them.’ Otherizing is a way that, sometimes without even realizing it we scapegoat, even in the smallest of situations, if we can blame a ‘them’ from our problems, and then cut them out of the party, the event, the conversation…whatever it may be…we can breathe a sigh of relief as if we have gotten rid of “the problem,” whether that individual or group was really at fault at all.

So, how does Kenneth Burke explain that we get rid of this guilt—for better or worse? In those writings I have done work on so far, and the teaching of Dr. Rosenthal, there are three: mortification, victimage, and the comic corrective.

Mortification: Blames the problems on the self or community. It is characterized by a need to take responsibility and step up to the plate. All these kinds of rhetorical themes fall under the umbrella Burke labels mortification.

Victimage: Creates an other, and therein can only solve, or get rid of a problem, by getting rid of that other, or scapegoat. It creates a villain, an enemy for us to triumph over.

Comic Corrective: Redefines. It offers and advocates “humility without humiliation.” Instead of preforming acts of victimage, we can try to humble ourselves, admit errors and work to take a new perspective of error not being clear right and wrong, but rather a learning experience that we can be bettered by, so that it doesn’t need to be destroyed.

In “Order and Hierarchy,” Burke discusses the linguistic invention of the negative, which creates polar, dichotomous terminologies that socially define situations, and therein color the attitudes surrounding any particular set of ideas. He writes: “On the side of order, or control, there are the variants of faith and reason. On the side of disorder there are the temptations of the senses and the imagination” (279). This ordering of the world within dichotomies, with reason, faith, and order on one side and imagination, superstition and chaos on the other, not only create but also maintain power structures wherein those who resist dominant ideologies can be easily silenced through the mechanisms of the differend. This is done by valuing the former at the expense of the latter, leaving it as negation of what is ‘right’ or ‘acceptable’. It is this silencing which paves the way for the guilt-redemption cycle of the tragic frame of motivations. Without having a group to scapegoat who do not in themselves have the legitimacy to rebut the guilt being laid upon them as mortification, the tragic frame would be a failure, never achieving redemption…

Burke’s comic corrective provides us with the “equipment” necessary for this task. Rather than viewing the world through a static lens that is constructed upon an objective truth and power structure conveyed through binaries, “a comic frame of motives avoids these difficulties, showing us how an act can ‘dialectically’ contain both transcendental and material ingredients, both imagination and bureaucratic embodiment” (Burke 261). Instead of insisting that there is a wrong and a right, and therein needing to find a single process or protocol by which to judge a situation, “it cherishes the lore of so-called ‘error’ as a genuine aspect of the truth, with emphases valuable for the correcting of present emphases” (Burke 265).

Up to this point, we have continually valued consensus, which the tragic frame utilizes to single out those who oppose the views of the centralized and dominant group. Using them as scapegoats, it creates an ‘Us’-‘Them’ mentality to foster identification between Us against a common enemy—Them.

OK, now in more common terminologies. The basic idea is that on an everyday basis, we operate in a dramatic way: there are characters who play out scenes in a particular setting to be interpreted by an audience. Our normal show, however, is a tragedy. We find problems and faults in people, groups or whole situations and then enter into the “blame game.” The group or individual that the blame eventually sticks to becomes the scape goat, and the easiest way to perceptually rid ourselves of the problem is to rid ourselves of the scapegoat. This applies to a range of communications and situations from an accounting error in a business to a rumor spreading among a group of high school girls, to the situation that Kenneth Burke analyzed for much of his work, The Holocaust. Rather than simply pointing out the tragedy of our lives, however, Burke offers us an alternative: the Comic Corrective.

The comic corrective is a method for living by which we can see mistakes that have been made and reinterpret or relabel situations so that by seeing it through a different perspective, we can find a way to grow from mistakes rather than destroying a scapegoat for the appearance of solving problems, that weren’t really that group or individual’s fault, so the problem still exists. What Burke calls “Perspectives by Incongruity” is a method for study and life that would require we consider the world through a variety of contradictory lenses — i.e. the black man, KKK member, the Supreme Court judge, the suburban house wife — in order to get a better grasp of reality, not solely our reality.

In ten words: before you judge, walk a mile in another man’s moccasins.

UP NEXT: The Differend

For those who are not familiar with the reference that inspired the name Comic Corrective, there will be an entire post devoted to the man who is my bread and butter in the world of rhetorical theory, Kenneth Burke. While I get that finished, though, spread the word; tell your friends, enemies, new acquaintances, teachers, students, relatives…that Comic Corrective is new, constantly improving, and finally home.

So what does a person like me do during the summer when there is no homework to be done, no papers to write, no more newspaper chores to do, nothing to work on? What do I do when all the journal submissions and conference proposals have been sent off, and I am just waiting for responses, for requests for revision? Quite simply, I go crazy.

Some find a summer job, killing two birds with one stone — they can make money to spend in their free time, while simultaneously giving them something to do. I, however, am at a severe loss for any skills that would lead to my employment outside of the school year. I am an academic through and through. I write a damn good rhetorical philosophy paper. I can study with the best of them. But, in these hard economic times, who wants a rising college junior to tutor their kids when they can have an actual teacher currently out on break?

Therein lies the heart of my problem. In this economy, employers have their pick of employees. Entry level positions are being filled by experienced, college-educated individuals fighting to support themselves, and many times their families. As a result, those of us who are actually entry-level material — wicked quick learners, dedicated, hardworking — we are overlooked, and not even given the opportunity  because there is bigger and better coming along every moment of every day. Inboxes are full of  resumes, and it seems as soon as someone sees “XXXX-Present” in an education section, they move along to the next one.

While students have one of the worst reputations for being lazy, shiftless, just interested in partying, and not wanting to go out there and get a job. Those with the power to dole out those positions, and sign those paychecks should keep in mind that many of them are actually the hardest working people in the nation. Who else spends their days in class for hours, only to go home and eat Ramen noodles or left over take out as they read an additional 200-300 pages for the next day, works on a draft of a 20 page paper (which is no comparison to “adults” page-long memos, or collating reports that have already been compiled), watches their favorite TV show, while finishing a newspaper article, editing a page, and then sending it off to the printer, and maybe going to bed, only to repeat the entire process the next day, with the addition of a few meetings for extracurricular activities in the hopes of one day being able to work a regular length day collating, copying, talking to customers… and then when they get home, beig able to sit in front of the TV without homework in their laps.

So, yeah, right now I am in a prime position in my life to see that an out of work workaholic is the worst kind of best employee there is, mostly because so few are willing to look past the few of our peers who aren’t getting anything done, and talk to those of us who are trying, if we could only be given the chance.

If I only had a nickel for every time I have to tell someone: “At Oglethorpe, things are different.”

This past Friday was the second of two summer orientation events at Oglethorpe that we call Passport. The incoming freshmen come to campus, have tours, meet others from their class, ask questions, register for classes…all that fun stuff. As newspaper editor and an admissions volunteer, I was there walking around, meeting people and generally trying to give these scared new students a friendly face they would know in the fall. With no letters on, it had not even occurred to me that there there were people from other sororities scoping out the new class, and trying to make a good first impression for their sorority. From what I saw, however, they were doing a pretty bad job of it.

Personally, I wasn’t there for Greek stuff, so it was out of my mind. Yeah, I ran up and hugged my sisters whom I hadn’t seen all summer. I commented on peoples’ cute summer haircuts and those upper class-men I spent the most time with during the day, just so happen to also e my sisters. It didn’t seem like anything out of the ordinary until a few of the incoming freshmen I had been sitting with at lunch asked me if the all the sororities here were as bitchy and judgmental as the ones on TV.

“Of course not,” I replied. “At Oglethorpe, things work a little bit differently.” That was when they pointed out to me a group of members of a certain campus sorority standing around together in a corner of the room pointing and talking about PNMs rather than mingling and meeting them. As they pranced round from one activity to another, doing the exact same thing, while all in T-shirts with their letters embroidered on the fronts, I was a little embarrassed. That feeling of humiliation, however, wore off when I realized that their behavior was just them being honestly who they were. And that meant that no matter how uncool, or dorky, or ugly people might think members of my sorority are, we still have one PR advantage that the others don’t—we care about people.

We are sisters in the best sense of the word. Yes, we may fight and argue sometimes, but who doesn’t. We are always there when someone needs us. We will do anything in our power to help a sister out. We do other activities besides our sorority, and therefore can go about what we would normally do without the forced conformity of walking around in a pack, wearing the same outfit and refusing to speak to anyone else. We are people first, and Sigmas second.

We are as diverse as any group on campus could be. We have singers, dancers, actresses, politicians, artists, travelers, aspiring-doctors, athletes, blacks, whites, asians, gays, bisexuals, heterosexuals…the list goes on and on. We are one of the only sororities in the country with official policies allowing transsexual women to join and for sisters to openly date each other. We accept each other, not by wanting to change each other, but by truly loving and caring for one another.

We all have our ups and downs in relationships of any kind, but sitting in the gym with those four new members of our community made me realize that I am a part of a culture that I am proud to say is not as bitchy and judgmental as you see on TV or in the movies.

So, when it comes to recruitment, or just talking to an old friend from high school about being a Sigma, I can honestly say, “Things are a little different here at Oglethorpe.” At least as far as Tri-Sigma is concerned.

Only after I had caught my breath from my hearty chuckle that I realized it wasn’t all that funny. I mean, yes, penguin relationships of an kind are funny in that “aww…look at the penguins looking awkward in their tuxedos” kind of way, but soon it hit me: this was CNN breaking news! We are at war, the economy is worse than its been in decades, the potential first Latin American Supreme Court Justice is in her confirmation hearings, and what we call one of our most dependable and reputable news outlets is putting in the time, energy and money to put out video packages on penguins, with the only actual news part of it being their sexuality?

I thought it was a joke. It had to be a joke…or at least I thought so until it was followed by a story of a family who was almost killed as their minivan burst into flames in the middle of the roadway, leaving one disabled relative stuck between the flames and a dividing wall. I’ve seen a lot of cruel jokes, but that was too far, even for CNN. It had to be real, which made me question a few things: Do we really want to discuss sexuality issues and pull them to the forefront enough for the homosexual relationships between penguins in a zoo becomes news? Is that really publicity to help “the cause”? Because quite honestly, I felt it was more of a mockery, a grab for ratings and attention, and the creation of a mental bond between the ridiculousness of the situation, and the reality that affects millions.

Sexuality, in one way or another, rips apart families everyday, and more than you realize. So, if it makes you feel its less serious because there are cute penguins on your screen, good for you. If not, then you  and I are of a similar frame of mind. And for those who think that it just isn’t that serious, or that it’s a cute story to break the monotony of disaster and bad news, keep in mind that everything you see in the media is put there for a certain reason by someone with an agenda. I may not know what their intentions were, but then again, neither do you. And when we are all ignorant of them, intentions mean very little in comparison to interpretations of the meanings in the final product.

There are a lot of people for whom such a story is interpreted as the light side of gays, and their ability to “go straight” when the right person of the opposite sex comes along. And it is such an ideology that forces thousands into the closet, drives countless young people to suicide and even more to deep, dark, depressing places they just can’t seem to get out of. I would now, for a while, I was there.

Here’s the deal: Feminism, or at least the Third Wave is supposedly all about telling stories, raising voices and finding a space of inclusion through deconstruction. Much of what is happening as a result of this ‘new feminist activism’, however, is more alienation and division than ever before. We are now living in a world where womanists, ecofeminists, liberal feminists, socialist feminists, radical feminists, post-colonial and third world feminists, french feminists, post-structural and post-modern feminists, multiracial feminists, libertarian feminists, and the list goes on and on, all claim to be true feminists, who have adopted the ideology that will free women and make for the best society, while attempting to silence all other “feminist” voices as not being as productive or meaningful as theirs.

The theoretical beginings of the feminist movement, and its third reincarnation, spout off idealistic rhetoric of a full standpoint, within which all aspects of an individual’s multitude of momentary and long-term idenities are brought into a senes of critical and optimal consciousness to deconstruct all power relations within the heirarchies and ideologies that intersect to construct societies. There are not many problems with standpoint theory its self that I would want to note, but instead wth the attitudinal practice that is using this theoretical approach to silence those who disagree with not only feminist mindsets and limited consciousness, but also with the dominant racist, capitalist patriarchy we like to call ‘the norm’.

At the point where those who believe in and follow the teachings of theorists like Sandra Harding, bell hooks, Kenneth Burke, Micheal Foucault, Jean-Franscois Lyotard and so many others are looked down upon as bigoted and oppressive, because they do not look specifically at subsets of the population — whether it be gay Asian males, straight black females, or any other of the innumerable possible combinations of labels that come together to form some one’s false conception of static identity — the ideals that have made the very foundations of the feminist movement have failed.

Now, it’s not just about whether you believe women are equal to men. It’s not just about defying ‘the man’ and forcing him to accept your need for a room of your own. Feminism is quickly becoming just another label, just another way to create an other where an ally once stood, and to make strangers from those who were once our closest friends all under the guise of equality and progress.

I once had to defend myself from all the attacks I would get for claiming to be a feminist. Now, the more I think about it, read about it, and see how ’sisters’ continually put each other down in the same breath as using the theoretical backings for patriarchy — dominance, power, control, correctness at ‘the other’s’ expense — to make their points, and if necessary create a whole new movement rather than launching discourse and helping a current one thrive ad grow, the more I feel the need to instead say: Fuck labels. I have beliefs. I have opinions. Ask me about them independently, but no, for the moment, I’m not a feminist.

In this chapter, Lyotard takes on sexual difference. He provides a brief, yet detailed examination of the subject by calling attention to what it is not, rather than popular conceptions of what it is, in order to arrive closer to a true definition of the term “sexual difference.” This method, in my opinion, is because the very nature of difference is what it is not. It is not representable, because in representation, definition and categorization, one would be choosing one method of judgment, therein silencing and devaluing others. His discussion calls attention to the problems of binary gender constructions in that as long as we attempt to organize, divide and rationally conceptualize gender, we are forgetting and excluding entire groups as “others” (or in Lyotard’s terminology: “jews”) faster than we can begin to understand all that we are destroying.

A new gender system that would allow for just representation of a myriad of varied and often opposing histories and accounts, would require dissolving the rigid boundaries between imagination and rationality, because sexual difference exceeds both of them and lies at the foundation of human identity. It could not, however, be a system in the traditional view and use of the term, because in doing so, it would fall victim to a whole new set of standards for ‘otherization’ and humiliation.

Some interesting quotes from this section:

On extermination and forgetting of “the other”

“One converts the Jews in the Middle Ages, they resist by mental restrction. One expels them from the classical age, they return. One integrates them in the modern era, they persist in their difference. One exterminates them in the twentieth century.

But this slaughter pretends to be without memory, without trace, and through this testifies again to what it slaughters: that there is the unthinkable, time lost yet always there, a misery; and, that this misfortune, this soul, is the very motive of though, of research, of amanesis—of the culture of the spirit as Freud said: Fortschritt in der Geistlichkeit. ["Progress in the Clergy'] A motive lost in the very principle of progress, soul lost in the spirit.” (p. 23)

“The solution was to be final: the final answer to the ‘jewish’ question. It was necessary to carry it right up to its conclusion, to ‘terminate’ the interminable. And thus to ‘terminate’ the term itself. It had to be a perfect crime, one would plead not guilty, certain of the lack of proods. This is a ‘politics’ of absolute forgetting, forgotten. Absurd since its zeal, its very desperation distinguishes it as extrapolitical. Obviously, a ‘politics’ of extermination exceeds politics. It is ot negotiated on a scene. Tis obstinacy to exterminate to the very end, becase it cannot be understood politically, already indicates that we are dealing with something else, with the other.” (p.25)