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Houston’s piece represents my first encounter with an article that applies computational text analysis. Computational text analysis cannot replace rich, deep qualitative and ethnographic narratives, but it can abstract large bodies of text that an individual could not observe and produce consistent diachronic descriptions of context. Though perhaps the scope is not very sophisticated compared to other methods, it can be useful when combined with other methods and data.

I reproduce below some key ideas from the article to understand what CTA does and how:

Feminist Computational Criticism: involves a reflection on not only the object of study, e.g. Victorian women’s poetry, but also on the decisions to make selecting the dataset, conducting analysis, and interpreting the results.

Text Analysis: the predominant analytical method in literary studies is close reading. The primacy of the text in “service of a larger theoretical approach.”

Distant reading: “examines the socio-cultural systems of value that produce the very category of literature itself.”

Analysis: use of free open software: Antconc, a corpus analysis tool, and the R programming language and libraries. Sample: 1,284 poems in Stedman’s anthology.

Unsupervised methods of machine learning: “a form of distant reading that can bypass some biases of human judgements. Unsupervised machine learning algorithms harness the computer’s pattern-matching power to reveal semantic patterns in texts, without any predetermined instruction in what to look at or what is significant.”

Topic modeling: “approach to understanding large sets of texts using an unsupervised machine-learning algorithm that implements an iterative, probabilistic assessment of word-occurrences in the documents in the corpus (…) it gathers information about which words co-occur in the same document, and the probability that those same words would co-occur in another document of the corpus.”

What kind of discourses or themes are present in the volume? Topic model “can help us examine semantic patterns in large sets of texts to see what kinds of discourses are present.”

Topic: “words that co-occur in documents at a greater than average probability together make up a topic, a cluster of semantic meaning.”

“The programmer selects the number of topics that the algorithm will locate in the corpus (…) the algorithm was programmed to discover 15 topics.”

Stopword: “stopword list was applied to the corpus before modeling it, excluding common articles, pronouns, and numbers.”

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Black feminist scholar, Patricia Hill Collins, popularized intersectionality in the nineties. Carastathis makes a detailed intellectual history of intersectionality pointing when it was introduced for the first time and what conceptual predecessors it has. Intersectionality aims to encompass multiple forms of inequality that are organized via a similar logic, to encompass in a single word the simultaneous experience of multiple oppressions. Carastathis highlights four analytical benefits of intersectionality as a theoretical paradigm and research methodology: simultaneity, complexity, irreducibility, and inclusivity.

Simultaneity: the author refers to simultaneity as the nonfragmentation of a phenomenological experience. Intersectionality as a knowledge project seeks to explain the ways in which multiple dimensions of inequality intersect and co-create one another in social life and in institutions. It points out that race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, ability, age operate not as unitary, mutually exclusive categories, but are always intertwined with one another

Irreducibility: intersectionality moves beyond a mono-categorical focus on inequality. Traditional approaches to study inequality foreground a single dimension of inequality such as race or class and conceptualize these processes as parallel. Intersectionality points out that race, class, gender, age, ability, nation, ethnicity, and similar categories of analysis are best understood in relational terms rather than in isolation from one another. It favors interpretative tools that can show the relational complexity of things, that indivisibility is important – therefore intersectionality does not simply add new variables.

Complexity: intersectionality introduces a greater level of complexity into conceptualizing inequality. Asking questions about, for example, how racial inequality works in the US, we will not understand or capture the complexity of racial inequality if we do not consider how citizenship, ability, sexual orientation, race, and other ways in which human beings are categorized and organized work together to produce inequality. 

Epistemic standpoint: Individuals and groups differentially placed within intersecting systems of power have different points of view on their own and others’ experiences with complex social inequalities, typically advancing knowledge projects that reflect their social locations within power relations.

Intersectionality as praxis, social justice: intersectionality is positioned in the academic literature and in activism as a critical social theory. It not only describes how inequality works but makes interventions and thinks about how we can make the world a better place. Intersectional scholarship is explicitly committed to social justice.

I am writing this in a hospital lounge, with a feeling of relief about my mother’s medical situation, and great appreciation for the medical staff, particularly the nurses. The last time I accompanied my mother overnight in a hospital was twenty years ago. At that time, I had the distinct feeling that the nursing staff felt that our presence as human beings was an intrusion on their professional commitment to tend to the physical needs of my mother as a human body. Tonight, the nurses have been so very attentive, friendly, chatty, eager to explain and accommodate–interactive, personal, and customized to adapt DH terms; social, communicative, holistic, and “caring” to use feminist terms.
I’ve been reading the article by Joan W. Scott assigned to Group 1 this week: “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” so I might have been inclined in any case to think of this noticeable shift in nursing culture in feminist terms. What led me to want to write this post was one nurse’s enthusiasm about the external catheter they were going to be using– assuring me that it was not at all painful, she proudly noted that the “Purewick” was “invented by a woman for women”: https://agilisit.com/podcasting/purewick-ceo-dr-camille-newton-talks-about-her-roller-coaster-ride-from-rejections-to-successful-exit-and-everything-in-between/.

This led me to think about how feminism and medicine is not only about increasing the number of women practicing medicine, but also about changing how all medical practitioners practice medicine. This reminded me of Scott’s description of how the use of the word “gender” in feminist scholarship (and eventually in “Gender Studies”) was in part a strategy for bringing feminist scholarship into mainstream university disciplines like history.
The main aspects of the impact of feminism on medicine with which I was previously familiar were: advocacy to correct the problem of “the default male” as was discussed in our readings for Week 2, in which human anatomy was defaulted to male, and female bodies were viewed as anomalies to the norm; and consciousness-raising about discrimination in medical research and care, e.g., as recently addressed in an episode of John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight: Bias in Medicine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TATSAHJKRd8. But now I found myself thinking of an ethics of care, as outlined by Carol Gilligan, and found this discussion from 2012:
https://www.omicsonline.org/open-access/applying-feminist-ethics-of-care-to-nursing-practice-2167-1168.1000111.php?aid=6557:

Brenda Green, “Applying Feminist Ethics of Care to Nursing Practice.” Abstract

“Through acculturation and socialization, caring involves both gendered and socially diverse patterns of understanding and behaving in the world. As a result, the implications for care are embedded in the personal and social values and experiences associated with gender, power, and politics. The general ethos of this paper will explore a feminist care ethic that emerged from the work of Carol Gilligan. This standpoint offers particular peripheral advantages as a feminist theorists’ critique of caring includes the critical examination of relationships from the position of people who have systematically been excluded from power. Although this perspective is theoretically challenging, it offer insights to the significance of caring for the other, the self and the community”

I’ve only begun reading the following article, from the medical journal The Lancet, Feb. 09, 2019. I might want to add further reflections later.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(18)32595-9/fulltext

Malika Sharma, “Applying Feminist Theory to Medical Education“
Summary

“To adequately address gendered issues of sexual harassment, wage gaps, and leadership inequities, medical institutions must interrogate medical education. Feminist theories can help to understand how power operates within our classrooms and at the bedside. This scoping review maps the four main ways in which feminist theory has been applied to medical education and medical education research—namely, critical appraisal of what is taught in medical curricula; exploration of the experiences of women in medical training; informing pedagogical approaches to how medicine is taught; and finally, medical education research, determining both areas of inquiry and methodologies. Feminist theory has the potential to move clinicians and educators from theory to action, building bridges of solidarity between the medical profession and the community it is called to serve.”

The direction in which I would like to think about this for the purposes of our course is: if there can be feminist approaches to medical education, then maybe some of these can be mapped onto feminist text analysis?

The first time I gave considerable thought to this question was when I was working at the Israel Antiquities Authority, attempting to collaborate with Google to create the first version of the “Leon Levy Digital Dead Sea Scrolls Library” website, which launched in December 2012:
https://www.deadseascrolls.org.il/home

I had no formal theoretical background in structuralism or post-structuralism, and had only passing familiarity with such concepts as the death of the author, or approaches such as “reader-response”. But I had a practical problem on my hands. I had to try to explain to Google that it would be unhelpful to simply apply the label “Genesis” as an identifier for all the hundreds of fragments that remained from a couple of dozen different copies of the book of Genesis, that had been recovered from 3 different caves at Qumran and from the site of Masada. Each of those fragments would need a label, and each of the original scrolls that they came from needed a label too–something that would show that each fragment, and the presumed “original scroll” that a set of fragments came from were physical artefacts.

It was also still important to me to designate the literary content inscribed on those physical artefacts, for example, the Book of Genesis. And it mattered that the text of the Book of Genesis was sometimes slightly different in a fragment from one scroll than it was in a fragment of another, and that sometimes these “readings” were “witnesses” to a different text than the traditional Hebrew or Greek texts of the Bible. I spent a lot of time worrying about what the words I wanted to use “really” meant, but my primary interest was to communicate effectively with my colleagues at the Antiquities Authority, with the Google team, and especially with the future users of the website. I needed to assign practical definitions, and to use terms consistently.

In the end, this is what my colleagues and I came up with, and placed in the “help” text of the website (which I suspect never got much traffic. But the enterprise of thinking about this together with some other colleagues in the field of Dead Sea Scrolls Studies did seem to have some impact on notions of “textuality” in the field, and dovetailed with growing interest in material philology):
https://www.deadseascrolls.org.il/help

What is the difference between a text, a manuscript, and a composition?

A text is a unit of writing. It could be a hymn, a legal contract, or an inscription on a clay potsherd. A manuscript is a physical object, the material form of a recorded text. Only about a dozen of the Qumran Cave Scrolls were recovered intact as complete scrolls. Most manuscripts survived only in fragments. Scholars sorted all of these fragments on the basis of physical material and shape, content, and handwriting in order to reconstruct the original manuscripts when possible. Each Dead Sea Scroll manuscript is unique, even if its content is also found in other manuscripts. A composition is a specific literary or documentary entity, such as Genesis or a Deed of Sale, which has been recorded on a manuscript. A composition may be preserved in a single copy among the Dead Sea Scrolls, or found in several manuscripts.

I had some difficulties -euphemism for a hard time- to follow the readings for this week. Though I am a curious reader, this is indeed a field I am totally foreign. In this post, I write about what a text is in Miller and Barthes, and why their understanding of what a text is entails different approaches for reading a text. Miller and Barthes represent a feminist and a (seemingly objective) metalinguistic and symbolic understanding of what a text is.

For Miller, the text, and reading a text, is not detached from any phenomenological, corporeal experience, which transcends the physical and linguistic boundaries of the text. In page 292, Miller says, “to reread [a text] as a woman is at least to imagine the lady’s place; to imagine while reading the place of a woman’s body; to read reminded that her identity is also re-membered in stories of the body.”

For Barthes, the text is radically symbolic, it is an open source, it is plural, and does not recognize any authority. The text does not exist outside the text, the textual activity, or better, outside the intertext. Paul Ricoeur in “The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text,” in page 105, gives a definition of what a text is that has some family resemblance with Barthes’s understanding of a text. Ricoeur points out that the four traits that characterizes a text are: “(1) the fixation of the meaning, by which he means the objectivation of the text; (2) its dissociation from the mental intention of the author, what the text says is more important than what the author meant to say; (3) the display of nonostensive references; and (4) the universal range of its addressees, it is open to an infinite range of possible readers.”

In The Pleasure of the Text, in pages 35-36, Barthes says intertext explains the experience of reading a text:

“Reading a text cited by Stendhal (but not written by him) I find Proust in one minute detail. The Bishop of Lescars refers to the niece of his vicar-general in a series of affected apostrophes (My little niece, my little friend, my lovely brunette, ah, delicious little morsel!) which remind me of the way the two post girls at the Grand Hotel at Balbec, Marie Geneste and Celeste Albaret, address the narrator (Oh, the little black-haired devil, oh, tricky little devil! Ah, youth! Ah, lovely skin!). Elsewhere, but in the same way, in Flaubert, it is the blossoming apple trees of Normandy which I read according to Proust. I savor the sway of formulas, the reversal of origins, the ease which brings the anterior text out of the subsequent one. I recognize that Proust’s work, for myself at least, is the reference work, the general mathesis, the mandala of the entire literary cosmogony-as Mme de Sevigne’s letters were for the narrator’s grandmother, tales of chivalry for Don Quixote, etc.; this does not mean that I am in any way a Proust “specialist”: Proust is what comes to me, not what I summon up; not an “authority,” simply a circular memory. Which is what the inter-text is: the impossibility of living outside the infinite text-whether this text be Proust or the daily newspaper or the television screen: the book creates the meaning, the meaning creates life.”

I want to reflect upon some points on feminism I draw from Carol Hanisch and Sara Ahmed. Hanisch coined the well-known phrase, “the personal is political.” Her work is related with the groups to conscientize women organized in the 1970s. The aim of the process of conscientization was to share experiences of everyday life in these groups, and from there to elaborate general principles about women’s oppression.

These groups were criticized for considering they were therapeutic groups. But Hanisch disagrees with the differentiation between personal and political, private and public, individual experience and collective experience. These groups precisely showed for her that it is possible to articulate political ideas from everyday experience. As such, these groups constitute a different way of participating in politics.

“The personal is political” because the goal is for the woman to understand what she experiences in her private life is not due to something she did wrong or psychological factors. In these groups, the personal narrative becomes a collective one. Women learn to identify her personal experience in the context of patterns of behavior that society naturalizes.

Sara Ahmed in her book “Living a feminist life” translates the personal is political into the question how to live a feminist life. Though she refuses to give a recipe, she points out two main factors: 1) Living a feminist life implies to formulate ethical questions about the injustice and inequality of the world. A world that also is anti-feminist. 2) Living a feminist life implies to ask how these ethical questions can become trends, habits. How we can make these ethical questions become practices. Specifically, feminist practices.

Living a feminist life for Ahmed implies to deconstruct, unlearn what was learned, and learn new habits. It is necessary to learn to live in a radical, different way; it is necessary to move from an androcentric to a feminist life. For instance, women have been historically restricted in the use of the space. It is expected women to be thin, to occupy not much space. We can think of how the restriction of women’s space operates in the distinction between private/public sphere; the restrictions in the labor market (glass ceiling); or in everyday microaggressions (manspreading).

How do women acquire feminist consciousness? The answer for Ahmed is phenomenological. There is not a single moment in the life of women, but a collection of moments, and at some point women feel, experience, the resistance from the world. Due to this resistance, and how women feel, the world cannot be called home. Thus, acquiring feminist consciousness begins as a collection of sensations, feelings, emotions. Then, women think why we feel uncomfortable in the world.

Ahmed asks how can we make a home of this world? We need to reform the house of the oppressor to make it our home. Remembering what Audrey Lorde said, “the master’s tools do not dismantle the master’s house,” Ahmed points out we need to create new, feminist, tools to reform the house of the oppressor. One way to do this is changing how knowledge is produced. Ahmed says anthropocentric epistemology is not useful. We need to deconstruct the way in which we produce knowledge. First, we need to dismantle the dichotomy between theory and praxis. Ahmed says it is possible to elaborate conclusions from experience: the personal is political and is also theoretical. Second, when we ask ethical questions, when we create new habits, we are doing theory as well.

I want to highlight below some quotations from Ahmed’s blog post on sweaty concepts. https://feministkilljoys.com/2014/02/22/sweaty-concepts/

“By using the idea of “sweaty concepts” I was trying to say at least two things. Firstly I was implying that too often conceptual work is understood as distinct from describing a situation: and I am thinking here of a situation as something that comes to demand a response, a situation is often announced as what we have (“we have a situation here”) as well as what we are in.”

“Concepts in my view tend to be reified as what scholars somehow come up with (the concept as rather like an apple that hits you on the head, sparking revelation from a position of exteriority) as something we use to explain by bringing it in.  For me, concepts are ways of understanding worlds that are in the worlds we are in.”

“Secondly by using the idea of “sweaty concepts” I was also trying to show how descriptive work is conceptual work. A concept is worldly, but it is also a reorientation to a world, a way of turning things around, a different slant on the same thing. More specifically a “sweaty concept” is one that comes out of a description of a body that is not at home in the world. By this I mean a description of how it feels not to be at home in the world, or a description of the world from the point of view of not being at home in it.”  

”When I use the concept of “sweaty concepts” I am also trying to say we can generate new understandings by describing the difficulty of inhabiting a body that is not at home in a world (for instance, how it feels to inhabit a black body in a world that assumes whiteness). Sweat is bodily; we might sweat more during more strenuous activity. A “sweaty concept” might be one that comes out of a bodily experience that is difficult, one that is “trying,” and where the aim is to keep exploring and exposing this difficulty, which means also aiming not to eliminate the effort or labor from the writing.”

I also enjoy reading the piece on the place of women in the Ancient world. Coincidentally, I have been re reading with a group of readers The Iliad and The Odyssey this year. We read one book by week, began with the Iliad on January 1^st, and since July 1^st we are reading The Odyssey. The Iliad clearly shows the no place of women, though it is most dramatically exacerbated in the context of the war, in which women just are a piece of trophy for men. The author mentioned the episode in the Odyssey when Telemachus asked her mother, Penelope, to shut up. But also, Zeus had done the same with Hera, in the Iliad, when Achilles’s mother, Thetis, visited Zeus to ask him help for her son. When Hera saw them, she made Zeus one of her typical scenes and Zeus also shut up her and she had to go sleep with him without saying a word. It is true, however, and knowing Hera’s bad temper, that she made Zeus pay for it later in the story.

The Odyssey it seems to me is more interesting to reflect around the place of women. It is true that Telemachus shuts up her mother. But he is not the worst male figure. One feels sympathy for Telemachus because the circumstances made him become a man, an adult, so fast. What is violent to me is the presence of Penelope’s candidates. They invade her house; they drink and eat her food; they pressure on her to move out with her father and choose a candidate. This shows to me at the beginning of The Odyssey the place of women. The absence of Odysseus brought disorder to the city and home. Therefore, Penelope must endure the violent presence of her candidates. Now, Penelope is not merely a subjugated woman; she is a thinker, she plays a key role in the development of the story. In a sense, knitting during the day and unknitting during the night, she tries to have some margin of action, of agency, and power in a powerless context.

I want to finish mentioning that one of the first feminist characters in the literature appeared in Cervantes’s The Quixote. Marcela is a peasant, who quit the wealth of her family and lived her life as a peasant because she chose her freedom. She also is accused of the suicide of one of her candidates because she rejected him. Though this is for her a way of exercising her freedom to chose as a woman.