Dishcloth, Water

I’m still grading papers tonight, and even though I’m saving the last batch for tomorrow night, I’m still getting a little bleary-eyed, so it’s time for a short break. They moved from doing more reflective writing to more analytical writing, and they’re incorporating quotations and paraphrases, so — unsurprisingly — the incidence of sentence-level error has gone up, and some of the insights seem to be developed with slightly less rigor than in the earlier papers. I’ll hopefully follow David Bartholomae and others in taking that as a sign that the students are, in fact, learning how to do new things, and that’s why the older skills have seemed to slip a bit.

Jenny Cameron’s wonderful “Throwing a Dishcloth into the Works: Troubling Theories of Domestic Labor” has offered me, via the way Cameron thinks about gender, some productive ways for thinking about class. Cameron offers a possible “context where gender is understood as producing culturally intelligible subjects” (35) and I think class does the same thing. In my case, I’m looking at how class produces culturally intelligible subjects within the classed contexts of the computer classrooms of various educational institutions: the Hypertext Hotel at Brown University produces subjects very different from the print stations at Montgomery County Community College. Furthermore, Cameron contends that “the political task is not to do away with gender by neutralizing differences [. . .] but to work from within the heterosexual matrix to find moments when the heterosexualized coherence of sex, gender, and desire is transgressed and alternative configurations come into being” (34). Again, I wonder if I could construct a similar goal for my work with class: rather than looking at how class hierarchies are reinforced by the activities at Brown and MCCC, rather than looking for alignments and correspondences across vectors of class, would it not be more politically productive to search for the moments of rupture and transgression; to see where class doesn’t work, where it explodes, where it becomes incoherent, and use that fissure as a foothold for seeing potential remedies for the injuries of class? Well, it’s a start.

The girls are being absolutely rotten tonight, and last night too. Zeugma overturned a full glass next to my computer and ripped down a wall hanging, to the point where I put her in the bathroom and closed the door to let her cool down for a while; Tink is testing me to see how many seconds it takes me to squirt her with the spray bottle after she’s jumped up on the kitchen counter. Like at least twenty times tonight. I don’t know if it’s the changing weather or false heat (they’re already spayed, but it’s about the right time) or just them being teenagers, but it’s a pain when I’m grading papers. I mean, I’m sitting there on the couch in the living room, and I hear this splash-splash-splash from the kitchen, and I figure I know the only water in the kitchen is in their bowls, so I tell myself I’m not gonna look. Splash-splash-splash. Nope: they want me to look. Splash-splash-splash. Not gonna do it. Splash-splash-splash. Oh, hell. So I go in, and sure enough, there’s Tink looking wide-eyed up at me, one soggy paw crooked over her dish, and There’s. Water. Everywhere. All over and up the wall, all over the shelves, and this puddle that stretches halfway across the floor, and I’m just like: why?