Last week, I attended the play J’Accuse, by Annick Lefebvre, at the Centre du Théâtre D’Aujourd’hui in Montréal.
The play is made up of a series of five monologues by five different (fictional) women. Each monologue is an expression of the character’s inner rage (mixed in with some joy and humour and sadness), and a sense of feeling misunderstood. The play is in French.
While this post isn’t exactly a response to Dr. Heller’s post from two weeks ago, I feel like her post sets the stage for this one. I suggest that you read hers first, if you haven’t already.
For a long time now, I have found comfort in scholarly argumentation about power imbalances and struggles. A big part of this is about finding a way to articulate, in a rational, logical, structured way, things to which I initially react on an emotional, or a gut level. Continue reading
“Language gains the power to create ‘the socially real’ through the locutionary acts of speaking subjects.” (Butler, 1999, p. 146)
“There are some very common meanings we have learned to make, and take for granted as common sense, but which support the power of one social group to dominate another.” (Lemke, 1995, p. 2) Continue reading
My sister, her partner, and their two kids came to visit me here in Montreal this past weekend. Because I feel the need to try to explain everything in great detail to my 3-year-old nephew, and because I’m just fascinated by everything he says and thinks, these visits inevitably get me thinking about things like belonging, identity, language and diversity. Two of the things I’ve been coming back to since this last visit are how to engage monolingual children with the multilingual reality of their world and how to allow kids to play with concepts like gender, while also preparing them to live in a world that doesn’t always welcome that kind of play. Continue reading
I’ve written on this blog before about my experiences as a speaker of French and English and how I feel myself self-categorizing, and being categorized by others, in relation to these two languages. Today, I’m going to add my third language, Mandarin, to the mix. Mandarin is a part of my daily life – these days, it’s present in the music that I listen to, it’s the subject of one of the classes that I teach, and it’s the language that I use to navigate applications on my computer and cell phone.
Continue reading
