Some views of Pride

More photos from my southern journey

FrogFrog at Lindsey’s Land

Lindsey at FrogFrog’s Land

Chocolate Date

Chocolate Date

Bunny eat me

Goodies from the Berkshire conference on the history of women

View from the women’s historians’ ward

Three Ones

“Don’t forget me!” says the little frog.

internal landscape

The internal landscape is the world inside the body, beneath the skin. Light from the outside world refracts through a mosaic of experiences, paints fractals of light and color, patterns within. The internal landscape is never simply a reflection of what its seen, never a reproduction of the world as is. Rather, it is through how we choose to organize and understand our experiences, and how we choose to engage in the world as we understand it, that we become who we are. The internal landscape is a name for the narratives, metaphors, myths, and patterns–visual, discursive, palpable–that shape our lives. And like any place on a map, the internal landscape is deeply defined by its relationship to the people, places, cultures, struggles, and institutions around it.

Our internal landscapes are deeply shaped by the natural and discursive landscapes of our surroundings. Inside in our bodies and minds we hold knowledge of certain shapes and textures: the stories that root us into our communities and institutions, the assumptions we often never know are assumptions, and the invisible ways of thinking we often take for the only ways of thinking. I saw a movie once about a man who went out in the sea in a storm, and he came up against a wall at the edge of the ocean. He discovered his whole world and everything he knew was only a world within a world. He could open the door and be somewhere else. These edges exist everywhere, discursively, in our minds. And finding the edge of discourse is essential to any liberatory project. Feminism is a means, a boat which takes us out to sea, by which we find the edges of our worlds, destabilize what meanings we might have taken for granted, denaturalize what they have tried to make us feel is natural.

I want to start with this idea of internal landscape: the mess of internalized knowledge we take for granted. So far I have two scholars to draw on in terms of how language reflects and shapes this landscape. These are Jean-Francois Lyotard and Ludwig Wittgenstein. I dont know who else to read. Anyone, ideas??

Of course i have no idea what i am taking about. but. i like this idea as a beginning for writing about epistemology and methodology in a more accessible way.