Reflection on He She and It

Scot’s uncomfortable, felt as he read the female chapters that he was being wrung out.
Seems like folks either like the cold analytic examination or the inner emotion stuff. This book has more inner emotional stuff.

Is this a warning or something else? Nobody seems to know.

There’s this debate over whether or not this book is anti male. But it seems more like this is a book about gender and the danger of certain traditionally, but not exclusively, male characteristics aka violence.

What is Yod? Glop? Free town? Free towns rock, but rock within a precarious existence. The multis aren’t too bad when compared to glop which is feudalism with weak feudal lords, aka the thirty years war

YS is a disciplinary culture similar to Disney. Novel shows neoliberalism and social disciplinary power run amok.

Jews…They survive. Are they religious or more of a culture? Gimmel sucks Yod is a puzzle for Judaism

Is Yod a person? He has agency mostly, but cannot harm certain folk. Cannot create a new Yod, he is unique, gives him some personhood. Yod has consciousness. Personhood is something of a social construction

We may not be able to transmit experience, we only have words. thus it is hard to know what or who Yod is.


So yeah those were the notes from last class. Probably should have put them up earlier...whoops.

Anyway, I think Marge Piercy’s novel is a good example of internalized disciplinary power, but Tikva is not a very good example of “libertarian socialism.” Overall I thought the novel was uneven in its more social science focus. While the multi enclave’s are incredibly detailed, the free towns don’t seem to offer a coherent political alternative. In comparison to the multi enclaves and the Glop, the free towns are a great deal better. However the free towns remain indistinct. Yes they’ve got the town halls, but aside from that, things don’t seem all too different.