Mundane Turbulence

This just in[to my consciousness]: WOMEN DO NOT FEAR DEATH.

Or, that’s what Professor Hollywood reports. Yes…that’s really her name: Amy Hollywood. It’s basically the coolest professor’s name I’ve ever heard. My dear friend Anna, who goes to the Harvard Divinity School, where Prof. Hollywood teaches, showed me probably the most intriguing course description I’ve ever seen:

Morning, Melancholia, and Mysticism

A common presumption of much second-wave feminist theory is that death does not pose a challenge for women in the same way that it does for men. According to this view, only an over-attachment to individuality, the ego, or the self renders human mortality problematic. Women, insofar as they reject these presumably masculinist values, do not or will not fear death. Yet even if we accept this argument (a big if), the reality of human mourning, apprehension, and fear in the face of the other’s death remains. The course will argue for the need for an explicitly feminist philosophy and/or theology of mourning, one attendant to the critique of masculinist necrophilia first launched by Herbert Marcuse and taken up most famously by Mary Daly. Toward this end, we will read important historical accounts of women’s relationship to death and mourning in Western Europe, as well as theoretical texts that articulate the role of mourning and melancholia in subject formation and the complex relationships between mourning, melancholic identification, gender, sexuality, and race. We will then turn to the Christian mystical tradition as a potential resource for a feminist philosophy of mourning.

Once again, new information about sex and gender blows my mind. How have I lived so long without ever hearing about this concept? Obviously, I don’t assume that it is true to all women — or even a majority of women — but the fact that it is at least true to many women is amazing to me. Why isn’t this explored in grade school? Why isn’t everyone taught to be unafraid of death?

Whenever I’m asked that fundamental question: what do you fear? My answer is invariably death. And yet, spurred on by this notion newly inserted into my frame of reference, I have informally asked many of my friends if they too fear death, and across the board, with the exception of my mother (don’t ever take her off of life support), the differences have been drawn entirely along gender lines.

I still don’t understand the opposite perspective, though. I know why I fear death: A) there’s nothing out there that’s convinced me of anything but the cessation of my consciousness upon passing (or not passing, as it were); and B) I don’t want to miss out on what’s in store for humanity. And honestly, it’s more B than it is A: people freaking rule. I want to see what we’re able to do before time runs out — will we kill ourselves? Will we evolve into something else? Will we survive as long as our sun does? Will we travel through space and time? I mean, I at least want to live to see hover cars, goddamnit. (Take THAT, Biff!)

Anyway…how the h-e-double-hockey-sticks did this happen? How did this difference evolve (not necessarily in the biological sense, but maybe it does indeed have something to do with that)? Is it a gender or a sex issue? If men were the subjugated sex, would they instead have a lesser fear of death? Do subjugated peoples in general fear it less as well (I wonder what the research is, if any, on Apartheid South Africans, Palestinians, and Tamils)?

I want to know more. This is the reading list for the class:

• Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Shell and the Kernel
• Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection
• Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictée
• Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief
• Margaret Ebner, Revelations
• Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id
• Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman
• Melanie Klein, Love, Guilt, and Reparation and Other Works
• Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia
• Julia Kristeva and Catherine Clément, The Feminine and the Sacred
• Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror
• Henry Suso, The Complete Works

I can’t quite put together how those books inform this course…I imagine that Prof. Hollywood does a lot of connecting the dots. The Psychology undergrad student in me is turned off by all the psychoanalytic stuff, but hey…maybe the reason why I can’t figure it out is why I ain’t a philosophy major.