Bookses

Is this the book you were talking about, Jon? Looks really interesting, if so!

So, Sam and I spoke a bit today about some of the books we might like to read... Here's what we came up with.

• Kamala Visweswaran's Fictions of Feminist Ethnography. We read this for methods, but that was two years ago, and we thought it might be cool to revisit. It's Feminism/Postmodern/Subaltern Studies goodness.
  
• Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities. As I understand it, this book discusses the relationship between media and the creation of the "Nation."
• Dirks, Eley and Ortner's (editors) Culture/Power/History. This is a general theory reader. It's got some wide selections, so we were thinking just reading the
  Intro (which is fantastic) and maybe one or two other chapters. I can scan this and send people PDFs.
• Judith Halberstam's "Oh Behave! Austin Powers and the Drag Kings." This is an article. I have the PDF handy. It's hilarious. It talks about how humor is used to contest "heteronormative masculinity" in Austin Powers and The Full Monty. It might be fun, I don't know.
• Carlo Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms: the Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller. I heard about this my freshman year and I've been wanting to read it. It challenges the notion of a homogeneous 16th c. Christian culture. It discusses (from what I understand is an interesting theoretical bent) the Inquisition confessions of a miller, and the world view expressed therein. Basically the miller believed the universe to be a mass of rotting cheese and God a worm in the cheese...

That was basically the ones we thought would be good to start with... They're all pretty theory heavy though. I like Jon's suggestion of reading fiction, and I'd be totally game to read Cat's Cradle. I'd also be up to reading Everything is Illuminated.

I'll look in to using the polling thing blogger has going for us to vote on books... alternative means of selection are welcome. But I figure we'll wait until tomorrow in case there are last minute suggestions!

Night all.