on slide shows

1. yeah for the maryland women. i just watched noah's hook from five different angles on cbs. i wonder if we will get the same vantage points when the terps take on duke?
2. just back from dinner in honor of a lecturer who came to campus tonight. more on the meal off-blog because even i have enough sense not to type about this here and now.
3. i will add that finally! in the lecture series i faithfully attended this term in my own college, we got to see images with women in them, ones where the women were the subjects. (we barely ever get to see people in the slides that the architects show). tonight, we saw women (and children) in the images: to be more precise, out of maybe 50-60 images: black women 5; white women 0; and i am pretty sure that there was one vietnamese woman in a noodle shop in final slide of life "on the fringe." one of the black women was prone on the floor, she appeared to be unconscious (whatever the state, she surely did not give her informed consent for the snapshot); one was a sex worker on a corner; one strode down the street. the other two women were in front of or outside of their homes in a decaying inner city. while no white women appeared on the screen, yet we heard a lot about "the poor" white women who had to resort to working the streets of this (black) neighborhood near a trash tranfer site/incinerator where truckers pay for the women's services. i was furious. i actually think that my colleagues near me could hear my heart beating. in the Q+A, i asked the speaker about how he made the decision to have these particular images and words work together during the lecture. i felt obligated to ask him about this because i could not sit there in a packed auditorium of students and colleagues and have this be the picture of black womanhood; or for even of white women for that matter. no doubt there are junkies and hookers in this place. but the attendant storyline that he offered, that framed our looking was deeply deeply problematic. his whole narrative of how we the viewers should feel especially sorry for the white women who had to go to the neighborhood to do this after they were born white was nauseating.
4. he returned to my question at dinner. after two beers, he asked: so what was up with that question. were you trying to construct some sort of feminist argument or what?

or what.