Experience Song (with guitar chords) Inspired by Joan W. Scott’s “Experience” from Feminists Theorize the Political (edited by Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott) VERSE 1 VERSE 2 G Em Breaking silence and sharing experience
G Em Knowledge is gained through vision
C D7 makes communities visible—
C D7 then it’s written on paper;
G Em Samuel Delany wrote that group sex
G Em the visible is privileged
C D7 gave him political power.
C D7 and writing is put at its service.
*CHORUS G A Experience can’t be the basis D G for foundations— G A we have to question authority D G in all its guises. VERSE 3 VERSE 4 This discourse has created a crisis in orthodox history - historians of difference grapple with how to forgo authority.
Making experience visible can preclude examination of the workings of ideological systems, its categories of representation.
*CHORUS VERSE 5 VERSE 6 Gayatri Spivak says it’s possible to see the subject-position, not in terms of reality, but in its operations. *CHORUS
14 RFD 172 Winter 2017
The history of concepts and categories can help us understand experience this is what Foucault meant when he talked of genealogy.