Thoughts from the Swimming Pool: Literature Review

Today was my first swim in 5 weeks, due to illness and busy-ness occupying my time instead.  I managed 1500m instead of my usual 1750, but I was pleased with my swim because it enabled my thinking.

I thought through my introduction for my literature review.

This literature review will cover contributory factors for my MA By Project: Valuing Women.  The literature review will consider how culture demonstrates how social groups set value upon each other (Raymond Williams); the importance of metaphor in understanding underlying messages (Lakhoff and Johnson); the implications of Residual, Dominant and Emergent forms of culture (Raymond Williams); embodied cognition (Lambrous Malafouris); the significance of the object within western culture (Hudek); the gendering of the gaze (Laura Mulvey); and the use of stitch as a feminine medium (Rozika Parker).  Additionally I will also consider examples of visual artworks,by Tracey Emin (Tent), by Grayson Perry (Who Are You?) and one by Cornelia Parker (Magna Carta).

This breaks down to about 300 words per item.

I started reading Lambrous Malafouris but then developed a migraine.  So I took myself off the to chiropractor and he diagnosed "student's neck" and dealt with it.  I had not met this chiropractor before, and it turns out he sees himself as a feminist as he was brought up in a single parent household and his mother was a strong woman!  He was brought up to think a school community of 50% lesbians and the rest as strong independent women was normal, and was quite stunned to discover at age 18 that the rest of the world did not think likewise!

I found my reading fascinating but hard work.  It gave the detail that supported a conversation that Linden and I had had a couple of weeks ago.  A lot of the stuff I have been looking at recently comes from 1930s, retheorised in 1980s, so I was very glad that Malafouris is writing in 2014 and it is cutting edge thinking.  Having read, paraphrased and slept on it, I hope today to be able to write some of the detail in easy words, to be half way between the complexity of the author and the simplicity of my conversation with Linden.