Re: e-mail tutoring

["David J. Coogan" <coogan@charlie.cns.iit.edu>]

Bill -- I think you're right -- the type of community building that MCI
apparently has in mind DOES try to background or erase difference.  And I
don't think Sara or I were trying to create an MCI version of email
tutoring.  But I do think that simply celebrating differnces is equally
reductive.  I am reminded of bell hooks, I think, who described herself in
a creative writing course, in college, deliberately NOT using black
vernacular, being coaxed by instructor and classmates to try using her
REAL voice.  What seems most instructive here is that noone would have
pressured her to assume that voice had she not been present, physically.

Dave

On Mon, 3 Mar 1997 CONDON@siena.edu wrote:
> 
> I just wonder what's so great (and what's at stake in claiming
> that there is something great)  about there being "no bodies. No 
> genders. Just minds."  What's so wrong with my body (or 
> any of our bodies, for that matter) that there is 
> a (cyber)space place in the world which is better because
> or our physical absence (or the absence of physical difference)??
> 
> Can we imagine or construct a cyberspace writing center where difference can
> be maintained, celebrated and integrated into our ways of 
> speaking, writing, and being? 
>