To lead with curiosity...

When I was reading Enloe's introduction to her book entitled Being Curious About Our Lack of Feminist Curiosity I thought what a great piece this would have been to read at the beginning of the semester. I thought it did an excellent job of summarizing key issues that surround the problems with modern feminism and how we must move forward in the future to avoid any repetition. As I continued to read, however, I realized how much of the text I would have passed over and not appreciated had I read it at the beginning of my woman's studies "career". The ideas of patriarchy and need for curiosity would have just not been as profound.

I think our entire class has been sparked by the notion that we are all curious feminists to some extent who want to know more about our modern culture, how we got to where we are, and how we are moving forward in the future. I like, then, how Enloe envelopes this idea of curiosity and how in fact a lack of curiosity "saves mental energy". If we just accept everything for what it is, we will not need to think about how it came about to what it is today and therefore we will encounter no problems with it from here on out. But this is just silly. If we accept such words as "natural", "tradition", and "always", three words Enloe ideally would prefer us to challenge, we make concepts "immune to bothersome questioning" and allow our social, albeit patriarchal, system to continue functioning in an unhindered manner. As Enloe further points out:

"So many power structures ... are dependent on our continuing lack of curiosity. 'Natural,' 'tradition,' 'always': each has served as a cultural pillar to prop up familial, community, national, and international power structures imbuing them with legitimacy, with timelessness, with inevitability."

For example, "It is natural for women to take on the more feminine professions such as secretary or babysitter". This implies that the roles women are destined to be in have been so forever and thus need not be questioned, thus perpetuating the said power structure which ultimately favors masculinity to the highest degree.

Perhaps a 180 from this discussion of curiosity is Enloe's enriched chapter on The Surprised Feminist. She mentions how the feeling of surprise is an undervalued attribute which we can all learn and grow from. It is, dare I say, natural to not want to be surprised because that means that you were not "all-knowing" to begin with and thus your credibility has been minimized. As a feminist, however, Enloe argues that to be surprised is necessary to succeed and adapt for the future. No one can predict the future. Thus when new extraordinary occurrences appear, we will yes be surprised, but be able to analyze them and say how they have followed within the fundamental structure we have seen so far and how we can build from it.

All in all, what I took from these two chapters were that it is important to be curious because without curiosity our world would be routine and at the same time we must allow ourselves to be surprised in order to prepare for what we can only imagine lies ahead.