I often use Heather Armstrong’s tirades against her bosses as a conversation starter during my social media courses. Her rants never named her bosses nor the company for whom she worked. That didn’t stop her from being sacked! Compare that with Steve Yegge’s rant about his employer, Google. He not only names the company but [...]
A post on dooce entitled I Have Something to Say is a useful example of parrhesia. Here we find Armstrong speaking truth in the form of a criticism – of both herself and others – which involves a level of risk to the speaker. It’s not a risk of life and death so much as [...]
Armstrong outlines one of the primary reasons for her leaving the church: the belief that she was not permitted to speak up against church doctrine. A strategy of censorship is one that supports the power of the church by silencing dissent and dulling resistance efforts. Here’s part of the text of this post: And so, [...]
Armstrong describes the first time she uses the word “fuck”. On March 12, 1997, ten minutes after opening a rejection letter from the admissions of one of BYU’s graduate programs, I stood up next to the open window of my bedroom and shouted, “FUCK!” for the first and most precious time of my life. It [...]
Here’s a fascinating entry relating to Armstrong’s account of her first kiss. It combines a number of elements anticipated in Foucault. First, the post contains a quote from a letter Armstrong sent to a friend. Foucault would probably read this as a hupomnema or perhaps more accurately as correspondence. Letter writing is an important technology [...]
Here’s a striking post from Heather Armstrong which begins to address the intersection between power and sexuality. Whilst Armstrong’s observations amount to a candid dislike of the Mormon church along human rights lines, her post opens up issues of how pastoral power is used in conjunction with the creation of sexual identities. I prefer not [...]
SPOILER ALERT: YOU CAN SUCK IT, plus Mormon Doctrine recited from memory | dooce ®: “‘We believe that the first principles and ordinances of the Gospel are FIRST faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, SECOND repentance, THIRD baptism by immersion for the remission of sins, FOURTH laying on of hands for the gift of the [...]
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