Joanna Maselli's List: Skriker Paper

• We, in turn, see ourselves in the monsters. We begin to understand our own monstrousness, our own departure from the "human."

  • To what extent is this true of our production, especially considering the work we did in rehearsal to explore all of the ways in which the humans are the ones terrorizing the monsters?

• What, then, makes women monsters scary?
• Perhaps it is because they represent such an undeniable disruption of the norm because they are capable of effectively producing fear.
• an element of surprise.
• Here in front of the player is a woman, a symbol of comfort and submissiveness. Yet she bears claws, fangs, rotting flesh. Suddenly, that femininity which culture has taught him should be beautiful comes before him as unrelentingly, unapologetically ugly. That femininity which he believed should serve him attempts, without sympathy or remorse, to devour his very body. That femininity which society has told him to protect, he must kill - not peacefully, respectfully, but in the most violent of manners, one befitting the slaughter of an animal. Now, that which was the most tamed is most wild; that which was once most humane is most foreign.

  • Reminds me of the staging of Skriker's opening monologue
• unwillingness to yield to expectations
• she completes a dialectic of womanhood. As a woman, she is the most familiar, but as a monster, the unknown; this combination makes her uncanny
• Before the gamer, she is a sexual predator. She is a zombie, in more ways than one, in that she is untamed in her desire for the consumption of flesh. This threat of sexual dominance is, perhaps subconsciously, as frightening to the gamer as the literal threat of in-game death.

  • Does the notion of sexual dominance apply here in the sense that the monster wants dominance over the women's' offspring?

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• a haphazard networked fashion
• As a story for learning, it is messy, unstable and uncertain
• resilient

  • Uncertainty + resiliency as source of "hope"?
• experimentation
• The idea is to think of a classroom/community/network as an ecosystem in which each person is spreading their own understanding with the pieces the available in that ecosystem. The public negotiation of that ‘acquisition’ (through content creation, sharing) provides a contextual curriculum to remix back into the existing research/thoughts/ideas in a given field
• more about participating and belonging than about specific items of content – the content was already everywhere around us
• the connections we create between people and ideas as the curriculum for learning
• participating in the community is the curriculum.

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