So, I’m in the third week of my second year.  Things seem a bit more doable this semester.  The reason: I am taking one less class than I did both semesters last year.  This is a huge load off.  The two seminars I am enrolled in this term are Theories of Feminism and Technology and Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society Seminar I.  In the former, we are focusing on domestic violence and the production of the female body within discourses of the public and the private.  In the latter, we are reading an overview of key theorists in philosophy and discourse: Bacon, Decartes, Saussure, Marx, Lacan, Irigaray, Derrida, etc.  Because I am a hopeless theory lover, the discourse seminar is my favorite.  I love nothing more than curling up with a good book of unintelligable theory and pretending like I actually know what it means.  There is something oddly empowering about this fiction.  On a practical level, I think this seminar will inform my work in feminist studies in very productive ways; namely, many feminist scholars appropriate the above theorists for contemporary projects, which sometimes runs the risk of tempting readers NOT to engage the original theory on its own terms.  Put differently, I fear that these appropriations may be a bit anachronistic or teleological in their endeavors (which I know I am guilty of).  The professor of this seminar, John Mowitt, will do an excellent job decifering how to work with these theorists in ways that are not misappropriative; I hope.  In sum, this should help me not only with my reading in feminist studies, but also in my dissertation/writing work.