deconstruction blues

For the response I have to write this week for my class on women and citizenship, I have been thinking a lot about the difference between what kind of work we do in the classroom (and by "we" here I mean the generally liberal graduate students working toward an emphasis in feminist theory) and what kind of change we wish to effect in the world. We spend pretty much all of our time in class dismantling various kinds of idealism: we discuss how achieving a sense of belonging relies on practices of exclusion, how ideas of a better future are almost always contingent on imagining the past as either very good or very bad (rather than somewhere in the middle), etc. At the same time, most of us -- I think -- make sure to vote, to recycle, to include women's voices (in the form of texts or student discussion) in our classroom, and to do all sorts of "little" things that we believe will help our own kinds of idealism come alive. We simultaneously believe in the possibilities of achieving equality, peace and environmental sustainability and see the many problems and paradoxes in the way people (including ourselves) think about them.

My program is a kind of home base for deconstructionist theorists (Derrida taught here, after all), so I feel like I can't really get away from it in my own reading and writing. But, as I've told Justin several times, I don't see how people whose lives center around deconstructionist theory ever do anything. There is some value in dismantling arguments, but then how do you ever work toward some sort of solution?

I apologize if this post is confusing; it confuses me too.