August Blog-Lauren Brill

For my blog entry, I decided to focus my understandings on Dialogic Listening and some of the Conquergood’s Performing as a Moral Act. From class I can define dialogue as the quality of contact that exists for humans in tension with instrumental and objective contact.  Within out textbook, by John Warren and Deanna Fassett, performance scholar Dwight Conquergood argues that dialogic performance is “one path to genuine understanding to others” (70). This means to me that our listening is how we can build a relationship with other people depending on if we would like to or not. Dialogue emphasizes conversation as a shared activity. Having an open-ended attitude toward the conversation can help an individual focus on what is happening between them. 

            Within Conquergood’s Performing as a Moral Act, there are four different acts. I decided to focus on Enthusiast’s Infatuation and Curator’s Exhibitionism, due to the fact that they are complete opposites. Enthusiast’s Infatuation is that differences are oversimplified or ignored. The textbook describes this as “a listening stance in which we hear only the similarities we share with each other” (71). Curator’s Exhibitionism is almost exclusively focusing on the differences of others. So, between both of these, an individual will either focus on the similarities or the differences they share with another person. The first thing that comes to my mind when I hear both of these is sorority recruitment.  

            Starting with Enthusiast’s Infatuation, this easily connects to sorority recruitment because during the process of talking to new girls, we can decide if we like them or not just due to the similarities we have with them. Just due to the fact of having the same major or coming from the same state as a girl, this can make up our minds on if we think they should be in the sorority due to these similarities. An example of this is the movie Neighbors 2. In this movie a group of girls decides to make their own sorority so they can throw parties. They looked at their similarities, which were wanting to party, an decided to join together and create their own sorority. 

            Curator’s Exhibitionism also connects to sorority recruitment because of looking at the girl’s differences. Depending on how different the characteristics are between the two girls can determine whether they think that the individual is a good fit for the sorority. Some of the differences could be personality differences like being outgoing or shy. Also, within the movie neighbors 2, later on in it, the girls realize how different they are from each other and it starts to pull them apart. Having these differences can change people’s opinions about each other, just do to the fact that they aren’t looking at the similarities that they share.  

            Just based on a simple conversation, can determine whether someone feels connected to another individual or feels too different. It seems to just be chance because they could both be so similar but they can just focus on the differences because they don’t realize how many similarities they have. It also is the other way around too, due to just focusing on one similarity doesn’t mean that they are completely the same person, and that they might have many differences. Dialogic listening just depends on the moment and what that individual decides to focus on.

            

Here is a link to Neighbors 2 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2i9Zz_AqTg