Anne French Dalke writes:
Rejecting “balancing” as too rigid, too binary, and “juggling” as too tricky, too dangerous (who wants to think of her kids as a juggler’s toys?), Kaye arrived at “emulsification”: the suspension – not the mixing – of small globules of one liquid in a second. (Consider salad dressing, a mixture of oil and vinegar capable, with vigorous shaking, of being briefly combined but tending always to separate out.)
…
To “teach emulsified” is to keep the classroom in perspective, to have always a consciousness of the larger world in which it is suspended. Liable to stir things up in or to be stirred up by what happens beyond.But liable, too, as Lugones says, to separate out:
“I am making mayonnaise…If I add too much oil at once, the mixture se separa, it spearates…In English, one mght say that the mayonnaise curdled. Mayonnaise is an oil-in-water emulsion. As all emulsions, it is unstable. When an emulsion curdles, the ingredients become separate from each other. But that is not altogether an accurate description: rather, they coalesce toward oil or toward water, most of the water becomes separate from most of the oil – it is instead, a matter of different degress of coalescence. The same with mayonnaise; when it separates, you are left with yolky oil and oily yolk.” (Dalke 178)
