feminism

Hey everybody, I don't really know if this has any place in this Ecological Imaginings class, but maybe if we can imagine the preservation of women to be a form of ecology, not unlike the preservation of all plant life, animal life.

I just wanted to call everyone's attention to this excellent documentary currently being shown on PBS on Mon & Tues nights at 9:00 PM.  I imagine you guys have lots of time to watch films, yeah!  But this is an amazing series.

"Half the Sky" about gender based violence.

Here's the link to the first & second segment:

http://video.pbs.org/video/2283557115   

http://video.pbs.org/video/2283558278

When I began this project I decided I was going to write about the controversy over the cesarean rate in the United States. I have heard nurses and friends talk about the trend of rising rates in cesareans, and from the conversation I’ve realized it’s a very controversial topic. I am interested in women’s health, so I started asking my health care providers what they thought of the c-section rate in the U.S., and I started seeing a trend that people’s view on c-sections often has do with a more general outlook on obstetrics. Many of the people who I came across that didn’t approve in the increasing rate of c-sections had other complaints about how obstetric units are run. People who disproved of the c-section rate often felt that medicine practiced in hospitals is too ‘interventionalist’ and treats birth like there is going to be an abnormality, when in general births are normal. Of the people that told me they didn’t think there was something wrong with the c-section rate, they often had the outlook that giving birth outside of a hospital puts the mother and baby at unnecessary risk of being without a physician.  After talking about birth and doing a bit of research I decided I wanted to not only do my paper on c-sections, but also on births in hospitals versus non-hospital births. I interviewed two ob/gyn’s and two certified midwives to try and get their opinions on the matter.

   The military has been traditionally defined as a masculine institution; actually it may be the most prototypically masculine one of all social institutions. Therefore, whenever women soldiers appear in public, they seem to be standout since people tend to think that for women to participate, either the military has to be perceived as transform to make it more compatible with how women are, or women have to be perceived as changing in ways that make them more suited for military service. Many changes have occurred in the past several decades. This period has witnessed a mushrooming of attention to women’s contribution to the army. More and more women soldiers are allowed to actually fight on the frontline or engage in violent and dangerous tasks. It seems that society started to recognize female’s ability as protectors of their countries, giving them space to choose whatever they want, including stepping on battlefields. Many people perceive this phenomenon as a huge progress of feminism, while others cast doubts on it. Interested in this issue, I would like to focus on female soldiers, especially Chinese women soldiers, in my webevent.

In tandem with Amophrast, Colleen Ryanne, aybala05, and S. Yaeger

Continuing conversations for the year

-After the revamped Q-Forum during Customs Week we will have continuing conversations periodically through the year. These conversations will be open to the entire school, not just first years. There will be three larger conversations, one in the fall and two in the spring.

FIRST CONVERSATION

Working title not yet here: what it means to be queer here and not there

How do we translate a queer space into spaces that we are less comfortable in/feel less safe in/etc.?

The first post-Customs Week Q Forum discussion, it will cover issues such as coming out, the idea of being out and all that entails, and talking with people from home/family about queer life at Bryn Mawr. This conversation will take place the week before Fall Break by hall, and will be open to anyone. There will most likely be follow up events hosted by Rainbow Alliance during Out Week (week we get back from Fall Break).

Theoretical Hosts: HA's and CDAs

Several things inspired the idea for MC and my teach-in for this class.  The thought of engaging all of our senses in Feminism is fascinating. Recalling the "This is What A Feminist Looks Like" movement that went around recently, we thought that perhaps we could go further than just looks.  We got the idea to do something similar to the "This is What A Feminist Looks Like" movement, and ask people what they thought about the other senses.  We chose to ask them what FEMINISM looks/tastes/smells/sounds/feels/emotionally feels like, as opposed to what A FEMINIST etc.  This was because A) it would be more useful to explore feminsm as an ideal as opposed to the people who perscribe to it, and B) we were probably going to get a lot of flesh-related responses that were not going to be useful. In class we dealt a lot with taste and feminism, and for the Book of Salt we even did a small taste workshop; Anne even talked brieftly about how she had once started the class with a "sensory smorgasboard," an idea that caught us and brought us to the final project we presented.  We decided to take the responses people gave us and bring them into class so that the class could experience feminism the way their peers were experiencing it.  

To Begin. . .

As an avid TV junkie, I have stayed up many a night to watch re-runs of the shows “Teen Mom” and “16 & Pregnant.” I know you are probably rolling your eyes if you're not a fan of the “reality” TV phenomenon, but these shows have affected me in a way that other “reality” based shows never could. (...So understandable when thinking about their consistent lack of depth: there are not a multitude of thought-provoking conversations that follow the documentation of rainbow Jello shots and women pulling out other’s hair extensions). These shows have affected me partly because I am the product of unplanned pregnancy to a fifteen-year-old girl myself, and a subsequent adoption. I find the show to be a way to help me begin to understand what I meant to my birth mother at age fifteen, the prime time for being a devoted Frito Lay consumer and wearing exactly what the mannequin wears.

Introduction

The VLogs

For our final web event, sekang, dchin and I reflected on the process of our class presentation and asked ourselves the questions we had asked others for the interviews we conducted.

*Both videos are long, so please allow time for loading before watching.

In the first video we reflect on our motivation for our class presentation, the process of interviewing strangers at Philadelphia train stations, the process of editing those interviews and how the product we created related back to the discussions we have had in Critical Feminist Studies this spring.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbZFJU-xkgU&feature=youtu.be

In the second video, we interview each other in the same style that we conducted the interviews for our class presentation.  We then reflect on being asked these questions and our new perspectives on documentary filmmaking. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDs50K5UBg8&feature=youtu.be

The Editing Process