Serendip is an independent site partnering with faculty at multiple colleges and universities around the world. Happy exploring!

Rest of semester Planning

Amophrast's picture
  • Monika Treut - Female Misbehavior 4 perspectives
  • get too caught up in otherizing communities
  • bridge them into complicating the mainstream
  • Buck Angel etc might be too "special interest" - not related to academics? bridging the gap
  • Posse Plus retreat - gender and sexuality
  • usually very rejuvenating --> exact opposite
  • What do we really know?
  • gen/sex for straight girls
  • queering the retreat

 

  • How would we make this useful for intro studies and interesting for the more experienced students
  • pretty difficult already - studying literature is different. used to looking at things in a different way
  • anti-feminist to give power to theories
  • "i don't know anything, i'm ignorant" --> that's not the POINT
  • people getting too caught up in definitions
  • reinforcing structures of expertise and power
  • terms good, but don't want to get bogged down... 
  • not very empowering.
  • things like women-centered language...personal interest...important to bring up, but may unnecessarily derail the class
  • no empowerment, product of whatever (teaching, learning, background)
  • Not productive to get upset about it, to deny it.
  • The most helpful thing you can know is you're not unique.

 

  • Unpacking, consuming experience, thinking about experience, being in this classroom
  • giving voice to different experiences
  • if feminism is structured around the experience
  • The sex act itself
  • why don't we want to think about this?
  • Gender expression, forms of dress might be more accessible
  • bring attention to it
  • what it means to do gender
  • schooling as a system...what we pay attention to, how we're taught, how we learn, choosing to be interested in order to self-motivate
  • unpacking experience
  • how we experience censorship...?
  • "age-appropriateness"
  • subversiveness through accessing erotica, sex ed., etc at a certain age
  • Sex ed = during adolescence it's other people telling you how to understand your body

    Specific texts:
    - On Becoming a Marijuana User by Howard Becker
    - Quiz from My Gender Workbook by Kate Bornstein, address ideas of sexuality, normative, non-normative
    - bell hooks

    Valorize experience and question/destabilize it

Comments

FrigginSushi's picture

My ideas on your ideas

I think on the topic of "How would we make this useful for intro studies and interesting for the more experienced students", it might be interesting to talk about uncommon text such a poetry or even looking at art. This can be a way to let everyone's own interpretation and way of thinking be shown no matter what level they are at in Feminism. Maybe we could do the Twenty-One Love Sonnets that Anne is always telling us about. We may not even have to center a week or even an entire day on poems/art, but use them as sort of "warm-ups" since sometimes I personally feel that we jump into things too quickly and too heavily. It might be a nice way to get our brains working.

I looked up if bell hooks had any poems and there is a book of her poems called When Angels Speak of Love. I'm not sure if it's relative or not, but it might be somethign to consider.

I feel like your notes are very spread out and cover a lot of gender/performative ideas ( "what does it mean to do gender" and "schooling as a system...what we pay attention to, how we're taught, how we learn, choosing to be interested in order to self-motivate"), particularly in the 3rd section of bullet points, and this might be a good thing to look at, but I know you also said you didn't wanted to get bogged up in theory as well. I'm not sure how we could cover concepts that have whole classes dedicated to them in just a week or two. That might be something else to brainstrom about tomorrow in class.