carolyn.j's blog

Kathy Acker concludes her essay "Seeing gender" with her powerful description of what she terms "languages of the body."  As she argues, the languages of the body are innately true and real, untouched by the mimetic qualities of language as it has been constructed and owned by the patriarchal model.  Because Acker cannot disconnect herself from her body, and in that same way how the body must be the site and originator of her imagination and self, she finds in it the only deeply true language in that it has not yet been subject to the socially constructed world outside her self. 

Choosing my avatar took me slightly longer than I anticipated, for considering all the misrepresentation a single, stand alone image can present.  What I ultimately came up with is a picture my friend and I took while studying abroad last fall.  I have unquestionably learned a tremendous amount during my time at Bryn Mawr, from a combination of courses, people, and experiences.  I often look back on study abroad, though, as the first time I really began to build a more concrete concept of how I wanted to play out my academic interests in the world.  In addition, my distance from Bryn Mawr and the people I knew there gave me a new perspective to consider the nature of the assumptions and knowledge I held - both of myself and the world around me.  My time away was in many ways transformative, even if that process and its results are not always obvious.