kwheeler's blog

In my first web-paper, I discussed my discomfort with Helene Cixous’ proclamation that “women must write women” (Cixous 877). Cixous discusses how women have been “kept in the dark” and led into self-disdain for so long that the amount of women authors is miniscule relative to men. I do not contest this statement and I believe that it is important for women to write and to let their voices be heard. However, while I realize that my discomfort with writing and speaking in class probably has a lot, if not, everything to do with the fact that I am a woman who has group up in a patriarchal society I do not think that every woman’s rebellion has to

Intro to Critical Feminist Studies: Web-paper 3

I love when the readings for my courses overlap, especially when it’s reading from different disciplines. Though I foresaw that material for my Anthropology of Reproduction class might coincide with readings for this one, I was nevertheless surprised when on the same day that I had to read Barbara Johnson’s “Apostrophe, Animation and Abortion” we discussed Faye D. Ginsburg’s Contested Lives: the Abortion Debate in an American Community in Anthropology. More readings that I have found relevant include the introduction

Out of all the texts we have read so far, the ones that I have identified with the most were James J. Sosnoski’s “A Mindless Man-driven Theory Machine” and Hélène Cixous’s “The Laugh of the Medusa”. Sosnoski really brought home for me some of the ideas that Virginia Woolf discusses in Three Guineas. In particular the idea of professionalism, which Woolf alludes to when she says that “[Professions] make the people who practice them possessive, jealous of any infringement of their rights, and highly combative if anyone dares dispute them” (Woolf, 66). Sosnoski attributes these ideas to the qualities of competitiveness and falsificity that he says are all too present in the