alice.in.wonderland's blog

I have a couple of separate threads of thought for this post -- not terribly related but both things I've been mulling over:

For one of the first times in my college experience (kind of surprisingly, I guess) I am re-reading a text I encountered in a previous course. Eli Clare's Exile and Pride was also on the syllabus for an English class I took with Theresa Tensuan as a sophomore (hardly a coincidence, as her work on these topics is part of the other online reading for Tuesday). Since initially reading the book (largely for the way it adapts the autobiographical form in creative ways) my perspectives have certainly changed. Again, the metaphor of approaching the same questions from multiple angles, key to the interdisciplinary nature of our work in PPPP, maps well onto this revisiting of a text with different (gender-oriented) set of questions. However, the fundamental, unavoidable complicatedness Clare tries to convey -- especially the interrelatedness of social justice movements -- hit me with a memorable force both two years ago and this time around. We can get caught up in the specifics/feasibility of some of his recommendations, but I think he makes a pretty good case that the underlying forces of oppression cannot be parsed out into neatly divided identity categories, and that creative collaboration strategies -- whether his or our own -- are therefore necessary to social justice movements that wish to have more than shallow successes.

My name is Katie and I'm a Senior Anthropology major at Haverford with a concentration in Gender and Sexuality studies. Looking back on my college experience, I've found gender and sexuality studies to have guided my course selection and my intellectual trajectory, and my thesis -- which will focus on urban bicycle culture in Philadelphia -- will certainly employ gender and sexuality lenses. I've always wanted to take an interdisciplinary class, and this seems ideal! (click through for more -- sorry this is so long...)