education

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

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.

My final project is a picture book for adults to inform them on gender and sexuality--what they are, why they are important, and how they work together.  I made this because I have friends and family who don't really understand much of this, and I want to give them a concrete way to get informed. It is an overview of basic concepts to create a vocabulary to help readers communicate their ideas with other people who without having to define every term.

I chose to make this in book form because reading a book is a different experience from surfing websites.  Reading a book is a more personal experience because you can hold it in your hands and turn the pages yourself. On the internet, you can click hyperlinks as much as you want, but you depend on the hardware to obey you. You can change the website, delete your history, and distract yourself with a funny cat video in all of 20 seconds.  A book is different because you make a decision to sit down and read it, understand it, and absorb it.  The stories stay with you.

That being said, I chose to include several resources for readers that go more in-depth than the book because, like I said, this book is just an overview.  I included websites, a film, and a GLBT National Help line.  I chose four websites for information, and seven websites by religion because sometimes people forget that sexuality and religion are not mutually exclusive and a higher power can be tremendously helpful when dealing with issues such as these.

 [just speak nearby the borders of our minds] <-- link

This is a piece about borders. About communities. About movement and restrictions and ideologies. I wanted to interrogate how feminism is at times bounded by qualifiers, that is, to differentiate between French feminism and Third-World Feminism, and the ways in which those are both appropriate and constructed such that the result is constructed identities viewed as essential.

Among artists in the 20th and 21st century, explicit reference to prior works has become a mode of producing pieces. This may be in the form of collage or pastiche of some kind, and in video art, it is typically through found footage that these references can be made. Video Artists like Dara Birnbaum have spoken on the power of reappropriating footage, specifically, in her case, from popular media sources, but some of the logic remains in what I have done. Birnbaum wanted the agency to engage with the images being presented to her, to take ownership and subvert their meanings to create new meaning, asserting that she wanted to “talk back” to the media. Further, she asserts:

Space is being shaped right now! 

Looking back on some of the classes we've had I realized that I do not agree with some of the choices that we as a class either made or went along with. For this web paper I have tried to address those issues. 

----> CURRENT TIMELINE

I have a few goals for the end of the semester:

• I've been reading a lot of teachers' blogs lately, and I really want to get to the point where I blog about my experience as a personal reflective tool. I assume that most of the teachers whose blogs I read were not told that they had to blog, and it seems like a great way of processing your experience whenever you have time. I've seen similar things happen on twitter with #edchat, #ntchat, and #1stchat, but blogging can just be a record. For the rest of the year, I'm going to try to do a few shorter blog posts when I have things to say instead of gathering them all up at the end of the week.
• I want to continue working through my narratives in Literacies of music, tech, and linguistics.
• I want to engage more with the class community in Literacies--on twitter, here, and in person. I know that I've been spending a lot of my time looking out to the world through social media for this class, but I think more intra-class communication would help me grow more.

I'm thinking about using Storify to tell my thrice-told tale once. What storytelling method are you excited about?

I wanted to learn more about the outreach that Kate Bornstein does today, and her website "Hello Cruel World" is something that I feel is really great.

www.hellocruelworld.net

I think that most people who disregard conversations about gender and sexuality as something that doesn't pertain to them if their lives fit in the expected gender binary don't realize the amount such ignorance can further pain those who are struggling with their identities in such a way. Kate says "I think that the world needs more kind people in it, no matter who or what they are, or do"

I think that in some ways I am also guilty of not trying to learn as much about issues of gender and sexuality, because I have never struggled with my own sexual orientation or felt that I am wrongly gendered. Even so, the gender workbook helped me realize that the "ideal" woman and man are pretend ideas that no one can ever really fulfill no matter how hard that they try. Even if one considers themselves able to fit neatly inside society's accepted gender binary, the binary's ideals pose a problem for everyone. . . regardless of whether you 'appear' to be fitting well within it.

Not to destroy anyone's fond childhood memories but The Lion King is not Africa. I know some people are thinking "Duh" and I used to think that went without saying...until I went there, set up an internship tracking animals for this summer, and came back. The misunderstandings range from the minorly annoying idea that all Africa is a jungle or the constant shock people feel when learning how "brutal" the animal world is. A point I find endlessly ironic, but I won't go into that. What was most surprising to me, however, were the reactions I got when I described my internship. I was asked if I would be working with "natives" and if I was nervous about it. The same person asked if I would be hiking through the game reserve in order to track the animals. I was stunned by the implication that I "should" be more nervous about working with the people who live there (who by the way are awesome, hilarious, and if I can learn 1/10th of what they know I will be beyond thrilled), then the animals I'm tracking. To give a little perspective there is a saying that Ben, the tracker I met in Ngala, eventually translated into English for me after 20 minutes of valient effort (and a fair amount of laughter) to teach me how to say it in Shangaan. The saying is this "You don't have to be the fastest--you just have to be faster than one other person". If I were indeed to wander around a game reserve by myself I can think of at least 15 ways I would die, only 5 of which involve predators.