Precarious, Performative, Playful, Potential...Perspectives!

     The difference that Humbach makes between rights and right relationships can be teased out within the debate on food security/sovereignty. Food security, as an ideal, is the right for all people and communities to have enough culturally appropriate food. Food sovereignty builds upon this by accentuating the importance of process in food acquisition. It places importance on community food systems, non-exploitation, and health.
      The issues of food justice and food security have always been important to me. On the surface, they are merely about food: having enough, access and availability. And on the surface, these are simple problems to fix, right? To fix hunger, farmers should plant more. Grocery chains should build stores in neighborhoods that lack them. But relationships always prove to be more complicated than their surface implications.

still haven't heard back from kammy, but/and/so
here's the (interim) current plan for tomorrow night
(feel free to use less--but not more!-- time than been's allotted for your group)

7:10-7:30: review end of semester requirements, portfolio work, etc.

7:30-7:37--alice.in.wonderland

7:37-7:44--amophrast, Katie Randall

7:44-7:59--venn diagram, jmorgant, phenoms

7:59-8:14--aybala50, lgleysteen, leamirella, S. Yaeger

8:14-8:29--jfwright, essietee, kimk, lwacker, rachelr

8:29-8:44--snacks

8:44-9:14--someshine, AmyMay, charlie, chelseam, Gavi, sel209, shlomo

9:14--9:30--end of semester evals

looking forward to this!
anne

We all know that Little Bee is a work of fiction.  Its poetic text, symbolic prose, and beautiful imagery—while stunning—are not describing real people or events.  But it is based in reality, and the fact remains that there are thousands upon thousands of refugees around the world.  Many of these refugees bear horrific physical and/or emotional scars that we cannot even begin to comprehend.  And yet, despite our acknowledged lack of comprehension, it is only natural that we want to help these refugees.  We are all human, after all, and the thought of other humans forced to flee their homes (and sometimes forced to lose their conceptions of their bodies as home) is hard to understand and subsequently ignore.

     After reading Little Bee, I know there was some conversation in class about what can be done to aid refugees.  It is my hope that my web event will serve to further inform and thus continue that conversation.  I think that by better understanding the international refugee crisis, how we can help, and hopefully implementing our new knowledge, we can build a right relationship (or at least a better, more just relationship) with the refugees scattered across the globe.  Anyway, because I want this web event to continue our in-class conversation, I have written this web event in what I believe is a conversational tone.  Finally, I want to mention that this web event is by no means a complete discussion of all that can be done, but it is a start.  Thanks for reading.

Gender Pay In-equality: A Call to Action In Orange Art

Attached are two documents:

Word.doc With pay gap data & reflective writing.

Artistic reintrepretation of possible road signage: photos of 14 different painted caution signs included.

SourceURL:file://localhost/Users/leecwacker/Documents/Senior%20Yr./GENSEX%20CORE%20COURSE/web%20event%203.doc

Lee Wacker

Web-Event 3

Gender Pay In-equality: A Call to Action In Orange Art

[Figure 1]                                                        [Figure 2]

Although cheesy, the saying “a picture is worth a thousand words” rings true. To express the concept of “right relationships”, I have “curated” an online exhibit of photographs. Although all of the photographs are real, because I have borrowed them from other websites, I have created my own titles for them. Additionally, for some of the photographs, the captions below the titles are not accurate for that specific photograph, but rather are based on the content of the photograph.

Because I am not computer-savvy enough to create a virtual gallery space, I will use my words to help you imagine the exhibition space in which this exhibit would be on display. Imagine a large, open room with light, sandy-colored wood floors and high white walls. There is also an expansive wall of windows allowing for natural sunlight to flood the gallery. The photographs would be 24” by 18” framed inside of a 2” white mat and a 1.5” solid black frame. The titles and captions would be printed on cards and mounted on the wall next to the bottom right-hand corner of the frame.

The Arc

Written on the wall, to be seen as the first thing when entering the exhibit:

I had attempted to create a video paper for this webevent but I encountered a couple of technical difficulties that 1. did not allow me to be a little more creative and 2. made the audio and the visual not match up perfectly. (YouTube...)

But I wanted to include my actual point in case the video wasn't clear. The right relationship that I had tried to build was the relationship surrounding the reproductive health bill. Through my lesson plans, I had the intention to working within the social context of the Philippines (or as I sometimes refer to it, the motherland) to improve sex education and thus, help alleviate the large population growth, lack of resources as well as educate the youth about sex in general. My point (or you could even say the thesis of this paper) is that although I am very connected and "entangled", through my roots, I still find it difficult to be considered as an insider because I still diffract the issues through the lens of someone who has been educated and who grew up in another country. Thus, I question whether or not I really have the right to be giving advice in the first place.

Sorry if it was difficult to watch or follow! I wasn't really so sure about how to fix that problem...

Several weeks ago, a user of the website TUBLR posted about Bryn Mawr’s  policies regarding trans women.  She called the school out for a number of things.  Students, myself included, responded pretty quickly to defend the school and to explain that the Bryn Mawr community is largely welcoming to trans individuals. 

I have been thinking about the exchanges we had since then and I have come up with many questions.  When I was trying to decide what to do with this web event, I planned on writing a paper exploring my thoughts on a possible right relationship between cis feminist activists and trans feminist activists.  Then, the thought occurred to me that doing so would be a little pointless if there were no trans female voices involved.  I thought of the question recently raised in class about how to humanize someone you don’t know. 

So I contacted the trans woman who had posted on TUMBLR and asked her if I could interview her for my paper.  She agreed and I planned on interviewing her via email and writing a paper based on our interview.  Something about that didn’t seem quite right to me.  I had recently conducted interviews for a paper in another class and I hated the process of treating peoples’ narratives like data.  I hated the idea of creating a closed conversation that would then be  presented through the filter of me. 

I had a bit of a revelation during our discussion of Little Bee on Tuesday, and since--in the midst of insight!--may not have been very clear about what I was suddenly seeing, I wanted to write it out here.

In 1899, Joseph Conrad published Heart of Darkness. In the late 1950's, Chinua Achebe critiqued the novel as "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness." He then created a new work of fiction, the novel Things Fall Apart, to give life and flesh to the sorts of figures Conrad had objectified in his novel. In 1979, the appearance of Buchi Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood called attention, in turn, to the peripheral role women had played in Achebe's novel. In this sequence a story was repeatedly re-worked-- first in criticism, then in fiction-- in order to bring into the foreground the sorts of characters whose lives had been neglected in earlier fiction. In each case, the attempt to fill one gap unexpectedly created another one.

Something quite similar happened with Charlotte Bronte's 1847 novel Jane Eyre. Like Achebe's essay, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's 1988 discussion of "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism" made problematic the fictional use of people of color as representations of the tortured psyches of Europeans. Spivak's analysis helps explain the generation of Jean Rhys's 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea, in which Bertha Rochester takes center stage (in Bronte's novel, she had been confined to the attic as a madwoman, a figure of Jane Eyre's unexpressed rage).