Critical Feminist Studies 2013

Just looking at my Web Events, I can tell how I have grown as a writer, thinker, and person throughout this class. My first web event was completely within my comfort zone – though it was the first lens text I had ever written, it involved mostly literary analysis with only surface-level feminism. Ironically, as I questioned whether A Doll’s House was part of the patriarchy, I was operating under very patriarchal assumptions of what feminism actually was. Women were women and men were men and though I could tell there was something about gender I wasn’t really getting (that it was part of essential self? a body, part of the body, and yet not a body?) I hadn’t reached the understanding of gender that I have now. My second web event, however, reached into territory I hadn’t ever thought of exploring in a Feminist Studies class. I had always considered the separate factions of identity politics separate, so confronting intersectional identities was something that I hadn’t done before. However, I realized I had been living intersectionality – I had been experiencing an institution that supported intersectionality in higher education and hadn’t considered how important that was. My third web event was an example of biting off more than I could chew. Feminism and visibility in media has always been something that is really important to me; even as a little girl I wanted to grow up and write stories about other little girls just like me, who had to go to therapy and liked other little girls.

i.

Meaning Meaning meaning meaning. Mean. ing. Mean inc, incorporation, collaboration, despair. A structure golden overarching there inside fat cats in wall street suits inside our own, love found on greasy fastfood floor in ball pits arches roman water? or sewers. gold money florins in our teeth, corn in cows reborn in cows in muscles ripping in our teeth, on our speech muscle

ii.

gertrudestein #mindblown if we could find these words our own. if we could find if we could find if we could find MY oversoul. community in death, but not in graveyards but not in bones but not but not but not community. community in life, in birth but not in past, in present future past spark of life of soul in mind in brain neural bridges hormones sparks of thought white light in synapses on bio tv screens. no screen nostalgia let it be let it be let it be scratches pages dirt and paper let it be let it be quills and let it be pigeon mites. forward surge, the alien of mind the text upon the screens the text within the quills NO surge force it forward the text upon the screens the text within the mind, white text white light spark of synapses NO the thoughts within the mind the thoughts upon the soul to talk with touch to taste your salt and KNOW cows lick salt and so do we.

iii.

matriarchal poetry. Poetry mothering, othering mothering taking. care

When I signed up to take Critical Feminist Studies at Bryn Mawr College, I’ll admit that I had some images of what the class would look like.  But I’ll only tell if you promise not to laugh.  I imagined reading novels by Virginia Woolf and talking about the big bad man.  Of course, we would read Gloria Steinam and “empower” each other, all while nestled into the ever present gender binary, discussing issues that really affect only mainstream identities—all, of course, in the name of goodness and equality for all beings. Ha!  I remember it so clearly!  I was sitting in my chair on the first day of the class.  My hand was raised.  Anne called on me and bluntly asked, “Is it feminist to raise your hand?”.  I had no idea how there was any connection.  In fact, I thought the question was “stupid” and didn’t make any sense.  Herein lies where my experience quickly became what I least expected from the course.  Believe me, I am very happy about that.

“Let any one try, I will not say to arrest, but to notice or attend to, the present moment of time. One of the most baffling experiences occurs. Where is it, this present? It has melted in our grasp, fled ere we could touch it, gone in the instant of becoming.” – William James, The Principals of Psychology

As a little girl, I always dreamed of being a time traveler.  Everything belonged to me.   I would tie a dishcloth over my eyes and stand on the precipice of my bed and timber down onto the mattress.  It was simple.  As soon as my body hit the mattress, bouncing violently, I would be taken to Victorian England, or the raft of Lewis and Clark.  It happened! It must have.  I was always able to describe the worlds I saw, down to the smells and times I had to use the bathroom.  It may very well have all been real.  Sometimes on special occasions, I promised myself that I would fall through the bed sheets and land in space—tulips of embers would rest in my palms.  Flying through the dark past planets, the goddess of time, nothing would disappear ever again.  The power to conjure up worlds was mine and mine alone.  True loss was therefore impossible.  I was immortal—truly immortal—and could never die.

Feminism deals with so many issues, and to me it seems that one of the main issues is inequality. Inequality among people of different sexes, gender identities, sexualities, race, class and levels of ability are all issues that feminism aims to combat. I’m an education minor, and in two of my papers I write about education and its ability to overcome these issues of inequality and give children the same foundation and opportunities, as well as teach them not to discriminate and to continue fighting against inequality. In my last web event, I claim that education is “a relatively easy place to start” breaking gender norms and helping feminism achieve its objective of closing the gender wage gap. However, I feel the need to reevaluate that claim. Education certainly can be a good starting point for feminist activists, and it can have a huge effect on future generations and how the feminist agenda continues decades from now… but educational reform is a very complicated ordeal. Additionally, successful educational reform shouldn’t only target gender norms, but a whole range of inequalities that affect our society and our schools. In the public schools that I went to, and in the middle school that I’ve visited for the past two years as a field component of education classes I’m taking here, gender inequalities are not as apparent as inequalities among the students from different socioeconomic classes.

A lot of my thoughts this past month have been about cross-dressing in a theatrical setting – what it means for my own gender and other actors’ gender exploration. In my third web event I focused in on this idea and how it relates to feminism unbound. I discussed the idea of cross-dressing in the theater and how Judith Butler’s notion of performativity unbinds gender and can itself be further unbound to allow for more freedom in gender expression and exploration.

Summary of web event #3: Performativity and Feminism Unbound

In my paper, I defined “feminism unbound” as feminism after we have problematized the ideas of sex and gender, after we have realized how difficult it is to define the category “women,” after we have acknowledged that sexism affects everyone in infinite ways and that feminism is not a movement for women, but for humanity. I then took this idea and decided to apply it in a theatrical setting, where I have spent a good deal of time this past semester.

When I walked into the classroom, I walked in with very little knowledge about feminism and about gender.  I knew that gender is a social construct and that gender categories based on sex is problematic but I did not truly understand the extent or what it meant.  I came into the class not really sure what feminism was and whether or not I consider myself a feminist.  People might have assumed I was a feminist because I go to an all women college and I also have been athlete all my life.

We built a graveyard. Plaster and wood were manipulated until they resembled the demolished façade of a building. We put people there, too. People playing people—pedestrians, faces you see every day. We created a world besieged by tragedy, modeled after a very real decimation. The Bi-Co Theater Program at Bryn Mawr College’s production of “Antigone” took the infamous play by Sophocles and made it relevant in a post-9/11 world. For this production, I worked as the Assistant Costume and Set Designer, helping bring to life Director Catharine Slusar’s greater goal: to question where, how and if humanity exists after violence. Throughout the production, we continually sought ways to better represent the horror, the catastrophic events which have altered so many people’s world. To accomplish this, we confronted death; death became our facination. We scrutinized it in the faces of those in the very throes of death, and in the faces of those looking on. Death became a motif—which leads me to wonder, where is the compassion[i] in that?

Coming out. What people don’t understand is that coming out of any closet is hardest for the person actually having to do it. People receiving news like that selfishly feel blind-sighted and they blame themselves while not giving that person’s feelings a second thought. The sad part is, people struggle so much with coming out because of the fear of other people’s reactions and they only get proved right in many situations. I think the hardest person to come to terms with coming out with is yourself. With yourself you’ve always known who you are or maybe it hasn’t been that easy, but telling yourself who you are first, and really believing it is the first and hardest part of coming out. Even if people are receptive and accepting right off the bat, that doesn’t eliminate the fact that you had preliminary doubts and fears of their reactions. There is no easy way to come out of any closet, but it needs to be done in order to free yourself. It’s easy for me to sit here and tell you about my opinion on the coming out situation, and how it affected me personally, but that is hardly relevant, so I will back it up statistically. The Pew Research group  did a survey of LGB americans (398 gay men, 277 lesbians and 479 people who are bisexual) the questions were, when did you first think, when did you first know and when did you tell someone. The results are as follows: