Serendip is an independent site partnering with faculty at multiple colleges and universities around the world. Happy exploring!
Critical Feminist Studies 2013
![Anne Dalke's picture Anne Dalke's picture](https://serendipstudio.org/exchange/files/pictures/picture-39.jpg)
![]() |
Welcome to the on-line conversation for Critical Feminist Studies, an introductory-level course offered in the English Department and Gender and Sexuality Program @ Bryn Mawr College in Fall 2013. |
Who are you writing for? Primarily for yourself, and for others in our course. But also for the world. This is a "public" forum, so people anywhere on the web might look in. You're writing for yourself, for others in the class, AND for others you might or might not know. So, your thoughts in progress can contribute to the thoughts in progress of LOTS of people. The web is giving increasing reality to the idea that there can actually evolve a world community, and you're part of helping to bring that about. We're glad to have you along, and hope you come to both enjoy and value our shared explorations. Feel free to comment on any post below, or to POST YOUR THOUGHTS HERE.
![ccassidy's picture ccassidy's picture](https://serendipstudio.org/exchange/files/pictures/picture-1298.jpg)
Ecofeminism Source
Here is a link to the source we referenced in our presentation on Ecofeminism:
http://womenst.library.wisc.edu/bibliogs/ecofem.html
We hope that our presentation answered any questions, opened everyone's mind to the possibilities that Ecofeminism has to offer and accurately recognized the reality to the movement.
![pialamode314's picture pialamode314's picture](https://serendipstudio.org/exchange/files/pictures/picture-1293.jpg)
Ecofeminist meal and final project
I thought it was really interesting to do our group project on ecofeminism and explore the subject more than we had in class. I have very mixed feelings about the concept and when we mentioned it in class it was more just in passing and often not taken so seriously, so this was a perfect topic to focus on more. I mentioned this in our presentation, but I think the thing that strikes me the most about ecofeminism is how open and accepting the concept is - it's definitely a case of feminism unbound - yet at the same time, how it is so inaccessible to the majority of people because in order to be a full ecofeminist vegan, you need to have access to the money and resources for it, which leaves ecofeminists in a very exclusive, classist clique. I'm not really sure how this issue could be solved and how ecofeminism could be made more accessible to a more diverse community though, which makes the situation very difficult - hence my mixed feelings about the subject! I was also interested to hear what other people's thoughts on ecofeminism were, especially because like I said, we hadn't taken it very seriously in class before; we'd just been brushing it off as totally radical. Although I'm only a vegetarian (not full vegan) and would have trouble identifying fully as an ecofeminist, I do think the movement in theory has a lot of good ideas and thoughts behind it, and studying it more has made me more concious of such things. Anyway, it was a fun project to put together! I documented some of the cooking shenanigans, so I will post those photos here.
![nia.pike's picture nia.pike's picture](https://serendipstudio.org/exchange/files/pictures/picture-1311.jpg)
Breaking out of society's boxes
I saw this video on Tumblr and just had to share it with the class.It is about breaking the boxes of gender stereotypes. Most of the video does not have words, but it is so impactful. I found myself rewatching it! It is time to break free of the boxes society creates for us! We can break out!
![samuel.terry's picture samuel.terry's picture](https://serendipstudio.org/exchange/files/pictures/picture-1317.jpg)
Feminism Unbound: Deconstructing Structural Violence, a Global Project
I read this book Economies of Desire: Sex and Tourism in Cuba and the Dominican Republic by Amalia Cabazas and I felt like was a really great example of feminism unbound. Cabazas discusses how all-inclusive leisure resorts owned by transnational corporations and placed within developing countries on the “pleasure periphery” are a product of structural adjustment policies. Structural adjustment policies are defined by deregulation, austerity measure, and the removal of trade barriers all mandated by the strings attached to loans from the IMF and the World Bank. These policies are premised on the development ethic of the “Washington Consensus” which asserts that macroeconmic growth will redistribute or “trickle down” to the poor and thus alleviate poverty and social inequality. What has been found throughout the world is that this ethic is faulty, rather structural adjustment is a form of neocolonialism wherein the third world is further exploited for resources and labor; populations remain dependent on transnational corporations for sub-par employment and are unable to develop a local economy that can compete within the global market. These resorts while simultaneously homogenizing the leisure experience in a way that eliminates cultural specificity/ authenticity, commercialize the “otherness” and exoticism of these locations and their people. Part of this commercialization is a corporate sexualization of women-workers. Indigenous women become another object to be consumed in the commodity chain of pleasure.
![nia.pike's picture nia.pike's picture](https://serendipstudio.org/exchange/files/pictures/picture-1311.jpg)
The finale
Today, we had the first three groups of our final presenations each lead a teach-in. I found the experience fascianting, not only my own presentation, but also the others. It was the begining of the cultimation of teh semester, however each group chose to illustrate it. My group addressed how we each have our own types of feminism, that we create. From this basis we constructed maps of feminism. Not only did I have lots of fun with glitter, paint, and patterned paper in my room; I also learnt a lot while doing it! I learnt a lot about myself and about what I have learned/will take from this class. Before taking this class, I'd never taken a gender and sexuality class at Bryn Mawr. Truthfully I only enrolled because I needed an English class to fulfill a requirement and this one fit with my schedule. But I'm glad I took this class! I wouldn't change my choice. I leave this class with more understanding, more answers, and most of all more questions on feminism, gender, and sexuality. I'm glad I spent a semester with y'all learning, questioning, and exploring! I hope to find time in my remaining three semesters to take another gender and sexuality course. Yet in the short-term because I can barely see past next week right now, I'm excited for the final three presentations on Thursday!
Oh and I'm attaching images of my two maps for y'all to look at up close!
![Ann Lemieux's picture Ann Lemieux's picture](https://serendipstudio.org/exchange/files/pictures/picture-1294.jpg)
Unbinding Gender Roles and Closing the Gender Gap
Throughout this semester, as we’ve discussed several feminist issues and viewpoints, our class has been unable to define simply what feminism is. However, we’ve been able to agree several times on what feminism is not: feminism is not gender stereotypes and norms, it is not the pressure that women (and men) feel to have a certain body type and look a certain way, and it is certainly not, as we’ve discussed amongst ourselves and with Heidi Hartmann, the wage gap between men and women. Whatever feminism is, it definitely aims to abolish the above issues, but it hasn’t yet been able to do so. The gender wage gap is still very real in today’s society, even among men and women in the same profession, and even though more women than men are earning bachelor’s degrees. So what’s binding feminism? In other words, what’s preventing feminism from achieving its goals, limiting feminism, and restraining it?
![sschurtz's picture sschurtz's picture](https://serendipstudio.org/exchange/files/pictures/picture-1321.jpg)
Unbinding Dependence Web Event #3
The idea of feminism unbound can be a confusing one. I have struggled with the idea of feminism unbound and it took me a while to understand it. After each discussion of the term I question my understanding. I understand it now to be that after you get past the ideas of sex and gender it is what happens. I think that an example of feminism unbound is the idea of looking at people individually, not on lineage or relationships. Separating people from their associations and seeing people for their individual achievement. Not assuming dependence. Looking at whom many people think of as successful and powerful women and seeing that many if not most seem to have a successful husband or father. We need to separate the idea of dependence from sex and gender to unbind it.
![Cat's picture Cat's picture](https://serendipstudio.org/exchange/files/pictures/picture-1342.jpg)
No Access Beyond This Point: Mumbling the Words of Revolution
Mainstream feminist dialogues, including our own Serendipian dialogue, are exclusionary. Alternative exclusionary dialogues often form within marginalized communities, addressing gender-based discrimination and other experience-based conversations that present uniquely in certain groups. Marginal groups can protect themselves from the lack of inclusion within dominant dialogues. Feminism is often defined as community based and inclusive as possible, but advocating for the protection of multiple groups, especially those who are marginalized by dominant dialogues and existing power structures, necessities inaccessibility of conversation.
Dialogue within marginalized groups is inherently exclusionary. It allows individuals within a group to build on the foundations of shared experience to build community (instead of trying to make descriptions of those experiences accessible to the dominant group). The barriers keeping nonmembers out of the discussion form a protection that creates a safe space. The barriers that protect the conversation within marginalized groups from the violence of the dominant group are formed from an enforced silence of the marginalized group toward those outside of it. Access is limited to the few in languages of identity that the oppressors do not understand, by intentionally obfuscating language in code, and by referencing experience that outsiders do not have access to.
![vhiggins's picture vhiggins's picture](https://serendipstudio.org/exchange/files/pictures/picture-1341.jpg)
Web Event #3: Unbinding Feminist Intentions
Unbinding Feminist Intentions
As a young black woman in America, I have had my fair share of troubles with accepting feminism. Author bell hooks, in ‘Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics’, defines feminism as an all-encompassing ‘movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression (hooks, p.1).” However, as I have previously understood it, through social discourse and mass media portrayals, feminism arose from a reaction of well-to-do white women to the oppressive patriarchal system that confined them to the household. So, as a result, these women sought and gained equality in the working world of their well-to-do counterparts.
According to hooks, however, feminists initially concerned themselves with women’s liberation from the oppressive, sexist, and violent domination of the patriarchy. However, it became polarized by a division between reformist thinkers, who wanted to alter the existing system to include more rights for women, and revolutionary thinkers, who wanted to overthrow the system and terminate the patriarchy entirely.
![juliah's picture juliah's picture](https://serendipstudio.org/exchange/files/pictures/picture-1312.jpg)
Web Event #3: Unbinding Bodies
The intimate gesture of touch can convey caring and concern or, just as easily, dominance and disrespect. Micro-level interactions, be they handshakes or long-term relationships, affect and sustain macro-level institutions of dominance. Despite the fact that body integrity is vital to one's sense of autonomy, kyriarchal systems have a history of appropriating bodies, and continue to do so as a way of systematically securing supremacy. In her essay, “Violence, Mourning, Politics,” theorist Judith Butler makes a call to reclaim the body in an effort to combat kyriarchal establishments. She asserts that violence, from blatant genocide to interpersonal cruelty, reinforces itself through a process of making the recipient “unreal”. This violence, and it is violence regardless of form, is not limited to women, or even humans for that matter. The perpetrators, however, excuse their actions by deeming their victims as unworthy, to the point that “the very bodies for which (the victims of violence) struggle are not quite ever only (their) own.” (26) Through this process, Butler maintains that when “the violence is done against those who are unreal, then, from the perspective of violence, it fails to injure or negate those lives since those lives are already negated.” (33) These arguments are the framework for her theories on derealization, or the act of stripping someone or something of its individual worth in order to grant oneself impunity and to justify acts of cruelty in order to preserve power.
![Celeste's picture Celeste's picture](https://serendipstudio.org/exchange/files/pictures/picture-1302.jpg)
Is Feminism The Word To Use? web event 3
Unbinding feminism has been the greatest challenge presented to me yet in this course. All semester, our class has explored the confined of being a feminist—the varying components (and intersectionality) within feminist identities. To deconstruct the goals and desires of feminism feels impossible without questioning the word itself. The word suddenly feels inefficient. Not incorrect, yet still inadequate for a form of activism that no longer relies on gender or sex to define itself. I first question the possibility of feminism’s unbinding. Then, alternate terms. I’m pretty fascinated by the etymology of the word itself, and supplemental terms used by varying groups of intersectional identities to better define themselves. As Wendy Brown asks, “Are we proposing to be after sex and gender, no longer bound by them or perhaps no longer believing in them, and yet in the peculiar offering that only temporality makes, bringing along what we are after even as we locate it behind us?” (Brown 98). In the unbinding of a term that at first felt so simplistic, yes, that is quite what we intend. But are we left with feminism?
![MargaretRachelRose's picture MargaretRachelRose's picture](https://serendipstudio.org/exchange/files/pictures/picture-1316.jpg)
3rd Web Event: Bounded Bodies
This morning I ate 5 sugar cookies for breakfast. Immediately after I washed down the last cookie with some lukewarm English Breakfast tea, I began carefully planning the rest of my meals for the day, excluding anything sugary, whilst reminding myself that I exercise twice a week (but that’s enough to keep off the weight, right?). This worried, calculating, self-shrinking mentality accompanied my logic for skipping meals in middle school, telling my mom that the cafeteria food too hard to chew with my braces so, yeah, of course, Mom – I had eaten when I got home when, in reality, I hadn’t.
It’s nearly 2014. Never before has there been a time more centered on self-care and abolishing the extreme, inaccurate mass-media portrayals of women. Despite this, though, how can women still have these self-defeating, body shrinking thoughts?
Some Huffington Post statistics have taught me that women experience an average of 13 negative thoughts about their body each day, while 97% of women admit to having at least one “I hate my body moment” each day.
And women are bound quite literally by their clothes. Skin-itching, thigh and stomach suffocating, sequined, short, skinny clothes. So much so that the damage is left irrevocably on their skin with grooves in their shrunken skin from skinny jeans and bras. Only 5% of American women naturally have the body type advertisements portray as ideal.
![nia.pike's picture nia.pike's picture](https://serendipstudio.org/exchange/files/pictures/picture-1311.jpg)
Fear of Feminist Indoctrination at All-Men's Colleges
The phrase "feminism unbound" is strange to me. I thought at first I understood it, but when we began to discuss this phrase in class, I got even more confused. So I sat down to think about it on my own. I thought about the rigors of society, the boundaries have set for ourselves and others, the world we have been told should exist. As someone who has chosen to go to an all-women's college I know I follow certain boundaries within the walls of Bryn Mawr College, regulations the college sets for me. I began to think of similar institutions. A friend of mine also goes to a single-sex institution, Wabash College, an all-men's college in Indiana. Wabash sets regulations for its students as well. A potential new regulation is a gender studies graduation requirement. This debate struck a chord with me, especially when I discovered the contorted view of gender studies some members of the institution had created around this issue . . .
"[The] wimpy, neutralized guys that gender feminists are trying to create: men who are not committed to constructive struggle and conflict and fighting for a cause and coming out the winner." (Michaloski and Allman) This statement was made by Dr. David P. Kubiak, a Classics professor at Wabash College in relation to the debate at Wabash over the proposition of a gender studies graduation requirement.
![EmmaBE's picture EmmaBE's picture](https://serendipstudio.org/exchange/files/pictures/picture-1305.png)
Web Event 3: Media as a Site for Feminism Unbound
We spend our lives saturated with the ideas in media. We experience different types of media in varying degrees depending mostly on our positions in social power structures, but we all experience it. It is where the value system of our society is taught; it is where the foundations of our mythology our formed. Patriarchy is disseminated through media, where it affects the participants in and the audience of the media.
![EP's picture EP's picture](https://serendipstudio.org/exchange/files/pictures/picture-1308.jpg)
Web Event 3: Unbinding Power Feminism
Unbinding Power Feminism
It’s easy to envision feminism as female CEOs breaking the glass ceiling, or an upper class woman who seems to “have it all” and lets nothing in her way. Many think of this as evidence that feminism is pushing women closer to equality to men. However, they forget that this is only pushing certain (and privileged) women towards equality. As with any other movement, the voice that everyone seems to hear in the feminist movement is the voice that has the most power. Privileged (often white, upper class, and educated) women seem to shape what the mainstream view of feminism is, pushing the voices that strive for equality not only in terms of gender, but also race and class. This creates a “feminism” that works within a system that caused oppression in the first place. This “power feminism,” while it helps achieve equality for certain women within the already-standing system, it also promotes the oppression that system caused in the first place.
![Amoylan's picture Amoylan's picture](https://serendipstudio.org/exchange/files/pictures/picture-1300.jpg)
Web Event #3: Unbinding Mourning
The definition of unbinding is formally “to release from bonds or restraints.” When I think of feminism unbound, I think of it in terms of unbinding the traditional idea of feminism, “queering” it in the sense that normative views and ideas on feminism are released from bonds or restraints. Everything goes beyond the surface of its normative definition and in this case, feminism and mourning can be related in terms of unbinding traditional definitions of the two. Mourning on the surface is grieving the loss of something or someone that meant something to you. Mourning an idea sounds like it is making a mockery of the process, how can you mourn something that was all in your head? Unbinding the traditional sense of mourning offers that mourning can be a process done by anyone for anything that has been lost.
![ccassidy's picture ccassidy's picture](https://serendipstudio.org/exchange/files/pictures/picture-1298.jpg)
Web Event #3: Unbinding the Feminist Stereotype
The first wave of feminism was characterized by its overwhelming strength and empowered voice for the women who had been oppressed by the male gender. During that era, feminism became a radical notion supported by women who would not be silenced by a ruling class. Since then, the dynamics of feminism have changed to focus on intersectional identities as a more inclusive method of removing a broader oppressive force. However, a negative stereotype concerning feminists has persisted, enforcing the idea that anyone who identifies with a feminist policy is automatically a flaming radical who harbors a deep hatred of the male gender. While many feminists still fight against a traditional, male-dominated society that is still present, post-modern feminists are beginning to focus their attention on a more general entity that is being oppressive. This new sector of modern feminists looks less at oppression in terms of gender but as a force brought on by anyone suppressing a voice or opinion. It is time for the negative stereotype surrounding feminists to be deconstructed and unbound so that the feminist movement can be accessible to all intersectional identities.
![shainarobin's picture shainarobin's picture](https://serendipstudio.org/exchange/files/pictures/picture-1309.jpg)
Web Event #3: Unbinding Black Feminism
Introduction
Within feminism, there is an extension known as Black feminism. Black feminism was developed with the belief that sexism and gender oppression are not the only issues that bind women together. It instead argues that sexism along with classism and racism are all interconnected, forming an intersectional identity. When the Black feminist movement was developed, many people felt that there were feminists out there in the mainstream who wanted to overcome sexism along with classism, but left race out of the equation. Black feminists wanted to show that race could be used against women as a tool for discrimination. It is therefore unique in the fact that it was started by unbinding itself from the second wave feminist movement. I’ve decided to explore two layers of feminism unbound by examining how black feminism itself had been unbinded. In order to do this I will be referencing a video-recorded conversation that I had with my Mom about her experiences with black feminism as a teenager in the 1970s and comparing it with my experiences from today.
Feminism Unbound/Black Diaspora
![pipermartz's picture pipermartz's picture](https://serendipstudio.org/exchange/files/pictures/picture-1296.jpg)
Unbinding the Housewife: Why Men and Women are Perfectly Able Parents
In March of 2013, New York Magazine posted an incredibly controversial trend piece titled The Retro Wife by Lisa Miller. The article features the stories of two progressive, “neo-traditionalist” women, Kelly Makino and Rebecca Woolf, who have decided to become the primary caretakers, also known as “homemakers” or “housewives,” of their families. The narratives of Makino and Woolf were aimed at exposing an alternative and empowering path for women, one drifts from the Lean In feminist mentality presented by Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook. Miller believes that Sandberg’s book “argues that the new revolution needs to start with women themselves, that what’s needed to equalize U.S. workplaces is a generation of women tougher, stronger, wilier, more honest about their ambition, more strategic, and more determined to win than American women currently are” (Miller). Shortly after this description, we encounter Miller’s complete doubt and hesitation to support this manifesto, stating that not all mothers can sacrifice the urgent demands of their families in order to become workingwomen. At this moment she reveals the true intentions behind the article—to promote and commemorate modern day “feminists” who make the decision to not pursue a demanding career.