Critical Feminist Studies 2013

Sorry I wasn't in class yesterday y'all, I possibly have strep so it's been a fun couple of days. Anyway, Julie told me that the conversation on Exile and Pride centered around Home and Claire's discussion of it in the text. Home to me was always a fixed definition, I always took it very literally as the place where I lived. I understood when people said you can have a house but you might not have a home, but it never occured to me that home could be anywhere else. I have found home at Bryn Mawr on such a deeper level than I ever imagined. I have found home in the wonderful people I have come to know here and surround myself with. I have found home in myself in realizing who I am and the reassurance that this is the place that I need to be. Home is no longer a fixed address in Massachusetts, it is within myself and all around me here. 

Today's discussion about home brought up a lot of thoughts and feelings for me that I had not before believed were part of me. The question about our desire for sameness and what do we have to give up for it reminded me of my high school. Nobody talked about differences. Whenever I brought up my two moms there was always an uncomfortable silence. I always wanted to know more about my Indian friend's culture but she never wanted to talk about it. Everybody was considered the same. Yes we had our differences and our strengths and weakness, but I nothing that made a person different. I wanted to find out all of the interesting aspects of people who brought into the conversation all different views and histories. But we never heard their stories. Now at Bryn Mawr, I feel like these conversations are much more open and more people want to discuss our differences. Everybody is different and we need to recognize and celebrate these differences instead of forcing people into silence and not allowing them to open their mouths and say their beliefs and their histories.

After our class discussion, I reflected quite a bit about what people said.  I can totally empathize/sympathize with feeling uncomfortable to speak, fear of misinterpretation, wanting approval and acceptance of your ideas from your peers (I feel like that all the time).  I definitely think that our learning environment should be a safe space that allows for growth, but how can we grow if we DO NOT speak?

I guess from our conversation I felt that the responsibility to fix this problem was very one-sided.  Of course the people who talk alot should create space for others to speak freely, but the people who don't talk have to work on speaking up more too.  I don't think it's fair to expect others to self-censor or limit their voice for the benefit of others.  

I guess for me it is more personal, because as a Black-American woman my voice is limited and censored in society by way of stereotypes and fixed roles.  For many people of color on campus there is a constant (at times sporadic) internal battle of self-censorship for one's own personal well-being, or if something is offensive saying something for the great good of the space by providing another perspective.  For myself, trying to figure out if the space is literally SAFE enough for one to speak, am I going to be marginalized as the angry black women or too sensitive/aggressive if I give the "Race" perspective, etc?   

Sorry for the late post, with all of the lantern night hype it completely slipped my mind. I wanted to comment on the class discussion we had on Thursday. I thought that it was healthy for people to get a little bit heated and share their thoughts on the silence or lack of silence in our class. Good suggestions were made on how to rearrange the class structure as far as conversation. I thought it was interesting that as soon as we began the 5 second rule it seemed as though everyone had more to say than they ever have. Personally I know that I spoke more that class than I have in a while and that felt good for me. I think the 5 second rule is going to be difficult though, the pace of the class has never been the issue for me personally so I think it will mess with our dynamic a little bit if we keep it around. Overall I think we had a healthy class discussion and I feel closer and more comfortable with everyone in the class now because of it. 

I like textile art, my mom really likes quilts, and they're something I look for whenever I got art museums. They're also something that a lot of people have, and that are often passed down through generations.

A fairly famous example of quilt making in action is the AIDS Memorial Quilt. I, admittedly, don't know a lot about it, but what I do know is pretty interesting. The project was developed in the wake of AIDS to memorialize people who'd died of it and consists of quilt blocks commemorating them, often made by family and friends. In "Queer Temporality," Halberstam talks queer temporality being shaped, in part, by the effect AIDS had (and still has) on the queer community, often referencing a fragility it produced. The quilt that references this temporality also has a long-lasting fragility--it takes a lot to conserve the quilt. It's also still around--it was created in 1987 and now we can still see it.

In the class so far one of the things that I’ve been interested in the most is intersectionality.  It seems that for many groups intersectionality is seen as a bad thing. There is pressure to identify with one group. Whether it is religious, able -bodiedness, sexuality, gender or race.  People want to put you into a box so that you are simpler to understand. That identifying as something else as well makes you less of a part of the other group. It makes you choose, which makes it seem like one aspect is more important than the other.  Are you this or that? Most people identify as a variety of things.  Many groups that are inclusive of people frown down on intersectionality. Why would groups that help people find their voice hold back the same people from exploring the different aspects to themselves? Why is there pushback against identifying with several groups? Is it the worry that the group’s ideas and goals will conflict with the other groups?

            I really like the idea of multi-cultural feminism and I think that it a great way to identify because it encompasses many different aspects. It takes into account that there is more to you then one idea and that all these ideas shape your view. I strongly believe that it is important to embrace your points of view together and not separate them because it’s easier.  Even if the groups don’t go together they don’t have to go together. There is no universal rule that your beliefs have to fit perfectly together.

I found the discussion we had on "queer time" in class interesting because it really brought to mind not only how Western society views the idea of time itself, but how Western society views success and "milestones" in a person's lifetime. Many of these ideas of success and milestones revolve around very traditional concepts, such as the idea that everyone should be married and reproduce at a certain point. The issue with this "normative" time is that it is exclusive of certain people, such as those who choose not get married, or those who cannot reproduce, and so on. That is where the idea of "queer time" might come into use. When I was learning about it, I was pretty confused about how "success" would be measured in queer time. Then I thought "Why does this idea of success have to factor into it? Is life really just a sum of successes and failures?" I may be simplifying it too much, but that's what we're often told life is: success and failure. We're constantly under the pressure to perform in order to succeed, learn from our mistakes the first time, and place value on who we are based on these things. However, if the ideas of success and failure were taken out of the picture entirely, I don't believe I, or many other people, would be productive or want to learn from experience. Both "normative" and "queer" concepts of time have their problems, but it was good to learn about ideas of time outside of what I've always known.

For this week’s post, I wanted to comment on our classroom structure reform because I don’t think the 5-second pause worked last Thursday. Topics, ideas, comments were lost amid the silence and confusion. Quickly it became difficult to keep organized who had just spoke and who was waiting to speak. I don't think we should be focused on restraining the oppurtunity to speak. Instead of sitting in shared silence, maybe we could promote more talking for the continually quiet by bringing back the ice-breaker activities we did in the first week of the class. We could use prompts from the weekly readings or from our Sunday Serendip postings and have one-on-one or small groups discussions to start off class. That way people who want to continue talking about a topic from Tuesday’s class have the opportunity to, and people who usually don’t speak during class can raise some questions or comments to someone in the class so at least on a small scale so they can be heard, then after 5-10 minutes, we can start the full-circle discussion and bring some of these smaller discussions to the forefront.  

On Tuesday, the guest speakers talked a little about how we see things related to disability-the ramps and parking and automatic doors, but we never talk about disability. Then later, people were talking about how at Bryn Mawr, a lot of people want to know if they are doing worse/as well/better than other students, but we don't talk about grades here so we don't know where we stand. When my math midterm was handed out before break, I saw that on the front cover it had spaces for percentage and number correct, but also for standard deviation and the average grade. I was happy to see that, because I knew that when I got the midterm back, I would be able to see if I was around or better than the average (hopefully not worse). But when I actually received my graded midterm, only the percentage and number correct were filled in. I was disappointed because I wanted some sort of confirmation that my grade was good.

Kelly brought up that students are likely to see professors as people who have successfully gone through what we are going through now, and that it is hard to be ok with failure in that environment. When Anne responded that the students don't know about any failures that the professors may have had, it made me think that not talking about the failures causes a stressful expectation. Knowing where everyone else stands in the world (or just in your class) can make you feel good, or motivate you to improve. But when we don't know, I think it is natural to be worried or self conscious that others are performing better than we are.