Critical Feminist Studies

Over the past year, I've been working across several classes and with several other students, as well as some people out in the world, to try to improve the way we handle gender on campus.

This project started with a post on tumblr from a young trans woman who was very angry at the idea of trans women being excluded from a women's space.  

At first, I and a few other mawters reacted defensively, but then I started thinking about gender on campus and all the ways we don't talk about it effectively.  

I started a conversation with her on serendip, wherein we discussed some of the problems of a Women's College in a post binary world.  (Post binary in the sense that not everyone identifies on the binary)

At the same time, Aybala was doing her work within the administration of attempting to determine the potential of admitting transwomen into the college.  She's already provided a link to that work in her post here.

Recently, and with a lot of help along by this class, I have begun to think about how the BMC community exists in several places at once.  

We are defined by the admistration as a space for women, women here presumably meaning people with vaginae, but we are not all women, and not all women are admitted here.

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.

I felt present during discussions, whether or not I seemed like I was.  In class, I tended to direct the conversation with questions because that kept the conversation going better than stating my opinion, which is what I tended to do online. Now that I look back, I’m surprised at the conversations my posts started.  Most of my class work was for my own learning purposes, honestly. I contributed to the conversation when I felt like it needed another opinion, and that usually worked out well.  Speaking in class has never been my strong point, but I am working hard to improve that.

My favorite readings were Goblin Market and Persepolis, and Book of Salt and Middlesex to a lesser degree. I did not like Jimmy Corrigan or Lifting Belly because they were difficult to understand. As a reader, my learning edges are at reading things that I do not like and learning from them.  Reading has always been a fun pastime for me, so reading something I do not like seems counterintuitive, but a necessary obstacle to overcome in college.

This class was much different than what I initially thought it would be. As a freshman coming into what was advertised as an introductory course for those interested in the Gender and Sexuality field, I expected to get a good amount of groundwork (vocabulary, exposure to scholarly works, theory, writing practice, etc) necessary to enter into higher level courses with a desired edge. What I experienced was actually quite different. I was left out of the loop for not having this groundwork which I had expected to gain, not teach, to the class, and often tremendously irrelevant to the inappropriately Bryn Mawr-centric syllabus.

I want to explore a text that is considered by mainstream audiences to be a text of female empowerment: Cosmopolitan magazine. I particularly am interested in the way that Cosmopolitan simultaneously instructs/ “empowers” women to reverse the male-female power dynamic through sex and tells them to feel guilty for doing so. The ideal Cosmo girl both objectifies men and feels ashamed of doing so; hence the woman who reverses this dynamic without this requisite guilt is considered shameless and worthy of judgment.

McMahon mentions early on that the magazine rose to prominence as a source of female empowerment (this is not to say it was universally understood as empowering; it was, and is, a controversial text) only after it came under the leadership/editorship of Helen Gurley Brown who at the time (she was editor from 1965-1997) and changed it’s purpose from a periodical of fiction stories to an extended advice column for the single, sexually liberated woman. McMahon does describe Brown as someone considered by Ms and The New York Times (during the 70s and 80s) to be somewhat of a feminist providing “ ‘half a feminist message’ to women who would otherwise have none (New York Times Magazine, 1974)” (McMahon 382): Ms referred to her as “the women’s magazine editor that first admitted that women are sexual too” (July 1985—30th Anniversary Issue). Thus she was considered and for the most-part is considered “somewhat” of a feminist innovator.

Considering the other student teach-ins, I was extremely dismayed with my own performance. Being a Haverford freshman and therefore unfamiliar with Anne's teaching style and subsequent project structures, I felt as if I misunderstood the project and its intentions. I intended to open discussion that I felt was sparked earlier in the semester about sex work and in that way create an avenue for extending rich conversations that I felt were repeatedly cut short throughout our course time together. By providing a small sampling of pornography throughout the decades slightly before and since the feminist revolution, I hoped that, starting with a few discussion questions, we could  continue our questionings of whether of not "feminist pornography" can really exist. I felt attacked at times for not being the absolute authority on knowledge of pornography, which I do not feel I pretended to be at any point. That being said, I had a wonderful experience watching the presentations and seeing the vast creative efforts of everyone in the class. I would like to think of the final performance as a direct way of getting the privelege to see how each of us manifests our ideas of feminism whether it be through zines, interviews, memes, games, or senses. Feminism necessarily creeps into many disiplines and spheres within our lives and these final projects as a whole demonstrated that.

Plans for moving forward:

This is a part of a joint project that I am working on with amorphast, S. Yeager, COLLEEN AND MEREDITH

The topics we discussed include:

Housing
Bathrooms
DLT Training
Custom’s Week
Freshmen/New Students
Discomfort/break in communication/sense of discomfort

How do we open up the dialogue, ease the sense of discomfort, and fix the break in communication when discussion certain topics such as queer?

Last year’s Hall Adviser training schedule is attached if you'd like to look at what kind of activities are involved. 

            Going into Critical Feminist Studies, I expected that we would focus on a series of well-known feminists or perhaps organize the course under titles like “First-wave Feminism.” I expected structure as I have usually encountered it, in which each unit and reading builds toward some kind of conclusion that the professor wants students to reach. Critical Feminist Studies was nothing like that; the syllabus was malleable and generated more questions than it answered. Subsequently, the primary challenge of this semester was learning how to move away from the learning structures I am accustomed to and accepting the more feminist classroom practices we chose to enact. My definition of feminism has evolved parallel to this learning trajectory, but in reverse. While the way I learned shifted from rigid to more abstract, the way I understand feminism went from abstract to more concrete. Before taking this class, I thought about feminism in a general sense but I had never considered what it meant personally. I would have defined feminism as the struggle for women to gain the same rights and privileges that men have. If I were to define it now, I would argue that there are different kinds of feminism, and the one that I subscribe to works toward rethinking and fundamentally changing the institutions that perpetuate antifeminist practices. The trajectory of my thinking processes in Critical Feminist Studies also leads me to the edges of my learning.

The VLogs

For our final web event, sekang, dchin and I reflected on the process of our class presentation and asked ourselves the questions we had asked others for the interviews we conducted.

*Both videos are long, so please allow time for loading before watching.

In the first video we reflect on our motivation for our class presentation, the process of interviewing strangers at Philadelphia train stations, the process of editing those interviews and how the product we created related back to the discussions we have had in Critical Feminist Studies this spring.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbZFJU-xkgU&feature=youtu.be

In the second video, we interview each other in the same style that we conducted the interviews for our class presentation.  We then reflect on being asked these questions and our new perspectives on documentary filmmaking. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDs50K5UBg8&feature=youtu.be

The Editing Process