Notes Towards Day 19 (Tues, Mar. 27): Learning the Words, and Looking In

sara.gladwin & aybala50: "setting
the scene" with The Perfect Gender

I. coursekeeping

* send me links for your "scene setting," please--including those already set;
I want to include them in the archive of class notes, for ease of reference now/later

* FrigginSushi is on for Thursday

* for Thursday, we will be focusing on issues of prostitution/sex work/sexual slavery
around the world--ways of representing these issues, and our responses to them

read Kristof and WuDunn, Half the Sky, Introduction,
Chapters 1-3, 14 (pp. xi-xxii, 3-60, 233-254)--
in our password protected file,
marked up by me--sorry!

In class, I'll also be sharing some images/videos from the
Half the Sky Movement which the book inspired:
Women Hold Up Half the Sky exhibition and review
She's the First (Bryn Mawr's cupcake sale....);
we won't get to all of them, so if you want to preview these
(esp. the images and videos in the Skirball exhibit), please do

* signing in

II. reflections on last week's experiences...
pejordan on female athletes: gender tested/gender transcending
melel: overlapping stereotypes of women athletes and supermodels
michelle.lee: which forms of media would be most
effective for spreading awareness about gender variance?
epeck: It's confusing how Bornstein talks about rejecting gender,
but at the same time talks about her (hir?) own gender...is there
gender or not?  Or are there many genders that are personal to
each individual?  I have trouble understanding whether Bornstein
believes that our gender identities are fluid ...or if we have a TRUE
identity which is hidden by our own performance of socialy-constructed gender. 
[get out of hell free satiric? belittling belief?]
FrigginSushi, channeling Goffman:
every gender performance is a valid self identity
melel: stay in the middle? (cf'ing Middlesex to Zhongyong--"Doctrine of the mean",
a Confucian philosophy...to maintain balance and harmony...directing the mind to
a state of constant equilibrium or neutrality (cf. the caution in
Middlemarch against the costs of "marching in the middle"/fitting in)
If gender is not really that important, then what’s the meaning of feminist studies?
S.Yeager&dear.abby on a trans woman's being
disqualified from Canada's Miss Universe Pageant
aybala50: Can open mindedness be achieved more easily if it begins at an earlier age?
Should there be a "Gender Work Book" that is accessible to all ages?
jdsisco: Bornstein should consider beginner, intermediate, advanced gender workbooks...

III. learning some (beginner, intermediate, advanced!) vocabulary:
"gender" terms you want to understand better/be able to use
(w/ a caveat!)

Colleen: I'd like it cleared up once and for all - or to be comfortable in
an understanding that nothing about this subject is clear and that I'm
striving to understand something that is not meant to be fully understood..

pejordan: ze, transgender/transsexual, political lesbian
epeck: aromantic/asexual, trans*, 5 genders
S.Yaeger: aromantic & asexual, transsexual & transgender
mbeale: bigendered, asexual, pansexual
Amophrast: (really?) neutral pronouns (e, em, eir, eirs, emself);
bois (and gyrls); viragoid (virago)
Melel: masculine & beautiful, girlish (vs. womanish)
FrigginSushi: pansexual vs. bisexual, androgynous,
more academic words for sexual "top" and "bottom"?
bluebox: gender neutral pronouns, agenderism, androgyny,
butch/femme (fashion statement, mindset, personality?)
dchin: pomosexual, agendered, metrosexual
michelle.lee: hir, 5 genders, perfect gender
dear.abby: hegemonic, Foucault, queering, gender vs. sex, cisfemale
aybala50: a 'gender' term; trans; relationship between sex, gender, sexual orientation;
will our use of language allow for us to lose the gender binary?
jdsisco: queer, grrl, androgyny
meowwalex: riot grrrl, gender binary, androgyny
sara.gladwin: gender neutral pronouns, "no-gender," "genderf*ck" and "passing" styles
Colleen Ryanne: "womyn" (etymologically problematic?), reclaimed words (queer, bitch, slut),
"disentangling gender and sex"
buffalo: pansexual, androgynous, boi

trying to organize this!

hegemony

Foucault

disentangling/the relations between....

IV. The First Gender Performance Workshop: On the Outside, Looking In
To familiarize students with their bodies, and some of the major limitations of
the kinds of bodies we have. To free students from some of the fixed ideas
they might have about their bodies by giving them another perspective on
looking @ their bodies (225f.).

...imagine yourself an inhabitant of a planet far far far away from earth...
your natural body is completely formless, shapeless, and weightless...
you have the ability to change your body @ will...Think yourself into
having two more appendages...Decide that you'd like to have a different
color scheme to this body....(229, 232)

Talking about these experiences....
How might you write/draw/express differently your emergently different ideas?
How might writing/drawing/expressing differently enable different ideas to emerge?