Final thoughts on maps

Here I am! Writing my last post on the teach-in that Emma, Erin, and Rachel shared with the class last tuesday.  If you don't remember our concept, we each drew "maps" of our personal feminisms.  Before presenting in class, we had actually started our maps together, but finished them separately.  Point is, I hadn't seen the finished products, and was pretty amazed by them.  For example, I was really only expecting to see topography and road maps, but instead, Erin came out with a dragon! How interesting to think of feminism as a body--or, at the whim of a writer like Acker, maybe that's what it always was.  

I've thought more about the topography of my feminism in the past few days.  When I drew "Binary Arch", I constructed it so that the winding path of identity/cathedral of self lay BEYOND it.  I thought by making that choice, I was freeing up the idea of gender and arguing that by looking past gender, we can be englightened with ourselves in a way that is impossible within strict gender performance.  However, the irony of a gender-fortress is perplexing and misleading...

More on the Cathedral of Self.  There is a certain godliness to all beings.  Well, so say many.  I still find it relevant that the true self lay beyond gender/race/class/sex/etc, and that by moving past these boxes, we are left with nothing.  Something I'm taking away from this course is that we might be nothing underneath it all, in the way that I truly believe that our thoughts are genderless.  Really.  That's a thing in my head.  Whooooo knew.  This was the point of asking these questions, presenting the class with this exercise.  For me, it was enlightening and successful.