Looking Back

            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. My initial reaction to one of our first readings, “Three Guineas” by Virginia Woolf, was to question how we would create an outsider’s society and whether this exclusion was realistically sustainable. In asking these questions, I was looking for tangible steps we could take to create Woolf’s outsider’s society. I wanted there to be sure answers to the problems that Woolf lays out, but as we learned throughout the semester, there aren’t any guaranteed measures of success for every context, only more questions. This space of questioning and uncertainty is where the edges of my learning lie. However, instead of looking for just one kind of intervention, I am beginning to accept that all interventions are flawed in some way. The best solutions do not fix all problems—they realistically cannot—but work to address as many as possible.      

            I have been present in both large and small group discussions. However, I did not contribute as much to the large group discussions as I would have liked to, and upon reflection, I realize that I am afraid of being wrong. I still felt uncomfortable risking offending people or simply being incorrect about something because despite the open and accepting community we tried to create in our classroom, Bryn Mawr is still the kind of environment where academic achievement is the norm and failure is not. Given my lack of gender studies knowledge and vocabulary in comparison to some of my peers, the fear of failing in front of them often held me back from expressing my thoughts. That being said, when I did speak, it was something I was deeply engaged with. Although I do wish I had spoken more, the benefit of not doing so was that I was able to listen more closely to my classmates. I find that when I am more eager to participate than anything else, I do not pay as much attention as I should to others because I am occupied with preparing my own thoughts. Instances in which I focused less on getting my own thoughts out actually allowed me to be more present in the conversation because I was giving other people’s observations deeper consideration.

               In small group discussions, I am much more vocal. The smaller number of people is less intimidating and more comfortable. During these small group discussions, I felt more comfortable taking initiative, and so I would be the one to bring the conversation back to the original question if we went off on tangents. This initiative carried over to the way that I posted on Serendip. While I commented on other posts, particularly for the mid-semester evaluation and syllabus construction, I posted my own observations as well. I felt more comfortable posting about topics I found interesting on this online forum than I did changing the thread of conversation while in class. I would like to think that as a person who is deeply concerned with the “how,” the practical side of theory, I was a force in the classroom that grounded the discussions we had by questioning the abstractness of some of the ideas we encountered.              

            What I enjoyed most about our readings was that, contrary to my expectations at the beginning of Critical Feminist Studies, they were not all explicitly related to feminism. Persepolis, for example, is described as a graphic novel about a young Iranian girl’s experiences growing up during war and revolution, but in our discussions we analyzed the text so that we could uncover the ways in which it was feminist. Gradually drawing out the feminist influences was rewarding because it demonstrated that feminism doesn’t exist solely in academia; it has a place in mainstream media as well. Through Persepolis, I saw that feminism isn’t just something to be written about, but is also a way of writing. The most challenging reading we did was Gertrude Stein’s “Lifting Belly.” As we discussed in class, we have been taught to decode texts, and when I could not decode “Lifting Belly,” I was frustrated with Stein’s writing. After the discussion, I can better understand why Stein chose to write in this way and the possibilities her work offers for disrupting patriarchal systems of writing. However, I still cannot bring myself to enjoy “Lifting Belly.” As a reader, I have learned to analyze texts with feminism in mind. Before this class, it was not a lens I would have employed unprompted. After this semester, thinking about the ways in which gender privileges are institutionalized comes more naturally.

            I have always written my weekly postings and web papers to the best of my ability. I would say that I have “moved” the most in my web papers. My first web paper was very traditional and interpreted Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” in a conventional way. Academic and disconnected from current events, it very much represents where my understanding of feminism was at the beginning of the course. My next web paper was completely different as I decided to try writing about something I was unfamiliar with, which proved to be a challenge. Moving into the highly political and extremely current topic of female suicide bombers and whether they are feminists, I was unsure how to write because I had never written about something so controversial before. This web paper was also the first that time that I had ever worried about its posting on Serendip. My first paper and every other paper I have ever written in college have been “safe,” with neither topics nor arguments that had the amount of potential to anger people that this one did. While writing my second web paper, I had to grapple with self-censorship and whether I could accept that my work had the potential to offend people. My last web paper about street harassment is the one I was most invested in. The topic was one that I am genuinely interested in and something that I wanted to write about. In contrast to my first web paper, in which I made arguments I thought I should, I felt the most comfortable making arguments I wanted to make in this last paper. I could feel myself becoming angry as I wrote it, which I have never experienced before. My “movement” through the three web papers has been a process of allowing myself to invest in my writing and become more comfortable writing about what I do not know in order to generate possible interventions, rather than writing about what I am comfortable with to reach a single, predictable conclusion. Through these web events, I have learned to become more open-ended. From the first paper to the third, I have felt increasingly confident in my own opinions and more comfortable expressing them.

           The direction that I traveled in my web papers felt like a logical build-up to my class presentation and final project. Since writing the three web papers was process of learning to put myself into my work, it was appropriate that the final project would culminate in my physical presence in a video. Filming a reflection on the thoughts behind our video presentation and the actual process of it was as present in a piece of work I could have been. Collaborating with epeck and sekang in a video reflection was, given the time constraints, the most equitable project we could have engaged in. Writing a paper together might have triggered disagreements given our various writing styles but a video was ideal because it allowed for a free flow of conversation, ultimately allowing all of our voices to be more present. Furthermore, unlike the self-censorship that usually happens when I write, this video collaboration prevented that. We made a rule that during the editing process we could edit footage of each other but not ourselves. This rule encouraged me to listen and learn from what my project partners were saying instead of only concerning myself with my own dialogue. Throughout the class presentation and final project, none of us had a set role. We all worked together on each step of the entire project, from the initial planning to the editing. Collaborating with epeck and sekang challenged me to reflect on the material we covered this semester in a novel way, and one that I probably would not have carried out had I been working by myself.