Self-Evaluation

When I first started posting, I felt inadequate in my knowledge of queer theory and I felt that my voice could not be validated but I grew to realize that I based a lot of my work on personal experiences and that was my theory. I was studying and reading things that I was living, so while I may not have been acquainted with the academic references to things, I definitely felt and lived them every day. This gave me the confidence to find and be secure in myself. I stopped being so timid and apprehensive about my work, and instead felt confident in my thoughts and ideas since the evidence came from my life. So, I feel that this class acted as the medium through which I gained access to my own voice and harbored confidence in it.

I feel that this change can be shown in the work that I have produced over the course of the class. I will say, though, that my weekly posts diminished in quality as the weeks went on, to the point where I stopped doing them. I did not actively decide not to post, but I was under a lot of pressure from this and my other classes and unfortunately I often forgot about the postings or could not find the time to get them done. However, my web events show the progress and change   that I believe I have made. My first web event was, in my opinion, weak and baseless. I had a voice, but nothing really to support it. However, as the semester went on and as I turned more in, I began to incorporate academic theory as well as my own, and my confidence started to show itself and my events grew to (self-proclaimed) outstanding quality.

However, this posed another, bigger issue as the semester unfolded. The work I was doing was mostly reflective, as I was able to look back at times in my own life that could speak to the theory I was learning, but that made things difficult as I was reflecting on what I now know to be  oppressive situations or in situations that are the by-product of multi-layered oppression. This was difficult for me to be reading about certain oppressions, recognizing some connection between those and my own life, and then writing about it all at the same time. 

Because of this, I will say that it felt like I was doing more work than I actually was. In preparing my checklist for the final portfolio, the number of on-time assignments I turned in is underwhelming. I guess the work I was doing was more mental than it was physically represented in my web postings, but I felt that I was constantly pushing myself to work hard to understand both myself and the world, as well as my place in it. This, to me, felt like the real work. 

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed this course. It helped me in many ways, and a better understanding of myself in this world will forever be what I remember as my takeaway from this class. Well, this class along with the others I was taking that required this same type of reflective work. I had an amazing friend and classmate in Kelly, who acted as a real pillar of strength that I could lean on until I gained enough footing on my own to support my opinions and ideas, so she gave me a tremendous amount of support that really helped. 

Where I am now is in a place of awareness and understanding. I have gained a tremendous amount of context and information about the need for feminism, and now I feel confident enough in my voice to offer up my own solutions and try to do what I can against oppression and its many forms. I began to take this class for its own sake, and ended up in an environment that worked within my larger life desires that will be manifested in the place I go to next, from awareness and understanding of oppression to action against it.