I collaborated with epeck and sekang for this web paper. The final product can be found here. 

            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.

I collaborated with epeck and dchin. The final project can be found here.

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

Hi everybody, for my project I'm making a sort of non-challenging picturebook for adults that defines gender and sexuality related terms. If you can think of any more words or topics I should include, please let me know.

 [just speak nearby the borders of our minds] <-- link

This is a piece about borders. About communities. About movement and restrictions and ideologies. I wanted to interrogate how feminism is at times bounded by qualifiers, that is, to differentiate between French feminism and Third-World Feminism, and the ways in which those are both appropriate and constructed such that the result is constructed identities viewed as essential.

Among artists in the 20th and 21st century, explicit reference to prior works has become a mode of producing pieces. This may be in the form of collage or pastiche of some kind, and in video art, it is typically through found footage that these references can be made. Video Artists like Dara Birnbaum have spoken on the power of reappropriating footage, specifically, in her case, from popular media sources, but some of the logic remains in what I have done. Birnbaum wanted the agency to engage with the images being presented to her, to take ownership and subvert their meanings to create new meaning, asserting that she wanted to “talk back” to the media. Further, she asserts:

For our final teach-in my group decided to play a game of taboo. Unlike the regular version of taboo, our version did not have specific taboo words under the word that was meant to be described. Instead each card read "Do not use gendered words" while describing this word. After having discussions in class about a genderless world we were curious to see if we were able to describe words without the use of gender. Some of the words that were described included father, bitch, love, and bisexual. As seen, some are inherantly more gendered than others. 

I was curious to see if there would be confusion between biological sex words and gender words. It was interesting to see the initial panicky reaction of those who volunteered to describe a word, followed with some confusion, but in the end everyone was able to describe their word in a way that allowed the rest of the class to guess it. 

It was interesting to try and imagine a world without gender. While we were able to guess words, without gender, would we still be using the word mother and father to describe a parent? Would they adopt new meanings? I find myself wondering now if this was a true experiment without our ability to turn off the gendered brains in the audience. Would we have been able to guess father without automatically thinking parent=mother OR father?