Going into this course, I would have defined feminism as equal rights and opportunities for men and women.  Now, at the end of the semester, I see that a critical feminist perspective would question many aspects of my definition.  I never thought about the gender binary, although I had heard about it, and I had not really thought about the problematic elements of the history of feminism, as we read about in Bell Hook’s book, “Feminism is for Everybody.”  My ideas of equal rights and opportunities are colored by so many factors as I learned in this class and I have learned that what I may see as equality could be problematic.  For example, Bell Hooks discusses how white women wanted to be able to enter the workforce, yet ignored a large population of women working in fields that those with privilege would have considered beneath them.  Another idea that was really challenged for me in the course was the good of international feminism, or at least the spread of western feminism and humanitarianism to an international audience and attempts of westerners to spread their brand of feminism.  I struggled with our discussion of “Half the Sky,” and actually read the whole book to see if any of my concerns could be addressed.  I ultimately felt that Kristoff and WuDunn covered a lot of points that our class criticized them for not recognizing, he just did so in sections of the book we did not read as a class.  For example, they talk at length about the importance of change coming from within a culture and ho

For our presentation, we wanted to interrogate how sex education information is or is not distributed freely, and when that information should be allowed to be consumed. We thought about form and delivery, and in the spirit of feminism and freely available information, made a series of little zines with sexual health/body/sexuality information, with the intention that we would "book bomb" a local library's young adult section, thereby subverting the institutional modes of publishing and the vetting process inherent to that institution, as well as utilizing nearly free resources (each zine is just one piece of white paper, and there are no staples, glue, or tape to keep the zines together)

This was something of a pilot of what such a project could be, with a lot of room for developing the content of the zines, but largely we wanted to be frank and inclusive, to not privilege the gender binary or any normative way of being that may silence other voices, as much as possible. It was also important to allow space for youths to find other resources, and give them a lexicon from which to draw to speak on these topics and ask questions more effectively, an act of empowerment that hopefully reflects some of the goals of feminism, writ large. 

For our teach-in, melal, FrigginSushi and I wanted to look at different modes of expression and how they related to our discussions in class and feminism as a whole. We particularly wanted to look at how people can use words or images to express certain ideas, and the difficulties that arose with each one, and so we used the general format of charades and Taboo to demonstrate this. We picked the words "strong" and "safe" for Taboo, and "weird" and "smart" for charades; all of these words are defined differently based on your experiences, and we wanted to use the difficulty of expressing them to demonstrate that we don't all have these shared experiences.

Hey All,

Here is the link to Feminist Henson.  I plan on keeping it going and accepting submissions if anyone wants to play around with it.  

http://feministhenson.tumblr.com/

Dearabby and I would also love to hear/read people's thoughts and suggestions.  

I had too much fun creating this video. Some clips were cut off too soon, and others need to be cut, but I think I'll just keep it the way it is!