I was a tourist. And so I stated as I reflected on one month of participation on Serendip and the course. I had been fascinated by the interactive work on the online platform and the subdiscipline of the digital humanities. On my first day, I assumed many things about the course and myself. I guess that’s why we should never assume things. I had eventually evolved out of the generalizations I had made.  I finally adopted the open classroom and the interesting discussions that branched out from title analyses or word definitions and were ongoing on Serendip. But there I was again, an observer, failing to pull my camera down to see what lay ahead of me with my own eyes.

            I have tended to remain silent many times, but not out of shyness or indifference. I grew to listen to what my classmates had to say, as I found the conversations to be intricately fascinating and chose to sit back and take in.  I can be a silent participant, but I did speak up every once in a while when I thought my contributions could be useful to the comments of others. Even if the board activities were imposing, I like how they sometimes forced me to be more outwardly vocal. I sometimes feel too self-conscious about my opinions that I do not speak up. The board activities challenged me to get up and share something, whatever it may be, finally stating what I kept to myself out of hesitation.

An Introduction to Feeling

I am a Scorpio. Generally, my zodiac sign is entirely irrelevant to an academic paper, but in this case it has some bearing. As a child, I was deeply uncomfortable with being a Scorpio, due to what I read was the inherent nature of Scorpios: passionate. I felt squeamish of the term, which to me had very sexual connotations. As such, I resented being told that I must be a “passionate” person. I was not passionate, my childhood self would have told you adamantly. In fact, I might have said so passionately.

Several weeks ago, when our class began reading The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession by Susan Orlean, the subject of passion came to the forefront of our group conversation. I found myself thinking again of my childhood zodiac qualms as we debated the nature of passion. This time, it was not the sexuality of passion that was being questioned, but its ability to last. Is passion, by definition, a passing feeling, or is passion something that can endure? Additionally, we wondered if passion is something that only some people have, or if it is more universal than that.

Critical Feminist Studies has been one of the most valuable classes I have taken so far at Bryn Mawr. When I entered the classroom, I was a self-declared feminist. Having grown up with a mother and aunt who are both very pro-choice and empowering, I saw feminism as something rather basic  – the act of fighting for the rights of women to be equal to those of men. However, I quickly learned that there are so many aspects of feminism that one has to learn about in order to be able to fight for each of those rights within the larger foundation of feminism. This really made my head ache once we started talking about all the various ways the direction of the class could grow. . . It was not at all as “basic” a viewpoint as I had thought. Everything my Mom had taught me had just been expanded to the utmost dimension. . .ahhh!

I was a child racked with nightmares.  I spent many nights whispering for my dad in the night, sweating and stricken to my bed, wondering why he couldn’t hear me.  I would dart down the hall to his bed and shake him awake  “Daddy!  Daddy, can I sleep with you?”  I would gladly crawl into his bed, cuddle with my stuffed animal, and fall peacefully asleep.  When I began to grow too old to be sleeping in my dad’s bed any longer, we had to have a talk.  “It’s not real,” he said.  “It’s all in your head.  Just tell yourself in your nightmare that it isn’t real and I promise you won’t be scared anymore.”  So my nightmares came less frequently and less intensely.  I befriended the witch that hexed me and the ugly creature that always chased me turned out to have a sweet spot.

As with all new classes, I came into this class somewhat terrified and overwhelmed and possibly hoping that it would provide me with a space in my schedule where I at least felt somewhat comfortable in the sense of already having an idea about what counts for feminism and what counts for feminist theory. I was also looking forward to learning much more about feminist topics and the ways in which they play out in the world at large.  I feel like this class gave me all of those things, while also pushing me to be more self-aware and more adventurous/creative in my approach to acadedmic work, as well as inspiring me to action as opposed to only working with theory.

In thinking about the edges of my individual learning, I think this class highlighted three posible areas of needed growth for me.  The first, and possibly most important to me, is that it continuosly challenged me to reconsider how I speak, what I speak to, and to whom I address my comments.  It helped me to feel way more comfortable with being unsure and with being criticized, and it also helped me to think through how to have a productive conversation across various levels of understanding, which has led directly to my final project of attepting to institute a changing conversation about gender on our campus and in our community.

the notification system...

Over the past month or so I have been posting regularly about a new HBO program which provoked a lot of public attention, long before it even aired.  I was interested in the show, and I was even more interested in what people in our course thought about it. But my “call to discourse” fell flat, so I have decided to take up the project myself. Now my primary interest in the show was not actually the topic, but the fact that the creator/director/writer was a female, liberal arts college graduate and only four years older than I am.  Go Girls. I am not sure if it is widely understood how rare this is—look up any of your three favorite television programs, and chances are extremely high, regardless of the topic that the “creator/writer/director” of the pilot episode is male. And if you happen to watch a show conceived by a woman, chances are further likely that she has a male partner/co-creator. Shows about Girls, written by girls, created by girls, and directed by girls simply do not exist. The stories we watch and television every day are stories coming from a definitively male perspective. This is not meant as an inciting, insightful statement. It is nothing but and “is”.