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Apples To Apples: The Gender and Sexuality Studies Way!
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For our final performance, aybala50, lgleysteen, S.Yeager and I created our own version of the (as I've come to find at college) popular game Apples to Apples. Using words that were particularly important in our discussions throughout the semester, we created adjective and noun cards and asked for volunteers in the class to play.
And we we didn't just make this game to make people have fun! (Though this was part of our intention.) We thought that just that simple game revealed many of things that we have been discussing this semester. First of all, we thought of the ways in which each player diffracted the adjective through their own personal lens. But this was not the only thing at play. Though the player was thinking of how they could use their words to 'match' with the adjective, they were also considering which word would win them the round and be 'judged' as being the best card. This demonstrated the entanglement between the players and the judge.
Additionally, there was further entanglement when considering that we had them play in front of the whole class. This was another factor in the decision that the player made as they were also aware that they were appearing and thus, had to choose a word that the class would understand. There was also entanglement to us, as the creators of the game, as we gave them them a fairly limited choice of words.
Lastly, we wanted to demonstrate how each of the words did not lend themselves to a fixed definition. Thus, we managed to question our use of labels and the way in which we define certain terms.
ALSO: shoutout to lgleysteen for the beautiful cards!
Comments
The Cards
I had a really great time working with the group as well. We had a very fun time creating the cards. The cards are made up of words and phrases from our classes, readings, outside lecturers, and things that we thought would work as well. These words are many of the main ideas that we got out of this course but we only created them from our own perspective. Here is a list of all the cards we had:
Green Cards
Beautiful
Precarious
Hetero-normative
Grievable
Entangled
Queer
Red Cards - Nouns
Drag
Discourse
Crip
AIDS
Skin
Vagina
Utopia
Disease
Structural Violence
XY
Dyke
Right Relationship
Biology
Trouble
Haverford
Religion
XX
Freak
Intersex
Slut
Top
Love
Mental Disability
Home
Tattoos
Hormones
Power
Kaye Edwards
Bryn Mawr
Family
Responsibility
Performance
Unisex
Anne Dalke
Culture
fun times
I had a great time working with the group in coming up with this idea. lgleysteen really did an awesome job with the cards. I think leamirella pretty much said it all, but I just wanted to add that if we weren't limited on time, we were also hoping to ask people who participated about how they felt either being the "judge" or how they felt about making a choice of which noun to put down...did you feel like there was a single judge? Did you worry about the rest of the class judging your decision as well? Did you even realize that the rest of the class was watching?