Critical Feminist Studies Web Paper 2

Sarah Kaufman
Critical Feminist Studies Second Midterm

Man as Comrade vs. Enemy: Is a Proletarian Feminist Superior to a Capitalist One?

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Project Proposal

            In my research project for the rest of the semester I am interested in exploring female and feminist art. I began this project by asking myself a series of questions that I wanted to explore both in my research and in my own artistic work. What makes a work of art feminist rather than female? Can a feminist work of art be produced by a man? Why are there not more women in the traditional cannon? If a work is done by a woman, does it make the work innately feminine in some way?

Critical Feminist Studies

Web Paper #2

10/19/07

Can We "Have A Happy Period"?

As a transgender student, and perhaps the only out trans-identified student living on campus to date, it has been a struggle finding and creating a niche on campus for myself. My friends are for the most part allies, and though some have questioned gender and some have even come to identify as “non-conforming” or “gender queer”, I am the only student, to my knowledge, that has committed to a gender identity and the mental and physical transformations that coincide with my interpretation of this gender identity.  

Dearest Sisterhood,

As I have already mentioned in an earlier conversation…

“I am a freshwoman from South Portland, Maine, and to be quite frank I have never even considered myself a feminist, nor have I even given the issue much thought. I consider myself to be a rather naïve and non-political person. Yet, here I am at a women’s college, in a course titled Introduction to Critical Feminist Studies. Hmm. If you are half as confused as I am, you’d maybe understand just how out of place I might feel here. Most days, I find myself wondering why I am here…and why I am in this class. But, as my Zen calendar said the very first day I arrived here at Bryn Mawr, ‘In your heart, you already know.’”

Abigail Sayre

Intro to Critical Feminist Studies

Project Proposal

10/19/07

I love when the readings for my courses overlap, especially when it’s reading from different disciplines. Though I foresaw that material for my Anthropology of Reproduction class might coincide with readings for this one, I was nevertheless surprised when on the same day that I had to read Barbara Johnson’s “Apostrophe, Animation and Abortion” we discussed Faye D. Ginsburg’s Contested Lives: the Abortion Debate in an American Community in Anthropology. More readings that I have found relevant include the introduction

When we read Helene Cixous’ Laugh of the Medusa, I felt more inspired than I had in a very long time. Since then, I have been trying to figure out exactly what about her writing speaks to me so deeply. In a sense, I can see why I so strongly identify with the things she says; yet, at the same time, the more I manage to unravel, the more complex it all seems.

For my project I’ve decided to read a selection of Japanese books and manga, (popular Japanese comics), as well as essays on feminism in modern Japan. I will be attempting to define and explore what feminism means in modern Japanese literature, how it differs from American feminism, and why. I think that examining what feminism means in this culture will let me both learn about a different kind of feminism as well as see American feminism through a new lens. It will let me examine whether, as Paula