Blogs

Why Minecraft is more than just another video game
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-23572742

I come from a conservative household in the South, where the discussions we are having in class and the readings we do for class would never be spoken about. These topics are taboo where I come from. Even though I'm from a large city, which is culturally very different than the rural south, there are still so many stigmas associated with not conforming to "norms." If one does not fit into a certain predetermined box, they are pushed to the edges of society, from which it is hard (but not impossible) to return from. During our exercise on Thursday, Ester drew a picture of me breaking out a box. That's a pretty accurate description of me. I do not think metaporphical, pre-determined boxes should have any part in society, in fact they hinder society. However, I honestly grew up in a box. It was a box with walls of expectations. I was never comfortable in that box. Yet it was not until I was old enough to think for and make significant decisions by myself that I began to question and tear apart my box. I wish I had begun this process earlier because I know now how much of an impact those walls had on me as a person. Our childhood molds us, but it does not make us who we are. I'm still discovering who I am, and am excited to have this class be a part of that journey.

Notes for Riverside Book Group, 9/6/13

(imagining 10 inside women, plus us…?)

(both w/ the women inside and amongst ourselves outside):

Outside-->

New issue of Radical Teacher on teaching inside carceral institutions
http://www.radicalteacher.org/default.asp
http://radicalteacher.library.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/radicalteacher/issue/current
(really piercing questions here about the relationship between teaching against and teaching inside prisons...)

Inside-->
first suggestion (from Anne):

Sisters in the Struggle: African-American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement

On August 9, 2013, Jody and I met w/ five women in Riverside Correctional Facility (below find the outline for the class we conducted). The point of doing this before the semester started was to get a sense of how the new book group we want to run (with the help of Hayley, Sasha and Sara G) might function--what sorts of texts are the women interested in reading? how open are they to writing? what might it be like to conduct a conversation that loops back and forth between reading, writing and our own experiences?

Geneva

If I’m going to tell you what my definition of what a city is, my personal style dictates that I use an original and slightly unconventional metaphor for it. This one was thought up today whilst I was burning calories in the pool. 

Imagine a bowl half-filled with water. 

Now imagine this bowl with blue food coloring diffused coloring in it. It’s a pretty shade of lavender. There is no obvious nucleus where the color leaks from because you’ve stirred the bowl to avoid this. 

Next, you carefully place the vial of food coloring into the bowl of water. Being only half-full, it bobs happily on the surface. Since you spilled a little on the vial itself before putting it in, the immediate water enveloping it is a darker shade of lavender. 

The bowl is the border of a country, the vial with the food coloring is the only city, and the water is everything in it. Granted, I can’t think of any country that only has one city in it, save for the Vatican but they don’t count for the purposes of this essay. 

Our discussion yesterday about Kathy Acker's "Seeing Gender" opened my mind to all of the different possibilities that the word gender can hold. We questioned whether gender or sex was binary or had a spectrum. I believe that gender is definitely not binary. It does not matter if somebody else "chooses" your sex for you. It only truly becomes who you are when you decide for yourself whether that gender fits you or not. Thinking about gender, our culture sees two distinct genders that cannot have a spectrum between them. We put so much space between the two genders that when people fit somewhere in the middle, others do not accept it. If the differences between the binary genders becomes smaller, it could be easier for people in the middle. As for a person's sex, I believe that, that could be slightly more binary, however that is not always the case. Because we think of sex as the biological part that makes up who we are, people usually assume that we can be either male or female. One interesting aspect of this is that if someone is born intersexual, the doctor and parents decide which sex they believe is stronger. This means that if the person grows up believing that they truly should be the other sex, they become stigmatized because the doctor chose the other sex for them and so they do not fit into the "correct" box that society loves to put people in.

My avatar is a picture of two umbrellas. A traditional Chinese umbrella is made of paper, making it delicate, romantic, and leading to dramatic possibilities. A man and a woman sharing an umbrella during a sudden rain and falling in love at the first sight, that is the start of a famous Chinese legend, Lady White Snake. The story is set in my homecity, Hangzhou, the production site of the best traditional umbrella, the inspiration of artists and poets, a unique city where a beautiful lake is located in the city center and exists in harmony with skyscrapers. The city kind of shaped my qualities: able to see beauty in every corner in daily life and keep a peaceful mind in the fast-paced city.

These are the images that we produced, to "figure" one another's gender presentations. Do we understand what we are seeing? (Ask about the ones that puzzle....) And then: what larger patterns do we perceive here? What does gender "look like" in our classroom? Represented on our boards?

Here are the "poems" Anne's class distilled from our texts today.
The first one we wrote is called "What is a City?", the second
"The Cultures of Cities," and the third "The Metropolis and the Mental Life."
Also of interest, we found, was the history and etymology of "gentrification."