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Class Summary: "Attending to a new genre: feminist drama"

Okay, this is my second attempt in posting this, so bare with me...

In today's class we started off with basic technical stuff and Anne brought up the Bi-College News article titled, "Evolving Technology, Evolving Feminism" which specifically talks about this course and the involvement of the alums. How does this inter-generational dialogue contribute to feminism?

In other news: Barack Obama continues to campaign against Hillary Clinton with his "post feminist" ideals seen in the article in the NY Times titled, "Feminist Pitch by a Democrat Named Obama." He says that gender shouldn't be the basis of our choice.

Now for the class discussion....

We began by finishing up some left-over postings from last week's readings which brought us to the idea of marginality and being privileged:

Lydia presented the question of, "why are great woman artists not remembered?"

other questions we began to ask were:

-who gets read and who doesn't?

-what does voice have to do with being able to write?

-being privileged?

Then we moved on to Wendy Wasserstein:

"Attending to a new genre: feminist drama"

After Emily shared her summary of The Heidi Chronicles we discussed questions and ideas such as:

-what does this play add to feminism?

*a feminist viewpoint towards the workplace

*demands the NEED for new representations and interpretations of heterosexual relationships

-why did we ignore and fail to highlight the heterosexual relationship seen in Kindred? Is it because it is the norm?

*slave/master relationship was bigger?

-is it possible to be a happy heterosexual feminist? and have it all?

Many people in class have asked to explore more heterosexual readings, which brought us back to discuss Adrienne Rich's 21 Love Poems. Ann added a post that asked us why we couldn't find "universality in the lesbian poems?"

Moving on to dig deeper into The Heidi Chronicles, we broke up into four groups, each choosing 2 pages from play to PERFORM.

Reading drama VS. PERFORMING drama:

It was really interesting to see the reactions and feelings related to PERFORMING bits of the play versus reading the play.

-what kind of feminism does performing this play portray?

*Heidi is attacked/challenged and doesn't appear to have a voice

*not a happy story

*Heidi is in the middle with all these people "swirling" around her

*she is the silent woman

*victimized by certain aspects of feminism

There seemed to be a lot of laughter when performing the scenes...

-where does this laughter come from?

*the ridiculousness?

-challenges deeper social structures

We ended the class with talking about different types of performances and how the idea of feminism should or could be performed:

-through comedy? is it appropriate to use comedy to get the ideas of feminism across to an audience?

-what do we want an audience to feel when an feminist production is put on?

-do we want to feel UNSETTLED?

Perhaps "How I Learned to Drive" will provoke an even greater unsettled feeling...

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