just speaking nearby some self evaluation thoughts and not so self evaluation thoughts

  In our meeting, you[anne] began by apologizing to me for the class, and it is interesting, because the entire semester, I wanted to apologize for myself, for my own performance. I either said too much or too little in this class, and am (or was, I have somewhat come to terms with it now) frustrated with my frustrations with my classmates, which I hope was not apparent, but probably were. However, I do think I was extremely engaged in classroom conversation, which is probably part of why I got frustrated. I felt stalled, as though I wasn’t going anywhere with my learning, and that I also wasn’t contributing to anyone else. But I wanted to be “into it,” I had sold myself on being in the class and there I was, so I might as well like it! And I did; we had some great conversations and discussions. We had some not so great ones and there were circumstances in the class that provoked my anxieties in negative ways, but I think that those are largely my own thing I need to deal with/have been dealing with/continue to try to figure out.

            Group work was more pleasant than I thought! Usually! I will say I’m not the best at group work (doesn’t play well with others) because I am stubborn and also painfully shy. But it was a nice, safe space, and the content was at times too important to NOT say anything, which I think is the greatest compliment I can give any course. I feel like, as you and I talked about in our meeting, and in class, all of our different learning levels were not bridged well, but that was as much our fault as yours, as our instructor, in that we could be responsible students who call on one another to be resources in our learning, but also provide insights as to things we bring to the table in a way that is patient and understanding of very different points of entry. 100-level courses seem like the hardest to manage, because of the possibility of SUCH disparate levels of familiarity with certain texts.

            Sometimes(usually), when we chose our own groups, I gravitated towards certain classmates that I knew were at similar points in their learning to me, or were in a place to take what I had to say and critically engage with it in a way that forced me to be rigorous in my comments. In saying that, I feel really bad, because I could have been less lazy and tried to be a resource for other classmates, to address topics they may not have encountered before and be something of a guide (although that kind of authority feels uncomfortable, but I suppose it exists, and as long as I am responsible and mindful of it, it can be productive)

            I will be frank and say I am writing this at 5am, nearly done with all of my senior work, after a week of mind-numbing amounts of writing and thinking and planning and theorizing and freaking out about the future and realizing this isn’t my home anymore. My head is aching and my brain is working through thoughts in not it’s typical fashion, or rather, I’m run down so ragged I can’t police it how I normally do, so interesting thoughts and connections are being made, but I am not sure of their value. I am thinking right now about how all of my work this week, all my courses, have melded together. There are no boundaries on the information, the ultimate interdisciplinary brain! This has a downside, in that I have been having trouble remembering which ideas go where and where exactly, in which paper did I write about this or that which might connect to something else or maybe I already said it in the same paper. But it’s also how my brain normally works, just magnified and unmediated right now. And given my love for theory, the beauty is how much I am able to think about common threads of thoughts and ideologies across disciplines and work I am producing. I could, in some ways, hand in any of the work I have done in any of the courses I am enrolled in (or three of them, at least). Feminism and the study of critical feminist theory was important to me (still is important to me) because I want it to inform my everything: all my thoughts and work and conversations and behavior. I want to understand those ideas so fully that I can apply them anywhere, and I think that has happened. I am not sure how much content I learned in this course (half because of where I was coming from in my education, half because I slacked a little bit) but I was able to very safely flex my theorizing muscles, to try to weave intricate lineages and connections and communities out of disparate ideas, and that was really, quite productive for me.

            My written work over the past year has changed a lot; perhaps  it could be said that I have “found my voice,” to be clichéd about it. Rather, I’m more confident and assertive in my writing, not because I feel as though it is good in the traditional, academically sanctioned sense, but because it is congruent with my ideological frameworks, and because it was too hard to say nothing when “normal” papers didn’t let me say what I needed to in the right way. I think I put less work into some of the web papers than I could have, namely the first (gosh, that was a train wreck) and the third. I am proud of the second, I think it is kind of beautiful, in its own way, and maybe that sounds cocky but I think I am allowed to find my own work pleasing in some way.  I think the only narrative is the progression of my work with borders and interrogating those, which I think does intersect with and engage with critical feminist theory, but it also is broader, perhaps, so I had moments of wondering if what I was doing with this video was appropriate for the class or not. In my mind, it all connects so clearly: thinking about borders, conceptions of womanhood and feminism and communities of so many kinds, education, education as imperialism or as liberation, postcolonialism, Western notions of the third world; all are so enmeshed in my mind, I find it impossible (if not unproductive) to untangle them from one another. It’s messy, but that is how this world is. I’ll end on that terribly unoriginal sentiment, or perhaps by saying it was a pleasure and I’m sad the course forum will exist no longer as an active thing as much as it once was. And that I loved having you as a professor and loved being in this course as much as certain aspects were less than ideal. And that, I think, is an indication of a successful course, that I wanted to be there every day even if I knew I had wanted to roll my eyes right out of my head two days before. Probably because most days I think, hey, it would be really awesome if I could just talk to Anne about all my feelings about all these things for a while, and see what she has to say!

on that note, cheers, y'all. done is good. done is graduation. done is subverting paradigms of gender and sex! [link]