Looking back

   Before I really started writing my self-evaluation, a question came into my mind: if I hadn’t had class with Anne last semester, what my performance in this class would be? I think this question is fairly important for me, because compare to some of my classmates, I knew more about how course would be (not in terms of knowledge in gender studies, but in terms of the components of the course, such as Serendip, weekly postings, final performance, group discussion, or probably just Anne Dalke.) even before it really started. This fact definitely made me more comfortable with many things about our class compare to my peers, like speaking without raising my hand, and enabled me to get along with everything well quickly.  

   Compare to last semester, I have been more present during discussions, both large and small. As mentioned above, one of the reasons may be that I felt familiar with the setting of the class, and therefore felt more confident to speak. But I think the main reason is that I’ve become a better English speaker and knew how to express my opinions efficiently. However, I did not contribute as much to the large group discussions as I would have liked to. Sometimes I still worried about saying wrong things or asking stupid questions. Different from those of who may have the same feelings, my fear came from two dimensions. First of all, I don’t know as much about gender studies as some of us, which made me feel being left-out of conversations when we reached some deep layers about our topics. And secondly I don’t have much background knowledge about American culture and I always felt self-conscious and seldom spoke in “Setting the Scene”. Therefore, I would say setting the scene actually didn’t enable me to interpret feminism by giving multimedia resources as a tool, but added more difficulties for me because I couldn’t get the connotations of some of the lyrics in the music video. But the benefit of not speaking much so was that I was able to listen more closely to my classmates. I find that when I am more eager to participate than anything else, I do not pay as much attention as I should to others because I am occupied with preparing my own thoughts. Instances in which I focused less on getting my own thoughts out actually allowed me to be more present in the conversation because I was giving other people’s observations deeper consideration.

   In small group discussions, I am much more talkative. During these small group discussions, I felt more comfortable asking questions, because usually the atmosphere is more casual. I really like to engage in the conversations online, because even there was something that I didn’t understand, I can just Google/Wikipedia it right way. Also, I felt that because we can actually write them down, we expressed our thoughts in a more organized way, which definitely helped online conversations more effectively. Now that I look back, I’m pleased about both the conversations my posts started and those I participated in. Most of my class work was for my own learning purposes, honestly. I contributed to the conversation when I felt like it needed another opinion, and that usually worked out well. I was also often inspired by other people’s thoughts. For example, michellelee’s posting about the movie Tomboy made me think about the popularity of tomboy culture in modern society and its correlations with feminism. And pjordan’s posting about women athletes attracted me, and let me consider the relationship between feminism and certain types of careers, and finally made me decide to focus on Chinese women soldiers for my last webevent. But I felt myself didn’t pay enough attention on reviewing my weekly postings. Haven’t noticed some added comment on my weekly postings, I missed some great opportunities for further conversations.

  What I really enjoyed about our readings was that, though we tried to put them in the context of feminism, feminist perspective was not the only thing that we looked for. In our discussions about many books, we found other themes that we covered The Book of Salt, for example, is described as a novel about a young Vietnamese man’s experiences as the cook of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. But in our discussions we also analyzed the limit of words as a means of expression. Among all the readings we did, Gertrude Stein’s “Lifting Belly” was the most challenging one. As we discussed in class, we have been taught to decode texts, but again, given my limited knowledge about English literature, I just could not figure out what “Lifting Belly” tried to tell, which made me lost my patience and give up finally. I felt that I grew most as a reader by coming to realize that different genres can bring different reading experiences for readers, which is why I suggested our group use charades and taboo to represent two major means of expression for our final performance. I don’t really have any particular preferences for certain genre, but I do think that a good piece of work, whatever literature, a comic book, or a documentary, should make readers feel invited and welcomed, as if they were able to sit down with the author and talk about their opinions on the subject. In this sense, I really agree with Spivak’s argument that great books should be open for interpretation and explanation. Moreover, I have learned to analyze texts with feminism in mind, or tried to interpret something from my own definition of feminist and feminism. This has benefited me a lot, especially in terms of critical thinking and academic writing.

   Looking back all my web papers, I found myself really engaged in finding relationships between popular social phenomena and feminism. I like my first web paper the most, which was about a popular Chinese dating show and its paradoxical correlations with feminism. Such fond in finding paradoxes made me produce my second web page in the same way as I did for my first. However, when look back now, I kept asking myself if such engagement puts limits on my thinking, making me assume there will definitely a paradox in certain problems without much real knowledge about them.

   My third web paper was completely different as Anne suggested me try to write about something I was unfamiliar with, which proved to be a challenge. Moving into the topic of female violence perpetuators and whether they are feminists, I was unsure how to write because I knew nothing about it. This web paper was also the first that time that I felt unconfident about posting it on Serendip. In my first paper and the second paper, I have focused on the paradox character that the issues contain. While writing my third web paper, I had to push myself to make an argument and give a punchline. To tell the truth, after being in our class for three months, I did feel nervous about making a statement because it seemed that things are always intertwined with each other and it is really hard to make a clear cut. Overall, my “movement” through the three web papers has been a process of allowing myself to invest in my writing and become more comfortable writing about what I do not know in order to generate possible interventions, rather than writing about what I am comfortable with to reach a single, predictable conclusion. Through these web events, I have learned to become more open-ended. From the first paper to the third, I have felt increasingly confident in my own opinions and more comfortable expressing them.

 Getting out of Critical Feminist Studies, I think that I learned more about a feminist way of thinking rather than specific gender-studies related knowledge, which was what I expected at first. Compare to our ESem, CFS is less structural, in which we had more freedom to make online postings, write web papers or even design our syllabus together. Probably this is a feminist way of organizing the course, because we were given more space to lead ourselves towards what we were interested in. However, the fact that everyone had different levels of knowledge about gender studies prevents everyone from getting what they wanted, which is not feminist way, on the other hand. Some topics were too elementary for some of us, yet for others they were totally new. Therefore it was really hard to find a balance. But thinking from another aspect, isn’t it our society the same way? There are different kinds of feminism, and the one that works for one person not necessarily works for another.