Still Growing: Self Evaluation

Just looking at my Web Events, I can tell how I have grown as a writer, thinker, and person throughout this class. My first web event was completely within my comfort zone – though it was the first lens text I had ever written, it involved mostly literary analysis with only surface-level feminism. Ironically, as I questioned whether A Doll’s House was part of the patriarchy, I was operating under very patriarchal assumptions of what feminism actually was. Women were women and men were men and though I could tell there was something about gender I wasn’t really getting (that it was part of essential self? a body, part of the body, and yet not a body?) I hadn’t reached the understanding of gender that I have now. My second web event, however, reached into territory I hadn’t ever thought of exploring in a Feminist Studies class. I had always considered the separate factions of identity politics separate, so confronting intersectional identities was something that I hadn’t done before. However, I realized I had been living intersectionality – I had been experiencing an institution that supported intersectionality in higher education and hadn’t considered how important that was. My third web event was an example of biting off more than I could chew. Feminism and visibility in media has always been something that is really important to me; even as a little girl I wanted to grow up and write stories about other little girls just like me, who had to go to therapy and liked other little girls. So instead of writing about feminism unbound, I wrote about feminism expanded – feminism taking over the huge domain of the media. Now I realize that I shouldn’t have written about why the media needed feminism (which was a little obvious) but a different system of cultural mythology that unbinds communication and storytelling from unequal power dynamics. I think this shows how much more I still can do for myself as a learner even after this class. I knew my essay wasn’t “unbound” enough, but I had convinced myself that whatever anti-patriarchal media theories I came up with either a) had already been done before or b) Judith Butler’s were better. I tried to address this in my final web event, where I used non-mimesis to avoid patriarchal language and ideas to communicate my ideas about patriarchal media in a non-traditional way (or at least, a way that Judith Butler has never tried. As far as I know.)

Looking at my posts and comments, I realized that I write most easily when I am working with or against an already established point of view, but I develop the most insightful or thought-provoking material when I am establishing my own point of view. When I was commenting on posts, I tended to ask a lot of questions of the original poster – questions I was not prepared to answer, but knew I could ask. I like a lot more of my original posts because I feel that, in at least some of them, I found a new idea that I was confident in or I managed to spark a discussion in the comments. I wish I had been a little more present online because I know I was not present in a lot of the group discussions. There are many reasons for that – I was sometimes anxious; sometimes afraid of the older and more experienced voices in the room, of being wrong; sometimes I had nothing to say, which scared me more. I’d like to think that I started to speak up more as the semester went on, though not nearly enough to satisfy me, to be honest. I’m not happy with the way I chose to experience a lot of this class – doing all of the reading, making notes, preparing myself – and then contributing nothing. However, I know I did a lot of growing that will lead to a lot more. I can safely say that I am a completely different person than the one who sat down on the first day, and I think that is the most important part of my experience in this class. I’ve learned so much, not just about feminism (although I have learned a lot about feminism) but about myself and my interactions with the people around me in the context of greater power struggles. I have found a broader lens with which I can look at the world, and I think I am truly blessed that this experience came so early in my college career.

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