While reading “My Gender Workbook,” I came across the following passage that Kate Bornstein had quoted from Mariah Burton Nelson:

"All female athletes are gender outlaws… In the act of lunging for a soccer ball or diving into a swimming pool or engaging in most of the other sports that millions of women now enjoy, the athlete goes beyond gender…She has transcended gender and, even more importantly, sexism. Which explains, in part, why women are so passionate about sports."

Reading this quote inspired all kinds of questions for me. I have known for a while now that athletics is an important part of my life and my identity, but I had never thought about how sports played into questions of gender until now. It does seem to me that in swimming, I can transcend gender; I've trained alongside boys ever since I started, and I've always felt that I was treated as an equal. I grew up in a time when women had equal access to sports, and (at my level, anyway) female athletes seemed to be as visible as their male counterparts. However, this wasn’t always the case. I want to look into women's history in sports to see where we stand today, and see if there are any changes that could still be made to further women's opportunities in sports.

Qualifying

My Bibbie invented Gabazoogoo the Talking Dog when his grandsons were little.  My sister and I, Bib’s first great-grandchildren, grew up with Gabazoogoo too.  Stories rolled effortlessly off of Bib’s tongue, and when he spoke, it felt like I could sit still for an eternity, mesmerized by wisdom.  I knew that Gabazoogoo was make believe, but Bib had knack for combining the fantastical with the very real, and I know his stories helped me to learn this world.  

During my daily perusal of feminist blogs, I came across this on Feministing. The wives of the British and German ambassadors to the UN produced  a video calling out Asma al-Assad, wife of Syrian president Bashar Assad, and encouraging her to speak out against her husband's actions in Syria. I am linking to the video instead of directly posting it  because of trigger warnings for gore, specifically injured and dead children. This video brings several conversations we have had in class to mind, including at what point are we allowed to involve ourselves in communities that are not our own (specifically white upper-class Americans in impoverished non-American communities, but I feel as though this still fits the bill) and what responsibilities does the wife of a powerful government official have to the community. 

http://www.theurbanpolitico.com/2010/11/nicki-minaj-1-step-forward-or-2-steps.html

This is an image I found on tumblr. Thought it'd be interesting to bring up in class in light of the discussion we had about trolls on the internet. It reminded me about the idea of crossing the line. Thoughts? Below is the link to the post and the blog it came from...

http://30.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m2kynsx8Wt1r7ge32o1_500.jpg

http://northwesternsexweek.com/post/21214281494/as-promised-a-yes-no-maybe-sheet-has-been

I'm very disappointed with Bryn Mawr's time limits for classes.  I thought our discussion of Adaptation was an important one to have since we compared the movie to the book and talked about what the movie was about and it's value etc.  However, I was so disappointed with what was not said - or rather what there wasn't time for.  OK, we can't agree on if Adaptation was a good/poor representation/purposeful-non-representation of The Orchid Thief.  Fine.  I guess I thought we could take the film at face value at least - meaning what the movie in of itself does and how it reflects the messages in The Orchid Thief.  I guess the example that stands out to me the most is that Charlie kept saying he wanted to show people that flowers were pretty.  In the movie, Charlie "writes in" a scene that didn't happen in The Orchid Thief.  When John is leading Orlean to see the ghost and John is lost, he gets very frustrated.  John says (something along the lines of), "People are always leeching off me.  Get your own passion!  Stupid bitch."  When Orlean sees the ghost orchid, she says, "It's just a flower."  She couldn't adopt anyone's passion or fascination with orchids because it wasn't hers.  This scene parallels Charlie's inability to make a movie that 'shows people that flowers are pretty.'  This is precisely because even if he had made a movie that exhibited flowers, he would not have succeeded.  He would not be able to force his audience adopt an appreciation for flowers.

I'm quiet in class and I have trouble focusing on serendip.  I can't follow our discussions and there's something that blocks up my ideas and makes it incredibly difficult for me to form ideas.  It doesn't mean that I don't have them.  I'm just haven't adapted well to the environment that is our classroom.  I would make a very poor orchid type.

So I guess I'm just going to ramble my random ideas for a little bit.

For starters, I really didn't like the movie Adaptation.  Not because of the way it was made or the circular movement of it.  No, I didn't like it because they represented a very real woman, Susan Orlean, as a drug addicted, violent, ragged character.  I was shocked.  I couldn't wrap my head around the fact that she had seen this movie and didn't sue everyone involved.  That's what really bothered me about the movie.  If it was trying to say that it's impossible to represent someone else's story accurately then I guess they succeded because I don't think they represented her at all.

Okay, so that's my two-cents about the movie.  I didn't like it, I felt like I was watching someone's reputation get destroyed by vicious middle-school girls. 

For this webpaper, I have made an artistic rendition of "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks", inspired by Kim Northrop's Neil Gaiman-inspired paintings. To accompany this, I have also played with my writing style. Once upon a time when I was in Year 10/11 (so the equivalent of high school freshman/sophomore), I did a GCSE course in fine art. We had to document our work, and I used this style to present the process that I used to create my piece. Within this style, however, I have used others, such as a letter format to communicate my ideas. With this documentation in the form of a "portfolio" of sorts, I hoped to parallel the method that Rebecca Skloot used to write her book. However, a lot of the things that I have written are ironic in the sense that I take the book as full "truth".  But, my final piece changes this a little bit as I use it to problematize Skloot's first line: "This is a work of non-fiction."

I've put images of the final piece and the pages from the "portfolio" here rather than embed them into Serendip as the image size was too big. Just click on the pictures and you'll see a bigger version of the piece!

Adding on to today’s discussion, I believe that no movie that is based on a book will ever be faithful to the book in its entirety because the creative team working on the movie will heighten a particular aspect(s) for the sake of entertainment. As for the statement of being original within a genre, we adapt what belongs to other people (discussed at the beginning of the semester) in the process of writing (it may be inevitable). In the case of working on a movie, it also involves the process of representation in the big screen. A good example to represent what I just mentioned is the scene where Donald asks his brother Charlie for a suggestion on how to kill someone in his screenplay and when Charlie does,his brother asks if it’s ok for him to use his idea.