Accessibility is defined as easily reached, easily understood, easily available, and approachable.  From this view accessibly is something that makes something else easier.  From my understanding accessibility, relating to the classroom, is the idea of making the classroom more open and more inclusive.  When thinking about the ways in which our class tried to make the classroom more accessible it came to my understanding that by making the classroom more accessible to some, was disabling to others.  Myself, personally found the structure of the classroom and the class overall more hindering.

Before this semester, I never have thought I could learn so many different kinds of plays. Simple play, critical play and deep play, every play has its special meaning and make the word ‘play’ complicated in my mind. In the final essay, I want to come back and re-write one of my works about critical play.

Critical play is the first strange definition of play that I attached. Artists use this kind of play to express their special ideas to the public. This definition seems to be abstract but the real trip to Philly helps me a lot to understand it. When I enter into Chinatown, I suddenly know, the total place is a critical play. For me, it remind me of something familiar when I stay in China. The words, the people, the language and the names of food make me excited. However, I find the language, although is a kind of accents in China, I cannot understand. The food is not orthodox, and buildings keep the style of that in 80s in China. They are different from my real life in my hometown. The Chinatown is a critical play that is played by people in Chinatown. They want to create a familiar environment but failed because many of them even never come to China. They follow the rhythm of their predecessors. Their impressions for China, sometimes is the China in old stories. The Chinatown is the critical play for me and it is different from the real China in my mind.

In Sontag’s article ‘Against interpretation’, she propose her idea that the interpretation today is useless and not valuable. When I read her title, in the beginning, I disagreed because I thought interpretation was necessary for me to understand the meaning of art works. However, when I read the article, I notice that maybe I’m wrong. In her definition and explanation for modern interpretation, that is, people set some criterions and ‘put’ art works in them to interpret the art works. This kind of interpretation is so terrible for me. Thousands of artists use special ways to express different ideas. If I really want to understand their original idea, I should discard such criterions and feel the work individually.

My journey in Critical Feminist Studies has been a long one and much like The Odyssey, it won't end after this class. Alright, cheesy sentence aside, this class is one of the reasons why I look back at my first semester at Bryn Mawr fondly. Before coming to Bryn Mawr, I was really just starting to explore feminism and the idea that things aren’t as good as they may seem. After watching movies/videos like Miss Representation and Feministfrequency I wanted to learn more about what defines feminism and how different people interpret it. As a sidenote, I was hoping to learn more about gender and its complexity. I realized upon coming to Bryn Mawr that I didn’t know as much about it as I wanted to and I thought that this class would be a good place to get an introductory lesson in the subject. We ended up doing this with My Gender Workbook and though I admit that it was confusing for me at first, I took the time to try and understand the complexity of gender and I found myself rewarded for my patience. I had similar experiences with most of the texts we read in class. The meanings didn’t come to me instantaneously and I often had to dig deep to figure out what was going on.

Introduction

When thinking of topics to write this final web event on, my mind wandered to ecofeminism and stayed there. It’s a topic and issue that has been picking at me since we first discussed it briefly in class and it has been urging me to take a closer look at it ever since. When the final group to present during our last class did their presentation on ecofeminism, the picking only intensified.  I knew then that I needed to learn about the history of the movement and why it carries the images and connotations that we discussed during that class. I felt like this would solve my desire to understand ecofeminism and would help me determine whether or not I could place myself within it. And so, I did just that. I delved into the origins and philosophies of ecofeminism and I decided to look at it from the perspective of people of color. A lack of a presence concerning women of color involved in ecofeminism seemed to be the most glaring issue that I faced when originally analyzing the ecofeminist movement. Keeping this in mind, I concluded that when researching for this paper I would look at popular ecofeminist texts that help establish a general definition of what the movement is, along with ecofeminist movements and texts that directly or indirectly come from the point of view of women of color.

Bryn Mawr is my home.

            That one phrase is so much more than the five words it contains. Now more than ever before. To me, a home is much more than four walls or a campus. Bryn Mawr is home to me because of its people, because of its community. It is here that I have become comfortable with who I am - my sexuality, my past, my life.

            When I first began to think about this final paper, I knew I wanted it to be about this place that means so much to me. Bryn Mawr. I also wanted to incorporate in parts of my other papers. As I reflected over my work and growth in this course, I realized I left my third paper open ended without a firm direction in terms of education for Wabash. During conversations (usually over food) with my friends, I began to see that Bryn Mawr also needs a new form of education. An education in inclusion. I began to think of my second paper on the inclusiveness/discrimination of the straight community within Bryn Mawr's community. I concluded Bryn Mawr needs an intervention.

inequity at so many levels of the system.  i find the piece disturbing, and am reminded of our (many!) conversations about individual responsibility and institutionalized/systemic issues...

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/12/i-got-myself-arrested-so-i-could-look-inside-the-justice-system/282360/

I enrolled in this class because after a history-based women’s studies class in high school, I became very interested in feminist issues and looking past the gender binary. When I started in this class, I didn’t have a lot of confidence in myself as a humanities student. I never spoke much in English and history classes in high school, because I had trouble with two things: getting invested in the subject matter, and believing that others would want to hear something that I had to say. I also found myself unable to really care about essay prompts I was given, except for one paper senior year where I chose my own topic.

Here are the notes that Marian, Piper, Amanda and I used for our presentation on Ecofeminism

Ecofeminist meal

• Salted kale chips
•      Reference to the “Book of Salt”
• Tabouli Salad
• Spinach salad

History of Ecofeminism

• Ecofeminism is new branch of feminism that focuses on riding the world of any hierarchical structures.  This sector of feminism addresses the “self” and “other” as a subject and an object.    
• ecofeminism as an extension of intesectionality
• need to be open-minded because this could be the way that people looked at first wave feminism
• “Particularly, ecofeminists attack patriarchal society's dualistic thinking, wherein one side of the dualism reflects the "self" or the subject, while the second represents the "other" or the object. The object is considered only insofar as it can benefit the subject.”
• “The movement wants to create an interconnected community, void of hierarchies, where all beings -- human, non-human, and members of the organic world -- have their own intrinsic value and are part of the same living organism, the earth.”
• Women’s Studies Librarians Office
• University of Wisconsin System
• http://womenst.library.wisc.edu/bibliogs/ecofem.html

Accessibility