When I began this class, I did so as a student who had already taken a course with Anne. I was a lot more prepared than I was at the beginning of my first class with her. In addition to being my first course with Anne, the ESEM that I took with her was my first college course. In contrast, I began Critical Feminist Studies after a year at Bryn Mawr, and that shows. I have a better grasp of both “college” (admittedly, mostly in the form of more questions and fewer answers than I began with when I matriculated at Bryn Mawr) and what “Bryn Mawr” is.  Just by comparing the Serendip posts that I wrote last year with the ones that I shared this semester, there’s a noticeable distance. I’ve changed as a person over the last year—not a particularly extraordinary circumstance, but a true one. The ESEM program assumes that students are not quite up to the “Bryn Mawr standard” yet, mostly in terms of writing and classroom discussion, and, upon entering this course, I’m at the very least, a stronger writer and conversationalist than I was when I began that ESEM.

Trying to make out a "map" for my group's teach-in was an interesting experience for me. I wanted to do something that was my own, but I couldn't come up with any "locations" to draw for a map. On top of that, I didn't know how to relate it to feminism at first. I finally decided to draw feminism in a way that made sense to me: as an entire body, a "creature." I wanted to draw the dragon because, though we cannot see it, we can see the power of fire, which it breathes. This is similar to feminism because, though many people cannot see the theory that goes behind it, they can see the actions that destroy harmful institutions and help create progress. Like the body of the dragon, though all the parts have different functions, they all can cooperate to have one common goal. I felt that drawing my "map" helped me better understand the idea of feminism as well as educate the class on my perceptions.

Here I am! Writing my last post on the teach-in that Emma, Erin, and Rachel shared with the class last tuesday.  If you don't remember our concept, we each drew "maps" of our personal feminisms.  Before presenting in class, we had actually started our maps together, but finished them separately.  Point is, I hadn't seen the finished products, and was pretty amazed by them.  For example, I was really only expecting to see topography and road maps, but instead, Erin came out with a dragon! How interesting to think of feminism as a body--or, at the whim of a writer like Acker, maybe that's what it always was.  

I've thought more about the topography of my feminism in the past few days.  When I drew "Binary Arch", I constructed it so that the winding path of identity/cathedral of self lay BEYOND it.  I thought by making that choice, I was freeing up the idea of gender and arguing that by looking past gender, we can be englightened with ourselves in a way that is impossible within strict gender performance.  However, the irony of a gender-fortress is perplexing and misleading...

Project Notes

15 - 20 minutes

- Write name of each (good) and (bad)

(Prepare body notes beforehand)

1) Bring in slips of paper and post it notes. (Ari) and double sided tape (Faith)

2) Write a category that you’re comfortable in. It can be one that you’ve given yourself or one that was chosen for you (put it on the back). And one that you’re not comfortable with (put it on the front).  

3) Ask people to write what they’re comfortable with and then we’re going to take those categories and switch them around. We’ll ask people if they’re comfortable with their new given categories  and we’ll ask them to share their thoughts.

4) Ask people if they’re comfortable with their new given labels.

5) Ask people if they’ve ever publicly denounced a label that they’ve been given and ask if they’ve ever felt like they’ve been given a label that doesn’t represent them at all.

6) Now do what you want with this category that we’ve given you. You can crumble it up, display proudly, put it behind you, put it in front of you, whatever.

I think the idea of "against interpretation" is fetched. Even she's trying to ask people not to interprete art, I feel like interpretation has to happen in the interaction with art. If you don't have any knowledge or experience of art, you would not even be willing to come to an art piece and spend time with it. And it's not like if you stop thinking, you would have a better approach with art. Many paintings have their own stories, without interpretation, the original story would be lost. I don't believe there could be any bare appreciation of art with no interpretation.

We are going to play Feminism Jeopardy!!

If you can get  into your Teach-In groups and that will be your team.

1 team starts and they choose a category and a point value. They have 30 seconds to answer the question.

You must answer it in question form.

If the team does not get the answer in 30 seconds it will default to the next team.

Whoever has the most points at the end wins.

We wanted this to be an all-inclusive exercise. We tried to make it as fair as possible and accessible for all teams. We wanted to include a lot of theory, but also supplement that knowledge with how it was applied in class. We realize it is not fully accessible for everybody, but by taking this class we learned that it is a continuous learning process. Everybody defines feminism, accessibility, intersectionality, etc. differently and so we learn from each other. From this process we hope to not only think about the theories, but think about the different ways in which our classmates define and think about the theories so that maybe we will think about them in different ways that we have not thought about before. This is one of the main things we learned from this class.

If I’m going to tell you what my definition of what a city is, my personal style dictates that I use a slightly unconventional metaphor for it. This one was thought up today whilst I was burning calories in the pool. 

Imagine a bowl half-filled with water. 

Now imagine this bowl with blue food coloring diffused coloring in it. It’s a pretty shade of lavender. There is no obvious nucleus where the color leaks from because you’ve stirred the bowl to avoid this. 

Next, you carefully place the vial of food coloring into the bowl of water. Being only half-full, it bobs happily on the surface. Since you spilled a little on the vial itself before putting it in, the immediate water enveloping it is a darker shade of lavender. 

The bowl is the border of a country, the vial with the food coloring is the only city, and the water is everything in it. Granted, I can’t think of any country that only has one city in it, save for the Vatican but they don’t count for the purposes of this essay.