Critical Feminist Studies Web Paper 4

To Begin. . .

As an avid TV junkie, I have stayed up many a night to watch re-runs of the shows “Teen Mom” and “16 & Pregnant.” I know you are probably rolling your eyes if you're not a fan of the “reality” TV phenomenon, but these shows have affected me in a way that other “reality” based shows never could. (...So understandable when thinking about their consistent lack of depth: there are not a multitude of thought-provoking conversations that follow the documentation of rainbow Jello shots and women pulling out other’s hair extensions). These shows have affected me partly because I am the product of unplanned pregnancy to a fifteen-year-old girl myself, and a subsequent adoption. I find the show to be a way to help me begin to understand what I meant to my birth mother at age fifteen, the prime time for being a devoted Frito Lay consumer and wearing exactly what the mannequin wears.

       For my final project, I would like to focus on our pop culture discussions in the beginning of each class session, or “Setting the Scene.” Our assignments to bring in a pop culture item, usually a music video or a post from the blogging website, Tumblr,   as a potential lead in to our intended academic texts and their subsequent dialogues (particularly the ones revolving around music videos) often were cut short—much too short for a satisfying analytic reading of the often multi-faceted material we were presented with. Some classmates suggested we process topics of our discussions prior to class meeting to allow for a more comprehensive reading. However, my qualm did not arise from ability of lack thereof  to process what I was seeing, it was the way in which most discussions  ended, an ending reminiscent of our “Is this a feminist text?” conundrum: an ending that reached for the shallow aim of finding our own preset definitions of feminism within these three to four minute worlds. I was most disappointed by the feminisms we didn’t see, even flat out ignored, in certain “setting the scene” presentations. Of our discussion of non-conventional feminist music figures my interest was most peaked by our rather curt reading of Nicki Minaj’s video, “Stupid Hoe.”  Her overtly sexual and aggressive music video presentation was quickly judged as trite and not worth the time of the class to watch the entirety of.

My final project is a picture book for adults to inform them on gender and sexuality--what they are, why they are important, and how they work together.  I made this because I have friends and family who don't really understand much of this, and I want to give them a concrete way to get informed. It is an overview of basic concepts to create a vocabulary to help readers communicate their ideas with other people who without having to define every term.

I chose to make this in book form because reading a book is a different experience from surfing websites.  Reading a book is a more personal experience because you can hold it in your hands and turn the pages yourself. On the internet, you can click hyperlinks as much as you want, but you depend on the hardware to obey you. You can change the website, delete your history, and distract yourself with a funny cat video in all of 20 seconds.  A book is different because you make a decision to sit down and read it, understand it, and absorb it.  The stories stay with you.

That being said, I chose to include several resources for readers that go more in-depth than the book because, like I said, this book is just an overview.  I included websites, a film, and a GLBT National Help line.  I chose four websites for information, and seven websites by religion because sometimes people forget that sexuality and religion are not mutually exclusive and a higher power can be tremendously helpful when dealing with issues such as these.

Introduction

Plans for moving forward:

This is a part of a joint project that I am working on with amorphast, S. Yeager, COLLEEN AND MEREDITH

The topics we discussed include:

Housing
Bathrooms
DLT Training
Custom’s Week
Freshmen/New Students
Discomfort/break in communication/sense of discomfort

How do we open up the dialogue, ease the sense of discomfort, and fix the break in communication when discussion certain topics such as queer?

Last year’s Hall Adviser training schedule is attached if you'd like to look at what kind of activities are involved. 

I collaborated with epeck and sekang for this web paper. The final product can be found here. 

I collaborated with epeck and dchin. The final project can be found here.

The VLogs

For our final web event, sekang, dchin and I reflected on the process of our class presentation and asked ourselves the questions we had asked others for the interviews we conducted.

*Both videos are long, so please allow time for loading before watching.

In the first video we reflect on our motivation for our class presentation, the process of interviewing strangers at Philadelphia train stations, the process of editing those interviews and how the product we created related back to the discussions we have had in Critical Feminist Studies this spring.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbZFJU-xkgU&feature=youtu.be

In the second video, we interview each other in the same style that we conducted the interviews for our class presentation.  We then reflect on being asked these questions and our new perspectives on documentary filmmaking. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDs50K5UBg8&feature=youtu.be

The Editing Process

 [just speak nearby the borders of our minds] <-- link

This is a piece about borders. About communities. About movement and restrictions and ideologies. I wanted to interrogate how feminism is at times bounded by qualifiers, that is, to differentiate between French feminism and Third-World Feminism, and the ways in which those are both appropriate and constructed such that the result is constructed identities viewed as essential.

Among artists in the 20th and 21st century, explicit reference to prior works has become a mode of producing pieces. This may be in the form of collage or pastiche of some kind, and in video art, it is typically through found footage that these references can be made. Video Artists like Dara Birnbaum have spoken on the power of reappropriating footage, specifically, in her case, from popular media sources, but some of the logic remains in what I have done. Birnbaum wanted the agency to engage with the images being presented to her, to take ownership and subvert their meanings to create new meaning, asserting that she wanted to “talk back” to the media. Further, she asserts: