November 12, 2015 - 09:14
When it comes to gendering silence it's a conversation I'm not looking forward to having, or at least it's one that lends me a great deal of confusion. I don't know how study silence as it relates to women; do I approach it from the 'outside' so to speak, as I do with race? Do I have any claim in that experience? Does it matter? It boils down to a personal question for me that I'm not sure I have the answer to: have I ever been a woman? I didn't have the vocabulary or concepts to explore that question when I was younger, but I always felt a 'disconnect' of sorts with gender, and I can't parse out what my younger self could have been thinking or feeling. As amusing as it might be, I can't time travel to my grade school self and say, "Hey, you don't have to be a girl if you don't want to! Non-binary is a thing! You in"? It's probably be for the best if I just shoved my gender feelings to the side and worked with the material as it is so I could actually do something with it without getting caught up in the web of my own personal nonsense, to the best of my abilities. Picking apart my sense of self has some value to me personally I bet, but I'm not sure this class is the best space for that. In the end I'm going to have to find a text to dive into and produce some writing from it, so the sooner I can get myself focused the better.