this zine will always be a work in progress because identity is always a work in progress.
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Web Papers and Events
Constructions of Masculinity: you can’t train yr daughter like you train yr horse
in a book about a daughter looking to dig up her mother in order to prevent becoming a mother herself, it makes sense that we focused on feminine characters in class discussions. but masculinity makes a strong appearance with a character who kinda identifies as a man but kinda doesn’t in a way that fits with the gender binary. it is not for us to decide how this character identifies, but we can pick up clues from their interactions with other characters about how masculinity is embodied and accepted. there are motifs as to what makes a man. money, respect, honesty, women, space. yet falling in line with those themes does not guarantee acceptance into a gender. external validation does not follow internal validation. external validation comes from a conscious choice that the external subject makes during every interaction. it must be decided if they will accept the internal validation, because that acceptance affects their identity too. if they allow a queering of one person’s gender, then they too must queer the concept of their own gender.
her shroud is loneliness, her god was listening. her heaven will be a love without betrayal
*this work is mainly without citation though i draw from many specific theories that i didn't make up myself. if you have any questions about where an idea came from, please let me know so i can clarify! all this stuff is jumbled in my head 24/7 so i often forget which book or which class it came from, or if i'm secretly brilliant and came up with it myself, but i can try!*
“In all, the Marxist compromise to legitimate racism while bracketing “race” at best is not without difficulties or at worst reproduces racism at the level of theory. This is unfortunate if Marxism otherwise could help explain the experiences of students of color.”
Your Money is Foul and So Is Capitalism: Why We Need to be Anticapitalist
“Globalization colonizes women’s as well as men’s lives around the world,
and we need an anti-imperialist, anticapitalist, and contextualized feminist
project to expose and make visible the various, overlapping forms of
sub- jugation of women’s lives.”
Chandra Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes” Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Struggles
Comments
Reflections
do you think
calling me ‘angry’
is an insult.
every time you call me ‘angry’
i hear your voice salt with guilt
and
i laugh.
look how easy it is to reveal you.
--- anger is a healthy and natural response to oppression
salt. by nayyirah waheed.
I don’t know what I would have done without this 360 looking back I'm not sure if I'll ever have the chance again to get to critically explore my own identity in the classroom. Ann Balay challenged that we do not bring our bodies into academia. We did that the semester by talking to ourselves but also with the art but we did with Riva. And wasn't it scary? Usually in class we talk about theory but we don't get the chance to put it in practice. I'm so glad that we got to go to Camphill. I don't think that our discussions about disability and representation would've been as productive, personable, and ethical if we didn't get the chance to see what we were talking about in action.