Blogs

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

Hi everybody, for my project I'm making a sort of non-challenging picturebook for adults that defines gender and sexuality related terms. If you can think of any more words or topics I should include, please let me know.

 [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:

For our final teach-in my group decided to play a game of taboo. Unlike the regular version of taboo, our version did not have specific taboo words under the word that was meant to be described. Instead each card read "Do not use gendered words" while describing this word. After having discussions in class about a genderless world we were curious to see if we were able to describe words without the use of gender. Some of the words that were described included father, bitch, love, and bisexual. As seen, some are inherantly more gendered than others. 

I was curious to see if there would be confusion between biological sex words and gender words. It was interesting to see the initial panicky reaction of those who volunteered to describe a word, followed with some confusion, but in the end everyone was able to describe their word in a way that allowed the rest of the class to guess it. 

It was interesting to try and imagine a world without gender. While we were able to guess words, without gender, would we still be using the word mother and father to describe a parent? Would they adopt new meanings? I find myself wondering now if this was a true experiment without our ability to turn off the gendered brains in the audience. Would we have been able to guess father without automatically thinking parent=mother OR father? 

For our presentation, we wanted to interrogate how sex education information is or is not distributed freely, and when that information should be allowed to be consumed. We thought about form and delivery, and in the spirit of feminism and freely available information, made a series of little zines with sexual health/body/sexuality information, with the intention that we would "book bomb" a local library's young adult section, thereby subverting the institutional modes of publishing and the vetting process inherent to that institution, as well as utilizing nearly free resources (each zine is just one piece of white paper, and there are no staples, glue, or tape to keep the zines together)

This was something of a pilot of what such a project could be, with a lot of room for developing the content of the zines, but largely we wanted to be frank and inclusive, to not privilege the gender binary or any normative way of being that may silence other voices, as much as possible. It was also important to allow space for youths to find other resources, and give them a lexicon from which to draw to speak on these topics and ask questions more effectively, an act of empowerment that hopefully reflects some of the goals of feminism, writ large. 

For our teach-in, melal, FrigginSushi and I wanted to look at different modes of expression and how they related to our discussions in class and feminism as a whole. We particularly wanted to look at how people can use words or images to express certain ideas, and the difficulties that arose with each one, and so we used the general format of charades and Taboo to demonstrate this. We picked the words "strong" and "safe" for Taboo, and "weird" and "smart" for charades; all of these words are defined differently based on your experiences, and we wanted to use the difficulty of expressing them to demonstrate that we don't all have these shared experiences.

Hey All,

Here is the link to Feminist Henson.  I plan on keeping it going and accepting submissions if anyone wants to play around with it.  

http://feministhenson.tumblr.com/

Dearabby and I would also love to hear/read people's thoughts and suggestions.