Blogs

Several weeks ago, a user of the website TUBLR posted about Bryn Mawr’s  policies regarding trans women.  She called the school out for a number of things.  Students, myself included, responded pretty quickly to defend the school and to explain that the Bryn Mawr community is largely welcoming to trans individuals. 

I have been thinking about the exchanges we had since then and I have come up with many questions.  When I was trying to decide what to do with this web event, I planned on writing a paper exploring my thoughts on a possible right relationship between cis feminist activists and trans feminist activists.  Then, the thought occurred to me that doing so would be a little pointless if there were no trans female voices involved.  I thought of the question recently raised in class about how to humanize someone you don’t know. 

So I contacted the trans woman who had posted on TUMBLR and asked her if I could interview her for my paper.  She agreed and I planned on interviewing her via email and writing a paper based on our interview.  Something about that didn’t seem quite right to me.  I had recently conducted interviews for a paper in another class and I hated the process of treating peoples’ narratives like data.  I hated the idea of creating a closed conversation that would then be  presented through the filter of me. 

I think the biggest problem wih academic writing is that it's too logical and rational. It prevents us from expressing our emotion. However, emotion is also a way of knowing besides reason, perception and language. First, emotion is a significant factor to form intuition. We sometimes just intuitively know something without thinking a lot about it. For example, it 's human nature to keep away from huge animals. Second, emotion is also the motivation to gain knowledge. Wrights brothers would never invented airplane if they hadn't had passion toward flying. And at that time,their  ideas about flying was totally based on their emotion (passion) rather than reason (this idea was contradictory to gravity force in Physics). However, academic writing underestimates the importance of emotion in gaining knowledge. Furthermore, it's somehow impersonal which prevents us from express ourselves and sharing our experiences and point of view.

I feel that formal writing obstructs the free flow of emotion and makes academic robots of us all. As students, it forces us to focus less on how convinced we are of our ideas, but on the impression it will make on our readers. Formal writing glorifies abstract thought; it appears classy to sound complex and demeaning to speak simply.  The more high sounding and philosophical we get, the more our audience takes our words seriously. We can see this in the reactions of our class to the writings Dewey in comparison to Williams. Yet not everyone can understand or relate to abstract generalizations, so formal writing selects its audience and leaves the lay ones in the cold. Academic writing is indifferent to the varied backgrounds of its potential readers.  In some respects, academic writing can be viewed as an egotistical attempt to leave your reader feeling awed by you. It is rarely a conversation, but a lecture.

Academic writing in a sense robs us of intellectual ownership, we lose authority as Percy asserted, because we have to back up our thoughts with sources.  The message is that we don’t have a right to think for ourselves, we have to think through the eyes of the ‘experts’, and consciously adjust our point of view to fit in with theirs. It perpetuates the idea that there is a group of knowers and that the rest of us, the ‘know not’s cannot go off on our own tangent. No, our ideas have to be validated by the opinions of others. Yet, who says the experts are infallible?

The class dimensions of academic writing seem to be very limited to x number of pages. There is an introduction, a body, and a conclusion, and of course a works cited. There is always a thesis that needs to be supported or refuted. This type of academic writing seems to be the “norm” for many professors and teachers. I am not saying that this type of writing is bad, but it is monotonous. Personally I feel that I cannot truly express all my ideas, thoughts, and questions, in these types of papers because I am more worried about structure, length, and other writing conventions. For these types of papers I feel like I am writing them because I have to instead of having to writing AND wanting to write it. I wonder if this type of writing became the “standard” so teachers and professors can clearly see what point is trying to be made rather than having to figure it out for themselves and really reading what is trying to be said.

Hey Everyone

Here's a cool article I read last year in the New York Times called "What Is It About 20-Somethings?" It kind of piggybacks on a couple of topics we've discussed such as our mini-discussion of forming identities in this time of our lives. However, after today's conversation, my perceptions of this article changed and seem much more classed than before. 

Essentially, the researcher in the article argues that there is a new stage of life similar to adolescence that happens in a person's 20's. We take a longer time to grow up and being self-actualized or find our purpose. However, what about people who can't extend their periods of self-discovery? What about those too time poor or money poor for the luxury of a few more years of "self indulgence?"

Some of these issues are addressed in the article, some are not. Overall, though, it's a good read. :)

Read On: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/magazine/22Adulthood-t.html?pagewanted=all 

P.S. GOOD LUCK ON FINALS!!!! 

As I think about what writing “like an academic” means, I can't help but think of formality and perfection. Tied up in dense theory or personal story, the author's we read about somehow articulate their ideas in a way that I feel I never could. Their ideas are described so well that describing them any other way could never do them justice.Yes, these works have been edited, pared down, and abstracted to fit the goals of our assertions. However, in this process of editing, paring, and abstracting, how much of our voice are we deleting and muting? How much of ourselves do we take out of our own equation?

In class, it was mentioned that informal writing made material more personable. Decoding theories into basic terms helps some people relate to the information more easily and in turn, helped them apply it to their lives. In turn, this made me wonder: what are the boundaries of formal writing? If informal writing conveys the message with equal efficiency, is it even necessary to follow the rules of grammar? For those who don’t know certain terms or aren’t able to understand convoluted language, will they be barred from valuable knowledge and a certain level of critical thinking?

In this instance, I am reminded of my parents who are immigrants of this country. If they had not received the level of education that they had had, they would not have experienced their life in America and in turn, have the same opportunities as they do now. They would not have met the people that they do and learn from them. Even now, in being of a different culture, certain terms in the English language and certain actions as a language of our culture (eg. table etiquette, certain mannerisms, etc.) can still remain foreign to them . As a result, they may still have boundaries to overcome in order to achieve success in American society. In any case, as education is class coded and as education has deeply effected the way in which people are able to communicate, in turn, language can be class coded as well.

Speaking of activism, it would be great if y'all could sign this petition for safe schools legislation in Pennsylvania, put forth by the Pennsylvania Student Equality Coalition, something that BMC's Rainbow Alliance and HC's SAGA are involved with.

http://www.change.org/petitions/pennsylvania-support-psec-and-safe-schools-legislation

The Pennsylvania Student Equality Coalition is an entirely youth-led and youth-run organization dedicated to advocacy across the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania on issues relating to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer youth. Comprised of leaders from youth-led LGBTQ organizations across Pennsylvania, we work in educational institutions and local communties on behalf of LGBTQ young people.

Our final ESem celebration and performances will be Sunday, Dec. 11, 7-9 pm in the English House Lecture Hall!  

Each group will have 10 minutes to present/perform/engage/teach and learn with us as you see fit …

Performance groups are:

Tanya, Meg, Samyuktha, Michaela, Jess

Nancy, Hayley, Jillian

Shannon, Serena

Ellen, Sam

Amy, Genesis, Sophia, Laura, Pan

Morgan, Elissa, Jia

Rae, Jacqueline, Mfon, Chandrea

Kamila, Jordan

…looking forward!

I had a bit of a revelation during our discussion of Little Bee on Tuesday, and since--in the midst of insight!--may not have been very clear about what I was suddenly seeing, I wanted to write it out here.

In 1899, Joseph Conrad published Heart of Darkness. In the late 1950's, Chinua Achebe critiqued the novel as "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness." He then created a new work of fiction, the novel Things Fall Apart, to give life and flesh to the sorts of figures Conrad had objectified in his novel. In 1979, the appearance of Buchi Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood called attention, in turn, to the peripheral role women had played in Achebe's novel. In this sequence a story was repeatedly re-worked-- first in criticism, then in fiction-- in order to bring into the foreground the sorts of characters whose lives had been neglected in earlier fiction. In each case, the attempt to fill one gap unexpectedly created another one.

Something quite similar happened with Charlotte Bronte's 1847 novel Jane Eyre. Like Achebe's essay, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's 1988 discussion of "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism" made problematic the fictional use of people of color as representations of the tortured psyches of Europeans. Spivak's analysis helps explain the generation of Jean Rhys's 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea, in which Bertha Rochester takes center stage (in Bronte's novel, she had been confined to the attic as a madwoman, a figure of Jane Eyre's unexpressed rage).