Blogs

In 1968, Jane Elliott created what would become known as the “Blue Eye/ Brown Eye Experiment,” dividing her class based on eye color and letting first one half, then the other, oppress their fellow students merely be telling them that one group was superior to the other. The exercise is used around the country to show that racism is a socially constructed phenomenon. Just as people are not essentially different based on eye color, so they are not essentially different based on race. The implications this has for feminism quickly become obvious. Students believe in the gender binary because

 

Proposal for Critical Feminist Studies Project

The project that I want to pursue this semester is going to be a bit experimental for me. I want to make a sort of intro feminist graphic zine. I’m not sure exactly what form this will take, but I have several ideas and sources of inspiration for this project.

The first impetus for this project came from my last paper for this course, envisioning my model for feminist

I've been working recently on a paper that reflects my interests in taking ideas from thinking about the brain and seeing how useful they are in trying to make sense of the social realm. And in issues of academic and political organization that seem to me intriguingly related. The paper will appear in the near future in the Journal of Research Practice, and I'll put a link to it here when it does. In the meanwhile, here's a link to a pdf of the latest draft of the paper

My ideas about feminism have been hugely transformed since I entered this course. What I perceived as a fairly black and white, manageable sort of civil rights issue has exploded into something more complicated than I could have imagined. Apparently, feminism cannot be stripped down to the question, “Should women be entitled to the same rights as men?” To be perfectly honest, I was drawn to the course because Virginia Woolf was mentioned in the course description. I love Virginia Woolf, I love literature, and I want to have as many tools for engaging with literature as possible at my disposal. I imagined that it might be

Gail and Mary, thank you for being brave enough to share your art with us.  I am moved both by your work and your decision to share it with us.  Thank you again. 

I am starting to better understand my frustrations with this course. First, this course (like the discussed mestiza) is straddling many identities. It's online, it's new, it includes alums, its students have a variety of class years and academic backgrounds, it's an intro to feminist studies that does not require texts from the mainstream, historical feminist "cannon" (Woolf excluded): all of these things make for a challenging environment. Hell, many courses don't have much of anything about them that sets them apart from semester to semester.