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I feel like I was an active participant in all of our class discussions. I attended every class and I always came prepared to discuss the week’s topic. I do not shy away from participating in small or large group discussions and I believe I offered a combination of specific commentary on the readings as well as outside information or insight. I hope that I was able to contribute to the learning of others through sharing my previous academic and professional experiences with Gen/Sex and activist topics in both on-line and in-class discussions. I have taken many Gen/Sex courses in college as well as some related to activism, such as Robert Washington’s course “Marginals and Outsiders: The Sociology of Deviance” and I was eager to relate the concepts and texts we explored in these courses with the class. I also have worked in the “activist” field of public health on “gendered” issues (motherhood, pregnancy, HIV prevention, etc.) and I often tried to share these experiences with the class when appropriate.
    The readings for this course ranged from immensely rewarding to very frustrating for me. I particularly liked our use of Exile & Pride and Little Bee in units 1 and 3, respectively. They were the two texts that were most gratifying and enjoyable to read on a personal intellectual level and I was also interested in how literature was used to aide our learning in our uniquely interdisciplinary course.  I also fell in love with Judith Butler's chapter “Violence, Mourning, Politics” and I plan on incorporating some of it into both my thesis and my final paper for another course this semester. I found it very eloquently written and moving. She made extremely important points about a topic that I had not previously read many academic treatments of. I am very grateful for its inclusion in this course. It was very useful when Kaye shared her tactics for reading a scientific text with the course, although I have to admit I still find myself more attracted intellectually to social sciences and the humanities.
    I am very proud of the work I have done this semester. I would have never expected to have gotten to where I am at the beginning of the semester. When we were first assigned a web event and were given suggestions to “go beyond it” I basically wrote a 4 page paper. I included some links and some slideshow images, but otherwise I did not venture far out of my comfort zone. I am still happy with the product I created and I think I did important research, but in hindsight it did not truly capture the unique possibilities of a web paper. My second web event, which I expanded into my final web event, was much more innovative. I created 13 unique “pages” of a pamphlet directed at prenatal women with a combination of original writing, research, quotes and images. I incorporated various web design motifs and attempted to at once mirror and go beyond the traditional style of an informational brochure. I produced materials for a second target audience as well by including an open letter to the Primary Care Providers intended to distribute the pamphlet. It was initially difficult to extend this idea into a final project because no topic seemed to fit as perfectly into the model I created as the initial concept of intersex. After my writing conference with Kaye I felt more comfortable adapting the idea rather than attempting to create a carbon-copy and I found a way to utilize two distinct ideas, cerebral palsy and sexual orientation, in a new way without abandoning the original framework. For my third web event I chose to play with form as I fragmented what could otherwise be characterized as a traditional research paper about an activism topic, sex workers’ rights. I created a segmented paper in small sections starting with either a bright red original headline or a poster and ending with bolded and italicized conclusions.
    I noticed a similar evolution with my blog posting, one of my favorite aspects of the course. I particularly liked the serendip posting because it felt like we “met” together as a class for a second time each week and provided a consistent opportunity to raise or reiterate points and topics that interest us.  For one of my first posts, I wrote a very traditional stand-alone reading response about a section of Exile & Pride that did not differ much in style from work I have done for previous courses. The post did not communicate with any other student’s posts nor did it reflect a concept that we had discussed in class. At the time it was important for me to engage directly with the text and I was less comfortable utilizing other types of critical thinking. Some of my favorite posts since then have brought in outside information, like “A Perfect Segue,” which responded to a question posed by Amophrast and connected an exhibit I had seen at the U.N. with Little Bee and the third unit in general. I also liked many of the aspects of my post “Homosexuality and Sports” in which I brought in concrete examples from the sports world that interest me, a video and an article, as well as my personal take on a matter that had already been diffracted through posts by Anne and sel209. I think both of these posts demonstrate where I have “moved” in terms of my blog posting as well as serve as examples of the type of interactions between members of our community and reflection of our personal interests that I especially appreciated about our blog.