Before this class started, I spent the summer telling friends and relatives that I was going to be taking a feminist course at Bryn Mawr.  I said it with so much pride, like this class was going to make me a true Bryn Mawr woman, someone with knowledge of theory and strong feminist beliefs.  Now that the class is over, I’m not sure I even know what a Bryn Mawr woman is anymore.  Surprisingly, I am content with this.  There were times during this class where my head would spin because of all the opinions that were being thrown around.  At the end of the day, I really appreciated hearing so many people question systems of power and other opinions.   I have always hated the fact that I can be swayed so easily by a person’s thoughts or opinions; I have hated that I feel like I have trouble taking a stand for or against anything.  That part of my personality seems so ‘non-Bryn Mawr.’  That being said, I do think that this class has taught me the importance of having an opinion, whether or not you feel comfortable sharing it.

A lot of my thoughts this past month have been about cross-dressing in a theatrical setting – what it means for my own gender and other actors’ gender exploration. In my third web event I focused in on this idea and how it relates to feminism unbound. I discussed the idea of cross-dressing in the theater and how Judith Butler’s notion of performativity unbinds gender and can itself be further unbound to allow for more freedom in gender expression and exploration.

Summary of web event #3: Performativity and Feminism Unbound

In my paper, I defined “feminism unbound” as feminism after we have problematized the ideas of sex and gender, after we have realized how difficult it is to define the category “women,” after we have acknowledged that sexism affects everyone in infinite ways and that feminism is not a movement for women, but for humanity. I then took this idea and decided to apply it in a theatrical setting, where I have spent a good deal of time this past semester.

            In my third web event, I had hoped to unbind the negative stereotype that is associated with being a feminist.  This particular type of stereotyping seemed to be very relevant for the culture of Bryn Mawr and the experiences that so many students have outside of our campus.  I wanted to examine the different aspects of the negativity surrounding feminism and deconstruct the gendered fear that has become inherent to the way society views feminists.  What I discovered was that there are so many different stigmas surrounding the feminist cause and it pressures people to avoid labeling themselves as feminists.  The most interesting article that I read for my third web event was titled “The F Word: College Student's Definitions of a Feminist,” authored by J. Scott Carter and Shannon Houvouras.  This article revealed that college students no longer feel comfortable identifying as feminists in a social or political realm because of all of the negative press that the feminist movement is saddled with.  I then tried to expand on the definition of post-modern feminism, specifically ecofeminism, as a means of demonstrating that feminism is no longer exclusive to gender.  Feminism has become a movement for all intersectional identities.  And yet, the stereotype of feminism still persists in every day life, in both trivial and significant scenarios.  The question then becomes how can people, or just me as an individual, slowly change the way that the world perceives feminism.

When I walked into the classroom, I walked in with very little knowledge about feminism and about gender.  I knew that gender is a social construct and that gender categories based on sex is problematic but I did not truly understand the extent or what it meant.  I came into the class not really sure what feminism was and whether or not I consider myself a feminist.  People might have assumed I was a feminist because I go to an all women college and I also have been athlete all my life.

            When I walked into this course at the beginning of the semester, I’m not entirely sure what I wanted. The beginning of my sophomore year had begun, and though I definitely felt I had found more of a direction than I had during my first year at Bryn Mawr, I was still floundering. I had spent the summer with an internship I disliked, and was coming to the same realization I had had a thousand times: so, I guess (insert basically any academic major here) isn’t for me. This class was almost a treat for me. I had really loved my ESem, and though I was trying to avoid an English major (nothing wrong with it, since it’s going to be my minor, I just grew up with journalists for parents), I wanted to take a class that was both challenging academically and creatively. This was so much more than I had anticipated.

            At the start of the class, I’ll admit I was a bit cocky. As we brushed over terms, attempting to establish the difference between sex and gender, I thought I was in the clear. Oh, how wrong I was. If this course taught me anything, it is that there are no answers. Questions are never-ending, always changing and expanding. Open-ended questions lead into a cycle of open-ended responses, and the maddening process goes on.

We built a graveyard. Plaster and wood were manipulated until they resembled the demolished façade of a building. We put people there, too. People playing people—pedestrians, faces you see every day. We created a world besieged by tragedy, modeled after a very real decimation. The Bi-Co Theater Program at Bryn Mawr College’s production of “Antigone” took the infamous play by Sophocles and made it relevant in a post-9/11 world. For this production, I worked as the Assistant Costume and Set Designer, helping bring to life Director Catharine Slusar’s greater goal: to question where, how and if humanity exists after violence. Throughout the production, we continually sought ways to better represent the horror, the catastrophic events which have altered so many people’s world. To accomplish this, we confronted death; death became our facination. We scrutinized it in the faces of those in the very throes of death, and in the faces of those looking on. Death became a motif—which leads me to wonder, where is the compassion[i] in that?

Samantha Plate

Play In The City

12/20/2013

What Is Play? (Re-Write)

We seemed to have taken a wrong turn somewhere. Walking down the streets of Philadelphia, my group and I were in search of mosaics. At an intersection we randomly chose to go right, hoping this would take us the correct way. It did not. The street soon hit a dead end. While trying to decide where to go next, the sound of laughing children caught my attention. We were right near a playground full of children who had just gotten out of school. Wanting to follow our course assignment of “play in the city” we decided to go in and join all the children having fun on the jungle gym.  

What is play? This is a question that many individuals have tried to answer. Theorists, psychologists, and scientists are always trying to pin “play” down and give it a strict definition. Play can be specified as simple play, critical play, and deep play- all of which have been important to our studies of play in the city and all of which have very flexible and overlapping definitions. As a child plays it seems so simple and natural, but it is actually very complex. Play in itself defies definition- it is playful. Play sets all the rules and breaks them too. There are so many ways to describe this essential part of life.

I began this semester with really no idea what this class was going to mean to me. I thought okay we’ll talk about feminism and empowerment it’ll be great. I could have never prepared myself for the journey that I feel I’ve taken with myself and the rest of the class. The class has made me question everything I knew to be true and actually able to teach people some things about my learning and experience. I’ve never been an academic person, that sounds crazy because I’ve been in school my whole life, I just mean I’ve never been excited about school until I came to Bryn Mawr. And I’ve never been excited about anything in particular until I came to this class. I’ve never felt so connected to the world and present issues, most everything we read and discussed has an important place in our world today and that is so important to me.