What Feminism is to me

I've been thinking a lot about the comment that breakit left yesterday about the paradigm shift. I think it's a really good point, so I wanted to respond in a more sustained fashion about what I believe feminism can be, and is to me. I think that will help clarify what I intend by male and/or female defined spaces, because I think that terminology is inadequate to describe what I mean.

Feminism to me is the belief that women and men are equal. That means that neither gender is less than. The problem with the three examples I presented yesterday was that they all made women less than. The rape seminars in the military make it seem like women cause the problem of rape, not that men & women in society might share equally in this problem. The law firm example shows that those men thought women were less than in the way they talked about them only as bodies, and when they turned to me and apologized, it was almost like saying "we think you're only a body, but we just didn't find it appropriate to say it to your face." As if I'm some delicate creature who doesn't know how they really see me. And in the third example, the guys insult each other by calling each other queer, and female. As if these are insults?!? Again, making women less than with speech and behavior.

Some feminists think women are better. They think that separtism and lesbianism is the answer. I have two musicians who I will quote addressing that problem. One is Ani DiFranco when she says that feminism is not a bad word. We make it seem like its discriminatory in society, but the belief that women are equal is not discriminatory. It's not intended to take away the rights of men, even if it seems that way. The other is Melissa Ferrick. She refuses to play at the Michigan Womyn's Festival. She states in every concert I've been to that men, women, straight, queer, and whatever people are welcome at her concerts. Every concert of hers I've been to (except maybe Indianapolis), there have been a sprinkling of men.

I know there is no answer to any of society's problems. But I think there might be answers in contexts. And I wonder if looking at spaces where both women & men can coexist as equals might reveal something about something. What those somethings are, well, we'll have to leave that to the universe. See what it brings back.

Thanks for letting me ramble.

Rape & Discriminatory talk

I found this post the other day on CultureCat by a woman in Iraq who is talking about the rape prevention seminars over there. Boy did this get me thinking...

I have become interested in spaces defined by women recently, and this post fits in very well with that question. The military, certainly a space defined by men, has rape prevention workshops defined by men. Is it progress that they have these workshops when the workshops are only geared to how women can prevent themselves from getting raped? And what if they had workshops that were for men about rape? I can see if they had a woman leading such a workshop what kind of shit she might get from the men. I wouldn't want to lead it...

I was once in the elevator at work with a group of guys who were runners at the law firm I was working for. They were talking about women's body parts as if I wasn't there. One of them apologized to me. Why apologize if you're not really sorry? Like it's ok to say those things, just not in front of me? I told him no apology necessary, I was used to it. If it's not sincere, I don't want it. J used to talk about how he never fit in with those guys because of the way they talked about women. He just didn't know what to say. Yeah, me too. Male defined spaces.

I was at New Year's dinner with my ex and all of his male friends. They kept calling each other queer. They asked me why I was so quiet. One of them wanted kept shushing the guys so he could call a girl and lie to her about his plans for the evening. He was just trying to get laid. My ex just smiled and went along with it. I didn't know what to say. Male defined spaces.

What do you say when you're in a space that condones, and in fact even praises, that kind of talk? There's not even a space for me to say anything there.

Syllabus woes

I spent about 4 hours yesterday working on my syllabus for the business writing course I'm teaching this summer. The syllabus is dense. There is a lot here. There is a lot I want to do in 8 weeks. It might be awesome.

I spend a long time thinking about teaching, more than most people I know. A lot of people teaching this same course have only tweaked their syllabus a little; I've overhauled mine 3 times. This is the first semester of teaching the course that I haven't changed ALL of the reading.

I'm nervous. This doesn't look a thing like a typical business writing course. I know exactly the reasons why we're doing this instead of learning the genres out of Locker, but what if my students don't get it? What if we can't pull it off? I think I'm going to need to trust one day at a time on this one. It's easy when you don't need your students to participate in order to pull a course off. But seriously, this is not the banking theory of education (quote, Paulo Freire). You don't learn writing by me telling you about writing. You learn writing by writing. And you learn rhetoric by becoming aware of your choices. And so, that is what will be doing this semester.

Girl with a Pearl Earring

I used to have a teacher in elementary school (he was a staunch Republican and tried to get me to vote for Bush in the last presidential election) who used to say that priviledge equals responsibility. I think he mostly meant that if we were going to be allowed more freedom in school, we'd have to clean up after ourselves and be responsible for the school. But there is also the same quote in Ever After, one of my favorite films, where the prince's mother states that with priviledge (in this case the priviledge of being royalty) comes certain responsibility (the responsibility of running the kingdom).

Girl with a Pearl Earring also made me aware of my priviledge as a feminist living in this particular society. Some feminists think this priviledge makes us reponsible to spread our notions of feminism to all the women in the world so they can be extended the same freedoms. I'm not sure where the line is; in the name of freedom imperialism has thrived for centuries.

Griet is a poor peasant girl. In this film, she is forced to work for a rich family in order to support herself because her father is blind and can no longer support her. Servanthood meant doing whatever anyone said or losing your job. She puts up with a lot of abuse and an attempted rape. She does choose to have sex with a man she likes out of wedlock; the last servant who did that got pregnant and shamed for having sex out of wedlock. The father of the baby was rich and had no reprecussions. The man Griet has sex with asks her to marry him, saying that she'll no longer have to work for anyone (she'll be free, if free means bearing his children and taking care of his household). She doesn't want that either. The man she really seems to love, the man of the house (played by Colin Firth who looks so handsome with long hair and an unshaven face) is off limits, although there are some intimate scenes of him painting her. What an interesting world.

Gender Genie

According to this Gender Genie (found from this blog), my writing indicates that I am male. I entered my previous blog entry to test it out. It is supposedly correct 80% of the time. So I must be one butch male!

Brilliant Rhet 105 ideas from the shower

I think while I'm showering. Today I thought about the DVD project idea I have for my Rhet 105 class. As a way to help my students understand meta-narratives, I want to show them the special features from Lord of the Rings extended edition DVDs (not all of them, just clips). It is so interesting to see how the director talks about his work, how all the other collaborators talk about their parts, how a movie can be split up into different components such as art, script writing, acting, etc.

Since the theme of my class is to be constructions of the personal in public spaces, I was thinking that since my DVD project will also be the research paper, my students might look at personal writing in academic spaces. As a way to do this, I might have them read part of Casanave's book Writing Games wherein she talks about the positioning of the personal in the academic writing of different students. I might also have them read two versions of a paper that I wrote about English majors working in a law firm. In the first version, I wrote a strictly academic piece with the intention of showing some of the benefits of a liberal arts education. In the second piece, I juxtaposed the academic writing with a version of the personal, intending to play with the idea of my own positioning as both an employee of the firm and a researcher. I wonder how my students would respond to reading my writing.

Feminist? Priviledge

The experiences I had today, coupled with some of the movies I've been watching recently, make me acutely aware of my own priviledge, especially to be a feminist. I watched Osama a few nights ago, a film about a little girl in Afghanistan that her family dresses as a boy in order for her to work and provide for the family. In the movie, most of the men in Afghanistan have died, and the Taliban will not allow the women to work. They must be entirely covered when they leave the house. The Taliban regulates the behavior of the women in this film through force. Several Americans are arrested for providing services as doctors or filming anything in the country for the press. These individuals are executed by firing squad. The girl gets caught as a girl dressing as a boy, but instead of execution, she is pardoned on her execution day if she marries an old man (she is perhaps 10 years old?). On her wedding night, he lets her choose from a number of padlocks that he will use to lock her in her room. What a wedding present.

In America, I can wear whatever I want, like tank tops and skirts. I am allowed to protest. I am allowed to call myself a feminist. I am allowed to post this blog entry. I can dress like a boy if I want, work if I want, and marry who I want. I can support my family rather than being locked up in someone else's family. I do not have to choose between a miserable life as someone's slave wife or death.

I am a graduate student, but I make 3x the amount of money per month as most of the women I spent the day with. This week, I treated myself to a Dell Jukebox that cost over $200. My friend treated herself to two CDs that cost a total of $10, the first music she's bought in a long time. I can afford to shop at the IGA. I can afford to go out for meals a few times per week. I can rent $20 worth of movies per month. My legs work, I weigh less than 500 lbs, and I've never spent the night in the hospital. I've never had major surgery. But my friends can still read what they please, listen to what they please, and marry who they please (or choose not to marry).

Do I want the rest of the women in the world to have what I have? No. I want all of us to have more. I want to live in a society where being a feminist won't get you stoned. Guilt? Priviledge? Gratitude? Definitely.

New Media and Swish

There is this very interesting article on Kairos by Madeleine Sorapure about a course she taught called "Writing in New Media." In the course, the students worked in Photoshop and Flash, and also looked at Lev Manovich's book The Language of New Media wherein they wrote on the theoretical work in that book. It sounds like a fantastic class. I want to teach it. What is so absolutely cool about this class is it incorporates the practical of these programs that students would like to learn with the theoretical of new media. I think I could sell a class like this to the majors in professional writing here. S says I should wait and teach Rhetoric 105 for a year, but I would like to propose a course like this. We'll see.

I went to another FSI workshop yesterday, this on a program called Swish, which is like Flash, and makes Flash compatible objects (meaning if you have a Flash plug-in, you can view it), and is far easier to use and cheaper. It's great. My only concern is if this program is not the industry standard, do I want to teach it to business writing students? They might be better served by having Flash on their resumes.

Dell Digital Jukebox

Hooray for digital music! I can now carry 7000 songs around with me wherever I go. I think as an end of the semester present, this is a perfect one. I have to charge it for 6 hours before I can use it though, so it looks cool, but I don't know how it works yet. Things this will allow me to do:

1. Listen to music while I walk to campus
2. Have access to all my music in the car
3. Arrange my music into playlists in whatever order I want
4. Bring music to campus and hopefully be able to plug it into the speakers so my students can listen to it also

I got assigned a last minute section of BTW 250 for summer session II. It's going to mean lots of last minute planning to get my class together. But since I'm not working out at Allerton very much the next couple of weeks, that shouldn't be a problem. I am excited about the opportunity to teach the course again, and I am rethinking ways to adapt this to a summer course and still do a lot of interesting projects on business writing. I am thinking about assigning every student to a day (or group of students) and having them market the day in some way. Or perhaps starting the course off as a business, etc. like others have done, and assigning the groups to a day. As it forms in my head, I will keep you up to date.

Last night I was thinking about "the turn to the visual". It's interesting how in Writing Studies some scholars have advocated having students do visual arguments in class, but few Writing Studies scholars (or scholars in general) do this themselves. Even Kairos is sometimes just an article in a hypertext rather than using the visual in any substantive or creative way. It seems to me that it often easy enough to advocate that "our students SHOULD be doing this", but what about us? Shouldn't we be doing what our students are doing? Shouldn't we be collaborating in substantive ways? If this is how one SHOULD learn to write, how we are exempt from learning to write that way? I think since we believe we are already "good" writers by the time we end up teaching writing, there still exists an attitude that we make up remedial exercises to help our students learn to write. It makes me queasy. I have a goal this semester to do every project I assign my students to do. If it's too boring for me, it's too boring for them. I'm not interested in teaching any sort of remedial skills. I want to teach writing in a way that my students can explore real ideas that are important them.

FSI Workshop on Teaching in the Smart Classroom

My head has been going a million miles a minute recently, so pardon the excessive posting. I have been attending the Faculty Summer Institute (FSI) on campus the past few days (actually I only attended one so far). Anyway, the session I went to yesterday on the Smart Classroom had me thinking about so many technologies I want to play with, both in my teaching and my personal life.



The tablet PC would allow me to cut images easily to the screen my students see and write all over things, hilight them, etc. Boy, would that change the way I think about teaching. Other things I could try using in class: Windows Media Player (why don't we listen to music more in the classroom), QuickTime (there are lots of clips I keep running across to show in class, but I never thought this would be interesting).






So there's a lot of hype recently in Writing Studies about the visual. Some of my colleagues have challenged in their own teaching and research why it is we only hype on the visual. There are many many ways of learning. The film & music both use auditory, as well as visual. I learned that almost 1/3 of the brain is for visual processing. What does that mean exactly? I don't know. But I'd certainly like to incorporate many more kinds of learning into my classroom.

A New Experiment

I started blogging as an experiment last December, intending to use blogs as an alternative to Blackboard in the Rhetoric 105 class that I will be teaching next fall. I figured to require my students to do it, I ought to try it out myself. Well, blogging has just exploded all over my life since then. I currently participate in 7 blogs, one for each of many uses, from extremely personal to academic, to marginally personal. Now that I've begun my blogging, I have decided to abandon the original experiment and begin anew.

This is going to be my new main blog. The topics will include reviews of films and books that spark me to think of ideas related to my research in writing studies and my teaching. The audience will be anybody interested, especially my students, friends, and colleagues. And, as it is an experiment, I can make no guarantees of its permanence. But, we'll see.