• Look at artists in Perez, Ch 2. Pick the artwork that speaks to you most. Learn about it and tell us. PRINT OUT SOMETHING FROM THE WEB TO TURN IN IN CLASS!
Appendices: Checklist for Action; Building a Kit; Writing Press Release; Interviews; Your Media; Socially Responsible Business; Donations
What does taking action mean in Women’s Studies?
Which chapters in Seely did you choose to read?
What feminist issues matter most to you and why?
How do these issues connect feminists?
What different forms of feminism address each?
How do you know?
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Which artwork/artist did you look up from Perez Ch 2: Body, Dress?
(51): "Within the double metaphor of the social body as text, dress and body ornamentation are writings on the body, and about it.... Dress and body decoration in the Chicana art of the 1980s and 1990s call attention to both the body as social and to the social body that constitutes it as such, specifically through gendered and racialized histories of dress, labor (in domestic space and the garment industry), immigration, urban dwelling, academic discourse, art production, and religious belief."
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=== From YouTube: "This is the trailer of a 46-minute documentary video by Alma López featuring a roundtable conversation [2008] with Chicana artists Ester Hernández and Yolanda M. López. For the first time, all three artists discuss their "controversial Guadalupes." This video is free when you buy the book, "Our Lady of Controversy: Alma López's Irreverent Apparition," co-edited by Alicia Gaspar de Alba and Alma López, published by the University of Texas Press, (Chicana Matters) April 2011. More information at http://www.almalopez.com "
Tuesday, 21 February – The F-word? What about Women’s Studies?
• Your section will meet this week. Make sure you know where to go and when. Attendance will be taken!
Download this Info Sheet from Google docs. DOWNLOAD FIRST! (go to top menu, choose File, click on download from there. or you can email it to yourself too). Only then fill it out electronically, print it out and take it to your section this week. You will have to download it into a format you can fill out with your equipment: a pdf cannot be filled out in, say, Word. You may need to experiment a bit to figure out which format is best for your situation. Keep the electronic version to put into your dropbox. You will learn more about this in section!
What do we learn about Women’s Studies from reading Seely’s book? This set of readings is the beginning of the experience that culminates in Assignment #2: your group’s event, flyer, and collective definition of feminism. Why is feminism defined collectively, in our project and in the world? Each feminist speaks from several collective locations. What are yours? How do they compare with Seely’s? Which collective locations might matter the most to you? To people you care about? To people you don’t know?
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In pairs or threes: in the reading for today make notes to share about:
• something new you learned from the reading
• something you found surprising
• an assumption you discovered you had and now want to consider
• a passion Seely might inspire you to take seriously
• Seely talks about how she became an activist in the Preface to her book (xi). Passion is at the heart of her story. What are you passionate about?
=== What does this quotation from Seely mean for Assignment #2? --
(p. 2): "Most of all, feminism does not have a static definition but encompasses and encourages many types of feminisms." [My emphasis: and what does it mean to not have a static definition? And, as the Wikipedia says: "Like other words, the term definition has subtly different meanings in different contexts."]
• What does it mean that individual feminists might speak from several collective locations?
• What collective identities do you find yourself inhabiting? • When are these "labels" you find controlling you? • When are these groupings that empower or care for you? • When might you work in "collectives"?
• How do you, how do we "START WHERE YOU ARE"? How do you, how do we create the feminisms that will empower you, those you already know and care about, those you need to learn more about and learn to care with and for? Empower many "us" -- many collectivities of feminist concern?
=== From hooks (2000: 7): "Feminists are made, not born. One does not become an advocate of feminist politics simply by having the privilege of having been born female. Like all political positions one becomes a feminist through choice and action."
From Sarachild (1978: pdf 1): "...let's examine the word 'radical.' It is a word that is often used to suggest extremist but actually it doesn't mean that. The dictionary says radical means root, coming from the Latin word for root. And that is what we meant by calling ourselves radicals. We were interested in getting to the roots of problems in society. You might say we wanted to pull up weeds in the garden by their roots, not just pick off the leaves at the top to make things look good momentarily. Women's Liberation was started by women who considered themselves radicals in this sense.... to get to the root, it seemed logical that we had to study the situation of women, not just take random action...."
From TED profile: "Suheir Hammad is the author of breaking poems, recipient of a 2009 American Book Award and the Arab American Book award for Poetry 2009. Her other books are ZaatarDiva; Born Palestinian, Born Black; and Drops of This Story. Her work has been widely anthologized and also adapted for theater. Her produced plays include Blood Trinity and breaking letter(s), and she wrote the libretto for the multimedia performance Re-Orientalism. An original writer and performer in the Tony-winning Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry Jam on Broadway, Suheir appears in the 2008 Cannes Film Festival Official Selection Salt of This Sea. She is the Artist in Residency at the NYU’s APA Institute for 2010."
From her website: SuheirHammad.com -- "Suheir Hammad is a Palestinian-American poet,
author and political activist who was born on October 1973 in Amman,
Jordan to Palestinian refugee parents and immigrated with her family to
Brooklyn, New York City when she was five years old. Her parents later
moved to Staten Island."
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From Reed (2005: 78): "As I look at poetry...as one key place where women's movement ideas, attitudes, positions, and actions were formed, expressed, and circulated to wider communities, I will also be using poetry as a metaphor for the larger process of inventing feminist analysis and diffusing feminist ideas and actions throughout the culture."
(89): "The formal CR group...proceeded through four stages: opening up (revealing personal feelings); sharing (through dialogue with other group members); analyzing (seeking general patterns by comparing to other experiences); and abstracting (creating a theory)."
(91): "...no movement has had a more sweeping need for epistemological transformation, for transformation in the nature and scope of knowledge...."
Tuesday, 14 February – What counts as art? What counts as feminism? For whom? OUR ADVENTURES IN THINKING, IN MUSEUM-ING, IN WRITING, IN DISCUSSION AND SHARING!
• DUE
ASS. #1: Museums & More: logbook 1 + hardcopy AT THE END OF CLASS! You want to keep your paper with you during class, in case you are asked to read something from it! (Next week you'll learn how to leave electronic copies in TA dropbox in discussion section).
• You should have read Freeland, Chs 4,5,7 by today and
be prepared to discuss!
• Check out Freeland’s website: http://www.uh.edu/~cfreelan/
What sort of passionate thinker is she? Notice about the book we are reading: "But is it Art?, Oxford University Press, 2001. Translated into Chinese (2002), Korean (2002), Spanish (2003), German (2003), Dutch (2003); Greek (2005); Polish (2005); Swedish (2006), Tamil (2006), Japanese (2008), Vietnamese (2009); Turkish (2009), Latvian (2009), simple Chinese (2009); under contract for translation into Hebrew, Portugese, and Persian. Republished as Art Theory: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, 2002."
• Sections start meeting next week! Make sure you know where to go and when! (look to the right hand side of this post to see which sections are where and when; you may need to scroll up or down a little bit, or it may be right here!)
Reports,
thoughts, analysis of our first class experiences, the museum visits. What
assumptions altered as you got involved here? What was surprising? What insights
about feminisms emerged? What was new? What was exciting and fun? Where will
this beginning take us this semester? What sort of journey have you begun? How
will Freeland guide us?
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On coming into class today, everyone should write down on a piece of paper to hand in, which
• art work in which
• exhibition in which
• museum
you wrote about as your three page choice for your paper today. We are going to try and gather this data for the whole class and put it up on the boards to shape and facilitate our discussion today. Consider how much adventure, fantasy, friends, and learning are involved here!
We will be discussing what people chose and why, how many people in the class made similar choices. As well as the questions for today about how you considered what was and was not feminist from what viewpoints, what you found surprising, and how we might excavate assumptions about feminism, art, culture, and forms of power, social justice and intersectionalities. Prepare yourself mentally to participate! If you are ordinarily a silent, perhaps shy person, challenge yourself to speak up and to think on your feet here! Anyone can be called on! If you are called on you can read bits from your paper to respond to questions and the discussion! Or, you can write something down and read it, sometimes that makes speaking up easier.
And be sure to click the pictures in this post (all class posts actually) and consider what the links taken together mean! What are the connections you see? How might they be part of what we are doing today? All class days? See if you can write down how you understand them all? How do they explain how "learning is sweet"?
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What is the difference between "what COUNTS AS art?" and "what is art?" What is the difference between "what COUNTS AS feminism?" and "what is feminism?"
=== IF FOR ANY REASON WHATSOEVER YOU ARE NOT TURNING IN ASS #1 TODAY, WHETHER YOU HAVE DISCUSSED IT WITH KATIE OR NOT, YOU MUST TURN IN A LOGBOOK WITH EXPLANATIONS AND PLANS FOR ALTERNATIVES! If at all possible, you should turn this in at the end of class today, in class. If that is not possible you should submit it as an attachment with the subject header <yrlastname> 250 logbook1 TODAY to katiekin@gmail.com (NOTE kin not king!). If for any reason you do not have this in hand in class now, turn in a piece of paper with your explanations and that you will email in asap. (Record keeping in a large class is complex!)
Tuesday, 7 February – Women’s Studies, what is it about?
What is Women's Studies? How do we learn about it by thinking about women, art and culture? • a scholarly field • feminist
action • issues in women's interests • analysis of power & knowledge
• intersectional interventions challenging dominant structures of
inequality
Notice how our class is structured as a series of
experiences. So-called constructionist learning and collaboration open up our analysis of women, art, and culture, and
our introduction to the field of women’s studies, as well as to activist
practices.
The course will involve both taking things in, absorbing
them and learning to put them in context; and also actively using what we come
to know, sharing it others, thinking on one's feet, brainstorming and
speculating, figuring out how it all fits together. Both require careful preparation before class and keeping up with the
reading. Some educators call these forms passive and active learning. One
can take in and absorb more complicated stuff than one can work with and work
out, at least at first. We do both in the class, but we also realize that
active learning requires patience and imagination, a bit of courage to try
things out without knowing something for sure yet, and a willingness to play
around with being right and wrong, guessing and a lot of redoing. (How to Read handout here.) How does the first museum assignment fit in here?
• Bring in our book-museum, Pérez’ book, Chicana Art. "Creating an invaluable archive, Laura E. Pérez examines the work of more than forty Chicana artists across a variety of media including painting, printmaking, sculpture, performance, photography, film and video, comics, sound recording, interactive CD-ROM, altars and other installation forms, and fiction, poetry, and plays. While key works from the 1960s and 1970s are discussed, most of the pieces considered were produced between 1985 and 2001."
• Start finding the artists in Pérez on the Web. Bring in
an example to share. Alma Lopez (p. 265)
How will we use Pérez to help us care about it all? How will we
activate web action to see how alive and dynamic women’s studies’ concerns are?
That they involve people of passion individually and in groups? "This book expresses what it has meant to me to be in the world with the companionship not, fortunately, of dead authors who are kindred spirits, but of the women I have been gifted to study and know in the pages that follow.... I thank each and every one of the women whose work is studied here, for they are a mighty, awesome, and glorious bunch." (xv) "It meant a great deal to me to discuss this work with other intellectuals when it seemed a dangerous topic." (xiii) "...the Hellman Family Faculty Fund for a grant that helped make possible the publication of this book's color images." (xiv)
Freewrite: "Think about the things that are important to you. Perhaps you care about creativity, family relationships, your career, or having a sense of humour. Pick two or three of these values and write a few sentences about why they are important to you. You have fifteen minutes. It could change your life." Setting up a positive cycle.
This will
be a media and technology intensive course. Bring your own laptop, netbook or iPad if you can, to connect across
media, to become increasingly savvy about web resources, and to use data visualizations and virtual environments for cognition and collaboration.
Throughout the course we will share resources for all these. • What is Web Action? How will we activate it? in class and everywhere • How do we use the Wikipedia wisely & well? • And what about distraction? How can we use it too?
Jason Farman, a faculty person here at UMD, wrote about this in today's Atlantic Monthy: "We absolutely need breaks and distance from our routines to gain a new points of view and hopefully understand why it might come as a shock to your partner when you answer a work call at the dinner table. Yet, by conflating mobile media with a lack of meaningful connection and a distracted mind, they do a disservice to the wide range of ways we use our devices, many of which develop deep and meaningful relationships to the spaces we move through and the people we connect with."
And as Cathy Davidson from Duke University puts it, delightful distractions can actually increase our ability to then refocus. Steady stimulation or high transmissions including joyful play, keep the gate to working memory closed and permit increasing absorption. The gate is opened by either an increase or decrease of stimulation, and that is when new information enters for reorganization, then closes the gate again.
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You
will be telling us about your museum experiences next week! Mentally prepare
yourself to talk in class! Notice the Freeland readings for next week too! Learn how to complete the logbook! Here is the template to download!
What is your
stake in all this? How might it matter to you and to those you care about?
