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What: End of the Year Celebration
When: Wednesday May 5th, 1:00-2:30pm (Please show up when class starts - 12:45 so that we can set up for presentations. For those of you who cannot stay the entire time that is fine, simply slip out the back at 2:00, when our class usually ends.)
Where: 440 Ford Hall (GWSS Lounge)
Also please feel free to invite friends and family to celebrate your wonderful senior year accomplishments.
]]>My paper has been coming along nicely. I am enjoying analyzing the survey, but it is difficult because I have only analyzed other surveys, in which I do not know the subjects of the questions. Nevertheless, it has been really interesting. I need to keep in mind my position through all of this and why I choose to highlight certain responses while not including others. I plan to work especially hard on my transitions between paragraphs but also between theoretical and personal parts. While I re-read and re-read again, I will make sure that my points are clear and explained thoroughly. Even though it scares me a bit, I think I will have some trusted friends and family members read it.
]]>I am currently struggling with the revision process because in many ways, I feel like I am already done. After turning in such a complete first draft, I've found it difficult to go back and dig in to the writing process once again. To be completely honest, I'm just worn out and ready to move on. I have learned a lot throughout this process and in many ways I already feel like I have moved on from this particular piece. There are many new things I am interested in writing about/working on but they are outside the scope of this project.
Although some parts have been difficult, I have enjoyed the opportunity to explore some of my creative writing and experiment with different forms of academic writing. This is the first time I feel even remotely successful in that endeavor. I am also grateful for the times I spent with students and teachers in workshops or in conversation. These were certainly the most meaningful learning experiences for me.
The process of peer review was helpful since it was the first time anyone read the meat of what I was working on all semester. It was nice to get feedback, both positive and critical, to push me towards the final draft.
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Brown, Wendy. "The Impossibility of Women's Studies." Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 9.3 (1997): 79. Print.
In The Impossibility of Women's Studies, Wendy Brown questions and analyzes where the field of women's studies is at the present moment. Brown highlights the importance of the creation of the field at the time of its conception and inclusion into academia. However, she also goes on to detail many of the numerous issues that women's studies as a discipline faces today. For instance, she argues that the field circumscribes meaning to the "uncircumscribable" category of women and that to maintain "women" as an object of study there must be a constant negation and expulsion of theory and fields that work to deconstruct the work that has been women's studies to this point.
This is a really important work for my paper because it really helped me to realize that my issue was not with feminism per se, but much more concerned with how feminism, institutionalized through women's studies (and GWSS), is used to create a category of women based on experiencing the same gender identity. And though that sounds like an equally broad generalization, I am using this piece to reflect on my time spent at UMD in the Women's Studies department before I transferred here to UMTC in the Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies department. My time in Duluth really shaped my understanding of feminism and this discourse that still continues in Women's Studies is what I'm using this essay to critique.
hooks, bell. "Sisterhood: Political Solidarity between Women." Feminist Review.23, Socialist-Feminism: Out of the Blue (1986): 125-38. Print.
In this text bell hooks addresses the political advantages of women uniting for a shared goal of fighting sexism and male dominance politically. hooks' argument argues that an important oversight of contemporary feminist movements is an underlying concept of sisterhood that must be embraced in order to achieve social change. She asserts that divisive obstacles such as class, race and sexist attitudes as well as other prejudices keep women from achieving this sisterhood.
This is a work that I will use to balance Wendy Brown's arguments against identity politics. hooks uses women as a group based on their identity as women and asserts that female solidarity is goal for which to strive. This is an argument for identity politics and therefore will provide an insight into the positive and revolutionary possibilities of identity politics to balance the negative consequences that I will offer through other texts in order to give a nuanced and thorough introduction to identity politics in my paper.
Brown, Wendy. "Wounded Attachments." Political Theory 21.3 (1993): 390-410. Print.
In this article, Wendy Brown discusses the "troubling aspects" of the development of identity politics, their inability to effectively create change while remaining in the same discursive constraints that oppress them, and the "wounded attachments" identity politics carry with them. She basically argues against identity politics by exposing some of the discursively problematic aspects created through their use.
This is a perfect article to expose some of the issues that identity politics come up against with various theorists. It's important for me to introduce identity politics as a cause of essentialism and to introduce it intelligently and thoroughly I need to acknowledge both advantages and disadvantages of identity politics.
I'm an anxious neurotic little creature, and the chaos of my thought process is somewhat elusive to the structure of the writing process right now. This class though has opened up space for me to see writing as a creative outlet that I just haven't really tapped into yet. We've done a lot to trouble the formality of the written product too, and to acknowledge the importance of documenting our important feminist work in a way the has longevity. Feeling that this work matters makes it easier to create for me.
Another frustration is that while I'm working on these solid deadlines, my all volunteer staff is not. So I feel like I'm trying to strike a balance between understanding that we're all very busy, and staying on everybody's case because I want to see results. While both my meetings went really well, and we have a great flow of creative energy, things aren't getting done as quickly as I would like. So, I just breath and put out positive intentions. I'm putting a lot of trust into other people, and the universe to help me realize this dream. Because this project is difficult, and it's testing the limits of my abilities, I know that it's worth doing. The hardest thing with collaborating on art is that there is so much emotional investment, I'm feeling very vulnerable and exposed through this process. Which is not a bad feeling necessarily.
]]>Particularly I would like you to think about the following questions:
Remember - for extra credit points respond to two of your peers' entries with comments.
]]>anyways, i have liked the class, but wish i had more time during the semester because i would have probably completed all the assignments in a more through way, which probably would have made the last leg of this process go smoother. it's crunch time for me - besides this class, working, moving, trying to decide on which grad school to go to, volunteering, and trying to have time for things like taking a shower, i have 2 more 10 page papers, a stats assignment and a stats test (which i hope i can do good on so i can actually graduate).
stress? what?
i will say this blog i'm writing right now has been the most therapeutic for me, as i get to vent for a few minutes... i am excited to actually have this whole thesis-thing done with and i know it will be a much better paper because of taking this class and having feedback, encouragement, deadlines, and shared stress.
]]>In terms of more difficult aspects, sitting down to write is always hard. A project as big as this is inherently overwhelming. I have to set time aside. Additionally, I have a full-time job now, which is awesome for my finances and future, but it's making school difficult time-wise as well as interest-wise! Senioritis is upon me!
Despite all this, I'm glad to have all my readers to help me through this and be so supportive and understanding. I think I can see the light at the end of the tunnel and now I just need to buckle down and churn out more pages!
]]> As feminists, we routinely and systematically examine how power relations embedded in our social system of gender, race, class, etc. This is implicitly social justice oriented, as we analyze these systems of power we work, theoretically, and practically, to expose the weaknesses in those systems and reveal some sort of truth that can give all people a more just life . From this position and understanding, I would venture to say that feminism (and gender studies) contains some sort of ethics, inherent in that we are examining existing power structures.
With this knowledge and a fierce love of feminism and I perceive to be its unsaid mission, I enrolled in a year-long study abroad program through the University of Minnesota that took me to Kenya as an undergraduate. The program was directed on the ground by Kenyan non-governmental organization (NGO) or community-based organization (CBO) as well as a semester-long research project of our choice in the community we were assigned to work and live in.
The training we received to prepare us for our research was minimal. We had resources available to us on ethnography and research methodology, but the one-on-one or class instruction on these topics was severely limited. As I remember it, the discussion of transnational research, especially between people with very disparate origins, was non-existent .
In this setting I chose to research a cultural practice colloquially called "widow inheritance" that was practiced and actively discussed and debated in the Luo community in Western Kenya (much more to follow on specifics of my choice a well as the context of this practice). As I completed my research I consistently felt uncomfortable and as though there was something inherently wrong with what I was doing, in interviewing many people and compiling their answers and my impressions. This feeling, intuition perhaps, dogged me as I wrote a primarily analytical paper of my findings per the program's requirements, and as I considered using the material as a foundation for further academic work in the US. (To read this paper, see Appendix A.)
Because of my consistent sense that something in my research was amiss, it became a personal mission to research feminist ethics and ethnography in order to understand this discomfort, and perhaps put it to rest. In this essay, I intend to discuss transnational feminist ethics in order to provide concrete recommendations for individuals in similar circumstances. Furthermore, I intend to use my own re-examination of my research on widow inheritance as a case study in how to ask and examine questions in a feminist and ethical fashion.
I will do this by first discussing my positionality, personally and structurally, as well as the discomfort I felt; then by briefly discussing basic feminist literature on the topic of ethnography. The final section of this chapter will provide concrete recommendations for someone in a similar situation to my own, a person preparing to transnational research with limited formal training.
In an effort to continue structuring my explorations of inter-being through praxis, I developed and facilitated two workshops on embodied pedagogies in the classroom. The first was featured in the Gender Studies and Pedagogy across the Curriculum Conference at Normandale Community College in Edina, Minnesota, with eight participants ranging from students to instructors to tenured professors. The second was conducted on the University of Minnesota campus with five graduate students from the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies and the School of Education. They were both structured as interactive workshops intended to introduce a framework for engaging in embodied pedagogical practices in the classroom as a way to build community and invite difficult dialogues. The workshops set out to create a space for organic, communal explorations of embodiment in teaching and learning in order to guide us in the development of one model for re-conceptualizing the relational politics of the classroom and for practicing critical pedagogies outside the contained space of the workshop. Both workshops maintained an emphasis on the dynamics of power and privilege within discussions of race, gender, and sexuality in an attempt to name the barriers to fostering productive and liberatory dialogues across difference in the classroom.
The following discussion of these workshops invokes a lesson plan structure, moving through the progression of the time we worked and played together, in an attempt to highlight the specific activities and maintain the importance of the cumulative structure of the workshop. This is not a lesson plan that in universally applicable to all groups or classroom spaces and should not be read as a solidified model for engaging these types of explorations. Instead, I hope it provides a useful jumping off point for considering concrete applications of some of the previously discussed ideas and articulates examples for re-envisioning the space of the classroom through embodiment and pedagogies of inter-being.
II. Abstract
*will complete when bulk of paper is complete*
III. Table of Contents
*not sure if I'm going to make one yet - depends on how long the paper winds up being*
IV. Positionality
The first time I was doused with pepper spray it was painful, but not at all surprising. It was September of 2008 at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota. I had been volunteering with Communities United Against Police Brutality (CUAPB) for about two years. Despite my activist views I had not been involved in many protests or demonstrations because I generally find them unproductive. But there I was in downtown St. Paul tagging along with video camera in an attempt to document police (mis)conduct as part of CUAPB's Cop Watch program. I hadn't been there long before the tear gas canisters started flying. Some kids were blocking a bus full of republicans or something... when they refused to stop out came the National Guard and Storm-Trooper outfitted police with gas masks already on. Of course tear gas, chemical sprays, smoke bombs, and concussion grenades were used almost immediately.
So for four days that's pretty much how it went at the RNC. People did nonviolent stuff and police responded with various levels of violence. Like I said, I wasn't surprised at getting tear gassed but I was pretty disgusted by the crowd's reaction. I mean really, what did they expect? You go to a major political event to protest where roughly fifty million dollars has been budgeted for police, most of the streets are blocked off and isolated for 'crowd control,' and part of the city's agreement was that the Republican Party cover the costs of any police brutality lawsuits that may happen...
The thing that shocked me the most was other people's reaction to how the police acted those four days. I mean, what do people expect from a country that used police/COINTELLPRO actions that lead to the murders of so many Black Panther Party members, a country that would allow the use of a military grade bomb on the MOVE Organization in a crowded residential neighborhood of Philly. Protesters during the RNC actually disgusted me. People were shocked, crying, dismayed. I just dipped my bandana in the nearest water source to cover my nose and mouth and tried to shoot good film footage while avoiding the "Less Lethal" weapons police were using.
Now, I haven't been brutalized by police (yet) largely in part to my white skin and female body, but I know many people who have been, so the RNC really wasn't that bad... but why wasn't it that bad, and why did the people there think it was so bad? Was it because the crowds were mostly white or because of the large media presence that made the police overall act less brutal than usual to the protesters at the RNC? I say yes to both. I mean, I heard a story from a man who contacted CUAPB's 24-hour hotline regarding what happened to him in St. Paul during those same days and it was far worse than anything that I heard of or saw happen at the RNC.
The gentleman lived in St. Paul, and did not participate in any RNC activities, but the police beat him severely. While I refrain from using his name because I do not have his permission, I will tell you his story as I heard it.
So this gentleman walked home, and was on his front porch fumbling with his keys before unlocking the door to his home. The St. Paul police observed this and jumped out of their car and quite literally ran up on him and proceeded to beat the living crap out of him. They beat him senseless for trying to get into his own home, breaking his ribs and puncturing a major organ (I believe it was his spleen). But was this story front page news? Where was the shock and disgust at what happened to this man?
Instead the newspapers were filled with mixed stories of police action at the RNC. And while I am not saying anyone's personal experiences are less important than others, I am implying that more often than not when police brutality is committed against the bodies of people of color it is either swept under the rug or minimized.
Police brutality aimed at people of color, particularly men of color isn't out of the norm in United States culture. Rather, it has been a common and recurrent theme in police history in the U.S. that continues to this day.
Most people who are victims/survivors of police brutality have much worse things happen than some pepper spray and a rubber bullet or two, I mean no one was killed by police at the RNC.
In Minneapolis, we can discuss the murders by police of Abuka Sanders (shot 35 times by Minneapolis police while in his car in the alley behind his home in 2000) or Quincy Smith (simultaneously tasered by five Minneapolis Police officers, one of which he had a pending lawsuit against because of a past incident regarding improper taser use).
You want to know who I am, what I do, why I'm writing this? I'm a person who has seen a lot of really terrible stuff happen. And I can write about this because I've seen it, it's effected people close to me, and I can amass a bigger audience than most people who have actually experienced (for no reason other than my skin color and the fact I managed to make it to college). What I'm talking about is violence. It's about someone I know having an eardrum burst and seltzer water poured into it while being called racist words. Or the woman who was raped by police and charged with a felony after the hospital forced her to report the rape to the same officers who raped her. But more than that, it's about all the people who have been brutalized and feel they can do nothing because the system that we live in has beat them down mentally first.
Maybe to put it overly simply: I write because what else am I supposed to do?
What else can I do to make someone pay attention to something so obvious to me?
V. Introduction
In feminist theory, gender is a main focus but often gender is reduced to mean the female gender, while constructions of masculinity are acknowledged but not explored in the context of everyday life or occupation in any real depth. While it is commonly understood that white male hegemony occupies the top position in the U.S. hierarchy, there is a lack of discussion on what could possibly change that.
Police are both the physical and ideological agents of legal control, wielding their own personal discretion. Police discretion can have a huge impact on the lives of others; therefore this discretion must be the subject of critical analysis.
They are power embodied.
Therefore police brutality is a feminist issue.
While feminist theory has addressed thousands of issues from language to post modernity, there has been a telling silence since Black Feminists from the 1960s included police brutality as a Black Feminist issue.
Police brutality has not ended. What's striking is the alarming expansion of the prison industrial complex, which continues to touch the lives of more and more people, and the silence of feminist theory in addressing the issues surrounding policing.
VI. Thesis Statement
I will argue that police brutality, as typically perpetrated by white police officers on the bodies of the "other," is an extension of "performing" ideas of white masculinity in the United States. White masculinity in this context depends of the physical subordination and control of the bodies of the "other" which tends to be men of color.
---add a sentence about why important work...
VII. Approach and Methods
a. Intro Section
b. Layout format for this section
c. Explain approach and methods
VIII. Background/Establishing Framework
a. Brief History of Police in the United States
b. Policing as a White Masculine Occupation
IX. Theories
a. Hegemonic (White) Masculinity
b. Butler's Theory of Performativity Applied to Masculinity and Policing
c. Said's Theory of Orientalism Applied to Policing in the United States
d. Colonial Repression and Police Brutality in the United States (?)
e. Another Look at Notions of Internal Colonialism (?)
X. Discussion
a. (Using Theories to Prove Thesis)
b. Examples of Police Brutality (?)
XI. Implications of Research
What this paper is trying to do...
The aim of this writing is to bring the issue of police brutality to light in feminist thinking. This is war on the home front, and although it may largely be a war furthered by (white) police against low income men of color, the lack of response and analysis implies complicity by feminists to allow such oppression to continue.
XII. Conclusion
Restating thesis, incorporating main points in each section
XIII. References
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