I spent two days deciding if I would choose today to be my “skip day” for our blog entries. I have to say, the articles we have read so far are very difficult to examine without plunging into my own personal feelings. I then realized that what I have learned from Campbell’s From Thinking To Feeling is that maybe emotions can be used to create important academic writing. Studying Women’s Studies often puts me in a dilemma when it comes to feelings. On one hand, all feelings are valid and all I want to do sometimes is talk about feelings and validate feelings. On the other hand, talking about feelings in a Women’s Studies class makes me feel like I’m succumbing to one of the dangerous misconceptions about our department and creating academia that’s almost frivolous because it’s filled with raw emotion. However, recalling Second Wave Feminist ideals and looking at the idea that “the personal is political”, it’s important to remember that an important and influential part of the feminist movement thus far has been personal narratives creating political theories. A personal anecdote that is usually filled with feelings and emotion, are often a representation of a system that is broken. In Women’s Studies especially, personal stories are important and relevant and they mark the reality of the oppressions that still exist today. We can refine raw emotion into perfectly ground political discourse and then use it to create activism in our communities.
As I was reading Campbell’s article and feeling uncomfortable and sad, I also felt angry because I could imagine a men’s rights activist reading this interview and feeling threatened and thus, blaming the woman for “pretending she liked it”. I could imagine so many ways that this particular story could be interpreted as the victim’s fault. Just the idea of pretending to be okay as a survival mechanism hits really close to home for me. In a lot of cases of sexual assault, pretending to be comfortable when you’re not is a very common concept, even though it is so difficult to do this. It’s hard to admit when we feel vulnerable. This is why so many of us internalize the idea that victims can prevent rape by following a few precautionary recommendations, even when in the end none of those “safety tips” ever actually prevent sexual assault at all. This made me think about my CSL group activist project along with a few other rad ladies in this class. We are planning to use projectors to illuminate dark spaces on campus with feminist messages and images. Dark spaces are one of the most prominent places to feel vulnerable and scared and I think this can be an effective way to dismiss some of the internalized misconceptions that exist in regards to safety and rape prevention and I am really excited to be collaborating with the Gender Based Violence Awareness Committee on this issue.
To conclude this entry, I want to express how excited I am for the remainder of this course and how glad I am that this course exists.
The idea of illuminating dark spaces on campus to build a safer environment just gave me chills. How a simple light could change the outcome to a situation or just make people feel safe. Since reading the articles for this class and talking about violence more predominantly, I have been seeing "sexual assault everywhere". I see it out of fear,confusion and anger; for so long i used tips when i was living on my own and knowing that in reality i was still just as likely to be a target, makes me realize how little i knew about the prevalence of sexual assault within any given environment or social setting.
ReplyDeleteI met with my supervisor for my placement on Friday and i was blown away by what i could finally see, the reality of what we talk about in a classroom and how detached we might actually be from the truth of peoples situations and experiences.This was going to be a challenge for me; yet again a situation arising that would make me have to feel, there was no detaching my emotions from the concepts and theories of what we learn and read. Those emotions were what provided me and outlet.
I think we limit our ideas into creating safety zones for ourselves when in fact our best defense mechanism is our ability to empathize.
To place the context of rape within a social and historical context in order to unveil rape as a conscious process of degradation, intimidation and dominance is my goal, while still including sexuality, political purposes and my own emotions as part of my thinking and processing of what is yet to come with this class.