Category: Announcements

Thank you for your writing over the last week and a half. I will provide more comments over the weekend as I read further. I also will provide some further explanation of the readings. I want to shout out Stephany’s journal post. I think she did a good job of summarizing what I think is most important from the readings. That doesn’t mean the rest of you didn’t, but you might check out her post because it’s a good example.

For this coming Monday 6/8 by 11:59 pm, there is no reading and no journal or discussion post. Instead, you will share your Gender Identity draft and comment on at least THREE of the posts made by your peers in discussion 3. Please note: comments are required for discussions, but optional for journals.

There are details and samples for your Gender Identity Project on our site. Please review them carefully. Also, note that so long as your draft meets the length requirements and references three course concepts, you will receive full credit. I will give you feedback for you to revise that draft and include the revised paper in your final portfolio. To post your draft start it as you would any other post. Choose the category “Gender Identity Project” and use the title convention “FirstName LastName Gender Identity DRAFT”

This is a reminder that by 11:59 pm tonight you should post your comments on discussion 2, reading journal 3 over the two assigned readings, and discussion 3 posts.

After reading your journal and discussion 2 posts, I wanted to make a few notes. It is clear that you all are learning to grapple with new terms and concepts, or the reframing of concept you had understood differently. It is really great reading your writing processing the assigned texts with your experiences. I loved your identity diagrams and the ways you wrote about them. I was also happy to see that it was a useful exercise for you all. As Jhulio wrote, “it is incredible how a simple diagram can help you be more conscious of the many ways you identify yourself and how things you do help others define your sex and gender.” I couldn’t agree more. Taking the time to write it out makes a difference! Just one benefit of writing across the curriculum and WI courses.

Before going much further, I want to take a moment to acknowledge what is happening in our world and to invite you to write about it in comments on this post. Some of you brought up the current protests in your writing – THANK YOU. If we were in class I would bring this up and we would take time processing together. That might be a little harder here, but I want to open it up for you to share your thoughts, feelings, experiences related to systemic racism, police brutality, and social protest. It is really important that we pay attention, employ media literacy skills, and support one another in solidarity right now (and always). And, as I hope you are learning, feminism and gender studies are intersectional (at least the way we are studying it). So issues of race are feminist issues. Issues of police brutality are feminist issues.

A few additional notes. I want to underscore that western society is built on a gender binary that we created. In many non-western and indigenous cultures, gender was always treated as more fluid. In some cultures, those who embraced more than one gender are/were also considered to be connected to the spiritual world and important community members. However, through settler-colonial practices, much of the globe has been forced to adopt a binary. The western world also created a racial binary. Lydia X. Z. Brown notes:

“Both gender and race are, in part, socially constructed. They are also rooted in certain lived experiences separate from abstract concepts, but there are significant differences. Gender can be shaped, often intensely, by culture. The contemporary underpinnings of the gender binary itself are rooted in imperial colonialism, where the white saviorist civilizing mission included enforcing patriarchal and restrictive gender roles onto Black, brown, Asian, and indigenous peoples’ societies wherein gender roles often spanned multiple categories and allocations of labor—including in Filipinx culture. Yet race, unlike gender, is tied to intergenerational and biological histories.” (Full Article Here)

I think this is useful to remember as we discuss intersectional identities. It is also useful to know the difference between race and ethnicity – though to be sure both are socially constructed. Race is about phenotypes – or physical characteristics like skin color and hair texture. Ethnicity is linked to cultural expression and identification. So, for example, being Indian is an ethnicity, though certainly within Indian culture, there is a lot of ethnic variation (Punjabi, Bengali, Tamil, to name a few).  However, “Asian” or “South Asian” is a race that often includes ethnic groups such as Indian, Thai, Filipinx, Laotian, etc. Of course, all of these are constructed and all serve to divide, but they also unite individuals around shared identity and can be important when pointing out systemic disparity. In New York, because we are such a global city, we seem to understand that not all people who are black are African American and that not all people who are Latinx or Hispanic are “Mexican,” as the current president often suggests, but have a range of nationalities and ethnicities. In this way, New Yorkers are aware of this difference, even if we can’t always explain it.

Next, I want to ask you to be sure that you don’t conflate gender and sexuality. Gender is how you identify and express and sexuality is who you desire in terms of physical attraction and romantic attraction. People often assume that all lesbians are masculine and all gay men are feminine. In this sentence, you can see I’m using terms related to gender (masculine and feminine) and terms related to BOTH sexuality and gender (lesbian and gay man). Many people confuse these because part of the dominant concept of gender is that men are sexually attracted to women and women are sexually attracted to men. When one is a man who is attracted to other men (or woman attracted to women) that is sexuality, but it also disrupts our traditional understandings of gender because we are taught a “real” man or woman is heterosexual.

MANY people cannot think outside of the gender binary. This is largely because of how society is structured and everything tells us you go in one of two boxes. They say there are only two genders. This statement erases the lived experience of many people around the world. Some may believe there are two genders, but reality does not support that. We also think there are two sexes, but that is also a construction. Sex is a combination of morphology (what you see), hormones, and chromosomes, and these things change throughout our life. When one is assigned a sex at birth, the doctors are only using morphology, or what they can see, and not examining the entire picture.

Last lecture-y note, one of you brought up the Bechdel test (it autocorrected to beachfront test in the post so I wanted to clarify). I wanted to share a video or two about the test. It is amazing that most movies still don’t pass it! Here is a video about the test from 2009:

And here is a link to the Bechdel Test movie list that people (like you!) can add to.

I have had the opportunity to skim your journal entries and discussion posts this morning and it is nice to see you grappling with material that is difficult. I want to go back through your posts more carefully today to look at your great diagrams and clearly address questions/clarify issues that came up in your posts. I will create a video and/or notes to send out to you by tomorrow.

But I do want to preview what is on the agenda for the next few days.

1. There are TWO readings on the schedule. Please do them both and get started on them early so you can complete them with time to process before writing journals and discussion posts.
2. There are also two videos listed on the schedule that I would also like you to watch. Reflect on gender and bodies as you do. They are relatively short and together should be about 5 minutes. Your big work this period is to read.
3. Write journal 3 and discussion 3 by Thursday 6/4 at 11:59 pm, and reply to at least three of your peers’ discussion 2 posts.
4. Your Gender Identity Project draft is approaching soon. Review the assignment and the sample papers included. If you have questions, please start or contribute to a conversation in the discussion forum.

Hi All – I was very pleased with your writing and how open you all were. It was a pleasure to read. You may have noticed there are some unlinked items in the course schedule. I like to get a feel for who is in the course before I decide on all the readings. I will be making updates, but not for the next due date.

Most of your stories made me really want to share my own stories. That’s a sign of a good story! But this is about you finding your stories, not me. I wanted to make a couple of notes about things that have come up.

JOURNALS: most of you did the discussion post, but some of you did not to the journal. Please do both. They are similar but not the same and I addressed that in the discussion forum this morning. If you are confused, please read that response. Also, a number of you referenced the readings as “Dan P. McAdams, Ruthellen, Josselson, & Amia Lieblich, Identity and Story.” I don’t know where you got that. The reading is from Gender Stories: Negotiating Identity in a Binary World by Karen Foss and Mary E. Domenico. All of the readings have full citations at the bottom of the course schedule.

MASCULINE/FEMININE: We all use these words a lot. Sometimes we say girly, “like a man,” “acted like a girl/boy,” etc. This is because we have a whole host of behaviors that we associate with men and another we associate with women. In reality, we could simply substitute a description of the before; in other words, use words that are more accurate. So instead of saying that someone fixes things and likes sports is a more accurate description than saying something like “they like guy things.” I often ask “what are guy things” as a way to show that other words might be better. I want to challenge you to think about how your gendered descriptions might be more accurate if you described the actual behavior. Just think about it.

FUTURE-POSTING: I would like you to start future-posting your Discussion Posts. You do NOT need to do this for journals. Future-posting means that you will set the date on your post in advance. This way all of your posts will be published at the same time and, more like a class discussion, you can read the posts as a group, or conversation, and comment. I put details on future-posting in the prompt for Discussion 2. However, my colleague Syelle Graves wrote up a much nicer and neater set of instructions here.

CATEGORIES: Please do NOT use the “Category Sticky” on the right side when composing a post. Ignore that box completely. ONLY select yours from the actual “Categories” option. Here is a diagram for you:

For our next due date on June 1, 2020, at 11:59 pm, these are the tasks to complete:

1. Comment on a minimum of three posts in Discussion 1.
2. Read UNIT I: AN INTRODUCTION TO WOMEN, GENDER, SEXUALITY STUDIES: GROUNDING THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS AND CONCEPTS.  Please note that this reading is an online book and you must click through on the bottom right-hand corner to the next section. You should read ALL of Unit 1, clear up through “References: Unit 1.”
3. Write Journal 2 reflecting on the reading.
4. Review the information associated with and complete Discussion Post 2.

Also, I didn’t make another video announcement. I am happy to do them if you like them and find them helpful. Feel free to comment on this post to let me know what you think about that.

Today’s announcement will be text and image only – no video. Reminder: Journal 1 and Discussion 1 are due today (Thursday 5/28 at 11:59 pm)

First, if you have created your account, but not joined the course do so right away. You can do that by going to our course profile (there is also a link on the top-left side of the site) and click the add button below the avatar. Until you join the course, you won’t be able to post.

Second, a number of you have been commenting on the discussion posts that are already up. I am so glad that you are on top of this! I have to approve comments and generally, I will just do that. However, for the first few discussions, I am going to hold off on approving them until after the original posts are due. So I will approve current comments tomorrow morning during the start of the “commenting” period.

Lastly, I wanted to share this diagram for creating a post. You might remember that you create posts by going to the top of the site and clicking the + button. One important note is to select a category for your post NOT a category sticky. The stick categories will be used only by me so for guidelines so that those posts stay at the top of the page for everyone. Click the image below to enlarge.