Hi everyone, my name is Nastassia Molicheva, I am a visual designer majoring in Multimedia Programming and Design and transferring to get a Communication Design B.F.A this fall. I am an immigrant from Belarus and have moved to the US about five years ago. Prior to moving I almost finished my B.S. in Languages and Intercultural Communications back home, so communications is a topic close to my heart. In my free time, I enjoy being in nature and taking long walks, singing, and keeping my body moving via yoga. I delight in traveling, learning new cultures, meeting new people, and discovering new things. I reside in Staten Island (don’t side-eye me, lol), but would love to have my own house with a beautiful backyard someplace warm (Cali? Austin?). Feel free to message me and keep in touch!<\/p>\n
I enjoyed watching the videos immensely, as I always am interested in other people’s stories as a way to understand them better and enrich my own perspective.<\/p>\n
My own gender story is that: I’ve grown in a binary culture, where women were supposed to be caring about the family, be soft and nurturing, and beautiful. That way, I internalized beauty and softness as a way to act like a woman (I identify as a cisgender woman). At the same time, I never felt myself naturally being like that, or even striving to be.<\/p>\n
I was raised partially by my grandparents, where my grandmom was the epitome of strength and resilience and power over the whole family ( while still for some reason emphasizing that “you need a man”), and my single mother, who, possibly wasn’t as authoritative in her power, but always valued intelligence over beauty.<\/p>\n
That way, I have grown with awfully mixed signals of what I am supposed to be. Besides the cultural binary of man\/woman, there also was a binary of beautiful\/smart. That way, I simply couldn’t be both, and I needed to choose one and be valuable for at least something. So I chose to be smart, at the same time resenting or not paying enough attention to taking care of how I look (not that I could really afford to). Because of the label, I chose for myself to adhere to the cultural norms of the society I lived in, there was no point to do so.<\/p>\n
Sometimes I wonder if my choice was also visible to other people. One cannot see “intelligence” as easily as one can see “beauty”, and those labels are definitely subjective. I think I worried too much about how people perceive me because even though I chose the label of smart, I still wanted to adhere to the world around me and be more valuable (beautiful) \u2013 hence the long hair, and trying to be skinny (nevertheless, ending up looking tomboyish).<\/p>\n
I am still not a girly girl, but more like a woman who loves both feminine and masculine clothes AND does minimal cooking (my boyfriend loves to, though), feels like she is smart AND beautiful (because beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and that eye is mine), and is ready to advocate for herself and others.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Hi everyone, my name is Nastassia Molicheva, I am a visual designer majoring in Multimedia Programming and Design and transferring to get a Communication Design B.F.A this fall. I am an immigrant from Belarus and have moved to the US about five years ago. Prior to moving I almost finished my B.S. in Languages and … Continue reading “Nastassia Molicheva Discussion 1”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":108,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"portfolio_post_id":0,"portfolio_citation":"","portfolio_annotation":"","openlab_post_visibility":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-discussion-1"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/gendercommunication\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/gendercommunication\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/gendercommunication\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/gendercommunication\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/108"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/gendercommunication\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=317"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/gendercommunication\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":396,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/gendercommunication\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317\/revisions\/396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/gendercommunication\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/gendercommunication\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.bmcc.cuny.edu\/gendercommunication\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}