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Day of feminist yay
Mar. 3rd, 2011 08:13 pmI had a very feminist day.
My morning was tiring but fun. I'm on the organizing committee for this year's Feminist Action Project at UT, and this morning we did a demo near the cluster of statues just south of the main tower, where there are a bunch of dead white dudes, mostly Confederate leaders, memorialized in bronze. This is a longstanding controversy on campus. There is only one status of a women on campus - the Barbara Jordan statue, which was erected just two years ago.
We think this sucks. So we printed out poster-size pictures of Gloria Anzaldua and Dolores Huerta and stood by the statues of dead racist assholes from about 11:00AM to 1:00PM with those pictures, flyers about their lives, and signs asking, "Where's HER statue?" The response was very positive! We got some coverage from campus media and talked to a bunch of people about these amazing women of color. And interestingly, at least half of the people who actually came over and asked us about the pictures were white men. And all of them responded with some variation on, huh, good point, yeah, they're really cool. RAD. And I'm only a tiny bit sunburned!
After I grabbed some lunch (yay for the International Relations student org that was having a benefit sale of Brazilian food! So much better than the crap in the student union!), I found a nice spot under a tree near the duck pond and finished the readings for my favorite class, a geography seminar on gender and migration. That class is fucking awesome. The prof is a delight and has done a great job of establishing a welcoming and respectful space for dialogue. Everyone in there is smart and engaged, and there is such a wide range of experiences and backgrounds! I'm the only person in it who identifies as white (there's another person who reads visually as white, but he spent half his growing up years in Peru until his family migrated here, so he identifies as Latino), and I feel really lucky that all these folks who have personal life experience of migration are willing to share their history and thoughts. It's challenging, energizing, and so different from anything I've studied before, I can feel it making me smarter. WOOT.
Today we talked about gendered geographies of labor and migration, which basically means the way labor practices and polices, migration, space/place, and gender shape each other. Today's readings covered women's labor organizing in Indonesia, Mexican migrant jardineros in LA, Chinese women who do domestic work in Singapore, men who do domestic work in a bunch of different places, and some interesting theory stuff about intersectionality. Really interesting stuff!
I'm tired as hell, but in that good way that happens after a long, productive day. Yay!
My morning was tiring but fun. I'm on the organizing committee for this year's Feminist Action Project at UT, and this morning we did a demo near the cluster of statues just south of the main tower, where there are a bunch of dead white dudes, mostly Confederate leaders, memorialized in bronze. This is a longstanding controversy on campus. There is only one status of a women on campus - the Barbara Jordan statue, which was erected just two years ago.
We think this sucks. So we printed out poster-size pictures of Gloria Anzaldua and Dolores Huerta and stood by the statues of dead racist assholes from about 11:00AM to 1:00PM with those pictures, flyers about their lives, and signs asking, "Where's HER statue?" The response was very positive! We got some coverage from campus media and talked to a bunch of people about these amazing women of color. And interestingly, at least half of the people who actually came over and asked us about the pictures were white men. And all of them responded with some variation on, huh, good point, yeah, they're really cool. RAD. And I'm only a tiny bit sunburned!
After I grabbed some lunch (yay for the International Relations student org that was having a benefit sale of Brazilian food! So much better than the crap in the student union!), I found a nice spot under a tree near the duck pond and finished the readings for my favorite class, a geography seminar on gender and migration. That class is fucking awesome. The prof is a delight and has done a great job of establishing a welcoming and respectful space for dialogue. Everyone in there is smart and engaged, and there is such a wide range of experiences and backgrounds! I'm the only person in it who identifies as white (there's another person who reads visually as white, but he spent half his growing up years in Peru until his family migrated here, so he identifies as Latino), and I feel really lucky that all these folks who have personal life experience of migration are willing to share their history and thoughts. It's challenging, energizing, and so different from anything I've studied before, I can feel it making me smarter. WOOT.
Today we talked about gendered geographies of labor and migration, which basically means the way labor practices and polices, migration, space/place, and gender shape each other. Today's readings covered women's labor organizing in Indonesia, Mexican migrant jardineros in LA, Chinese women who do domestic work in Singapore, men who do domestic work in a bunch of different places, and some interesting theory stuff about intersectionality. Really interesting stuff!
I'm tired as hell, but in that good way that happens after a long, productive day. Yay!
