merielle: purple passiflora on a barbed wire fence (Default)
I 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!
merielle: purple passiflora on a barbed wire fence (Default)
So I'm sitting on my couch, working on my final paper for my feminist theory class. My partner is out of town on business and the house is super quiet, so I had Young Frankenstein on in the background.

Our papers for this class are supposed to advance our master's thesis work. In my thesis, I plan to think through the limited sex education offered now, why and how it fails young people, where they look for information instead, how the current approach reinforces patriarchal gender roles and the ideology of rape, and how we can do better at helping young people have healthy sexual lives. What I'm doing for this paper is reading the few publicly available sex ed materials used in Texas schools through the anti-racist, anti-homophobic, feminist critical lens we've been developing all semester.

As I was writing about the disconnect between what the public wants (more than 2/3 of Texans want comprehensive sex education in schools) and what actually happens here (92% of schools teach abstinence-only), and how fucked up that is given how sexualized popular culture is, Young Frankenstein ended and some piece of crappy softcore Skinemax porn came on. Thanks for underscoring my point, universe!

Now I have Ronin on instead. Because I think my head would explode if there was stupid heteronormative mainstream porn on in the background while I'm ripping apart the racist, sexist, heteronormative, fear-mongering, factually inaccurate horseshit these people call a sex education curriculum.

Profile

merielle: purple passiflora on a barbed wire fence (Default)
merielle

February 2018

S M T W T F S
    123
45678910
1112 1314151617
18192021222324
25262728   

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags