Lasts and Firsts
On this the last day of classes, I looked back to my first post for this class. I had many many questions, all of which someone brought up in the class at some point. Here’s some quotes:
It fascinates me that the internet may give us the potential to move beyond gender, to exist in a gender-ambiguous state. Can we move beyond gender labels, both online and in real life?
Can we escape our biology, our sex, and exist solely according to our gender?
Also, when does deception [about our identity on the internet] become dangerous?
We didn’t fully resolve any of these questions, not because we were taking a “get out of jail free” card, but because these questions don’t really have answers. I think that’s what I’ve most learned from this course–sometimes there are no answers, and the only thing to do is to have a conversation. The conversation must be unending because to do otherwise would be to reduce the questions down to a simple form where they’re no longer worth asking. So, I end this course with the same questions I came into it with, but with an important difference. We’ve been conversing all semester.
What do you all see when you look back at your first post?
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Ok, thinking about new questions: I’ve started asking myself “how” questions in addition to “can” questions.
“Can we move beyond gender labels” is an impossible question. So now, I’m asking “How do we start to do so?” in addition to playing around with “can”. This comes back to Guinevere’s challenge to push ourselves to move beyond the classroom and to apply what we’ve learned.
Also, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask “how” when I don’t even know if I “can”. To change the use of the word a bit, it’s a “possibility space” of sorts. Within the boundary of the unanswered “can” question, there’s the potential for a “how” question to emerge. (citing Haraway for the within-the-boundary idea)
I like this move very much, esp. the claim that we could actually–and productively– ask “how” we might do something, before knowing, not knowing if we “can” do it–> that re-phrasing the challenge in that way might actually enable something to happen that we haven’t yet thought possible.
I’m teaching the core course for the GAS program in the fall–Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Gender and Sexuality–and plan to incorporate there your question-asking rubric:
ask questions @ the beginning;
revisit them @ the end;
then revise ‘em.
It occurs to me that this would be a great additional method of assessment, a way of measuring where and how students have moved over the course of a semester….