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just some random thoughts and such…

2009 March 3
by Nat

So the following are just some things that have been coming to mind during class over the past few weeks that I never really got the time to mention:

  • if you get the time over spring break, may I suggest reading Why Men Don’t Listen & Women Can’t Read Maps, by Allan & Barbara Pease. I read it a while back but it provides some pretty interesting insights into more everyday dealings with gender. I vaguely remember there being a chapter about gendered careers that looked at the low percentage of women pilots and discussed women’s apparent inferior spacial and depth perception skills etc. Anyways, it’s an easy and fun read that offers up some ideas that may or may not be relevant to our class.
  • I don’t remember exactly what we were talking about during a panel that made me think of linking to this but Rutu Modan is an Israeli graphic artist who blogs for the New York Times. Many of her columns revolve around her experiences of grappling with the various aspects of life as an Israeli woman in the Western world. I think it might’ve been Julia (representing the cross-dressing pirates) that made me think of this column in particular: Queen of the Scottish Fairies
  • I took a class last semester (Gender, Nation & Diaspora) in which we watched Daughters of the Dust, a film by Julie Dash that has become somewhat of an American classic. The film is a study of the Gullah culture (which Cat represented last week) and is set in 1902 on the sea islands off the coast of South Carolina/Georgia. The film focuses primarily on the roles of the women on these islands and how religion, tradition and race all play into their lives. Our panel last Wednesday (the one with the highly genderized occupations) reminded me of the film when we began to touch upon intersections of race, class and religion. If you’ve seen the movie, there is loads of fascinating literature on it. I would suggest Exiled at Home: “Daughters of the Dust” and the Many Post-Colonial Conditions. If you’re interested and plan on seeing the movie at some point, I would say that it is almost absolutely necessary to read the above article since the film is kind of dense, slightly abstract at times, very slow moving, and they all speak pidgin-English in very interesting accents.

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