final paper

Women Studies 250, Women Arts and Culture, has been a very interesting and different experience than I could have ever imagined. When first entering this class I thought we would just be memorizing different women artist and their pieces of art, but I was completely wrong. I did learn about women in art, but the art was a lot different than I was familiar with, and there was a lot more information used to put everything in this class together. I look at this class as having four parts or “chapters” that alone do not make a big statement, but teach us little things we need in order to move onto the next chapter. When all four of these chapters are put together we get the big over all message and meaning that the class serves to teach us. I have titled these four chapters “Assumptions”, “What is Feminism”, “Oppression and Empowerment in Everyday Life”, and “Conclusion”. The last chapter has a broad title because I think that the chapter has a lot of different information in it that helps to pull everything together.
The first chapter “Assumptions” has everyone realize their assumption they have about art and feminism. Project number one required us to go to several museums, including the National Museum of Women in the Arts, The National Museum of the American Indian, and two other museums of our choice. I choose the Hirshorn museum, and the Holocaust museum. After going to these museums we wrote a paper discussing assumptions we may have had about these museums before we visited them. This project helped us realize that everything is not what we assume it to be. Before going to these museums some of the things I assumed were that all of the work in the National Museum of Women in the Arts would be celebrating, and showing off the good attributes of women, but what I found out was that this was not the issue. Women were portrayed as big, hairy, fat, dirty, and mean. This came to a shock to me, I think because I had never seen women portrayed like this before, because most of our society only wants to see women as being beautiful, proper, etc. This and other pieces at the museums showed me that my assumption of art only being beautiful portraits was false as well. Art can come in many different forms, and it does not have to be anything close to being beautiful. Even though this assignment asked us to talk about our assumptions about the museums, I think it served for us to realize that the assumptions we may have about the class, feminism and art may not be true, so we should forget those and open up our minds.
In the first reading assignment in this chapter, we were supposed to pick a chapter from Freeland’s book But is it Art to read. I just choose to read the first chapter which discussed various pieces of art work. This chapter talks about how things that we never thought about before could be used for the purpose of art, like blood or urine. One piece the stuck out to me was “Piss Christ”. When the art work was first being discussed, it made me mad and grossed out. I thought that this was so disrespectful, but as the reading went on it made me realize that something like urine that comes from us can be beautiful and meaningful. The artist, Andres Serrano did not mean for his artwork to be disgraceful, but beautiful, and for it to celebrate human nature. This reading actually added to my realization that art can be more than just paintings, but much more out of the ordinary. The main purpose, of this chapter of the class I think was to introduce us to the subject of art, and feminism, and to make us realize our assumptions are not always true.
Chapter two, “What is Feminism” lets us examine feminism for ourselves. In the second project we actually work with our discussion group and come up with our own definition of what feminism is, and what it means to us. This was a really good idea I thought because it made us understand this tricky subject. To me Feminism is a really broad subject, but actually brainstorming what we thought feminism was and meant, and coming up with a definition, helped me a lot to shrink down everything and actually put meaning to the word. This project also had us come up with an imaginary event feminist event. I thought this was sort of weird at first, because I did not know what something like that would teach us. My group decided to hold an event on campus that would bring the community together, and bring awareness to domestic violence .An underlying purpose of this project was to help us learn to work with groups, and to come up with schedules that everyone could work with. For our group this came very easily. We got along great, and if there was something that we disagreed with one another about we figured out how to handle it reasonably. I myself have a very busy schedule, so having to do projects in a group is usually not something I choose to do, but it really helped me think outside the box and become more creative.
During this part of the class we started reading Fight Like a Girl by Seely, which gives us her definition of feminism, that is “1. A doctrine advocating social, political, and economic rights for women equal to those of men. 2.A movement for the attainment of such rights.” These two helped me get a grasp on the concept before actually having to come up with my own. The beginning of her book really gave me a sense of what feminist do, and fight for. At first I did not recognize injustices that women still had, I thought that we had already got rid of all of our problems by the time the third wave of feminist movements came around, but I have recognized that now we are not just fighting for well known injustices, but undercover unknown injustices that still appear today not only in our country, but in places all over the world.
Another book we read during this chapter of the class was Goldbarg’s New Creative Community which not only helped us get a sense of what it might be like working with others, which was something we had to deal with in this chapter, but it also introduced us to the idea of cultural community projects, which I later realized that this was similar to what we were planning in our projects. We were bringing the community together, raising awareness (even though it not being about diversifying the society), and helping the community better itself. This chapter covered a lot of stuff, but I think the main focus was helping us realize what feminism is, and what it can do.
Chapter three, “Oppression and Empowerment in Everyday Life”, requires us to do something that we usually do not take the time to do. In this chapter we must examine our own lives. When doing this we start to see where oppression and empowerment comes from. My favorite part of this section was the discussion on social locations. Here we looked at various parts of life, and where we stand in those locations. The ten locations that were examined were race, gender, geographic location, able-bodiness, nationality, age, language, class, religion, and sexuality. After establishing where we stand in those locations, we learned about the matrix of domination through marked and unmarked categories. I learned that I was mostly in unmarked categories, meaning that mostly where I am I hold the power in these categories. In only two categories, gender, and religion, am I marked. Through looking at all of these, I started to realize that all of these locations intersect with each other. Every part of my life interacts with and determines other parts of my life. I realize now that because in most of my social locations I am located in unmarked categories, this may be why I have such a good life, and have gotten as far as I have, not due to what I would like to believe, hard work and determination. With this we see how our power in certain aspects may affect the oppression of others, or vice versa. The idea of conceptual maps discussed in lecture, especially the conceptual map of the train tracks helped me visualize the interconnection between social locations especially in that case, race, and class.
During the middle of this section of the class, we had spring break, which we were assigned to read Kindred by Octavia Butler. This was another aspect of the class that I did not get at first either. During reading this novel, I wondered what the point was. It had been a long time since I was assigned to read a fictional novel for a class, but I did really enjoy it. After going back to school and discussing it in class, I realized that the point of the novel was to show us real oppression through the subject of not only race, because the book was about slavery, but also gender, because the main character was a women. Something else that I got to do during this section was visit the tunnel of oppression. This further helped me get a better grip on the subject of oppression by letting me actually have a visual connection with some of the subjects discussed. This part of the class was really interesting to me, because I realized for the first time how not only does everything in my life intertwine together, but how my life and others’ intertwine together. I believe what we were supposed to recognize sources of empowerment and oppression in this part of the class.
With the closing of this class, I like to think the last chapter of it is a summary/ conclusion of everything we have done in the class. In this chapter we finished three books, Perez’s Chicana Art, Seely’s Fight Like a Girl, and Goldbard’s New Creative Community. We can finally tie all of the ideas presented in each of these books together. A lot of the time in this section focused on the ideas of cultural community activities. In my words these activities are done to help raise awareness to a community about a problem facing either that community, or the country, or even the world, and help solve that problem. This helps to diversify a community, make it more prosperous, cleaner and beautiful, and a better place to life with better opportunities offered to all people. During lectures, and while reading Goldbarg’s book we were exposed to several of these community projects. One project that stuck out to me the most was the gleaners’ project, where people harvested the left over food from local fields to give to the hungry. This idea I thought was just awesome. Also through out this last part of the class I began to realize that projects like this did not have to be hard, that anyone could do it and we should to help those who need it. I realized that I want and should be helping other women out there that are less fortunate than me, and that helping does not have to be hard, or something big and radical, even small things can make a difference. I have never been very into art, I just needed to take an art class to fulfill core requirements, but what I found myself getting interested in more and more throughout the class was the cultural community projects that we learned about. These are something I can see myself getting involved in. The end of the class to me served as a summary of everything we have learned so far, and to make us reflect on everything brought up in the class.
This class was not like any other class I have taken before. Instead of laying out exactly what we should learn and get out of the class, it was up to us to figure that out. I really liked this idea, because now reflecting on the class I think I got more out of it being this way. The projects in this class taught me more than a test could have ever done. Each section sought out to add something more to what was already there. The third chapter was the most interesting to me, but the last chapter of the class is what actually led me to put everything in perspective, and in its place. This class was very different than what I expected, but I really enjoyed the way it was set up, and hope I get to take more classes like it in my years to come at University of Maryland.