Final Project

Here is the video of my final project. The piece was inspired by Anne Sexton's poem, The Abortion. I used each stanza from the poem and made a phrase describing that stanza. The phrase the repeats three times is the line from the poem that repeats three times, "somebody who should have been born is gone". Hope you like it!

Final Project

Here is the link to my final project. I created a blog exploring how women are portrayed in film.

http://2013womenwritersfinal.blogspot.com/

BEYONCÈ

http://nprfreshair.tumblr.com/post/69893944129/beyonces-super-secret-album-just-dropped-this

Love that Beyoncè is able to shed some light and draw more attention to a very talented female writer!
She samples an excerpt from a Tedx Talk that discusses how we essentially raise women to be brides and force them into competition with each other only for a man.

And who doesn't love Beyoncè?!

Another Slate Article

I stumbled on this when reading the article Alyssa posted earlier. We've had many discussions about biologically gendered propensities which this article speaks to as well as being reminiscent of Emily martin's article on gendered assumptions shaping interpretations of scientific studies: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2013/12/hard_wired_brain_differences_critique_of_male_female_neuroscience_imaging.html

Final Project- Wanted to share

Just wanted to share picture of my aunt Sharon who I discussed today in class to give everyone a better understanding.  And I thought this quote was perfect for these pictures.

“In other words, it requires deliberate self-deception, including a constant effort to repress or block out unpleasant possibilities and 'negative' thoughts. The truly self-confident, or those who have in some way made their peace with the world and their destiny within it, do not need to expend effort censoring or otherwise controlling their thoughts.” 
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America

http://www.gofundme.com/Kobel-Children-Education

Here is the link for the Education fund for my president of my sorority (Delta Phi Epsilon).  All of the funds go to the kids education and any amount of money would help, there is a brief description of what exactly happened on the link! Thank you all so much, happy holidays!

Fredonia Women Writing Anthology

Here is my email for all interest and questions
Paol9644 @fredonia.edu
Please make sure to emphasize intent in email subject.

I am looking for 10-12 submissions from Fredonia Women.
I am looking for women who have some written piece to share.
Any genre or type of writing is excepted and encouraged.
I will also be including a short biographical paragraph.
Please forward to your friends and peers if you think they'd be interested!
Submissions need to be in by Sunday 12\15

Good luck on finals and papers!
Holly Paolicelli

Etymology of Lady

Soujorner Truth

I really loved this piece and I keep coming back and thinking about it throughout not only our class periods, but at random times throughout the day. The passion behind the work is incredible and in the video we watched last week of Alfre Woodward presenting Ain't I A Women was remarkable. She really emphasized the yearn for acceptance and it struck a chord with me. It truly shows that the topic of women is much broader than we realize. Race, background, orientation, etc. There are so many intersecting components that make up each woman. We shouldn't just honor upper-class white women, we have to take all women, everywhere into account. Not only that, but we should never believe that men are stronger. Women create men! Woo! We're just as strong if not much stronger. The work is absolutely beautiful, and the way Woodward gave her speech was inspiring.

Here's a really interesting article about women writers describing misogyny in the literary canon, and how it made them feel.

Notes Toward a Politics of Location

A part of Adrienne Rich's piece, "Notes Towards a Politics of Location", was on page 1097. She wrote,

"Wherever people are struggling against subjection, the specific subjection of women, through our location in a female body, from now on has to be addressed. The necessity to go on speaking where silence has been advised and enforced, not just the our subjection, but about our active presence and practice as women. We believed (I go on believing) that the liberation of women is a wedge driven into all other radical thought, can open out the structures of resistance, unbind the imagination, connect what's been dangerously disconnected."

When I read this I thought of the intro that we read, but I also thought about Trinh Min-ha's piece as well. From the itroduction, I connected Rich's quotation with what they were talking about how resisitance literature offers various models of racial, gender, and class empowerment and that it engages with many types of interventions. I think that they both relate because in order for the liberation of women to succeed there needs to many types of resistance and people working together to intervine. I also thought this could relate to Min-ha's piece becasue she was talking about how people may be differnt, but when those differences are embraced, there is a sense of empowerment. I understood Rich's quotation to mean that women need to work together, no matter what differences, to fight for women as a whole.

-Jessica Mitchell

Three White College Students File Racial Discrimination Complaint Against Professor Over Lesson On Structural Racism

You can also read the article here.

Zolaria

After reading this short story, I am very disappointed that I was unable to attend the presentation of it. The way that Horrocks was able to maneuver seamlessly through such a vast timeline was wonderful and impressive; and her writing was very fluid and almost prose-like.

The story itself was heart-wrenching, if only because she is able to capture what it feels like to be a child faced with these hardships and the confusion and guilt that comes along with it. She is able to make it believable and relate able, even though these are [I believe?] situations that did not actually occur in her life. That's what makes this piece even more impressive, I think--that she was able to write with such conviction and character that made it vivid enough to seem like an auto-biography rather than a short story. 

I recommend that anyone who didn't attend this reading look this story up--it's really, really wonderful.

http://www.upworthy.com/a-glimpse-at-how-the-media-treated-women-this-year-is-a-look-at-way-too-many-cringe-worthy-moments-aa3-5c-2

Everyone should watch this.  It is a great example of someone speaking up for feminism and how far our media/society still has to go to improve!

A great interview

WI know you're all overloaded with work, but this interview is a wonderful example of two iconic women leaders of resistance and transformation.
Interview: Vandana Shiva and Jane Goodall

Ain't I A Woman

I took Survey of American Literature last year with Professor McGee and we read Sojourner Truth's piece "Ain't I A Woman". We watched the same reading of the piece by Alfre Woodard that we watched today. When I read her piece for today's class, I read it just as the speaker read it in the video. I think that it is interesting the way it is read differently before hearing it read compared to reading it for the first time. If you haven't read it again, you should. You will read it much differently. There is just more power behind the message that she is delivering and I think it really shows how well she could speak, even if she was said to be illiterate.

I was planning on posting that video on here after class if Professor McGee did not show it, but she mentioned that Kerry Washington also did a reading that I was not aware of. I watched that one, and I think I like Woodard's reading better. I just liked the tone and the power behind the words that Woodard used. I felt like that was more like how Sojourner Truth would have read it. To me Washington's reading just seemed a little more passive. What do you think?

-Jessica Mitchell