WGS event: What Can Service Learning Offer to Women's & Gender Studies? Panel presentation

At the beginning of the semester, I attended a panel presentation about what Service learning has to offer community activism, with several women’s & gender studies professors from schools around the St. Louis area. I was kind of on a women’s studies high, having just started the semester and sitting in a room listening to what these intelligent women had to offer to their communities and world was incredible (I took 5 pages of notes). It was really cool to see how political or not these women decided to make their work, and how their own brands of feminism manifested in each one of them. Some talked about the important political nature of the past, some talked about the taxonomy of “women’s studies” and how the differences in the way each of the represented schools decided to label their programs was important, showing what their focus was.

I could write a TON about this, but some of the things/ideas that stuck out to me most were:

-Feminists can tend to “leak” into other events, making it a very flexible/all-encompassing field; there is overlap in activism projects (intersectionality!)

-Another definition of feminism: “Making individual opportunities available to women and other people that don’t have the resources”

-Women’s and Gender studies can learn from the real world as there is inevitably going to be some reflection on the social dynamics of the time

-There are multiple forms of leadership that should be appreciated, more than what or who is on top or in front (simply: appreciate everyone, everyone is valuable!!)

-Locally situated knowledge-important issues or what my community needs from me

-Dr. Laura Kramer said: Be ready to see the unexpected and react to it with something “feminist”--there are many opportunities for creative activism (then went on to explain the fake Champagne clubs the feminists of Iceland held to trick lecherous old men to call attention to the sex trafficking of women and young girls)

-Existing in a network is energizing! Networking and collaboration are key to activism

-Theories are messy, don’t always mix so we need to get into the real world and learn from experience

-Women’s studies has its roots in radical times-we stand on the shoulders of that time

-Service learning= a shared knowledge, high-impact educational experience

-Service model vs. Social change model--helping change the system, not just bandaging problems within the existing system

-Grassroots empowerment is everything!

Penny Weiss: feminist activism--“No” means “not yet” or “regroup and try again later” --be relentless!

Personally, I loved how political these women all seemed to be. That is something that I feel I have been lacking in at SLU: political, intellectual stimulation. It was so refreshing and empowering to hear these women talk about the ways they are changing the world around them.

Museum Visit

Today my boyfriend and I went to the Saint Louis Art Museum in order to observe how women are represented through various mediums. The first room we walked into contained mainly religious images and I noticed immediately that women were either painted as saints (the Virgin Mary's image was in great abundance) or painted as maternal figures. In the first picture, I am standing next to a woman breastfeeding her two children, which was a common theme in the religious artwork. The next section we entered was much more abstract and the last two pictures both came from this particular section of the museum. Much of the women in this section were mostly portrayed as nude and some even in a suggestive stance with sexual connotations. The middle painting caught my eye because it contains many naked women seemingly waiting to serve the male figure (who is also nude) in the picture. The painting is entitled "The Fire" 1945, and the plague under the work states, "In this unsettling scene, a group of women advance toward a reclining and androgynous figure in the center of the composition."
I thought this was very pertinent to our class for I feel as though the painting contains patriarchal values and conveys the inferiority women have faced in the hands of men for centuries. The last picture I chose because it is just one example of the many suggestive paintings we saw. This abstract is entitled "Standing Nude" and the positioning of the woman's body, specifically her hands, exudes a rather suggestive and promiscuous message to the observers of the painting. Overall, I really enjoyed looking at all the art and it was interesting to see how the perception of women changed according to time period as well as the mode of the art.

Women's Studies Event

This post is long overdue, but back in late October I attended the women's fair. The event focused on developing strong women within today's society and was put on by two of the sororities here on SLU's campus. The event featured Meredith Osborn, a SLU counselor, who began the session by asking us to define what we believe a strong woman is and to think of someone who meets this criteria. She then asked what it means to be empowered and I thought the suggestions were quite interesting. The group came to a consensus that empowered women set aside stereotypes to be their best and most authentic selves. I really liked what someone said when they asserted that empowered women are strong and believe they deserve the best in life and therefore seek it. Meredith then showed a couple of videos to the group including a video with feminist speaker Courtney Martin and Robin Thicke's Blurred Lines feminist parody as well. I thought this event was extremely interesting because it allowed an insight into how others define both strong and empowered women. I also liked how Meredith encouraged discussion and participation from the crowd in order to reach a universal definition of what an empowered woman looks like and how to further develop strong females despite societal pressures and oppression.

Models over 40

So I stumbled across this today and thought it was pretty cool that in a profession usually associated with an obsession with youth, these models are breaking that stereotype. These women seem pretty badass so check it out if you get the chance!

http://www.buzzfeed.com/antwaunsargent/older-models-who-are-absolutely-beautiful

I just think it's a good thing to show the beauty of older women, after all everyone is going to age so why should people be obsessed with trying to avoid it and 'stay young'?

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I ran into an old friend from high school yesterday and we decided to hang out.  and then i told her that i was taking a intro to women's studies class and it made her so excited because she told me that she took a women's studies class at Forest Park and just feel in love with it to the point that she made it her major. i just felt like sharing this because it made me realize that feminism is coming into my everyday life and i'm beginning to notice when it does and i find it cool that it's becoming a really good conversational topic for me. nothing much left to reporti just felt like sharing.

4th Wave of Feminism: The Rebel

I know one of the essay questions on the final study guide poses the question of whether or not we think feminism is dead, and recently I came across this article which discusses the fourth wave of feminism. Not only does this article negate the idea that feminism is dead, but it also asserts that today we are experiencing a fourth wave of feminism known as the "rebel women." This article is wonderful and I would encourage everyone to take a peek at it (although I know it's finals time so maybe later), but it discusses the increase in protests, marches, and campaigns within the past year for women's rights all over the world. The article also briefly discusses the history of feminism, and gives an abundance of examples regarding how women are changing the world one protest at a time. This article really is extremely interesting, and as it is rather lengthy I skimmed a lot of it but once finals are over I plan on reading it all. It is quite uplifting and inspiring that women today are still finding their voices and standing up for relevant issues such as, "pay gap, childcare costs, and pregnancy discrimination." I think this article is extremely important to our class as well as gender studies in general and is really worth a read. Enjoy!

Museum Visit

So Monday my friend and I tried going to the St. Louis Art Museum, but they were closed so we went to the history museum exhibit about the World's Fair Instead!



The exhibit wasn't that big but it was pretty cool to learn more about the fair since it took place in St. Louis!

Now the fair took place in 1904 so they talk a lot about different cultures and inventions that became popularized by the World's Fair and parts of the exhibits you would've seen at the fair.  In regards to women being represented in the exhibit I was a little disappointed, surely women did something noteworthy at the World's Fair?

The exhibit really only focused on three things in regards to women which included their nationality, their appearance, and then their role in advertisements or art produced by men at the fair. In the defense of the museum, I did not listen to the audio that accompanied the exhibit so maybe there was more said about women there.

The exhibit was a little disappointing once I got home and looked up that there was a Board of Lady Managers that were in charge of women's interests and were given the ability to award prizes to exhibits that were partly or wholly produced by women! Some of the exhibits that were produced by women seem pretty stereotypical by our standards, but included innovations in domestic inventions and "intricate lace work". Now those don't exactly sound as cool as the waffle cone, but those were pretty cool accomplishments at the time. Intricate lace work could be easily compared to a detailed painting in complexity.

Overall the exhibit was pleasant, but I just felt saddened that women who did have exhibits accomplishments were now forgotten and instead the bonnets and dresses they wore seemed to have more importance than their creations.