Assignment 4

Chris Maltbie

5.10.2008

WMST250:0107

Assignment 4

Epic Feminism

When I consider this course, Women’s Studies 250, Women, Art, and Culture, as a book, I cannot help but feel that it is, indeed, an epic novel. In many ways, this course has taken me on a long, sometimes enthralling and sometimes confusing, constantly informative, journey through feminism. In this paper, I will discuss the various sections that comprise this epic narrative of feminism.

The first part of this journey culminated in the completion of Assignment #1, a paper about personal assumptions about feminism and the revelations that came from breaking these assumptions down. Like any good epic, this section of the course got us started with a sudden jolt/surprise (think Lord of the Rings), and kicked us right out the door, into a world that many of us did not know or understand at all. In being sent blindly out into Washington D.C. to discover how and what I felt about feminism, I was forced to thoroughly evaluate my own views and come to grips with how I felt about the movement as a whole.

At the same time that I was evaluating feminism, we were assigned to read some parts of Freeland’s But is it Art? This book challenged me to consider what constitutes art. Although there had been many times in my life where I had wondered what art was, whether something was art or not, and who could say for sure, Freeland’s book helped to quantify art by objectively looking at it in several areas. These specific areas, such as analyzing how the value of art may or may not affect its qualification as “art” or to what degree art created by females displays feminism (intentionally or unintentionally), are introduced by the author in order to help the reader sculpt their own opinion of art. This reading was in many ways the literary accomplice to the experiences that were found in the museums of Washington D.C. for assignment #1. In both instances, at least for me, I entered without having any real clue what the subject matter (feminism and art) was.

By the end of the first section of the course, marked by the completion of Assignment #1, I had taken the very limited amount of knowledge I had entered with and greatly refined it (almost grinding it down to nothing), before expanding it into my own personal definition of feminism. It is in this way that I consider the first section of the course my “push-out into the world” of feminism. At this point of the course, I felt that feminism was the act of accepting that men and women are different, but equal; the two sexes would never be the same, but one would never be better that the other. For the first time, I was aware of the vast world of feminism around me, although I did not know all of the things that inhabited it.

The second section of the course, in my opinion, was about exploring and discovering some of the habitats in the world of art and feminism. This section of the course focused on things going on within the world of feminism, primarily through art. Additionally, we learned about activism on the whole. Classes on topics such as shadow projects and the manipulation of billboards to deliver a message introduced me to the types of things that people were doing within movement to make a difference.

While working on this section of the course, I feel as if my definition of feminism continued to grow as more material from the course was packed into it. Assignment #2 helped to sculpt this definition tremendously, as I got the chance to join up with a group of other characters on my epic journey. Instead of wandering through the world of feminism alone, I was accompanied with a team to help influence my decisions. While working on this assignment, our group came up with a long-winded definition that was very different than the definition I came up with on my own during Assignment #1. In a nutshell, we defined feminism as the movement against the unchallenged notion of men as superiors, although not in an anti-male sense; it was the structures that allowed this notion to go unquestioned that were the target. This assignment also marked my formal introduction to the feminist movement, not just the world of feminism, as we created a feminism event.

Coinciding with Assignment #2 was the beginning of Seely’s Fight Like a Girl. The first chapter of this book works to identify the misconceptions about feminism in society and the structures within society, namely patriarchy, that allow this sort of thing to go on. The appendices, meanwhile, lay out a basic guideline of how to run a feminist event on your own, in hopes of empowering those with a voice. Overall, after being shoved into the world of feminism by Assignment #1, I felt that Assignment #2 was about getting a bit involved in the day to day activities in the world of feminism and obtaining a better idea of the world around me.

If the second section of this course was about my surroundings in the world of feminism, the third section was about the inhabitants in the world of feminism and their experiences. This section of the course chose to emphasize feminism through other people’s eyes. By giving students access to the experiences that other people have had with feminism, sexism, and oppression, this section of the course greatly helped to both inform me why feminism is so important, as well as how I am impacted by feminism and the things that make the movement necessary (structures of power).

One of the most important parts of the third section of this course was the reading of Butler’s Kindred. Kindred was especially powerful because it used science fiction as leverage to drive its points home. Butler was able to completely ditch the normal conventions of non-fiction due to her genre of choice; since Butler did not have to conform to normal tactics, she was able to tailor a story that very specifically pinpointed the topics of sexism and racism. In Kindred, Butler uses time travel to give her characters a sense of parity in the way they are oppressed and clearly defines structures of power. Although Dana had some experience with oppression in her time, when she was sent back to the plantation, she learned what it was like to be completely powerless. With structures of sexism and racism weighing down on her, she had absolutely no power in the past. Kevin, meanwhile, had no experience with this type of oppression. As a white male, Kevin was atop the structures of power, and therefore did not have to suffer. Although he did worry about Dana, Kevin could never totally understand what it is like to be completely powerless (A point that Dana makes to him at one point in the book).

On the whole, Kindred was quite shocking. In conjunction with Assignment #3, Kindred made me consider positions of power as I never had before. Like Kevin, I have never had to feel the total weight of a structure weighing down on me; although I have had occasional run-ins with power figures, I have never known what it is like to feel completely helpless. Over the course of writing Assignment #3, I came to understand why so many people have the feelings they do about racism, sexism, and positions of power in general. This helped immensely in making me understand the people who inhabit the world of feminism on my epic journey through it.

Additionally, in keeping with the theme of other people’s experiences with feminism, this section of the course featured some other people’s views of feminism. One of the first readings for this section of the course was Bell Hook’s Feminism is for Everybody. In discussion, we talked about her definition of feminism, which stated that the purpose of feminism is to bring an end to sexism and the exploitation and oppression that come from it. This further helped me to understand how other people see feminism and was a great point of comparison for my own definition that was refined in Assignment #2.

The final stretch of this epic course is where we are right now; now that I have been introduced to the world, gotten equated with the surroundings, and met the people in it, I finally have a real sense of what is going on. I am now able to pull together the different areas of the course to formulate a final definition of feminism as I see it. Feminism is a movement to refine the structures of power that surround us. There are no individual targets of feminism necessarily, but rather a firmly entrenched set of beliefs that allow oppression and sexism to carry on unquestioned. Although there cannot yet be a true “happily-ever-after” for this epic story, reassurance can nevertheless be found in the power and consistency of the feminist movement that has grown and continues to gain support from newcomers such as myself. In my opinion, this is where the full strength of the movement lies; there are a countless reasons to start supporting feminism and no reasons to stop.