Activism Log 8

Rachel Collins

Jeannina Perez

WST3015

17 April 2010

Activism:

This week, I'm done sending out the letters, and main concentrating on getting the petition to as many people as possible. I know Kelly got some responses from places, but I haven't heard anything from any of mine. In our last meeting with Nina, we talked about what would happen after the first round of letter sending, and we decided that we would send another round of letters, this time talking about the petition and sharing the url of the online version. I'm still sending the petition to everyone on the facebook page almost every day, and we've got a fair amount so far, but a long way to go.

Reflection:

This week in class we talked about girl studies, and especially on the effect of media and pop culture on girls, while reading the first two volumes of the Gaia Girls books series, which connects to both eco feminism and girl studies ( Perez 4/14/10). The development of the next generation is directly related to the aims of our project. A major result of having a holiday honoring Alice Paul is that it would provide the impetus for educational institutions to focus, even for a day, on the history of Paul and the women's movement as a whole. As it is, these facts are almost wholly ignored. To not have our public schools impart this information to their students is to have whole generations of girls grow up with very few and very insufficient female role models and historical figures to look back to.

Reciprocity:

After sending all my emails, I'm finding that even many of the programs who had email addresses don't exist, as my emails have been sent back to me with a "delivery failed" notification attached. It's discouraging, but I'm just focusing on the petition and on doing everything else that needs to be done.

Avatar and The Environment

Rachel Collins

Jeannina Perez

WST3015

14 April 2010

James Cameron’s “Avatar” was largely hailed as a momentous achievement with regard to the technological advancement involved in its production, and it happened to be the first movie that I ever saw in 3D. Given its status as a veritable cinematic feat of the future, it’s ironic that Avatar contains so very many of the tired tropes and stereotypes imbedded in our cultural consciousness with regard to gender and the environment. From the very beginning of the movie, even before we meet the Na’vi, the characters’ views about nature align stereotypically with their gender identity. Parker Selfridge is male, and the head of the mining operation on Pandora. He is clearly the human symbol of environmental destruction, and he shows almost no empathy for the Na’vi, even when it becomes clear that their efforts to mine will kill them. The other main antagonist of the movie is Colonel Miles Quaritch. Also male, he embodies stereotypical masculinity. He is scarred, scowling, and unapologetically brutal. In contrast to these two, Dr. Grace Augustine is a biologist, and she is devoted to growing and maintaining peaceful relationships with the Na’vi, even going so far as to live with them and learn their language. When we look to the two main character, Sam (a human who spends time in Na’vi form) and Neytiri (a Na’vi female), we find the same dynamics. Sam is an intruder and an imposter in the world of the Na’vi, and his original purpose there was to covertly further the destructive aims of the mining operation. Neytiri, however, is portrayed as having a unique connection to nature. Under her increasingly-flirtatious tutelage, Sam comes to a deep appreciation and understanding of the Pandora version of nature. By the time his double-agent role is exposed, Sam is in love with both Neytiri and her way of life, both of which are symbols of nature and a harmonious, symbiotic relationship with it. As we discussed in class on April 7^th, 2010, these gendered relationships with nature echo an idea that women (and native peoples) have an intrinsic connection to nature, and especially more so than their male counterparts.

Elements of the avatar story also echo the ideas about the earth as a single, collective organism (Gaia Theory) that are expressed in the Gaia Girls series book, Enter the Earth, in which a ten year old girl named Elizabeth is designated by Gaia to fight for the wellbeing of the earth, beginning with her family’s farm. Gaia teaches Elizabeth to connect in a profound way with the rhythm and harmony of nature, in order to make it conform to her will. Similarly, the Na’vi use a deep and almost spiritual connection with nature in order to live in harmony with it. In both stories, this connection is portrayed as elemental and timeless. This is the same romanticizing of nature that we discussed in class on April 14^th, 2010.

In these ways, Avatar does not deviate from traditional depictions of the relationship between colonizer and colonized, man and woman, manmade and natural.

Word Count: 507

Works Cited:

Perez, Jeannina. "Eco-Feminism." WST3015. University of Central Florida, Orlando. 7 Apr. 2010.

Perez, Jeannina. "Girls and The Environment." WST3015. University of Central Florida, Orlando. 14 Apr. 2010.

Welles, Lee, and Ann Hameister. Gaia Girls: Enter the Earth. White River Junction, Vt.: Chelsea Green Pub., 2006. Print.

Activism Log 7

Rachel Collins

Jeannina Perez

WST3015

10 April 2010

Activism:

This week we're pretty much just powering through sending out the letter and continuing to send the petition to anyone and everyone. I've been posting it on individual people's facebooks, and on my own every day. I'm a little bit discouraged by how slow the signature getting is, but I think once we start tabling on campus and keep using the internet as a distribution tool, it will eventually pick up. We hope to get at least a thousand. We haven't had a meeting with Nina this week since we're pretty much just sending letters nonstop, but we're probably have a meeting before the week where we table.

Reflection:

This week we talked about eco-feminism in class, and the way that women in movies and other media are often portrayed as have this innately close bond with nature and the environment, while men are often cast as the destroyers of nature. Nature is often sexualized as "virgin" territory, "penetrated" by mankind. This topic does not directly relate to our project, but I think it's relevant as another example of how stereotypes and myths about women are used as a means of control. This is true of the myth of women's increased connection to nature, but it appears in many forms. A common argument, for instance, about why women should not vote (and, today, why they should not hold high public office) is that we are too emotional, not logical or analytical enough, or that we easily become hysterical and could never work under pressure. Any thinking person could easily realize that these common perceptions are erroneous stereotypes, but they still manage to hold sway over our societal perceptions.

Reciprocity:

An objection to the idea of this project that I keep hearing is that the person I'm talking to "doesn't believe in having holidays for everything," or "what, every minority group needs it's own holiday? We'll have one for everyone if this keeps up!" This argument strikes me as ridiculous on many levels. There are only ten federal holidays, and only one recognizes a non white person, while non recognize a non-male person. In a perfect world, our education system would incorporate the importance of all groups to our countries history in a realistic, unbiased, and factually accurate manner- we do not live in a perfect world. While we live in this world, holidays such as these provide the impetus to get people talking about the role and specific history of the groups and individuals that they recognize.

Works cited

Kirk, Gwyn, and Margo Okazawa-Rey. "Women and the Environment."Women's Lives: Multicultural Perspectives. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 2010. 539. Print.

Myths and Misinformation

Rachel Collins

Jeannina Perez

WST3015

5 April 2010

I read through much of Riverbend’s blog, most of it because of my own interest rather than for this assignment, since the entry that I chose to focus on appears near the beginning of the blog, dated August 28th, 2003. The theme that I focused on within this entry recurs throughout the years on the blog, and that theme is of the American misperception of what Iraqi people and life are like. We have constructed a myth about what life must be like in an “underdeveloped” country, in addition to myths about followers of Islam, and myths about the condition of women in such a society. In Women’s Lives, Multicultural Perspectives the authors detail the biased manner of thinking that many use when formulating opinions about countries that are deemed “underdeveloped” (375). It is often assumed that this process is natural, linear, a foregone conclusion- how could any country’s people want to be anything BUT developed? What about progress, technology, and freedom!? What we tend to disregard is the idea that economic and technological progress are not the only things that are valued in many societies. All nations and cultures, whether developed or undeveloped, hold a vast store of historical, cultural, and traditional knowledge- the worth of which is not subordinate to western ideals of progress. We can see the friction of these ideas played out in Riverbend’s writings. In the entry that I focused on, she writes that the myth of Iraqi people as backward, ignorant and primitive is a blatant untruth- Iraqi’s have electricity, running water, computers, VCR’s, bridges, universities, schools- all the trappings of “developed” nations such as ours. WLMP quotes Vandana Shiva, an environmentalist writer and scientist, in calling less wealthy nations “devastated” instead of “underdeveloped, to reflect that fact that much of the wealth of richer countries actually comes from dominating less wealthy ones (376). This idea, too, is demonstrated in this entry on the blog. Riverbend writes about the fact that after the destruction of American bombing, Iraqi contractors were not the ones to rebuild. Instead, American contractors, namely Halliburton, were given most of the work of reconstruction, and often at prices much inflated from the ones that Iraqi engineers like Riverbend’s cousin estimated. This dichotomy between violent conflict and the industrial sector is also discussed in WLMP, which states that “nation-states, militaries, and corporations are increasingly intertwined” (509). Riverbend emphasizes that the words "rebuild" and "reconstruct" necessarily imply that something existed before- an idea that firmly contradicts the commonly believed myths about Iraq and other middle-eastern countries. Riverbend’s blog transcends the false boundaries between the personal, political and educational: it is all three, and a great example of each. Her personal, like ours, is directly affected by the political, and vice versa, and her blog is clearly educational because it is a great tool for debunking the myths that surround this issue.

Works Cited:

Kirk, Gwyn, and Margo Okazawa-Rey. Women's Lives: Multicultural Perspectives. New

York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 2010. Print.

Riverbend. "The Promise and the Threat." Web log post. Baghdad Burning. Blogspot, 28 Aug. 2003.

Web. 5 Apr. 2010.

Activism Log 6

Rachel Collins

Jeannina Perez

WST3015

2 April 2010

Activism:

This week I created an email address specifically for this project, womensholiday@gmail.com. Nina sent us back the finished letter, so now we can begin to actually email and mail the letter to the places on our lists. Like I said before, my states are Alabama through Hawaii. I've already began to compile the email addresses to each school, but there are some schools whose women's studies programs seem to be defunct and without email addresses, with the website just sitting there. We're also decided to table later on this month to collect signatures on the petition. I created an online petition as well. The petition incorporates the language from the letter and I've now started posting it to my facebook and the Women's First National Holiday facebook page as an effort to get more signatures.

Reflection:

In class this week, we discussed Womanism, and the ways in which women of color have branched off from the mainstream feminist movement. It made me think about the role of women of color in the suffrage movement- or, rather, the fact that they didn't really have a role (Perez 3/31/2010). Alice Paul was one of the white women in the mainstream feminist and suffrage movement, and it was partially due to this racial privilege that she was able to enact the changes and leadership that she embodied. I don't think that this fact should detract from our view of her accomplishments and importance in the struggle for women's rights, but I think intersectionality should be taken into account when we analyze all aspects of women's history.

Reciprocity:

While looking for email addresses on the websites of all the schools I'm going to email, I thought about the luck I had in UCF even HAVING a women's studies department, since I didn't come into college with any idea of majoring or minoring in it. I hope that we find other people who have at least heard the name Alice Paul while we're tabling, but if it's anything like talking to people so far, I think most won't. The more I talk to people about it while sending the petition just makes me more motivated to educate everyone that while can during the course of this project.

Works Cited

Perez, Nina. "Womanism." University of Central Florida. 31 Mar. 2010. Lecture.

Activism Log 5

Rachel Collins
Jeannina Perez
WST3015
25 March 2010

Activism:
This week we began to work on splitting up the states and getting the email addresses of the heads of the programs. Adam found this really helpful list of American Women's Studies programs, so I think we're going to use that as a guide to expediate the process. We met with Nina to discuss where we are and what else needs to be done, and I volunteered to create the petition itself. We went over a timeline of what needs to be done and when, and we realized that there is definitely a lot of work to be done.
Reflection:
This week in class, we discussed women's relationship to the military and also global feminism. By its nature, our project is not global. Alice Paul was influential in American suffrage. However, I believe that rights for one group of women affect women as a whole. Maybe we're only as free as the least free among us. The same questions that we discussed in class in a global context are also relevant in a national context. IS there a national feminist movement? Many would say no- the needs and wants of women grow disparate over racial, class, and other differences, but I think honoring Paul is something we could probably all rally around. Voting is a right we all enjoy.
Reciprocity:
Having a definite timeline for our work is a good thing. It makes me beileve that we can actually finish and get something done. And despite how stressed this project is starting to make me, I'm encouraged also by the number of women's studies programs that exist. Though we're only a small group of people right now, I believe that many others out there would and eventually will support our cause.

Works Cited
Kirk, Gwyn, and Margo Okazawa-Rey. "Living in a Globalizing World."Women's Lives: Multicultural Perspectives. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 2010. 385. Print.

Activism Log 4

Activism:
Recently, it's been difficult to make everyone's schedules work together so that we can meet effectively. We've decided to split up the women's studies programs according to the fifty states, with ten states to each person (and Australia for Nina). My states are Alabama through Hawaii. Adam and Jessie are working on getting a list of feminist organizations to send the letter to, and we're going to make a petition in order to begin gathering signatures. In the second wave of letters, we're gong to send a link to the online petition, so that we can get people to sign who aren't in our immediate circle of friends and university community. I don't think our problem is that we're not motivated, because we all understand the real importance of what we're doing, it's more that not being able to meet as often as we should is holding us back some, but we're working on figuring that out.

Reflection: We read "The Mommy Tax" in class this week, and while this topic might not seem to directly relate to our project, I believe that it actually does. Dealing with issues like the disparity between the work situations of men and women due to differing parental roles is just another part of the fight for equal rights in society, which is the same thing that Alice Paul was fighting for. As well as the right to vote, women should have the right to not have to let their reproductive capabilities destroy their career. Children and rights and a career should not all be mutually exclusive. I also performed in the Vagina Monologues this week, which was inspiring because it helped me to realize the struggles that some women endure in other parts of the world, which reminded me how important recognizing and appropriately honoring herstory really is.

Reciprocity:
It's been discouraging while discussing this project with people to realize how little most people know about Paul and the suffrage movement in general, but the ignorance of other just makes me more determined to help educate society about the invaluable contributions of Paul and women like her. I want my potential daughters and granddaughters to have historical figures to look to and be proud of as women.

Works Cited
Kirk, Gwyn, and Margo Okazawa-Rey. Who Is Your Mother? Red Roots of White Feminism. Women's Lives: Multicultural Perspectives. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill, 2010. 21. Print.