Blog the Fourth

In The F-Word Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner talks about how young women come to feel neglected and devalued by the social structures that currently rule the electoral and academic landscapes. There is a definite current that stigmatizes "gendered" interest in the academy, despite the progress that bell hooks talks about in Feminism is for Everybody, where "gendered" interest means taking an interest in what women do. There are any number of classes in the Women's Studies department that could be useful to me, not least of which the one that I took last semester, Body Image vs. Reality. My focus has always been more on Cultural Studies with a specific focus on Film, but here at OU my "gendered" understanding of those issues means that the Women's Studies department has been the best fit for me.

One of the issues I have is that the academy really appeals to me, especially as Cultural Studies grows into its own field on a post-graduate level, and I would very much love to one day pursue post-graduate studies in Cultural Studies with a specific focus on gender and sexual identity, because those are the issues that are most pressing and important to me. But in a lot of ways I feel as if it is just as important to do as bell suggests and to be some of the change I seek in encouraging strong feminist (or humanist, if you will) expression in other more readily accessible art forms than academic writing.

I feel that while it is very important to be able to pick apart the hierarchies of oppression and have a theoretical basis to understand institutional factors that artificially legitimize prejudice, it's also important to have strong figures who children can look up to and emulate, that teenagers can identify with, because while a fifteen year old might not have access to scholarly works in cultural or gender studies, they can (and do) find solace in, for instance, rock stars that are willing to put themselves out there by being "other" than the norm. And there are all sorts of reasons why it's safer and more acceptable for those rock stars to push the limits of gender and sexuality than it is for your average high schooler, but having icons is an important step in the very long road to acceptance, and it's one of the things I feel really strongly that I can actually make a meaningful contribution to.

Although I really, really hope that one day I can teach an Introduction to Cultural Studies class for a bunch of freshmen, because that, too, is a way to reshape the world.