Who I am and What I do

Welcome to my website. You can expect disproportionately feminist ideas and probably a lot of academe-speak, since I am currently a graduate student in rhetoric and composition.


I've placed links that are important to me in the sidebar. The fEMMINISTA website is currently underdeveloped (it's malnourished due to the excessive amounts of work that a grad student + composition instructor must endure) but the organization itself is about to start walking. It's still at the cruising stage right now (again, all that pesky work). fEMMINISTA is one of the three most important things in my life (the other two are my teaching and Suliman, the love of my life). fEMMINISTA is the child of my activist-self, who needed to become better acquainted with my academic-self. In other words, my love of feminist theory needed to work with my need to be active in working for social change. I needed to bridge the theory and practice within myself (oddly, I feel that this lacks lucidity). Thus, fEMMINISTA was born during the writing of a paper on Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. The paper, "Girls Kick Ass: Buffy, the Vampire Slayer as Third Wave Feminist," focuses on the need to establish community among feminists. Audre Lorde expresses, quite eloquently, this need for community. Her statement nicely encapsulates my philosophy:


"As women, we have been taught either to ignore
our differences, or toview them as causes for
separation and suspicion rather than as forces for
change. Without community there is no liberation,
only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice
between an individual and her oppression. But
community must not mean a shedding of our differences,
nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist."


To use Donna Harraway's term, I desire an affinity. I believe that we must come to an understanding that communal identity and individual identity are not mutually exclusive. That one does not have to be sacrificed in order to embrace the other. Only then will we be able to affect long-lasting and significant social change and I believe that this change should come about, not by pushing a certain agenda (which basically amounts to changing who is in power rather than the structure that the inequities are based on), but by sharing information and ideas. To not try to convince people that we are right and that they are wrong but to give them information that will allow them to make an informed choice regarding their beliefs. I believe that most people would agree with or at least listen to the ideas of feminism(s) if they had more than a media-image of feminism. (You know the one: we all hate men but we want to be like men because that's what lesbians want and you know that, like Pat Robertson says, we're all lesbians who hate men and practice witchcraft or something to that effect). I'm going to pause here because my grad student duties are calling and I'm afraid they're going to disturb my neighbors.


One more thing: the paper that I wrote, my first conference paper, brought into my life the three things that I love most: I got the idea for fEMMINISTA; I presented the conference paper (my first) at Purdue University's Third Wave Feminism Symposium and while looking for things to do while I was in West Lafayette at the conference, I discovered that Purdue has quite the English department. I applied; I was accepted; I was offered a teaching assistantship; I moved to Indiana. After beginning graduate work at Purdue, I discovered their amazing Rhetoric and Composition Program and as I learned more about rhet/comp, I realized that rhet/comp would allow me to do what I most wanted: study women's writing not just women's literature. In rhet/comp, I can see how I am becoming a better teacher as well as a better scholar, as I indulge in my love of feminist pedagogies. Finally, moving to Lafayette enabled me to meet my boyfriend/fiance/love of my life and no force on this planet could convince me that all of those decisions were not worth the effort, even if Suliman was the only love that I found through making them. Two years ago I knew nothing about Purdue University and if someone had told me that I'd end up in Indiana, I would have laughed at them. But here I am, a girl from South Carolina who has met the love of her life, a veterinarian from Jordan, in Indiana of all places.

:: Cat 8:03 PM [+] ::
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