Hello, is there anybody out there?
A draft of an entry I saved, but never finished. I don't feel like finishing it now either, but don't want to forget this, so here it is:
Tonight I revisited a piece of writing from my first semester in grad school, hoping to recover some ideas I'd forgotten. The essay was god awful. But in the middle of this fantastically horrible (in the were-you-blazed-when-you-wrote-this way) essay, I stumbled across a paragraph that perfectly captures a major element of my dissertation:
"As much as I have read over the course of my life about patriarchy and as many times as I have noticed people in the West treating me differently because of my gender, I could not have predicted the ways in which experiencing African culture would make me realize the arbitrariness of most gender norms, whether African or Western. For instance, I was surprised to find that, contrary to the West, hairy legs and armpits are acceptable for women but smoking is not. The strangeness of being told over and over again in Africa that a woman should not smoke forced me to face the strangeness of being told over and over again in America to shave my legs; it made the familiar unfamiliar, making the gender norms of my own culture something open to change, or at least resistance. For a long time before my trip I knew that the necessity of shaving my legs was a cultural imposition I did not really have to follow, but until I went to another culture and saw how easy it was to rebel against their gender norms it had not occurred to me how I could muster up the resolve to rebel against my own culture’s norms. The experience did not completely convert me, but it broke down some of the barriers and forced me to ask why it is that I care more about what an American stranger thinks of my legs than what an African stranger thinks of my smoking habit. Is there something intrinsically different about the two habits? Or does something in me change when my judge changes?"
I have no idea why I shared something this personal in a grad school assignment. I'm sure my professor was just like, "Awesome. Are you gonna talk about your period now too?" But there it is. This fitting, little paragraph.
Tonight I revisited a piece of writing from my first semester in grad school, hoping to recover some ideas I'd forgotten. The essay was god awful. But in the middle of this fantastically horrible (in the were-you-blazed-when-you-wrote-this way) essay, I stumbled across a paragraph that perfectly captures a major element of my dissertation:
"As much as I have read over the course of my life about patriarchy and as many times as I have noticed people in the West treating me differently because of my gender, I could not have predicted the ways in which experiencing African culture would make me realize the arbitrariness of most gender norms, whether African or Western. For instance, I was surprised to find that, contrary to the West, hairy legs and armpits are acceptable for women but smoking is not. The strangeness of being told over and over again in Africa that a woman should not smoke forced me to face the strangeness of being told over and over again in America to shave my legs; it made the familiar unfamiliar, making the gender norms of my own culture something open to change, or at least resistance. For a long time before my trip I knew that the necessity of shaving my legs was a cultural imposition I did not really have to follow, but until I went to another culture and saw how easy it was to rebel against their gender norms it had not occurred to me how I could muster up the resolve to rebel against my own culture’s norms. The experience did not completely convert me, but it broke down some of the barriers and forced me to ask why it is that I care more about what an American stranger thinks of my legs than what an African stranger thinks of my smoking habit. Is there something intrinsically different about the two habits? Or does something in me change when my judge changes?"
I have no idea why I shared something this personal in a grad school assignment. I'm sure my professor was just like, "Awesome. Are you gonna talk about your period now too?" But there it is. This fitting, little paragraph.