Semester OVER!
okay so I owe y'all updates about eighty gazillion things in my life and I also have a whole lot of things I want to process out in my own head but today let's talk about: ANOTHER SEMESTER OF GRAD SCHOOL. For those playing the home game, this was my 9th semester of grad school: six at UMass Boston getting an MA in English, two at IU working towards a PhD in Gender Studies [0], and one at UA working towards a PhD in Gender and Women's Studies. This semester I only took two classes, both of them required courses, and now my grades are in. I haven't gotten feedback from my professors yet, but here is how they went:
[0] Technically I took reading credits during the summer semester. The end result of this was (a) me reading some books and (b) one part of the university giving a few thousand dollars to another part. Whoop-de-do. Before I was sure I would get into UA, let alone accept their transfer offer, it seemed like a good idea to have the option open. I can't transfer them, so it matters not at all now.
[1] With bonus points for being able to say "also we were all sleeping together" without having tenure yet, and winning awards! Someday that will hopefully be me. ^^;;; This entry was originally posted at http://rax.dreamwidth.org/97701.html.
- Feminist Theories 1: I was initially worried that this would mostly be a repeat of things I had already read and talked about. There were a few readings that more or less worked like that, but because so much of my Feminist Theories class at IU was "Butler and Butler Butler with a side of Butlering Butler," actually a lot of this stuff was new for me. Particularly I hadn't really stared down Marx and Marxism in any sustained or structured way. I'm still not quite sure who won that staring contest, if anyone, but I think it was worth doing. Things from this class that I particularly found useful: Althusser's work on ideologies and interpellation, Saidiya Hartman's Scenes of Subjection for thinking about depictions of violence and trauma, Hartman again on the way racialization happens, Derrida although I still don't think I actually get it in any real way. My final paper here was about how furries are constrained by but also rupture capitalism, which took me into the professor's book Against The Romance of Community as well as the work of J. K. Gibson-Graham, both of which I want to follow up on. I'm honestly not super-happy with how the paper turned out even though I spent a lot of time on it; I am not sure if that's because I spent enough time and did enough revision to see how much more there was to do, because I was panicking at that point in the semester, or because it just actually wasn't very good. I got an A in the class, so it can't have been that bad, so I'm guessing it was a little of all three. (There was some of the just not very good. Oh god I struggled to find a coherent voice when I was unwilling to just be like "arglebargle I am the author look at what a furry I am." This is a longer-term thing to think about actually --- some of my work only makes sense with me in it, but for the stuff that doesn't work that way, what should I do? Dunno.)
- Feminism and Related Social Movements: I was super excited about this class and in bits and flashes it even exceeded my expectations but in other places class discussions just didn't really get going. (For a lot of folks it was their last class of the week and you can kinda tell when people haven't done the reading? It's frustrating but them's the breaks. With the way grad students are overworked I cannot blame them. I would not do the reading sometimes, except the horrible pangs of guilt I experience sitting in a classroom unprepared are way worse than just not having fun for however many hours it takes me to do the homework.) I think that I could have approached the readings with a different set of questions in mind from the beginning of the course and gotten more out of them; the way I was thinking wasn't really a good model for dealing with the subject matter I wanted to work with, and I could feel it chafe with a lot of the texts. A couple of them I revisited and got a lot more out of; others maybe I will, maybe I won't. Things from this class that I particularly found useful: Rereading Chela Sandoval's Methodology of the Oppressed with an eye toward the first two chapters instead of the later chapters (that is, considering her actual practical argument rather than crazy Barthes love ramblings, which are basically one of my favorite things), Deborah Gould's Moving Politics for how to write about a movement you are deeply embedded in [1], Jasbir Puar's Terrorist Assemblages which is super helpful even though sometimes it frustrates me through its bleakness, and even though I didn't like it I want to come back to Grace Hong's The Ruptures Of American Capital because even as I was reading I could tell it was doing something on a level I just hadn't figured out yet. A conversation with the professor helped me see it as an alternate avenue to writing about social movements directly, and I thought that was really interesting, but I still don't 100% get it.
- Anyway, my final paper! On a different bullet because that one got super long! I started off with an outline and a bunch of notes and actually I wrote a few pages and then I looked at it on Monday, the day it was due, and said "Rachel, what you are doing here would be exploitative and misrepresentative of yourself and of people dear to you. It's pretty awful frankly. Stop this nonsense at once." At 11 AM on the day the paper was due, I deleted everything I had written and started completely from scratch. ...And got an extension to Thursday morning. I wrote about furries as producing self-knowledge primarily in opposition to what is said about us in the media or on the Internet by trolls, and suggested that furries needed to consider Sandoval's differential consciousness, moving between different methods of knowledge production depending on what is most useful at the time. This is actually really hard for a large group to do! But I think it would be way better than focusing on negative publicity and then trying to fix it through a particular kind of positive publicity. I mean, I am a person who believes very seriously that they are a fox, at least when I do not think I am being completely ridiculous. I don't want to be arguing about whether or not that means I am more likely to be a homosexual, or more interested in sex than the average college student. I want to figure out what it means that I'm a fucking fox, holy shit what is that. We need to try lots of different methods! I don't even know all the methods we should be trying! I'm considering trying to work this into something I can internet-publish for furries because I think it's important but I'm not 100% sure yet. I'm waiting to get feedback from my professor on it before I figure out next steps. Again, I got an A in the class, so the paper can't have been a complete and unmitigated disaster. (Also my advisor smiled when she listened to me talk about it, which only for sure means that I was super enthusiastic as I got into it, but that on its own is a good sign.)
- Feminist Theories 2: THE REVENGE! okay it's not actually called THE REVENGE. But it will be more contemporary feminist theories and I look forward to it. I don't have a particular approach to this. It's a required course. So... I will take it!
- Independent Study with my advisor: I decided to do this. At first I was like "uggghhhhh I don't know if I have time" but I had a super useful conversation with Ruth who was all "Hey, how excited are you?" and I was like "hella excited, I moved to Arizona to work with her, the reading list she put together for a colleague was amazing, I'd be doing a variant of that." We talked about it and yeah it will be a lot of reading but it won't have a final paper and it should be OK. Plus, as described, hella excited.
- Feminist Knowledge Production: As far as I can tell this is the revenge of the methods class I took at IU. I'm hoping to transfer out of it because (a) I've already taken a very similar class and (b) I don't feel like I got a whole lot out of the methods class at IU. Not that it was terrible or anything, just that it was very breadth not depth and I am at the point in my graduate career where I need some depth please thank you very much. I will almost certainly not be taking this unless the chair advises me that there will be no way to transfer this in, since it won't be offered again for two years, and at that point I would like to be either done or verrrrry close to done with classes.
- Chican@ Literatures: I can't get the official title of this class because our scheduling system is down and I don't have a syllabus kicking around. I would be taking this mostly for the requirement, but the professor seems awesome and I have friends taking it and I think overall I would dig it. Plus hooray more use of my actual English skills! ... well disciplinary-English versus language-English. Arguably I'd be better served by language-Spanish. (Is there disciplinary-Spanish?) I'm prrrrobably going to take this, which will put me at three classes, but my schedule will work like it does this semester more or less. I am still waffling slightly. If I get the syllabi and it looks like a disaster I will go down to two classes. Or if the administration won't let me do the independent study because I am deciding too late, then I will just take this and do some of the reading for the independent study not-for-credit.
- Outside chance of some anthropology or geography class instead
- Follow up with the Rhetoric professor and advanced graduate student who were all "dude, your project sounds amazing" and meet up and talk about working together on stuff
- Apply to conferences: this one is due Dec 31 and this one is due Jan 15, though it is a less good fit. ...and they're both on the same weekend. Huh. I hadn't noticed that, which suggests I have been distracted. PERHAPS BY GRADUATE SCHOOL
- Follow up with the costume designer who had the car accident and was thus out of touch
- Follow up with the person who did Second Life classroom work
- Follow up on Geography contacts to talk about research methods
- Send an email to Liz Kennedy I guess?
[0] Technically I took reading credits during the summer semester. The end result of this was (a) me reading some books and (b) one part of the university giving a few thousand dollars to another part. Whoop-de-do. Before I was sure I would get into UA, let alone accept their transfer offer, it seemed like a good idea to have the option open. I can't transfer them, so it matters not at all now.
[1] With bonus points for being able to say "also we were all sleeping together" without having tenure yet, and winning awards! Someday that will hopefully be me. ^^;;; This entry was originally posted at http://rax.dreamwidth.org/97701.html.