After we have a teach in explaining the theme of this year’s GSFS core course projects, you will break into groups and figure out a “public facing” project. What I mean by that is that the project should be informed by feminist theory and the readings in this course BUT it has to pitched to a different audience- your younger sibling or a friend who has never taken a gender studies class or your Auntie who is smart but doesn’t know any of the information you are gaining in this class.
Because this year’s theme is “feminist activism vs. feminist theory” you should center your project around conceptualization of the body. Is it “knowable” or is the body in fact a series of questions that we can accumulate knowledge about but never fully answer?
Why might activist approaches to the body want to tell stories that make sense? Why does feminist theory and gender studies continue to make things more complex rather than simplifying them? How can we get a broader audience to think more critically about the body and how we know it?
Another overlapping theme is how conceptualizations of a simple body overlap with the larger anti-gender ideology movement which is associated with various far-right and even fascist movements around the world.
Or how overly simplistic understandings of the body can leader to trans-exclusionary feminism and how this sort of feminism can overlap with far-right conceptualizations of the body.
You will do this project in 5 steps:
- form a group
- write a proposal (5% due on 9/29 to Canvas)
- write an update on project (5% due on 11/3 on Canvas)
- present project at mandatory evening symposium (10% on 11/30 7-8:30pm and upload presentation or video of presentation to Canvas)
- final completely done project handed in in person or images and explanation of it uploaded to canvas or video/etc. uploaded (30%)