Do do do do do, Two Classes!*

*Sung to the tune of Two Ladies from Cabaret

Well, I have attended two of my classes for this semester. On Monday night, it was Communication & Technology,

my one actual graduate course that I had to petition to get into. We have a course reader that I picked up from the copy place this evening, and three course books. The three books are:

The Medium is the Massage by Marshall McLuhan
The Question Concerning Technology by Martin Heidegger
Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music by Christoph Cox & Daniel Warner

I am responsible for a creative project, in class discussion, 5-7 readings a week, a research project using a new form of technology that I am not familiar with and we also are suppose to contribute to Wikipedia. And it can just be as easy a contribution as editing someone else’s entry, thank goodness.

The class isn’t quite what I thought it would be and I am very glad that my friend Big D is in the class with me. Also, one of my fellow Graduate students is recording the lectures and will make them available through a podcast, totally doing this of his own volition. And it is very appropriate for a class on Technology and Communication.

At first I wasn’t sure how I was going to stay on topic with my preferred research topic but explore the way in which technology affects a form of communication. But then, right before our break, it struck me. If the Professor will approve my topic, I plan on writing on the use of ‘photoshop’ and other such editing software to diminish and corrupt the presentation of women in media. Meesh had that wonder post about the appearance of women in ads and a link to a website for photo-retouching that I can use and I also had a couple articles from my Women and Media class last semester that talks about erasing women.

Okay, so I am not very coherent on the topic of my paper but it’s there, more or less. I’ll keep you informed as it develops.

Class # 2 Rhetoric of Women

When I first purchased my textbook for this class, I was not excited about it. The text book is:

Governing Codes: Gender, Metaphor, and Political Identity by Anderson and Sheeler

Politics and women – booo-ring!

Well, I have changed my mind. I think that I am going to have a blast in this class. It also has a class reader and a lot of work but it promises to be an interesting experience. We have journal responses due each week to show that we are reading, understanding and synthesizing the readings. We are also doing a group project on one of the five female politicians that we are studying: Ann Richards, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Christine Todd Whitman, Elizabeth Dole, and Shirley Chisholm. The group will present in class and then each individual member is responsible for a paper. We are presenting ‘sightings’ (re: current events), and creating a poster for a Global Feminist Activist group, and a research paper on any approved topic as long as it is based on women and their rhetoric. One of the options is to select an ‘artifact from popular culture – I can pick a movie – and we have a comprehensive essay final exam.

We broke out into groups of 3 and tried to find things we have in common (all our group could come up with was we have all been to countries in Europe) and then we had to come up with three statements, 2 true and one lie. We were to tell the others and there were suppose to guess which one was the lie and then we selected one person to stand up and tell their statements to the class and have them guess. I was selected by the group to present my statements to the group. And no one guessed my lie correctly! Me, the one with no poker face. My three statements were:

I have 12 aunts and uncles.
I have a degree in Costume Design.
I won a beauty pageant when I was in high school.

They all thought my second statement was false. Awe, they were all so kind!

Any who, the only one who knew that the last one was false was my friend JW from Texas who is in the class with me. If we are allowed to, we are going to do some joint research on the activist groups from Chiappas (sp?).

We also took a quiz. I was able to match all the women that were listed on the matching portion but I had to guess on the first half of the test, a True or False section. For guessing, I didn’t do too badly. I got one and a half wrong, the half point was for a poorly written question that was both True and False. Test your knowledge below and see how you do. Answers will be in the comments section of this post.

TRUE or FALSE
1. Women in the U.S. were the first in the world to recieve the right to vote.
2. U.S. Women recieved the right to vote in 1920.
3. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was the first woman to run for the U.S. House of Representitives in 1866, even though she didn;t have the right to vote.
4. The first Women's Rights Convention, held in Seneca Falls, N.Y. was strongly supported by Fredrick Douglass.
5. The cult of domesticity asserted that men and women were fundamentally the same.
6. The 14th amendment inserted the word "male" for the first time into the U.S. Constitution.
7. President Kennedy was sympathetic to women's issues as evidence by the formation of the Commission on the Status of Women.
8. The original intent of the Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was to prohibit sex discrimination.
9. NOW, The National Organization for Women as an organization, was embraced by radical feminists.
10. To protest the Miss America pageant's focus on women as sexual objects, radical feminists burned their bras at the 1968 event.
11. Female College graduates and male high school graduates have equivalent incomes on average.
12. Women currently receive more undergraduate degrees than men.
13. The states of Florida and New Hampshire have enacted laws prohibiting lesbians from adopting children.
14. The Equal Rights Admendment was passed iin 1982.
15. Shirley Chisholm was the first woman to run for President of the U.S.
16. The United States Senate now has 16 women senators.
17. The United States Supreme Court now has two female Supreme Court Justices.
18. Title IX of the Education Amendment bars sex discrimination in publicly funded educational institutions.

Sorry for the long wordy post but right now, the classes are so new that I don’t have any pictures to go with it. I’ll get back to less wordy posts soon.