We're all feminists as far as I can tell

     I think teachers love when their students take the ideas they’ve been taught and make them their own. But, what they don’t know it that is the secret agenda of every student. Students yearn for it. I crave it. We struggle to make something our own – to personalize it in a way meaningful to us. For most classes, this is just a dream too good to be true. But for the best classes, this is the point of the class. It’s no longer just Instructor Ed’s CORE 112 class for the girls (and guys) “went bad” and appropriated feminism for themselves.

            The crux of this appropriation was “Sh*t Feminists Don’t Say,” but it was a long time coming. I saw this happening as I grappled with the ideas this class presented to me, applied them to random events in my life that didn’t seem to warrant that like Waiting for Godot, developed favorite characters from the readings, and grew alongside them and my classmates. Looking at “Sh*t Feminists Don’t Say,” its apparent how badly appropriate like this is needed in the college curriculum. In the video, we aren’t simple repeating what Ed taught us in class, but if we are it’s repetition with a difference.

This video was written by students, filmed by students, starring students, for…? It’s hard to say. Certainly at one level, we wanted to please Ed and produce a high quality work for our final project, but the pressure to conform what he was expecting wasn’t as looming as it was in A1-A3. We just wanted to have fun, show off what we’ve learned, and adopt feminism for ourselves. At the same time, we were creating a binary that our class try so hard understand the implications of having and even attempt to dismantle. I think the overarching point of out project wasn’t to create new tenets in the feminist world but suggesting what they can and can’t say, but a call to action, an impetus to take something larger than one’s self, try to understand it, and generate fresh ideas.