Thought Paper

         One of the things I appreciate the most about our class discussions is how much we all truly care about what we’re talking about; writing and healing. I can easily sense how each of us are connected to the issues we talk about, yet all those connections and experiences vary. This is because we all have our own perspective. Not everyone writes in the same way, not everyone heals in the same way. Each one is valid though, and really important to the greater ‘voice’. 

         With that said we are also a female dominated class. I love to talk about feminism, especially associated with writing. Taking Women and Writing last semester was truly a blessing, I was finally placed in a setting where the people around me also wanted to talk about female empowerment and feminism. We also talk about these kind of things in our class, particularly with the Clothesline project. As feminists we know that more than white cis women are affected by feminism. I think I would like to stretch our boundaries a bit. Talk about current struggles people face. The police brutality, the rise of transgender awareness and pride, Islamphobia, lesbians, and so on. I think it would be useful to look into communities that aren’t right under our nose, learn what life it like for people who struggle with things that aren’t easy to talk about, and are current enough that healing may just be in the beginning process. 

       I would love to hear voices of these people. I was glad to talk about Malala and her point of view on the violence against her and her people. I struggle with the fact that the book we read from, while still widely relevant, is a bit outdated. I want to focus on what’s going on now. 

       Another thing I might like to talk about is feminism for boys/men. Because it’s not just for women, often times I feel like I am most motivated for the little boys of the world. They grow up being told not to cry or show much emotion at all. They are taught to treat women this way and that, usually as things and not as equals. Something to talk about, no with. The way they are raised to view the world not only harms females, but themselves and other males as well. There are boys who suffer eating disorders but never get it checked out because it’s not ‘manly’. In fact mental illnesses in males tend to go overlooked while females are treated but also deemed ‘crazy’. Boys cry, girls cry. Women cry and no one looks at them funny, they just assume they are psming, when men cry they pretend it’s not happening. Both are extremely harmful. Feminism wasn’t created to bind men, but to release them as well. Men who struggle may never find the healing of writing, since writing is considered an art and art is considered feminine. 

         Lastly, there is Twilight Reimagined, exactly the opposite of what people wanted Stephanie Meyer to do. She took the complaints of sexism and decided to retell her vampire love story with a gender swap of literally every character. She could have used find and replace to just change the names and pronouns, since she kept the story near verbatim. But now there are now articles comparing lines from the two books. It’s easy to identify the moments of sexism. She turns emotional moments with Bella into emotionless ones with Beau. She honestly furthered the sexism in her stories past a point no one dreamed of. This might be an example of writing and NOT healing. Perhaps it was for Meyer, but not for the public.