Speeches

I had expected the papers that people were writing to be pretty spread out between all of the intersections that could be created between the many groups we had to choose from.  I was suprised how many people did the intersection of gender and violence. I think literally all of the people on this first day with the exception of me were either doing gender and violence or race and class.  I guess these two are kind of the more obvious options looking back at it. These two topics are also not very controversial. It also makes sense that a lot of people chose gender and violence because a lot of the readings that we've done throughout this semester have been about the subject. I liked Marissa's presentation. I thought it took a lot of courage to critisize "christian values, especially in a presentation to a class in Texas and also becuase a few people in this class have talked about their religious beliefs. I think the presentations in general would have been more interesting if there was more diversity in the topics. Maybe it would be a good idea in the future to have students sign up for topics and limit the amount of people that can discuss the same topic.

Thoughts on Spring awakening, paper, and the coming out monolouges

I can see why Spring awakening has been banned in a lot of scool libraries for so long. The subject matter is pretty intense and controversial, even if the actual wordings arn't extremely explicit. It is interesting that people were talking about issues like when to tell children about sexuality in the late nineteenth century. I had thought theses diolouges hadn't started until much later. I haven't reccieved any essay ideas from my parters yet, I'm guessing chilifest may have had an effect on the timelyness of their responses. I went to "The Coming Out Monolouges" for extra credit on wednesday.It was a very interesting, though intense, experience and I learned a few things. One of the main things that I now understand after going to this event (to quote my write up about the event): I didn’t understand before is that people don’t just come out once, they have to come out or decide whether to come out again and again whenever they meet new people, join new organizations and get new jobs.. Another thing I came to realize is that even today coming out can defiantly be hard to do but can also be liberating as it removes confusion and stress of secrecy. I would reccomend that other students go to the events that are going on next week, it was not as intimidating as I had expected it to be to go to an event on a controversial topic with people that I don't know.

Thoughts on the Guest panel

I missed class on tuesday and forgot that we were having people come to speak to us on thursday. When I first walked into the class i thought I had walked into the wrong class. I thought the guessing game was pretty interesting, it was pretty suprising that the first things they encouraged us to ask about were the things that you are typically not supposed to ask people about when you first get to know them: religion, political views and personal feelings. Based on the reactions of the panelists it seemed like our class was more reserved in the questions we asked them than they were used to. This might have been because we were in a class or because it was 8am, as was joked about. It was interesting that the by having us try to use stereotypes about gay people to try to guess who was gay, they were able to show us that you really can't tell. It was interesting listening to their stories about the gay community here on campus, I knew there was a glbt resource center but I had always thought of it as being like an office where you could go if you were being discriminated against. I didn't know that it was also a place for people to hang out and socialize. I also didn't know that the allies was a group that exists. The guy who is a member of that group had an interesting perspective because he faces some of the stigma that gay people do when he's around homophobic people and even around his gay friends he faces some confusion at times that he presented in a comical way but I could also see as being a real issue.