Quin's Blog

The "G" Word: Perspectives on Gender from a Queer Woman of Color (784)           My gender has been shaped by my education, my family, and being surrounded by Southern culture: my schooling taught me to be “modest” and “soft spoken”, my family insisted that I be interested only in boys, and living in the South caused me to view my gender as a way of serving men and to not be a threat.  The strict dress code and the casual bullying through my K-8 education made me hate the “feminine” side of myself. I was raised by white parents and went to a predominantly white K-8 private school where the dress code was enforced more heavily on the girls than the boys. The rules for girls were to not show anything past the collar bone, if one wore skirts, they had to be two inches above the knee, and lastly, do not wear any makeup. On the other end, boys must not grow hair beyond their ears and must wear polo or dress shirts. It was assumed by the school officials that boys were not capable

  Ethnic Notions, Race: The Power of an Illusion      I watched this piece with a group on Monday in the common room of Braun, which made watching more communal. From my personal experience and growing up in the South, the oppression and media surround the Black community has been taught to me in a distant way. Not to say that the impact of the history is lessened or any less valid, just that my knowledge about this subject needs to be examined and broadened.      The style of the cartoons of exaggerated black caricatures made me realize how easily these stereotypes are passed down onto children as well as adults. Though it didn't shock me when the iconic Bugs Bunny wore blackface and sang in a stereotypical "Black" voice because it made me reconsider what media I was given and consumed as a child. Bugs was a character I had seen every Saturday morning on the family computer and while he made us laugh, Bugs was also normalizing these grotesque depictions of black and indi