Welcome!

Hello! Welcome to my blog, mostly made up of feminist or racial issues, and sometimes both at once. Throughout writing and compiling my portfolio, I realized what issues were close to my heart. I wrote most often about about race and women’s issues. There isn’t necessarily a central theme to my portfolio other than the fact every issue I talked about is something I have either lived through or have taken a great, frustrating, political interest in. I felt mostly angry while writing this. This past semester as a whole has been either rekindling past hurts about our current state of society, or teaching me new ones.

As a white woman, I have many privileges. The woman part is where that ends, though. It boggles my mind when I think about how the female body is treated as ‘less than’ when compared to males. Even in our considerably progressive nation, women are still fighting for equal pay and their bodies are overly sexualized to sell products, like sandwiches or music (read more in my Ad- Dawn and Album cover- Witherspoon posts). Despite the constant battle women are fighting to get onto the same level playing field as men, we still get bashed down everyday. We receive countless casually sexist remarks from men in a desperate act to recover any hegemonic masculinity they feel they lost while respecting women. TV shows, popular music, and advertisements showcase these ‘passable’ remarks in an ever surrounding bubble of inequality. While women continue to deal with sexual assault on a regular basis, we are creating a uniting front of survivors and fighters to eliminate rape culture.

Before this class and doing too much research, I didn’t think to much about how I had to carry pepper spray on me and how I couldn’t walk outside at night. Now I am painfully aware that I have to take precautions that half of the population wouldn’t even think of.

While cis women are still struggling to be seen in the same equal light men are, transgender bodies are battling a much further uphill fight. I touch on the first ever televised trans woman superhero. The actress, Nicole Maines, will be making history and breaking visibility boundaries for the LGBTQ+ community.

As I mentioned, I’m Caucasian. This allows me many privileges that others don’t have. I will never have to experience the model minority myth first hand and will never be on the receiving end of ignorant color-blind racism. I won’t feel the pressure of negative cultural stereotypes that some do and I won't ever feel the pull between two different nations I call home. But I am happy that I am able to educate myself on racial issues such as these so that I may better help lessen the gap of misunderstanding.

Education is always the first step to long term change. To create a paradigm shift in the way our culture thinks and acts, we need to be able to analyze and critique our surroundings, rather passively accept them and move on.

Please enjoy my cumulative angers, pleas, and frustrations in the form of scholarly and academic articles and artifacts.