(More Than) Grrrl Power! Girls Studies at UCF

http://www.girlscantwhat.com/

ALL PROCEEDS GO TO www.girlsrockcamp.org

Here's the link to the website I made like I promised. I highly recommend viewing it in Firefox though, because it doesn't render properly in Internet Explorer. I still have some bugs to work out, sorry! el eligado cinco

Yesterday my cousin and her roommates (two of my really good friends) were visiting and we were sitting around my kitchen table. We got onto the subject of having kids and my cousin remembered how when we were little we'd play the game Life all the time. There was one instance in which she had the misfortune of landing on every "You just had a baby!" square and ended up having so many kids that she couldn't fit them in her little plastic car. I remembered this vividly and laughed just as much as I had the night it happened, probably over ten years ago. I told everyone that she had so many plastic people that I had to take some of them in my car. She reminded me, "Yeah, you told me, 'I'll take your dogs but you can keep all the kids in your car.'" I suddenly remembered how normally when playing I would put my husband in a back seat and my dog would sit up front with me. As my cousin said, "She wouldn't just put the husband behind her, she...

The Most Amazing Grrrls I Know!!!

After talking about Hannah Montana in class, I decided to watch a few shows. The first one I saw “You Are So Sue-Able to Me” I decided to do my cultural artifact paper on Hannah Montana. I already knew that so many girls absolutely adore Hannah, but I found myself aggravated by the Hannah character. First of all, I don’t like the fact that Hannah is thin, blond, very flashy with her wardrobe, and that she wears a lot of makeup. So many people worship Hannah, but Miley, on the other hand, who is plain in her clothing, and has brown hair, is barely noticed. What does this tell young girls? I also do not like how the Disney Company produces so many Hannah Montana products. Parents would have to struggle financially just to afford all other the CDs, DVDs, clothes, and everything else imaginable that Disney put out for them to buy. Instead of making things, like friendship bracelets, or spending time swapping clothes with friends like I did as a child, girls now are told to shop, shop, shop...

This is amazing! Be sure to watch it to the end, especially for the awesome feminist song she performs;) Girls Rock!!

As many of you know, I am working on my PhD in Texts and Technology (T&T)—an English degree at UCF. While I have played with social networks and blogs in my personal and professional spaces for some time, I only recently found theoretical homes for the work I have been doing. As part of my theory-based Introduction to Texts and Technology course, I decided to utilize our Girls Studies blog as part of my "Digital Artifact" assignment. The assignment asks us to: …design, produce, create, modify, or otherwise bring into being an artifact that makes a point about relationships between texts and technologies. […] The object must include new media tools, connect in some way to class readings and discussions, demonstrate relationships between texts and technology, and be thought-provoking. (Bowdon) I created our Girls Studies blog as part of a Summer assignment that inspired me to take online class discussions out of closed, password-protected forums and into more...

When I tell people about Girls Studies the class, a lot of womyn respond, 'O so basically we all should have had that class during middle school.' It's pretty messed up that girls are purposely cut off from a lot of the information we got to ingest this semester. A lot of the authors in our texts would talk about girls' sexuality and comment that in our culture, or in most cultures, girls supposedly have no sexuality. I caught myself feeling a little uncomfortable about thinking about the fact that twelve-year-old are sexual people, even though I've been really aware of my own sexuality since preschool, no joke. I'm grateful for late night sleepover conversations when my middle school friends and I talked about taboo topics, but it would have understood myself and been so much more confident if I had been able to talk about sexuality openly. I really appreciate the research that contributors to our texts did on girls' perceptions of sexuality in media and ...

So looking back on this past semester, I really didn’t realize how much that I have learned until I sit down to think about it. Throughout Girls Studies, I have subtly gained knowledge that I can carry and pass on to everyone in my life. Thinking all the way to the beginning, I remember looking at a video on advertising and how over sexualized womyn are portrayed in the media, and how young girls see this and think this is how they are supposed to be. This class allowed me to reflect on my own childhood and think back on things that I thought or did because I saw them in magazines or on TV and I wanted to be beautiful like those womyn. And still today, it is difficult just how it was in middle and high school to see these “perfect” womyn constantly thrown in your face, and realizing that you don’t look like them, and most likely never will. But now I do have Feminism, and now I realize that people are airbrushed, and that a very low percentage of womyn actually do have the bodies that ...

I am a grrrl, we are all grrrls! That is something I have become comfortable calling myself and others. Before this class, grrrl seemed like an insult, inferring that someone is young, immature, naive and most of all underestimated. This class has shown me the power of grrrls and the power for us to identify as them! Through the readings, class and my service learning I have experienced the potential and ability that grrls have today and that they are using their power more than ever, like with blogging. This has been a really cool outlet for discussion, I never did it before but really enjoy the style of it, and its another way for grrrls to alternatively get their voices heard. Grrrls today seem to already have the critical eye for conscious raising and culture jamming and it amazes me to see their accomplishments. If people only knew this, and the difficulties it is to be a grrrl today, they would give them a lot more credit. I am so glad that I got to be in this class at the beggi...