1st
Week 15
In “Talking Back,” Hooks reveals her childhood experience of having a “voice.” In class we discussed how Hooks was prohibited in some ways to claim her voice. For example, when her sister found her journal she laughed at her. Also, she was not allowed to speak unless spoken to. In the article Hooks states that if she had been a boy then maybe she would be punished differently. This reminds me of when I attended school in Mexico, Tepic Nayarit. Everyone wore uniforms even college students. I was in the second grade and I remember all the girls had to wear a pink dress/uniform and the boys wore kaki pants. I remember I wanted to play and run around but I was too uncomfortable doing all that running with a dress on. I just remember thinking “why do I have to wear a dress? Why do we all wear the dress?” but because no body ever seemed to question it, I felt a sense of prohibition, maybe I was not even suppose to talk about it. It is just interesting to me how something so little turns into feminism. In “Bringing Feminism a la Casa,” Daisy Hernandez reveals her experience as she tried to explain “feminism” to her community. I feel a great connection with this piece simply because I think that there is no way to interpret feminism to my mother. I feel that this is so because of our background/culture. In class we discussed what we think it means to be called a feminist by an outsider/or non identifier-feminist? I feel that for my mother this word is not recognized as what it actually is, it is a word that has become masculanized and as a result a lot of negativity is connected with it. Lorde’s piece was a very challenging one. The term erotic is exposed in a different kind of way. Lorde re-emissions the erotic. Although I had a great difficulty understanding the text, I can still see that Lord argues that the Erotic is something powerful and feminine although we have attached a different meaning to it. For example we see it at pornographic and sexual when it is something spiritual/powerful.
