(no subject)

It's ironic that I'm doing so much reading and writing about movie-going in the early 20th century. I'm really interested in the cultural and architectural context that movie theatres occupy in the past and present. I think their place in and influence on tons of aspects of society are fascinating. But, generally speaking, I have very little interest in actually watching films, past or present. For one thing, without someone to sit next to me and tell me what's going on, I can't keep track of actors from scene to scene!

I've got about 5 eighths of a draft of this paper done. I really really hope to have it ready to be looked at in class tomorrow.

(no subject)

Also, this is pretty awesome. It's a sort of primer on sex, gender, and orientation and how to view them as independent things. Maybe it would be helpful to show people who have not encountered some of these concepts.

http://lybio.net/hank-green-human-sexuality-is-complicated/nonprofits-activism/

(no subject)

It's a little embarrassing, but I'll admit that I don't fully understand the difference in common usage between "UK / United Kingdom", "Great Britain", and "England".

(no subject)

I've been away from here for a while, due, of course, to school work.

This sources and methods in history class is taking up, by far, the most time of any course I'm in. There are four papers through the course of the semester. I really and truly love the idea of doing historical research and learning to use original sources. But I'm frustrated by the constraints of the paper topics. The first one had to be on the cities of Kenosha or Racine here in Southeast Wisconsin. That was fine; I loved digging through the archives.

The second one had to be on a national topic. That's great, as I'd love to write about a couple different things on that scale. The rise of car culture and they way it affected population distribution on a regional, state, and national level for instance. The changes of centers of power based on common modes of transportation. I'd love to write about the rise and cultural role of movie palaces, my favorite buildings amongst my architectural geekery. But we were restricted to using periodical sources for that paper, so I didn't think I could find what I needed for that kind of research just using newspapers and magazines. (Though maybe I could have if I'd really looked. I'm not sure.)

For the current paper, we're supposed to be using scholarly articles. Which is awesome, 'cause there are tons of them out there on all sorts of topics! Except the topic now has to be international, which kind of cuts out the possibility of writing about the rise of the automobile strictly in a US context, which is what I'm interested in. So instead I wrote about movie palaces and film around 1900 through 1930. And I think I did an ok job, though maybe I wander a bit.

But at the end, I need to state an argument that I'd like to make into the basis for the fourth and last paper, and talk about how I'd use the materials I found to support that argument. I was stuck on that for the longest time tonight after finishing up the rest of what I was writing. I tend to come to a topic just wanting to learn more about it. Once I know a lot, then maybe I'll have things I want to know more about, or have some ideas about why things happen a certain way. But all I really wrote about was the social and cultural context of these giant, ornate theatres. I don't have any good idea what I'd like to argue about them.

I finally decided that I'd make an argument about censorship in movies of the time. That it's a technique used by people in power to enforce ideology, and that it ties in to a long-standing perception of minorities, lower class people, and women as being inherently immoral and subject to corruption, unlike those good middle-class mainstream people who are smart and decent enough not to need other people telling them what they can watch.

I hope he likes that idea. I mentioned a couple of interesting articles I found in that vein, like one on the KKK protesting Charlie Chaplin due to his supposed portrayal of Protestantism is a deeply offensive way, and another about Ohio banning D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation only when it suited the national war effort and attempts to recruit African Americans for World War I. I'm going to start looking at the school library catalogue and requesting some books from other campuses too, 'cause we finally are able to use all kinds of sources for this last paper, and interlibrary loans take time.

But I've finally got this draft done! Now I just need to go and write up all my references and stuff. This third paper is graded more heavily on writing and formatting rather than research like the last ones were, so I feel like even if my research might be a little lacking compared to my other ones (and I kind of feel like it is), I ought to still be able to get a good grade out of it.

(no subject)

We had an interesting talk in my anthropology class today about female genital modification (FGM). My professor likened popular perception of the issue to any number of other issues that revolve around women; it looks at women as passive recipients of the action and doesn't account for the role of any agency on their own part in it.

I'd used FGM in conversation with a couple of other people as an example of where I felt cultural relativism can go too far. But perhaps the issue is more complicated and nuanced than I originally thought (as are so many things perceived more toward the black and white end of the spectrum). We talked about women's perception of FGM. Our textbook also has an account of an anthropologist from a culture that practices FGM; she wrote about her choice to return home for the procedure and what it meant to her.

There are a wide variety of FGM practices, from versions that are rather less invasive and damaging than male circumcision, to versions that are much more so. We can argue that women are forced by their societal framework to undergo the procedure, but the same could be argued about adult male circumcision as well, which, for me at least, provided a bit more relativity in my perception of it.

And perhaps of most direct relevance to people in Western society, attempts to stop FGM are really having the opposite effect. Especially the more extreme forms become more common and widespread as a result of outsiders trying to ban traditional practices. It becomes a symbol of cultural identity and solidarity; a rejection of outsiders who come in from out of the blue and want to tell people what they can and can't do.