Multiplicity January 19, 2007

I am really enjoying teaching.  It is amazing how much I am learning, “seeing”, and how “in flow” I feel.  I am so happy I have this opportunity.

The students did presentations on Wednesday: they are asked to find an issue pertaining to women in the media and present on it as well as hand in their written script.  They were each fantastic but so varied: a First Nations woman who makes “feature-less” dolls spoke about the word “hope” and her own meaning of hope that of perserverance and not a “passive sense of hope”.  Another woman did a presentation on “purses” and how their price, size reek havoc on women’s bodies and pressures to be able to afford them.  Great stuff!  Students also in class have asked me to explain articles in front of the prof, allowing me to both balance respect for her but also respond to the students.  A young man in the class sent me an email verging on inappropriate that I had to flag saying “I didn’t know there were pretty “girls” in women’s studies”…that will make way into my disseration or at least a paper one day.

Another exciting development is that I met with Tami (the filmmaker) and she is really into my work and the project.  We are committed and she knows of a fund we can apply for that is solely interested in more academic projects, if that fails we will go the NFB route or Arts Council.  Currently she is thinking up sites and people who would visually lend themselves to our topic: such as various zine and magazine editors, young women who are involved in political and artistic activism and projects, and various other opinionated women.  I threw out some artists including my dream of Nomy Lamm and some other writers that I know/know of as well as musicians.  How cool would it to have ANI in the film!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  My dream, I wonder if she remembers the golf cart incident…okay stream of consciousness diversion but here it goes…

When I was 16 Ani played the Folk Festival, and not just the mainstage but little workshop stages.  I knew Kinnie Starr and was hanging out and dancing in the back.  Once the show was over, I saw that Ani got into a golf cart to get her to the next stage…and the cart stopped so that she could talk to a guy she knew.  I ran over to it and then patiently waited to talk to her.  I held out my hand and she held it as I told her how meaningful her music and lyrics and feminism was to me and she was gracious and patient at my little star-struck self.  I adore Ani, through every era, through every pivotal place in my life she was there.  It sounds cheesy and cliche, but as I am lyric driven she really gave me a new language in my teens and an outlet of a range of emotions that weren’t just directed to the male gaze, and the quiet, scorned, emphasized femininity part but to anger and sexuality, and complexity, contradiction, confusion, ambiguity, girl crushes, politicization.  Tami has travelled with funding to interview people such as Carol Adams who wrote the infamous text “The sexual politics of meat”, perhaps we can go to Buffalo New York.

So I also set up a MySpace and then accidently deleted all my friends so I have to go and do that.  Tami is on it so when the film gets made will be an interesting tool.

I have a fear that I am getting sick so I am trying to be good to myself and not overextend though life is very full and busy and I feel like I have that excitement back that had dissipated since my SFU shit year. 

Off to teach, more soon, happy to actually see the rain

A