What I Leared From This Class...

I think the most important thing that I took from this class was how to make an analysis through a critical, feminist lens. To me, this entails thinking about things together in ways that traditional disciplines don’t do. I understood feminism today as being invested in approaching the matrices of oppression and the existence of hierarchies that affect everyone, by approaching how they particularly affect the lives of women all over the world. Because of interlocking oppressions, we have to do an intersectional analysis, one that looks at gender, race, sexuality, nation, etc, which is to say, a feminist analysis. Therefore, to have a feminist lens is to approach our analyses intersectionally. In this way, the “personal is political”—something Minnie Bruce Pratt talked about in terms of feminist scholarship demanding that the personal be considered with the political as a legitimate way of creating (situated) knowledge(s) and understanding our world. The most salient example of this for me was when we read about violence against women and paired that with global capitalism and the global economy. We read about how violence against women is seen as a private, personal domestic issue, but as we saw with Seniorita Extraviada, it has political and global repercussions. To me, this is where the importance of praxis comes into play. By thinking intersectionally, we demand an employment of feminist theory and practice together to create change.