Coleen Herbert Blog 8

In my first post, I began by discussing Anderson's points about Marxist historiography. It was a great introduction to the course in that it immediately changed my mode of thinking about a certain subject. I wrote about the American nationalism surrounding 9/11 and what it was like to grow up in a fractured nation, a nation that desperately tried to repair its nationhood after a national tragedy. I also wrote about how privilege   affects how we interpret each other. Since then, I've discovered that the best way to work beyond privilege is to confront it. We've had several discussions in class that have confronted privilege and what it's like to be outside of a discourse. The least successful way to have discussions about social change and issues is to ignore privilege.
What is my community and where is it? I ask myself the latter question in that sentence more often than I do the first. The first thing that people probably notice about me is that I'm White. The second thing that people probably notice about me is that I'm a woman. We've definitely talked about women and race in class. Lastly, they notice my appearance. But what does my appearance say about me? When I came out, many people acted very surprised. I got a lot of, "But you don't look like a lesbian," and, "Remember that time you had a boyfriend?"  Some people don't realize it, but these comments were some of the most ignorant things that I had ever heard. I heard some of them from "progressive" people. It's not up to you to decided whether or not I get to pass. I welcome you acknowledgement of my sexuality and the role that it plays in my life. I don't welcome your policing.
I'm combining my statement on privilege and my identity into a project on Queer women's lives in Iran. My project will use the recent film Circumstance (2011) to highlight contemporary queer issues in Iran. I'm also using some contemporary articles that either comment on the film or speak on the lives of LGBTQ people in the Middle East. Teaching both inside and outside of a discourse has been a learning process for me. I'm not Iranian. I think that this project also integrates a lot of information that we haven't had the chance to cover yet. In a way, it also leads into the next section of the course.