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the political

Lately I’ve been thinking about how important “the political” is to me. Once I find a political element to something, or something I thought was sort of bland is politicized I’m immediately more fascinated with it. And I’m speaking really broad terms, not “political” in the sense that abortion is “political,” but political in the sense that a piece of art is more appealing to me if it is political, or something else. Is it that I’m turned off by most female cancer awareness campaigns because they fail to connect to the political past that birthed them? I know that I care about making sexual health knowledge available to those its kept from because its regulation is political . Is my focus, maybe obsession, on the political the reason I have never volunteered at a soup kitchen, or really participate in any plain old “volunteerism,” but still consider myself to be working toward a greater social good (yes, I’m very fuzzy, and vomit if you need to) by doing all the feminist-y stuff I do like directing The Vagina Monologues (which raises lots of $$ for services for women who have experienced violence)? I guess being a volunteer victim advocate for a local group that works with and supports rape victims is volunteering, but it doesn’t really feel like it.

And recently some research has been published that TFA graduates are less “active,” in terms of voting, volunteering, etc, than people who ...

p-r-i-v-i-l-e-g-e

My inability to spell the word privelege privilege manifested itself in such a real way this week. I am writing my philosophy senior thesis this year on global feminism and international feminist interventions, and I’ve been reading up a storm this semester. The last thing I read was a piece on Cosmopolitan Feminism that used a lot of the language and ideas I had read about before, and I was sort of bored with it, so I took just one part of the article and wrote my response paper on it. The author was examining the work of international bodies and groups and claimed that their work could be justified by the philosophy she was advocating, but not that the ...

My inability to spell the word privelege privilege manifested itself in such a real way this week. I am writing my philosophy senior thesis this year on global feminism and international feminist interventions, and I’ve been reading ...