Trans-Sister Radio Paper Proposal

In my paper, I plan to research what exactly it means to be a man and woman based on biology, societal structure, and stereotypes. I plan to look into any research that might have been done on how we enforce gender roles on small children, so they fit into societal stereotypes as they grow older. I want to explore what effect gender role reversal has on families, and then the potential of the effect it could have on society as a whole. I find the fact that Dana is discovering what it means to be a member of the opposite sex outwardly very intriguing, and want to explore how a real-life male to female transsexual is accepted by society and whether she feels like a woman as much on the outside as she does inside, after the operation.

I'm really just toying with the idea of gender and whether it is just that - an idea - or, is it something more tangible; are women naturally more attuned to be nurturers, etc.

Gender and gender roles will be a large part of my research, as will research about the after effects of post-op transsexuals.

Evaluation

Every week in my blog post, the material I am posting about is very specific to that week of study in class, and so every blog post comes out radically different than the week before it. After reading through each of my posts through the semester so far, I discovered that I really tend to use the blog as a medium for thinking out loud and asking questions of my classmates that came up while I was reading. In class, I don’t have these questions ready to ask, but writing the blog seems to provoke more questions for me, hence the reason they mostly end in questions to be answered in the comments on my posts. 

Over the past 5 weeks, I have noticed my posts getting shorter and shorter, and I think this is due to the fact that as the semester has progressed, my life has become busier and busier. However, I don’t want to my work to suffer because of this, and am going to make a conscious effort to make sure my blogs are longer and more detailed. 

I think that with every week I try to focus on some smaller aspect of the novel/ article I’m working with to make sense of just a small part of the text. If I were to try to dissect a larger problem/theme, I would get too overwhelmed with it, and end up having an extremely long post. 

The week we had to work on Fernando Botero’s artwork on the Abu Ghraib pictures was my favorite post. I really liked looking at a picture and trying to find meaning in the smallest aspects of the picture. A picture can mean many things all at once, and different things to each person who views it. I liked writing about what I thought about these paintings, and I also enjoyed looking at which paintings other people looked at and reading what they thought. 

What surprised me when I was re-reading my work, was the first post about 1 dead in attic. I now wish I had picked two different stories to focus on, since the issue I first had a problem with now seems irrelevant. I think this is partly due to the fact that it was the first week, and I hadn’t finished the book at the time. 

Overall, I think that after this exercise, I will try to make sure that my blog posts are longer, and more analytical to the topic at hand. 

Made for Lifetime

The books we have discussed so far have always had this backdrop of disaster around them, but this book is missing that. However, the texts we have read all focus on the human psyche and explore how to deal with strong human emotions after a life changing event, which is what this book is largely based on. Trans-sister Radio tells the story of a man changing into a woman, and the effect it has on the relationship with his new girlfriend and her family. The story is told from the point of view of all the parties involved, switching between them from chapter to chapter, thereby providing different insights to the issue. 

I haven’t read much of the book so far, but I think the character I am most intrigued by is Allison. It will be interesting to see her struggle with the information that the new guy she has fallen for wishes to be a woman, thereby changing Allison’s sexual orientation. 

I don’t think a movie version of this book would be bad - when I think of it as a movie, I think of a movie like My Sister’s Keeper to compare it to.  It would probably end up as a made-for-tv movie shown on the lifetime channel. My first idea for a star in a movie version of this book would be natalie portman as the daughter, Carly. I’m not entirely sure why, I can just see her in this role. Other than that, I have no idea who else I would cast. 

Fernando Botero's Artwork

This image painted by Fernando Botero is called Abu Ghraib 31, and was painted in 2005. 

The stark white of this image with the two smears of red really caught my eye.  The lack of color directs the eye to the posture of the prisoner, kneeling with his hands tied above his head as if praying to get out of there. His naked body and covered face coupled with his position provide a sense of anguish and desperation successfully without having to explicitly show a tortured face, etc. 

The reddish brown stains on the floor and wall make me feel somewhat sick - I can not determine whether they represent blood, or excrement. Perhaps it is the intuition that they are supposed to represent both that makes me feel sickened in a way that the real photographs didn't. I think that by leaving things ambiguous and unsaid often times makes images more powerful, because the observer is left to imagine more horrific circumstances. 

As with most of the art pieces in this slideshow, the prison bars are prominent in this picture. While in the real photographs there were many images of bars to show they were in a prison, they rarely featured so explicitly in the pictures. Botero's paintings however mostly focus on the imprisonment of the prisoners, showing them often times behind bars, or holding on to the bars trying to break them apart to escape. I think that this feature of prison bars gives a sense of urgency and fear that the real photographs couldn't convey with all their attention focused on the use of dogs, and fear on prisoners faces. 

Overall, I do believe that the painted images create a greater sense of fear and despair than can be represented in the real photos. The exaggerated form of the subjects provides a bigger canvas for pain and destitution, making it more 'real' and depressing.