#btw that article i linked is like THE MOST BASIC understanding of gendered socialization

[lastseance]

i really am gonna need all trans people to learn about gendered socialization as a sociology concept, then make actual effort into unlearning those social roles we were taught SINCE BIRTH because lots of us dont actually do that. we just transition to try and match those gender roles that especially subjugate women. its why we have such issues with transphobia and misogyny in our communities. unlearning gender socialization, realizing there's more ways to be a man or a woman and your gender doesnt mean you naturally prefer to be dominant or submissive or whatever, is what ever trans person should do when we come out. i get that it can cause dysphoria but the socialization we're put through actively harms afab people so we have to work on it instead of ignoring it.

[english-ext-2]

Viva Voce (NEW)

Please note exact requirements will vary across schools, and all analysis here is based on the sample assessment/support material from the NESA website 

The Viva Voce is the first formal assessment task, worth 30% of your internal mark. It’s the only assessment carried over from the old course, so some of the information here is recycled from my original post. 

The Viva is a 15-20 minute panel interview where you present your Major Work to your teachers and respond to their questions. It’s basically “selling” your MW and its concept: “hey, look at how great my idea is! This is the form it’ll take, here’s the research I���ve done so far, and this is how I intend to carry it out.” You will also need to submit your Major Work Journal for review. 

According to the sample assessment material on the NESA website, the presentation could include the following:

A thorough explanation of the purpose, audience, context and form of your Major Work

Acknowledgement of the sources you have used in developing the proposal and inquiry question

An outline of your plan to complete the Major Work project including a timeline

References to your journal to assist in explaining choices made and research completed.

Before I unpack the above, I want to briefly address concept. You obviously need to explain to the panel what your MW is about, but concept also underpins your understanding of purpose, audience, context and form. I have other detailed posts on developing a concept, but for our purposes here I just wanted to highlight concept as key to how you explain everything else required of you in the Viva. 

Explanation of purpose, audience, context and form (+ concept) of your MW

While it’s important to explain each of these individually, it’s just as (if not more) important to link them together.  

Purpose: Basically what you’ve set out to do with your MW. At this stage, it should not be something bland like “I aim to entertain my audience” or “I want to make people think”. Literally anybody could say that about their major. What is it that you want your MW to do specifically? What is the “conceptual purpose” of your MW, if you will. You might like to start out brainstorming a list of verbs, or thinking about the messages/themes you want to explore in your major.   

Audience: Who is your Major Work intended for? Which group of people will respond to your major in the way you want them to? Again, broad answers along the lines of “the general public”, “high school students”, or “young people” won’t cut it. You need to delve a little deeper. Running with the last two examples, it’d be more “high school students who are highly active on social media” or “young people frustrated with their experience of the political system”. Specificity! It’s your friend.  

Context: To quote the NESA glossary, context is “the range of personal, social, historical, cultural and workplace conditions in which a text is responded to and composed.” Replace “text” with “major work”, focus on “composed”, and you’ve got the gist. You need to be aware of your context (how your MW links to Advanced and Extension, for example) AND situate your MW in its context, e.g. a critical response on female journalists in WWII would require some knowledge of wartime reporting, government propaganda, censorship, attitudes towards women in journalism, etc.  

Form: Most obviously, what is your form? And why have you chosen it? I’m not sure as to how detailed an answer teachers expect from the second question, but you should have some idea beyond “I like it.” This is where tying form to the other elements becomes important. What makes your form the most appropriate for your concept, purpose, and audience? 

Putting it all together

Running through every permutation of purpose, audience, context and form would take far too long, so I’m going to limit this section to the relationships I personally find to be the most important. Please note that I’ve chosen to pair the elements for simplicity’s sake, but they all feed back into and overlap with one another.  

Form and audience

Let’s say your major is a short story. Your intended audience would obviously not be film critics or even people who enjoy watching films. In other words, your intended audience should be directly related to your chosen form.

But there should also be a consideration of how your concept factors in: for example, why did you choose poetry to explore environmental activism on climate change? It could be because poetry is a strongly emotive form, and climate change is an issue that rouses great passion in your intended audience of green activists seeking new, culturally relevant ways to express their concerns around the consequences of failure to act on this issue.

(Btw there’s no shame in saying that you chose a form because it means a great deal to you personally! Familiarity with and fondness for a particular form is a perfectly legit reason to choose it. Just that it can’t be the only reason.) 

(I pulled that poetry/climate change example from thin air, but turns out it’s a real thing.)

Audience and purpose

Your understanding of one is shaped by the other, the why of your MW informing the who and vice versa. Just as you wouldn’t buy someone a gift you know they’ll absolutely hate, you wouldn’t create a MW for an audience unlikely to appreciate it.

Say your major aims to deconstruct the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope in science fiction film and encourage change in the way women are represented in this genre. Film critics and/or cultural studies academics might be interested, but they’re not in the best position to push for change. A better fit would be, say, directors and producers working in the sci-fi genre who are interested in subversive or transformative gender narratives.

Form obviously plays a part here too, since you may have decided a podcast is the best way to reach your affluent and online audience.     

Form and purpose

Why is your form best suited to doing the thing you want your MW to do? Or to quote from the NESA description of the Major Work: “The form of the Major Work must be chosen deliberately to contribute to the authenticity, originality and overall conceptual purpose of the work.”

To go with my sci-fi example from above, deconstructions of popular tropes are very well-suited to critical responses (and academic audiences). But as I noted, the purpose of encouraging change in the film industry demands a more visible platform that you’d get with a podcast. If, however, you were more interested in deconstruction-through-satire, a short story or short film would be the better choice.

Acknowledgement of the sources you have used in developing the proposal and inquiry question

It should be self-evident, but bears spelling out in full: cite specific sources. “I read an interesting article online” isn’t as strong as “I read an Atlantic article about how teenagers use Instagram to debate the news, which informed my thinking about the ability of social media to polarise, and the evolution of news consumption among young people.” Let the extent of your independent investigation shine! Show off the knowledge you’ve accumulated! Own your research, basically. (Also ironic in that you’re acknowledging other people’s work, but you get what I mean.)

It wouldn’t hurt to link those specific sources to your proposal and inquiry question. I don’t know how thoroughly you’ll be expected to explain those links, but something like the following would be a decent example: “This Atlantic article helped to narrow the scope of my inquiry question about the impact of social media on news-gathering behaviour to young people, instead of everyone.” The key thing is to at least mention various sources and show the teachers you’ve actually been doing relevant research.

Action plan outline, including timeline

Hint: structure your plan in relation to the composition process. Obviously, the particulars are going to be specific to your major. But be realistic in your planning. Try to strike a balance between micromanagement and no time management at all: while you don’t strictly need to break the entire EE2 course up into minuscule steps like “week two: write the opening scene”, it’s also not helpful to say you’ll tackle the entire investigating stage in January. To reiterate: the points under each stage of the composition process provide a good guide for your action plan.

Be aware of your own and others’ limits too! If you know you’re a serial procrastinator, can you really crank out a first draft in three weeks? Will you be able to secure feedback from your learning community in the week before an assessment block? You also need to account for any other Major Works you’ve got and remember the workload from your other subjects. How will you fit EE2 around them? There’s nothing wrong in keeping your timeline tight, a kind of platonic ideal to which you aspire, but it shouldn’t be so unrealistic as to be impossible.  

I say it in my guide to the composition process, but remember that your action plan will likely change throughout the year. Life happens! Something might happen in your personal life; you could come down with the flu; maybe a friend is late in getting their feedback to you, and you find yourself falling behind schedule. It’s not the end of the world. You can adjust your action plan as you go - working around obstacles is part and parcel of EE2.  

References to your journal to assist in explaining choices made and research completed

You should be able to point to specific entries in your journal to explain why you made a decision, which is a good time to remind you to keep your journal up to date!! Back-filling entries is a pain but also procedurally unsound, since you can’t return to your state of mind and exact train of thought when you made a decision.

Preparing for the Viva

You’ll be given the questions 15 minutes beforehand, but that doesn’t mean you can’t prepare. Make sure you are familiar with and prepared to discuss your major’s concept, form, purpose, audience and context (particularly links to Advanced and Extension coursework).

If you’re still in doubt, the old English Extension 2 Support Document includes a handy list of starting questions, a sample of which I’ve copied below:

Concept

What concept have you developed for your Major Work? Describe it.

Why are you interested in this concept?

What are your sources of inspiration?

How is your concept an extension of the knowledge, understanding and skills developed in English (Advanced) and (Extension) courses?

Purpose

What are you aiming to achieve during the Extension 2 course?

How are you planning to achieve this purpose?

Form

Have you decided on the form in which you would like to compose?

Why have you chosen this particular form?

Intended Audience

Who is the target audience of your work and why?

The questions you answer in the Viva will be different and/or tailored to your MW specifically, but the list above broadly covers the things you’ll be asked. You don’t need to write an entire essay in response to each question; dot points are fine. The Viva is not a speech, so your language doesn’t need to be as formal.  

Practice, practice, practice

If you’re worried or anxious about fronting up before a panel, I recommend doing a practice run with a close friend. Grab your notes, MW journal, a stopwatch, and someone you trust, then get them to pitch you the list of questions you’ve prepared for. Use the stopwatch to keep yourself within 15-20 minutes. Practicing will build your confidence and familiarity with your notes, as well as help you cut down on any waffle you might be inclined to.    

During the Viva

The preparation is one thing, communicating what you’ve prepared to the panel is another. Of course, a lot depends on who the teachers are, how comfortable you are with them, your own confidence levels, etc. I can’t really help you there. All I can suggest is that you try to convey your interest and enthusiasm to the panel. It’s your project, and you want it to succeed. Channel some of that passion into the way you present your MW. You’re pretty much stopping short of grabbing each teacher by their lapels and yelling LOOK AT THIS FANTASTIC IDEA I HAVE.

The teachers will ask you questions related specifically to your MW, ones which are spontaneous and based on their understanding of your MW as you’ve presented it to them in the Viva. Again, try not to stress. The teachers are not looking for ways to trip you up, they’re helping you to think about the direction your MW could take. One of the most important things you’ll learn from the EE2 course that isn’t mentioned in the learning outcomes is taking criticism. It’s about being able to accept (reasonable) critique of your work and striving to improve those areas, as well as exercising control over your creative process, i.e. not taking absolutely every single suggestion put forward unless you truly believe they’ll all benefit you.    

Post-Viva

When you get your marks back there should be comments as well, like suggestions on what you could be reading, or questions that might help you orientate the direction of your MW. Take these on board, and discuss them with your English teacher(s) as soon as possible. The assessment tasks are certainly there to assess you, but they’re also ways to keep you on track and help you to make your MW better. (Keep in mind what I mentioned above about taking criticism/feedback.)

[lovewomanshate]

Emma Watson and her feminist movement is a complete joke, with a shitty punchline.

I found an article on the interwebs of which I will be referring to, I’ll link it for those who wish to read it themselves or to see that I didn’t make this crap up.

https://www.politifact.com/global-news/statements/2016/mar/15/emma-watson/emma-watson-more-lives-are-lost-due-gender-discrim/

Emma Watson opens with the claim that “more lives are lost due to gender discrimination than in all 20th century wars”, this is already lacking information, okay we understand that you are referring to the wars of the 20th century, but what’s the range of years for gender discrimination deaths?  None is given, is she referring to the last 10 years?  100?  If she’s referring to all time then hell yeah that’d be accurate, no contest, and it also wouldn’t be groundbreaking information.  We need an actual time range on both points of which she’ll be referencing here.

I’m going to skip over questioning why exactly an actress’s opinion in politics is exactly important or necessary, just fyi.

She later says

"There are now 101.3 men to every 100 women on the planet. So women are no longer half of humanity," “ More lives are lost from violence against women, sex-selective abortion, female infanticide, suicide, egregious maternal mortality, and other sex-linked causes than were lost during all of the wars and civil strife of 20th century.’ "

okay we’re running into more problems here, lets go through what exactly she’s counting to make this claim.  

“violence against women” believe it or not, isn’t always targeted or because of gender, sometimes it’s just “violence”, counting violence in it’s entirety when woman are affected by is far from accurate, just because a woman faces violence, it doesn’t make it violence against women.  Of course some of these are motivated by gender, but it’s incredibly outrageous to claim all are.  

Next we have sex-selective abortion, I’m going to admit that this is a fairly justified claim, it’s a shame that it is as ingrained into some cultures as it is, and I’m as against it as anyone else.

Female infanticide is nearly the same thing, but again it comes down to a cruel culture in some areas of the world.

Suicide? No, this isn’t a gender related issue, this is an issue.  Wanting to end your own life out of despair, self loathing, or whatever the reason may be, is far from a gender related issue.  If you want to make it a gender related issue, consider the fact that males die by suicide 3.53x more often than women (source: https://afsp.org/about-suicide/suicide-statistics/ ) , so why is only female suicide the issue?  If you think the reason for female suicide is exclusively a gender related issue, or that suicide itself is a gender related issue, promptly go fuck yourself.

Next we have “egregious” maternal mortality.  Again, this is an issue, for those who don’t know, it’s women dying in the act of giving birth basically.  But is this by the fault of men?  Is this “discrimination”? No, this is nature, should we actively try to lower the mortality rate of giving birth?  Certainly, but again, not a case of “gender discrimination”, as Watson calls it.

The rest is referred to as “other sex-linked causes”, which concerns me, as several of the already stated examples are anything but “sex-linked causes”.  I would also like to bring back up the fact that Watson still hasn’t given a time frame of which she is counting the deaths of these sex-linked deaths, we still don’t know the starting point of which will determine these numbers.

"So from this perspective," she continued, "The greatest security dilemma then is systematic, social devaluation of female life. I’d never come across a statistic like this. I had not understood that we were literally affecting the balance of the population of the world."

Ahhh the good ol’ “social devaluation of female life”, ya know the saying, “if the ship is sinking, people with penises and children first”, wait, I think I have that wrong.  What about the fact that we exclusively have women in the war draft here in America?  Wait, it’s the opposite?  You mean only men can be drafted from their homes and families in times of war?  Oh darn, what about the occupational deaths of women working dangerously in the coal mines and heavy machinery?  What?! You’re telling me men die about 12x more in the workplace? ( https://www.statista.com/statistics/187127/number-of-occupational-injury-deaths-in-the-us-by-gender-since-2003/)   Damn, if only men would stop dying so much so I could back up this claim...

“Looking at the available data, Watson has a point that the devaluation of female life leads to a staggering amount of lost lives. However, it’s not clear that those lost lives are higher than the number of war and conflict deaths in the 20th century. The numbers are comparable, but some estimates find the number of war deaths as slightly higher. “ ( this comes from the article itself, not Watson)

Okay so we’re finding out halfway through the article that the main claim isn’t even proven or has passed through peer review? Well, shit.

“ She then compared that number to the number of "missing women." This concept, developed by Nobel-winning economist and philosopher Amartya Sen in 1990s, uses abnormal male-to-female ratios to determine how many women would be alive in a specific year or time period if they weren’t aborted, neglected or victims of inequality. “

Okay so the numbers she are using are from population differences?  Ever heard of deviation?  Believe it or not, if you roll a dice 100 times, it’s not always going to land on an even number 50 times, which would heavily effect these numbers.  Any place that lost that dice roll, which resulted in a higher male population, is now having the population difference being added to Watson’s number count, but the places where they break even or have a higher female population such as Bulgaria, Cambodia, The Bahamas, Armenia, Barbuda, Argentina, etc, are just swept under the rug and irrelevant in the data used.

“For example, in 2005, the sex ratio in India was 107.5 males per 100 females. The normal sex ratio for a stable population is about 98 to 100.3 males per 100 females. (Women tend to live longer under equal circumstances.)

This means that there was a 6.7 percent to 9 percent shortfall in India’s female population, equal to roughly 36 million to 49 million missing women.

Hudson used the UN Population Fund’s estimate of 163 million missing women in Asia in 2005 — 10 million more than lives lost to 20th century conflicts.”

Ahh good ol 2005 statistics, ( which that UN Population Fund’s estimate is using as well btw)  Though this is where I agree that there is a problem, a 7% deviation obviously isn’t normal, and again this comes down to a culture where women are unfortunately facing sex-selective abortion, this is an actual decent example of discrimination by gender within an area, but why not focus your efforts in places such as this where the numbers are at their most severe?  Why focus on first world countries where the problem is substantially lower, if there at all?  My personal theory is that it is because these areas don’t directly affect those of which are demanding change, I believe feminists are using these areas as examples to prove that there is a problem... but pretending these issues are present in other areas as well... such as where they live... which isn’t where they are citing their data from.

“‘There are more missing women today than died in the two World Wars of the 20th century,’ said Stephan Klasen, a professor of development economics at the University of Göttingen.”

Well no shit, women didn’t serve as much in these wars, or at least in combat, most of these deaths were likely women being caught in the crossfire such as Pearl Habor, Nagasaki, Hiroshima, and starvation in the USSR, China, Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines and India. According to Wikipedia ( which I try to avoid using as a source, but alas it is more difficult to find these numbers than I thought) there were only 543 American female war-related casualties despite there being 400,000 who served. ( remember, serving does NOT mean that they were put on the line of fire, or in combat, production and medical roles exist.)

Overall Emma Watson should stick to play Hermione, perhaps she can find a spell that gives her a decent argument.  Maybe one that would survive peer review?

-Mod Tree Shark

[laundryandtaxes]

Not trying to start gender drama but what do you think of neuroscience studies determining that the hypothalamus dictates our gender identity and that it is actually something we are born with. Because I keep getting linked to articles stating that this part of the brain that typically helps determine our sexuality, also dictates whether or not someone will experience gender dysphoria with no influence of environmental factors.

One word: bullshit! No, for a real answer, for one thing that would literally be impossible to determine except under impossibly controlled circumstances (comparing those of two people, one of whom turned out to identify as trans later and one of whom didn't, under social circumstances in which they weren't then socialized with the intention of turning them into cishet adults of either gender as children, and then under circumstances where nobody tells then what men and women are supposed to do, and then under circumstances where there are no benefits to being a man as opposed to a woman socially and materially) so I am positive the science behind any claim like that is procedurally weak and for another, it makes no sense at a basic ontological level- how could our bodies determine something that does not exist in nature like gender, that is as manmade and artificial as clothing? It's like saying some part of our brains determines whether we will be politically conservative or not at birth or what kinds of clothes we will wear when, of course, our bodies are not capable of -knowing- anything in a meaningful sense on their own, especially not things that are entirely about a set of social relations, which is what gender is functionally. There's just an obnoxious push on the part of lots of people to naturalize gender identity or gendered relations from a lot of actors. Certain radfems who are unable to accept that transness is one of many ways of conceptualizing the self, and that there is literally no "truth" to be discovered about who is really x gender because there is no gender that exists before politics, but wish to maintain some level of pity for trans people and therefore categorize them as mentally ill rather than as in disagreement over how gender works or what gender means. Certain sections of liberal trans thinkers who wish to claim their legitimacy, or their allowance to do as they wish with their bodies, through a prepolitical naturalness, through any number of things like brain sex, which btw has long been discarded as a valid way of understanding gender/sex by almost all of the most serious trans theorists working, writing, and thinking about gender. Both are nonsensical and rely on some objective truth about what we REALLY are in a gendered sense when that objective truth literally does not exist, or at least there has never been any meaningful proof of it.