blog 5

After reading the book Autobiography of a Face written by Lucy Greatly, I have a better understanding about the troubles faced by a disable female, and how she could get support to conquer them.

First, it is known that to cure the disability requires a large amount of money to pay for the fees of variety of surgeries, medicines, and treatments. So that would form a serious burden to the patient’s family. The people in upper class and the rich could afford them easily while the one in lower class and the poor could not. As a result, the disabled patients in upper class and rich families could get better treatment and have more opportunities to be healed and the ones in lower class and poor families could not. However, the lives should equal, so the government should make a difference to help the poor disables. They should get financial aids and more welfare from insurance, especially the female disables. And the support from the government and society could bring better treatment to the disables, and make the lives equal among all the classes.

Second, the disabled females rely on the care from their family more than common such as Lucy. As described in the book, “my father would stop by after work to say hello when he wasn’t working too late, while my mother, who hated driving into the city, came in less frequently. Some of the other visiting parents, the ones who came in every day, felt sorry for my lack of visitors and sneaked me contraband food items” (Greatly 38). That shows Lucy really cares about the visit of her parents and hope they could come more frequently. As a disabled female, Lucy is lack of the sense of safety, so she is easy to feel she has been abandoned by the family. So the parents of disabled female should offer more attention to their children, more time to accompany with them and give them support, courage and care in both their physical and mental. The support and love from their own family could help the disabled females quite a lot.

Third, the disabled females have to face some own problems and no one could suffer the pain instead of them. They have to suffer the pain from every treatment, bear the sadness from the discrimination, the laughter and fear at their disabled part of body, such as Lucy’s jaw, and the difficulties to get a job or a sweetheart. If they could not face these difficulties with a proper and healthy attitude, they would be destroyed by serious psychological problems. And the only way to solve it is to have a strong heart. In the book, Lucy said, “One had to be good. One must never complain or struggle. One must never, under any circumstances, show fear and, prime directive above all, one must never, ever cry” (Greatly 30). Those words taught her to be tough with the pain in the future such as the surgeries, the fear about death, and the fear from others towards her jaw. So then she was able to live strongly and had a nice attitude towards her bitter life.

In a nutshell, a disabled female should be provided the financial aid from the government and the love from her family, and the most important one, is the strength from her own heart. Sometimes, the disability in mental is more terrible than the one in physical, so one could be disabled in physical, but could never be disabled in mental.

blog 4

After I have read a couple of feminist autobiographies in graphic memoir, I am impressed deeply by the pros and cons of this genre to tell stories.

First, one of the unique benefits of graphic memoir which impresses me most is that it could capture readers’ interest more easily than entirely textual autobiographies. For instance, in the book Persepolis, when the author talks about the repulsion from the girls about their veils in the beginning of the story, she uses an amusing picture full of the girls playing with the veils, such as “Execution in the name of freedom””Ooh! I’m the monster of darkness””Giddyap” (Satrapi 3). This picture could reflect the girls’ revolt against the oppression from their society and religion more vividly than just one or two textual sentence to describe that. So the readers’ attention could be easily drawn to this point and understand what kind of oppression the girls suffering from the religion better.

Second, there is also an obvious disadvantage of the graphic memoir for it is easy to lead the readers to misunderstand the writer’s true idea. From the book Persepolis, as the author describes, “At school, they lined us up twice a day to mourn the war dead. They put on funeral marches, and we had to beat our breasts” (Satrapi 95) with a big picture about the children beating their breasts, I find the demeanor of the children’s faces are so obscure that I failed to distinguish the real emotion they have about this activity. Until later in the book the heroine’s mother spoke out that “So they can hit themselves twice a day” (Satrapi 98), I understand that the children felt unhappy and angry with this activity instead of the mourn for the war dead and this is another kind of oppression of girls from the school and religion. It is known that the graphic memoir is not as specific as direct words, so there is quite a large challenge to make the readers understand the author’s real meaning correctly.

However, this genre is quite important for feminist autobiography because the graphic memoir could raise the stronger emotional support from the readers than entire text. At the end of the book Persepolis, when the heroine is leaving, it is said “I turned around to see them one last time. It would have been better to just go” (Satrapi 153). And the picture is her mother fainted in her father’s arms, with their sad demeanor. The words and picture get united perfectly and impressed the readers deeply. It raises the readers’ same emotion as the writer and the readers’ own experience could be recalled by seeing that. So the readers could understand the author’s thoughts and experience deeper, according to their same emotions drawn by the pictures.

Blog 3

It could not be denied that one of the most main purposes of feminism is to set free of the large group of female. And this kind of “freedom” could be defined into two parts: the physical freedom and the emotional freedom.

To get the physical freedom, a woman must have an independent economic situation so that she does not need to rely on others and could go anywhere if she wants.  As illustrated in “Homophobia: A Weapon on Sexism”, “when battered women tell why they stayed with a batterer or why they returned to a batterer, over and over they say it was because they could not support themselves and their children financially, they had no skills for jobs, they could not get housing, transportation, medical care for their children” (Pharr 29), we could know that if women do not have the economic status strong enough to support them and their children, they could not leave their battering husband no matter how they want to do that. So it is impossible for a woman who could not live on herself to be free and independent physically. She must live with someone else even if she does not like that.

And to get the emotional freedom, a woman must possess the sense of equal and free in her mind which could not be achieved from others. In the book “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” written by Harriet Jacobs, the first love story of the heroin Linda is a good example. Even though Linda was a slave, she still had the normal emotions as a free person. She fell in love with a free man, which seemed to be impossible in that situation, but that reflected the sense of free and equal hidden in her heart. Through the whole chapter seven (Jacobs 480), it fulfills the troubles and difficulties the two lovers had to be faced with and their struggles. The heroin knew that if she was married with her lover, she “could not still get off the control of her master” (Jacobs 486). What’s more, if they had children, the poor kids would “follow their mother’s fate” (Jacobs 486). Even though, the heroin still kept struggling with the cruel facts and had a horrible quarrel with her master, but she failed at last. During her struggling for her love and getting united with her lover, Linda’s spirit to be free and the will of enjoy the love as normal people has been strongly represented. Even if she was a slave, she still had the normal love and hate as an independent person, which had set her heart free at first and became the motivate power for her to struggle for her happiness. So if a woman wants to get the emotional free, she must free her heart with the spirit of equal, which could make her emotion beyond the gender, race, status, sexual orientation and something like that.

So in a nutshell, the independence of economic situation is necessary for a woman to get the physical freedom while the free and equal sense with the heart is essential for a woman to achieve the emotional freedom, and that is what the feminism kept working for during so many years.

Blog 2

In the past, my definition of autobiography used to be a true and complete representation of the real life of the author, just like a realistic narrative film to represent the whole life experience of the author to the readers. But, Scott’s “Experience” has changed my notion of autography to be a polished or embellished work piece for experience is not equal to truth. Because what the authors wrote was what they felt, thought and saw, the real facts have been mixed and polished by their own opinion. And not every specific part of their life was presented in the autobiography. So the autobiography is not as true, complete, and unchanged as I used to think.

Now that the autobiography has been embellished by the author, this fact forms the one of the reasons why people read autobiography to some extent. People who read the autography are interested and care about the author, so they are curious about not only the story written in the autography, but also the information of the author hidden behind the autography. The very information, forms the very autography for the identity, gender, religion, race, experience and something like that have form the author’s philosophy, world view, sense of worth and ideology which the author used to us a different life representation of his/her own. That means a special identity has formed a special angle of view such as women, black man, and homosexual. In “A Tool Kit” written by Smith& Watson, we know that an autobiography has a strong relationship with  “authorship and historical moment” (Smith& Watson 165), “the history of reading publics” (Smith& Watson 167) and “identity” (Smith& Watson 168). So we could get conclusion that one of the reasons people read autobiography is that they wonder the effect on the autobiography of the authors’ gender, race, sex orientation and so on.

What’s more, the “cracks” formed by the special identity of the authors have also offered the opportunities for the feminist theorists. Through these “cracks”, the feminist theorist could discover the historical background, the special experience, and the contradictions of the author. The more they learn from the author, the more they deal with the feminism. That’s why the feminist theorist could find opportunity in the “cracks” of the autobiographical works.

blog 1

In my opinion, the original definition of feminism that is “a belief in equal rights, and taking a stand against discrimination based on gender and also race, ethnicity, religion and sexual orientation” is not complete enough. According to my own comprehension of feminism, I think it should take some consideration about the relationship between the economic status and sexism. So, I define feminism as “a belief in equal rights, and women should have independent and equal economic status, and taking a stand against discrimination based on gender and also race, ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation”, which is based on the original one and my own understanding.

And some examples in the readings have informed my definition. First, women lost their freedom and rely on men for their economic situation is not independent. As illustrated in “Homophobia: A Weapon on Sexism”, “when battered women tell why they stayed with a batterer or why they returned to a batterer, over and over they say it was because they could not support themselves and their children financially, they had no skills for jobs, they could not get housing, transportation, medical care for their children” (Pharr 29), we could find that women did not leave their husbands even suffering from home violence because they do not have the economic status strong enough to support them and their children. And this is a significant reason of why women could not evade the home violence efficiently: they could not live on themselves.

Second, economics is the root cause of sexism. “Men profit not only from women’s unpaid work in the home but from our underpaid work within horizontal female segregation” (Pharr 30) tells us that women have been suffering unequal treatments in both housework and job work for their work and payment are not in balance. So, that is another significant part to support that the definition of feminist should contain the importance of economic independence of women.

Third, economics is also the underlying, driving force that keeps all the oppressions in place (Pharr 31). Described in the same paragraph (Pharr 31), sexism and racism are intersected as women and people in color both consist the bottom of the economic system in United States as unpaid or low-paid workers. So we could know that unfair economics is not only significant in oppressions of gender, but also significant in race.

In a nutshell, the equal and independent economic status should be considered in the definition of feminism for it stands for the freedom to get away from battering, the ability to live on self, the balance between work and payment, and the power against sexism and racism.