tbarryfigu's blog

Please find the works of Elizabeth Cantanese, Sarah Lindberg, Gail Chavenelle, and myself in our attempts to illustrate feminism. We are two alum and two current students, each with our own account of what it means to be a feminist in today's world.

In reaction to each piece, please do one of two things: Either (a) compose a list of 5 individual words/piece which describe the work or the feeling emotion that they inspire OR (b) write a few sentences describing the illustrated definitions of feminism. If you were to look up feminism in the dictionary and find these paintings/sculptures, what would you take away?

 When I close my eyes and think “feminism,” I don’t think as a feminist; That is to say, I don’t close my eyes and think as I did before. Instead, I see color, texture, and light. I see the physical materialization of a movement, of a driving and ever-present force. The struggle to make sense of these colors and textures is one that I feel significantly shapes my definition of the summation of values held by feminists all over the world. I find that I cannot separate thoughts of past and current female oppression from the bright flashes of red gritty paint that manifest themselves in my mind’s eye. I cannot read a text about identity and womanhood without sculpting the female identity in my thoughts.

Tamarinda Barry Figueroa

Critical Feminist Studies

Anne Dalke

10/16/07

Illustrating Feminism

The world that we live in is

separated by more than just oceans, rivers,

 mountain ranges and borderlines.

The world that we live in is

The individual’s search for identity in a world where society dictates the implementation of common generalizations is peculiar, as the strong hand of scientific opposition negates the importance of personality with regards to members of the human race. The population is widely accepted as the sole unit of biological evolution, and yet, humans all over the world are thought to slowly evolve as they change the manner of their ways in one distinct direction. This evolution, which in literature, is typically represented by the movement of one toward or away from “goodness,” cannot take place unless that individual obtains a persona capable of definition. This personality, immune to both duplication and recycling, is as important a possession to that person as any secular item used to help define it. With this in mind, it is no surprise that “we refuse to be each other,” as our sense of individuality justifies our actions and consequent evolution over time (Smith, 2). Questions remain, however, as we negate the significance of DNA sequencing, which both supports the idea of inimitability and disregards small-scale evolution. Is any given human persona truly capable of definition, given the limiting context of language? Can one truly be unique if general categorizations like race and class prevail as the most common methods of identification?

Given the hierarchical, self-important outlook of human-kind on existence, it is no surprise that most regard ethical knowledge as a “marvelous perspective that we and no other creatures have” (Dennett, 468). Such a statement may seem well-founded, as ethics are derived from our own ideas of human morality and the consequent rules established in their wake. Yet, it is difficult to discern just how this societal construct came into existence. In a world where the ends tend to justify the means, how can we explain the evolution of human morality and the resultant negation of our animalistic instincts?

Tamarinda Barry Figueroa

 Stories of Evolution & Visa Versa

Professor Anne Dalke

02/16/06