Overview

As the semester is closing and I reflected on this course, I realized how much I have learned about women globally. Each week we examined how women were affected by their location physically and socially. As a woman, it was very interesting to see a plethora of resources that were highlighting women experiences and accomplishments. This class exposed me too much more artwork, literature, and ideas that women created themselves. It helped me think much more about my role as a woman in society. Expect to learn a lot about women in many different settings, from a variety of cultures, with different backgrounds that express their oppression in a plethora of outlets. It is a class you will learn more about the truth of society than one will realize. I have learned a lot about women globally and think about it in comparison to the lives women have here.

Looking back on all of my blogs, the most common idea is how women expressed themselves from the conditions of oppression they lived through. We analyzed literature, films, and artwork that allowed women to have a voice and an outlet from being the second best to men all over the world. Each piece we looked at brought awareness to different issues women are faced with. The film Boys Don’t Cry illustrated the pain and inner conflict that transgender individual’s to find their comfortable sexual identity. Not many people treated Brandon the same when they found out he was a transgender. It also gives you an inside look of the rural working class in Nebraska.

This class brought light to the amount of power men have in most societies. We started off the course with watching the documentary, Killing Us Softly that illustrates how the entertainment world expects women to be perfect, live up to standards that are unachievable. American women have a lot of freedom but are still looked at as second fiddle to men. America’s society has an underrated male dominance within society. Not only was Frida Kahlo’s disability and the physical pain of her impairment but also being a women going through the pains of love molded her paintings. Mexican women used quilts to depict their worries of immigration and their hopes to live the American Dream. Artwork can speak for its self and tell so much simply through a picture. 

I enjoyed the fact that we had to go to a museum, the National Museum of Women’s Art in Washington, DC where you saw the artwork up close and in real life setting in comparison to on the computer and less detailed. The content of our in class lectures were always a thought provoking discussion. When we discussed the issues of the Iraqi war from the novel Baghdad Burning, we would discuss the event of 9/11 and how that one-day was like everyday in Iraq. When we were asked to replicate Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, I was brought out of my comfort zone and went with the shock value of feminism. I learned much more than expected in this class and I would take this class if I could all over again. 

Baghdad Burning

The novel Baghdad Burning is the story through the eyes of a 24-year-old blogger from Iraq who goes by the anonymous name, Riverbend. She writes blogs about everyday life occurrences, which are very different from America when there is a war going on in your backyard.  Riverbend was raised several years aboard as a child and never stop studying English when she moved back to Baghdad. Reading the novel through a woman’s perspective for this experience is very unique for this story because as a woman, you tend to notice many more details and see the different emotions others go through.  She explains in detail the trauma that Iraq goes through during the war with America. It is shocking to realize that while we were off living our lives almost forgetting about the war while people in Iraq were going through such grueling circumstances and had their world turned upside down. In Iraq, electricity was scarce forcing her family to have one generator for 5 houses, the area was going through a drought, and people were constantly living in fear. Not only were the men fighting, women and children were being dragged out of their homes where their possessions would be burnt or damaged. Many people are dragged from their home or school and are never found again; they just disappear. Others are caught in the causalities of bombs or guns because they live in a warzone. Fear is constantly present instilled in every Iraqi of the unknown. Riverbend repeatedly describes the way certain women are handling this war. She speaks of women who have lost someone to have eyes of sorrow or vague and lifeless look in her gaze. Her blogs just prove that it is more than a war to these people it is tearing apart and ending their families. A woman lost her children and husband and when Riverbend looked at her she was ¼ of a person.  Riverbend explains the holiday, Eid, which is the ending of the fast of Ramadan. The purpose of the holiday is to bring the family together which they do to celebrate but they are scared to be seen in a large group because they could be mistaken for a terrorist group.  The war was affecting family traditions

The president of America, George W. Bush apparently came to visit Iraq for approximately two hours and he made it seem as if he liberated Iraq. When Bush came to Iraq, his arrival trumped the story on how two girls were killed allegedly by American soldiers. Riverbend showed how there were two different stories the ones that Iraq believed happened and the Americans trying to prove they were not blame for this casualty. It made me question all the information we got from the news over the years about what was going on in Iraq during the war.  Most people picture the detained Iraqis to be men in 30s or 40s but there are women who get dragged off to prison as well as their children. There is this stereotype in other coutnries heads that it is just the men that are being tortured by the hostility but it is everyone. Compared to what I thought at the time of this war was not the same idea I was getting from this blog. The news was creating a different image of how the war was impacting the people of Iraq but Riverbend’s blog gives a new incite to how a person from Iraq views the circumstances and the realities of what was going on. I heard about many of the causualities but was  unaware of how taxing and large they were but there were also many that were not reported.

Something that put the entire circumstance into perspective was when Riverbend said, “ we started the year of 2004 preparing for war while other countries were making their lists of resolutions” (180). The war changed their lives while the rest of the world was living in a fantasy that all was well in the world.  It has held them back from moving on from their life and developing into the person the strive to be. Riverbend stopped keeping track of time when the war started in March.  She started to view war as, “its not that you no longer feel rage or sadness, it just becomes a part of life and you grow to expect it like you expect rain in March and sun in June” (181). Because of this war not only was Iraq in a financial crisis; there were ideas that Iraq would be separated into several different sections based on ethnicity and religion.

The closing pages are about 9/11 and how in Iraq this occurrence happens on at least a monthly basis.  How we felt using the airports after 9/11 is how the Iraqi people felt doing anything normal.  Weddings, stores, resturants, and many everyday places were used as the target. They live in a land of no safety with a ton of fear.