Epiphany

My mother is a slight hoarder. Not like the kind that you would see on the shows on TV, but she does keep WAY more than we need in the house. We have boxes in the basement of things that haven't been unpacked since we moved into the house ten years ago. I used to not understand why we would keep things we haven't used in so long (we won't use them again!), until I understood where this compulsion to keep things came from.

My mother's family grew up pretty well-off. They weren't rich by any means, but they were definitely comfortable. My grandparents are both second-generation Americans, so they were raised to be penny-pinchers and make things last. My grandmother is the thriftiest woman I know: she even sends me coupons in the mail that she won't use. My mother didn't experience poverty until she had my sister at the age of 17. While raising a child at such a young age was a hard enough task on its own, my sister's father left them both shortly after. Being a single, working mother is expensive, and my mother was pretty poor.After meeting my father, getting married, and years of both of them working, we are financially comfortable. I never had to worry about my basic needs being met as a child, and didn't ever feel richer or poorer than the other kids at school.

Knowing all of this makes me worry that I will follow the same cycle. It's a bit different for me as I'm going to college and not having a child, so I don't have those kinds of expenses and stressors that my mother had. But I see the obsessive thriftiness of my mother in little things that I do.

And in food.

"The Elephant and the Ice Cream" really made me come to this realization. I have the same relationship with food as Khazzoom has, and it's because of the hardships that my mother went through. I wouldn't classify it as a food addiction, but I am definitely a member of the clean plate club. I was trained to be. My parents spent money and time buying and preparing meals, so I had better have eaten all of them. Portions are hard for me to control, because I was always given heaping amounts and told to eat them all up. And I was always rewarded when I did this, rewarded by dessert. Maybe that's why I eat when I'm stressed or down, it feels rewarding. I don't have too much of a problem with my body image, I just think it's incredibly interesting that my eating habits come from so much of a deeper origin.

What would your name be?

Last night, I went to a workshop presented by Robyn Ochs on gender. It was so reminiscent of what we've been talking about in class and reading about in My Gender Workbook. Gender is something we are bombarded with every day, and in a lot of cases gender violations are more important than the safety of others. Robyn gave a sad statistic collected from a survey of over 6,000 transgender students, staff, faculty, and administration in colleges and universities across the nation. In this response, about a third responded that they fear for their physical safety in their place of work/education. Fear for their physical safety because of the way they express their gender. Is that not the saddest thing that you've heard in a while?
I've never been afraid that because I'm wearing makeup, I'll get beat up. It's not the same for everyone though.
Robyn had us think about a very interesting predicament. Imagine your best male friend revealed to you that he feels trapped in his own body because he is really a woman with male packaging. He tells you that he is going to start dressing as a woman, and start the process of hormonal treatments to become a woman. How would your parents react? Your friends? How would you feel walking across campus with her? As you can imagine, this was a heavy topic for the whole room to ponder. For me, it wasn't heavy because I realized I could no longer be this person's friend in the same capacity; that just isn't the case. It was because I knew that I would make it my personal responsibility to protect this person, and that attacks on them would be attacks on me too. It would be really hard for both of us. One of my friends at the workshop tried to alleviate the somberness by telling everyone he would want to know what her name would be.
Our names represent us as individuals and as part of many groups as well. My name is Elizabeth Brink, which represents  me as a person. It also represents me as a part of my family, a Brink. It indicates that I am a female and of Scandinavian origin. Some names can be identified as "Jewish", "black", "Hispanic", "Catholic", etc. Can you imagine changing your name to indicate something completely different than what you've been identified as? Calling myself Billy just for shits and giggles would be odd to my parents, but changing to that name because I identify with that gender would be downright heartbreaking to them.
Putting myself in that situation helped me realize how terrifying our social construction of gender and how it is to be expressed and by whom it is to be expressed can be.
If you changed what society labeled you as, what would your name be?

Flawless Flaws

The one thing that stuck out to me the most in doing this week's readings was the value of imperfection. I'm a sociology minor, so I instantly saw this as the functionality of imperfection. There are pros and cons to our abnormalities, and sometimes these functions are easier to see than other times.

In "Strip!", Diana Courvant discusses the tribulations of undergoing the sex-change process from start to finish. She focuses on a pivotal memory during the awkward in-between phase of having breasts but also having male genitalia, and overcoming the fear of herself by stripping in front of a crowd of 90-100 people at a conference. Although she was uncomfortable with these parts of her body, showing them off to the masses made her completely comfortable with her body. They were both a stressor and a stress relief: dysfunctional and functional at the same time.

My favorite line in "Barbie-Q" by Sandra Cisneros reads "So what if our Barbies smell like smoke when you hold them up to your nose even after you wash and wash and wash them. And if the prettiest doll...has a left foot that's melted a little - so? If you dress her in her new 'Prom Pinks' outfit, satin splendor with matching coat, gold belt, clutch, and hair bow included, so long as you don't lift her dress, right? - who's to know." The story refers constantly to the speaker and her friend not being able to afford the brand new Barbies and striking gold by finding damaged Barbies for cheaper. This reminds me a bit of the Beauty Myth: perfection, just like the perfect Barbies, is only available to those who can afford it. Imperfection is functional in its availability to the masses, and if one takes the attitude of "so what?", then "who's to know" the imperfection is there in the first place? It allows us to feel perfection without necessarily having it or having access to it.

Take this picture of Kim Kardashian for example. The photo on the left is the natural shot and the photo on the right is airbrushed, and more likely to appear in the media. If you didn't see the picture on the right, would you notice her "imperfections"? Would her thighs really look that big if they weren't next to tiny, cellulite-free ones? Would her waist look that chubby if it wasn't next to that of someone who doesn't eat regularly? Would you notice her abnormal hairline if they didn't simply remove it? "Who's to know"...

In John Varley's "The Barbie Murders", perfection is shown as nothing but dysfunctional, as it allows one Barbie to wreak havoc on the others while getting off scot-free. Since the Barbies are all identical, investigators can get nowhere when Barbies are killed by other Barbies. The message is clear: perfection and purity and the pursuit of them are dangerous. These pursuits result in a loss of identity, dangerous to ourselves and to those around us. Imperfections are safe, especially when we are comfortable with them.

We see imperfections as only being dysfunctional. I challenge you to find what purpose yours serve.

Perception

My name is Beth. I am one of two Beth's in this class, and I have the pleasure of being Beth number two. I am a junior psychology major, and I am pursuing a sociology minor. I have already finished a Latin minor, part of the inspiration for this blog name. Formosa in Latin means beautiful, but it's not just a pretty face kind of beautiful. A woman is formosa when she has a beautiful face, a shapely body, the total package. Formosa represented an ideal Roman woman: gorgeous, smart (but not too smart), curvaceous, and someone who played out her social roles correctly.

Barbie is not formosa. She's more of a pulchra kind of girl: pretty, but not much else there.

Women struggle with image. We're always primping, worrying whether we have something in our teeth or a hair out of place, and comparing ourselves to other women. We worry about our prettiness while failing to acknowledge our overall beauty. This is not a surprise to any woman, or any man for that matter. What is a surprise is that we aren't naturally like this...it's fed to us from a young age by spoons like Barbie.

I was always more into Barbie's accessories than the doll herself. Her dresses, the bike I got with one of them, and the dolphin that came with my Baywatch Barbie stuck out more in my memory than her miniscule waist, lack of anatomical correctness, and conical breasts. Barbie looked kind of like me: she had big, blue eyes and long, blonde hair. The problem was that I didn't like how I looked, so how could I look to Barbie as my beauty staple? My sister, who was 12 years older than me, was my Barbie if you define Barbie as the ideal of beauty in young girls' eyes. She's always been tall, about 5'7", with short, dark hair, and eyes that were so black that you couldn't find her iris. She has a gorgeous olive complexion, and her body shape is unique: hippy, but slender, even after two children. She is the most giving person I know, and she has such an artistic soul. To me, she is formosa personified, but she doesn't see it quite like I do.

I hate my thighs. And my belly, and my arm jiggle too. They are the total opposite of pulcher. But along with my dazzling smile, infectious laugh, stunning eyes, and self-sacrificing personality, these imperfections are formosa. I am formosa. I just wish that was easier to believe than it is to write. I'm hoping this class will help me to see myself as a whole, not a sum of parts.