Growth Mindset W17

For growth mindset I choose to do number 12 which is what is Genius? This assignment is based on a great cartoon by Grant Snider. What do you think the elements of genius are? Here's the cartoon:

This shows me that genius is made up of many elements that come together to make up genius which is much more than the definition we are used to. which is exceptional intellectual or creative power or other natural ability. Most people think it is something that you are naturally born with which is part of it but the other part is hard work, critical thinking , and just go outside the box. To me genius is always reaching for more and constantly trying to be better than the you of yesterday. 

Wikipedia Trail form "Fascinating Womanhood"' to "Articulating Adolescent Girls' Resistance to Patriarchal Discourse in Popular Media"

I searched women's role in patriarchal society from there I looked at the first article Fascinating Womanhood. published in the1920's and 1930's the book seeks to help traditionally-minded women to make their marriages a lifelong love affair. It takes in many sources from historical women and examples shown in classic literature.This gained attention of many feminist writers who largely regard the book as detrimental to women in various ways

The next article I hopped to was The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. The author makes a case against tabula rasa models in the social sciences, arguing that human behavior is substantially shaped by evolutionary psychological adaptations.the author talks about three linked dogmas. the blank slate (the mind has no innate traits)—empiricism, the noble savage (people are born good and corrupted by society)—romanticism, the ghost in the machine (each of us has a soul that makes choices free from biology)

The next hop was to an article called In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development. In the book, Gilligan criticized Kohlberg's stages of moral development of children. Kohlberg's data showed that girls on average reached a lower level of moral development than boys did. She strives to emphasize that women, like men, are capable of thinking and acting in a manner associated with justice, and women with elements more associated with the value of care.

My last hop leads me to an article called Articulating Adolescent Girls' Resistance to Patriarchal Discourse in Popular Media. This paper explores and theorizes the experiences in adolescent girls' lives that pertain to their ability to resist damaging media representations of femininity. Traditional theoretical approaches to resistance involve notions of “resistant reading” of media messages.

week 17 analysis

This week I will be doing a literary analysis of Mahasweta Devi story "GiriblaIa". The literary devices that devi use in her story are Characterization, Dialogue, setting and changes between first to third person. She use Characterization when she describes the the girls that are being married off and how young they usually are when this happens. She also shows dialogue through out the story specifically when characters are talking to one another, Giri and her mother I believe. The setting takes place some where in India in the late 1900's. The story changes from a third person narrater when it is talking about the over all story and details then changes to first person when the character is actually talking. The theme I see in this story id a big one which is women do not have rights in India. This plays out very well in the story because they make it quiet obvious that this is the way there society is ruled and factions. This metaphor works perfectly to address the issue of inequality in India as well as the rest of the world. It also show how bad places that are not America can be when women do not have any rights. I choose this reading because this displays the history India and many other places around the world that are still like this. where privileged patriarchal power structure in a society constantly  subordinates, subjugates, and oppress women’s lives to years of injustice and gendered brutality and impoverishment. This was once apart of almost all societies in the world at one point in time, which is now apart of only a few countries now. I can tell the elements that I choose influenced and informs the authors work because she herself is an Indian women who has probably seen this first hand and wants to inform other of what is truly happening.   

Reading Notes W 17:Mahasweta Devi "GIRIBALA" Part B

Giri is only 14 years of age when she is married off to the abusive Aulchand and indoctrinated into the patriarchal dictum: “A daughter born. To husband or death. She’s already gone” In this property exchange in which Giri’s father paid Aulchand “eighty rupees and a heifer before he married her,” Giri is cast into the patriarchal bargain for exchange “After the birth of her fourth child, a daughter she named Maruni,¹ she asked the doctor at the hospital, where she went for this birth, to sterilize her”. Her request for sterilization raises questions of reproductive control and incurs the wrath of her husband. When Aulchand terrorizes her to tell him why, it becomes apparent that Giri chooses to preclude her reproductive system from any further patriarchal control in a society where, “having a daughter only means having to raise a slave for others” . Giri’s uterus goes permanently on strike from further patriarchal intrusion in a country that devalues daughters as disposable second skins.
Giri’s Bela had become another victim of a duplicitous business venture of “procuring girls on the pretext of marriage”. Devi observes that the police do little to help the mothers and young girls in these circumstances. Instead, they blame it on the father and the fact that “Poor Bela had this written on her forehead”; she was a girl after all. Giri’s first response is to bang her head against a patriarchal ceiling that positions men as owners and women’s as oppressed producers. It is a determining logic that sustains gendered subordination, as “A daughter, until she is married, is her father’s property. It’s useless for a mother to think she has any say”. Here, we co-witness how young girls have become alienated commodities to be bartered, bought, and sold as instruments of sexual labor.It is not until Giri has been duped into marrying her almost ten-year old daughter, Pori, off into what she believed at the time was a way to protect her from the same fate of her first daughter Bela that Giri begins to find another way out of her predicament. Unfortunately, the mother and father have been swept away by the desire to marry their daughters. Trusting Mohan, a family friend, to find her daughter a mate before Auchland intervenes, Giri, unknowingly, delivers her second daughter into a large-scale prostitution ring. It is for this reason, that Giri sterilizes herself and removes any future daughters from her womb to this fate. For the commodity Giri produces, “unlike all other commodities, is unique to capitalism: the living human being”—the pubescent sexual laborer herself. By taking control over her body, “Giribala” directly subverts her husband’s domination over her reproductive organs and contests the transformation of her daughters into surplus labor to feed male sexual appetites. Because Giri’s fertile womb is essential for Auchland, Giri’s refusal to reproduce is the ultimate form of social power and resistance. Auchland’s chastisement of Giri’s actions confirms his economic motives: “Foolish woman, you shouldn’t have done that operation. The more daughters we have, the more money we can have”. Giri precludes her womb from begetting more fetishized commodities to be sold into sex bondage, for “no matter what euphemism is used, nobody ever sets up home for a girl bought with money”. Motivated by survival, Giri leaves Auchland “to work in other people’s homes in order to feed and raise her remaining children”.

Reading Notes W 17:Salman Rushdie , "THE PERFORATED SHEET" Part A

Salman Rushdie, whose extended family lives in India as well as Pakistan, published his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, in England in September 1988. On Valentine’s Day 1989, Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini, then the leader of Shi’a Muslims in Iran, issued a fatwa, or religious decree, urging Muslims around the world to murder Rushdie for his acts of blasphemy against Islam in writing the novel. With typical irony, Rushdie called the fatwa an unusually harsh "book review." The incident sparked off a global controversy about freedom of expression, modernity, and "Islam versus the west," and Rushdie had to live underground for a decade, with maximum security provide by the British secret service. For many readers ever since, the international fallout from The Satanic Verses has been a public measure of its literary value, and a confirmation of Rushdie's status as the world's most important living writer.

Saleem Sinai starts by giving his exact date and time of his birth August 15, 1947 at midnight. Saleem’s birth coincides precisely with the moment India officially gains its independence from Britain. Saleem states his miraculously timed birth ties him to the fate of the country. He is thirty-one years old now and feels that time is running out for him. Saleem’s believes his life is ending and he must tell all of the stories trapped inside of him before he dies. Saleem begins the story with his grandfather, Aadam Aziz on an early spring morning in Kashmir. Saleem describes Kashmir as a place of incredible beauty and says that 1915 Kashmir was still pristine looking just as it had during the time of the Mughal Empire. At this point in the story, Kashmir is free of the soldiers, camouflaged trucks, and military jeeps that will come to characterize it in later years.

While praying, Aadam bumps his nose against the hard ground, and three drops of blood fall from his nose. As a result, he vows never again to bow before man or god, and consequently a “hole” opens up inside of him. Aadam has recently returned home from Germany, after five years of medical study. While Aadam was away, his father had a stroke, and his mother took over his duties in the family gem business. As Aadam stands on the edge of a lake, Tai, an old boatman, comes rowing toward him. Saleem describes Aadam’s features, particularly his prominent nose. Saleem also describes the enigmatic Tai and the local rumors that surround him. Tai’s boat draws closer. He shouts out to Aadam that the daughter of Ghani the landowner has fallen ill. Here, Saleem interrupts his narrative to say that most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence, but he reassures us that he has the ability to see things he didn’t actually witness. In this way, he is able to describe Aadam taking care of his mother, attending to the landowner’s daughter, and being ferried across the lake by Tai, all at the same time.At the landowner’s opulent house Aadam realizes that the old man Ghani is blind. While waiting to see the patient, Aadam gets nervous and considers fleeing, but then he has a vision of his mother and decides to stay. Aadam is taken in to see the patient, who is flanked by two extremely muscular women holding a white bed sheet over her like a curtain. In the center of the sheet is a hole, approximately seven inches in diameter. Ghani tells Aadam that, for modesty’s sake, he can only examine his daughter through the seven-inch hole.

Week 16 Analysis

This week I will be doing a close reading of Toni Morrison story "Recitatif". The section of the story that intrigued me the most was "“Listen to me. I really did think she was black. I didn’t make that up. I really thought so. But now I can’t be sure. I just remember her as old, so old. And because she couldn’t talk—well, you know, I thought she was crazy. She’d been brought up in an institution like my mother was and like I thought I would be too. And you were right. We didn’t kick her. It was the gar girls. Only them. But, well, I wanted to. I really wanted them to hurt her. I said we did it, too. You and me, but that’s not true. And I don’t want you to carry that around. It was just that I wanted to do it so bad that day—wanting to is doing it ”(p. 1187). I like this part because this is the end of the story were both character come together to reconclie the past between both of them. This conversation is between Roberta and Twyla and they are talking about the past misunderstanding. Were Roberta thought see saw Twyla with the gar girls and they were harassing the older lady named Maggie. So Roberta saw this as racial discrimination because she thought Maggie was black. Yet Twyla said she did not do anything she just happened to be there when this happened. This was there first misunderstanding that led to other misunderstandings as they encounter each multiple times through there adulthood. At first before they explained this issue I thought there first misunderstand when there parents met. The thesis I see in this story is misunderstandings that are left unresolved can lead to other problems and more misunderstandings.

Reading Notes W 16: TONI MORRISON Part A

Nobel laureate Toni Morrison combines realistic depictions of African American experience with a strong sense of the past’s hold on the present. She often conveys this sensitivity to the power of history by invoking magic or supernatural occurrences. The combination of techniques resembles at times the magic realism of the Latin American Boom; at other times, Morrison's concern with the border between fiction and history seems postmodernist. Her writing also addresses the role of racial and gender discrimination in the contemporary society. In all her work, while drawing on the experimental fictional techniques of the early 12th century, she maintains a close connection to African american oral and literary traditions and to everyday life in the united states.

The story opens with Twyla’s declaration that she and Roberta were brought to the orphanage of St. Bonny’s because Twyla’s mother Mary who dances all night and Roberta’s mother was ill. When they are initially introduced they do not get along. Mary has taught Twyla to hold prejudiced views about people of Roberta’s race. Eventually, the girls begin to bond over the fact that they understand each other without asking questions. They are also brought closer by the fact that they both get F's all the time; Twyla can’t remember anything she learns, and Roberta has not yet learned to read. They are also forced together by the fact that they are excluded from the rest of the children at St. Bonny’s because they are not real orphans. Sometimes Twyla and Roberta are picked on by the older girls or gar girls, who wear makeup and seem scary but are in fact mostly vulnerable runaways.Twyla often dreams of the orchard, but isn’t sure why because nothing really happened there, except one incident in which Maggie fell down there. Maggie is a sandy-colored old woman who works in the kitchen and has multiple disabilities. She is mute and possibly deaf, and has bow legs that cause her to rock and sway as she walks. The story jumps eight years ahead in time. One day, when a Greyhound Bus stops at the diner, Twyla notices that Roberta is among the passengers, accompanied by two young men. Roberta goes to leave without saying goodbye, but before she does Twyla asks how Roberta’s mother is. Roberta replies that she is fine, asks after Mary, and leaves. The narrative jumps another twelve years forward. Twyla is now married to a man named James whose family have lived in Newburgh for generations; the couple have a son named Joseph.She eventually resolves to buy only Klondike bars, because both her son and father-in-law love them. At the checkout, Twyla runs into Roberta, who is dressed elegantly and reveals that she now lives in the wealthy suburb of Annandale along with her husband and four stepchildren. They later catch up over coffee were they talk about Maggie and the incident that made Twyla and Roberta fall out. One day, Twyla accidentally drives past a protest against busing, where she sees Roberta holding a sign that reads “MOTHERS HAVE RIGHTS TOO!”. The women call each other liars because of how they both said the Maggie incident went, and eventually Twyla comes back to join a counter-protest, at which she waves a series of signs that directly address Roberta and don’t make sense to anyone else. The final sign reads: “IS YOUR MOTHER WELL?”, and this seems to cause Roberta to abandon the protest. As time passes again Twyla and Roberta come across each other again during the holidays at a cafe, they both confront each so they can both apologize with one another about everything that has happened between them both.