awesome fucking students.
I think most of you know by now that I teach freshman composition. The main focus of my class is a series of assignments that makes them think about the language and rhetorical techniques used by American media and popular culture to make arguments about non-normative gender and sexuality. (I hate the term “non-normative” but it’s the easiest way to explain it to my 18-year-old students.)
Basically, I have them look at the ways the media/pop culture portray people who fall outside of the male/female and gay/straight binaries. So far this quarter, we have watched an episode of Transgeneration, an episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race season 2, and read both an article about drag kings and Amy Bloom’s short story, “A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You,” which is about a woman coming to terms with her adult child’s identity as a transgender man.
So far, I have a student writing about the ways a certain popular movie portrays kids who don’t fit gender stereotypes and how it invites us to respond to them, basically critiquing the way we treat tomboys differently than we treat the male equivalent, and I have another student writing about a short clip from FOX News where they interviewed a teenage trans girl who was running for homecoming queen, even though her school district told her she couldn’t, and tried to put her on the ballot for homecoming king instead, looking at the ways FOX News uses specific language to set her apart and force the viewer to make negative assumptions about her without actually being vocally transphobic. Their understandings of the nuances of language, of the underlying meanings of things other people just overlook, is just fucking incredible.
I am kind of in love with both of these students. They are the coolest fucking 18-year-old guys I’ve ever met in my life. We talked after class today and seriously, they totally give me hope for the future. I love that these freshman in college, both from small towns in Ohio, have such open-minded and analytical views about gender. I would like to say that it’s because I’m a good teacher, but I don’t think that’s it — I can imagine that they have learned that much in two fucking weeks. Seriously, though, I just really fucking adore them both.
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PS - I love that this is my 800th post. Totally worth it.
