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So much spam...
Dalek of the Day
Just about all of the comments on this blog so far are from spammers...
Anyway, my blogging for Bitch continues with my latest post about the damaging presentation of Asperger's and intimate relationships in Tony Atwood's The Complete Guide to Asperger Syndrome.
Last night I had the first meeting of my Graduate Consortium of Women's Studies class on female bodies in American film. The course seems really promising, and I am excited to get to know students from different colleges in the area, from all different academic backgrounds. A few people I already knew from Simmons are in the class, and my other classmates come from schools like Brandeis, Boston University, Northeastern, UMass, and MIT.
The class meets once a week and every class session has a different topic, so I am a tad concerned about interesting subjects being glossed over. I would also love to have seen more horror on the syllabus, since the subject of women's bodies in horror films has been the topic of pretty intense academic scrutiny. We did touch a bit on the sadism that may be inherent in all viewership in the first class, when we talked about the foundational scholarship of Laura Mulvey and took a look at Slavoj Zizek's phenomenally entertaining "The Pervert's Guide to Cinema." We were supposed to get to bell hooks' concept of oppositional viewership this week, but we ultimately ran out of time before we could discuss it in depth. I certainly hope we'll address it in the classes to come since it's also a foundational contribution to film studies.
Part of our credit for the class includes presenting on one of the weekly topics, and I have signed up with a classmate to work on a special presentation about fat bodies in film to be presented not only to the class, but as part of a special film event at MIT. I'm a little nervous, but I think it will be fun.
I'm going to try to explore my interest in fat studies this semester, even though I still intend to do my thesis work on representations of autism. I'll be able to do this not only through the film class, but also through my public health systems class. I'd like to do my final project in that class on cultural attitudes toward obese patients in the US, and the effect that these attitudes have on actual access to and distribution of care. In fact, I think I'm supposed to have emailed the professor my intended topic right now...
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