Where did this whole idea of Sweating the Small Stuff come from?
If you take a look at American society, you’ll see that stereotypical binaries can be found everywhere. We polarize race, religion, politics, education, gender, etc. Our society forces dichotomy even when there very well may be more than two options.
Take American politics, for example. Often on Election Day, voters are asked if they chose “red or blue” even though there are plenty of green party nominees and candidates on the ballot.
The polarization of gender, however, has recently been a topic I’ve been most interested in.
For my writing class, when I had to synthesize essays from our textbook to create a parallel between the chapter on education and a chapter of my choice, I was ecstatic when I discovered gender was a topic I could choose from. In a 6-page, 2,000-word paper synthesis, I related the two by illustrating the similarities between binary gender-identity and binary college choice (Liberal Arts vs. STEM education.)
Check out this cool article here.
Because of my interest in gender, it seemed while writing every other paragraph I would get more and more off track from the educational emphasis of the paper. After meeting with my Professor, we decided a lot of my information of gender wasn’t really building my points on education, and it needed to be saved for later.
When the next assignment rolled around, I had to shrink that 6-page paper into a 500-800-word blog post on almost anything that I wrote about in my paper. I knew my blog post would be the perfect opportunity to expand upon on gender identity.
Essentially, what I did was copy and paste every sentence from my paper that related to gender onto a Google Doc and started reformatting it so everything fit together. For the most part, it worked well! Although it didn’t fit together seamlessly, tying together most of my points was not difficult. Incorporating information to fill the spots that didn’t flow perfectly was easy because, if you read my bio… I actually give a shit about what I am writing.
From there it was easy. I added more information to tie everything together, and my peer-review session both in and out of class prompted me to incorporate a closing paragraph full of suggestions and more information about going forward.
The formatting of my blog is just as important as the content of blog post. The header image is a screenshot from French movie Persepolis, a coming of age story of a young Iranian girl during the Iranian Revolution. The background picture is from the Women’s March on Washington, and this lovely lady’s sign is not only hysterical, but also way too true. Both pictures, and the font style are all in black and white. The color scheme symbolizes the black and white attitude of gender and the black and white of my educational paper.
Blogging in general is weird, it makes me nervous to think I might actually be good at this…
Me, never.