Image by Manchester Library via Flickr
Today I'm taking the option of writing about something other than writing for my course journal. A friend of mine is having a "Witches' Tea Party" tomorrow for her 3- and 5-year old nieces, which should be a lot of fun. She has tea parties for the girls (and they have them on their own, too) from time to time, and they dress up in silly/fancy ways (they read the Fancy Nancy books), wearing hats with feathers, lots of jewelry, and so on. This is the kind of harmless, fun activity kids should be doing, right? The problem comes from stuff the girls have heard when their parents are watching the news. Every time they hear the words "tea party," they think it has something to do with their kind of tea party.
Image by Jenn and Tony Bot via FlickrYep, I'm way behind in my postings. I did all the journal entries direct to our course page, and I forgot to post them here. I'll try to do better from now on.
Today I'm getting ready for a conference tomorrow with Dr. Toffee about our big assignment (25% of the course grade). My draft is a mess. (It's happening again-- Zemanta just put up a bunch of pictures and articles having to do with mental health. I must really sound nuts to them). So anyway, the assignment is to analyze a scene from a film using what she calls a "critical model." I picked the film Bewitched, and I'm using gender studies as my model. I'm pretty excited about it, because I found a bunch of things in my scene that contradict everything that was in the movie reviews I read about it.
But I'm still not happy with my thesis, and I hope she can help me out. The one thing I came up with has more to do with what everybody thinks a female character has to be in order to be true to the women's movement than it does with the film. All the reviewers thought that the witch character was a throwback to the 1950s because she wasn't a "strong" woman, meaning, I guess, that she wasn't forceful and ambitious. What she wanted was the average kind of life you see on TV. A nice home, a nice husband, a nice career, and so on. When things don't work out that way, she takes action, which is exactly what she should do -- why should she throw her weight around when everything is going fine? Anyway, I'll let you know how it turns out.
