Alexander Response

SYNTHESIS: AS MANY AS POSSIBLE
This article ties to Flynn's based on how they both speak about feminism in writing and how it is involved in how people view themselves and others. It also focuses on identity like Gee and Wardel who also speaks about belonging and that also ties in to the article. Another similiar article is to McCloud and how self image is important to how you see yourself and how you allow others to see you as well.


DIALECTICAL NOTEBOOK:

RESPONSE	QUOTE
Student's styles are impacted by their identities and their ideas of the outside world and their beliefs. To enhance how they write and see themselves and others, many steps need to be taken for them to be better associated with different types of people and styles of life.	Put another way, our student's identities, informed by prevailing, politicized  and personal definitions of gender and sexuality, can have a significant impact on their participation in class, their sense of themselves as learners and knowledge producers, and, by extension, their engagement with writing as a mode of exploration, communication, invention, and discovery. pg 198
I think that if you know yourself better you are better able to do everything in your life, by not being concerned with how you see yourself or how others see you, you can accomplish your goals.	Some scholar teachers have suggested that such identity interrogation along the axes of sexuality and gender is important for both students and instructors. pg 198
I don't personally think that sexuality has anything to do with how a theory should be formed, no matter what the topic is.	At the same time, however, next to no scholarly work addresses directly how transgender or transsexual theories might inform a feminist composition pedagogy. pg 199
By paving a new road for people to explore down in uncharted territory we learn more about the people who see themselves as different or apart from the "norm".	But the aims of many self-identified trans activists and theorists are to create cracks in the monolithic structure of gender identity and to search for wiggle room in what William Pollack has aptly termed the "Gender Straight-jacket" (40-43). pg 200
Accepting students and instructors and even authors helps broaden the conversation of things that we do not know or understand about the GLBT community and other types of minorities.	Acknowledging the presence of the transgender-ed is useful not only for understanding those who are differently gender-ed or whose presentation or experience of gender falls outside our "norms":'but also for helping us interrogate the constructs of gender that we often take for granted as "natural" or "normal".
	I have asked myself and my students to think critically about how we compose ourselves as men, women, masculine, feminine, and even gay, straight, or bi. pg 195

By finding out how we see ourselves we can move
forward to learn more about ourselves and others
alike and not alike us.

THOUGHTS:
I did not like this article. I do not think that gender or sexuality is involved in the writing process. The only way I could see it being involved would be in the topics, like what the author chose to write about. I did like the stories at the end of the article though although the stories of how they became the opposite sex were involved and how they felt they should have been born that way. I think that the author makes a good point, but I think it is unrelated to English and writing.

VIDEO: