Author: Megan

What I like about my draft so far is the word choice and organization of it. I feel that I worked hard on the way that I phrase my argument to make it easier to understand for the average reader that does not know as much about the topic as I do. I decided to work on this for this second draft because during peer review I noticed that those who read my draft were confused about some of the ways that I phrased my sentences. Luckily, the issue with word choice and a couple sentences being phrased oddly is a fine tuning revision that was easy for me to go back and change things around to make it clearer for my reader about what they were reading. I also rearranged some of my sentences at the beginning of my paragraphs to ensure that my topic sentences were as clear as possible. Thankfully, I learned during peer review that almost all of my topic sentences were clear to the reader that they were at the beginning of my paragraphs.

What I am concerned about for my draft right now is if my introduction and conclusion are clear and make sense. The feedback I got from the first peer review was that my introduction felt like a summary. I changed some things around and flipped the paragraphs in that section because I want to avoid the paragraphs feeling like a summary. I want to make sure that the introduction and conclusion do not feel like they are summarizing my argument and are instead moving the conversation forward.

I’d like to get feedback on my introduction and conclusion and if they are clear and are adding to my argument rather than summarizing it. I also would like feedback on my topic sentences to ensure that they are clear and are at the beginning of all of my paragraphs. Along with that I’d like feedback on if my quotes are clear or need to be revised in some way to make sure that I am giving enough information but also have my own voice in the paper.

What I left to do for my draft is basic editing and some revision based on the feedback I get from this second peer review. I feel that I’m in a good place with my draft. I just want to make sure that my word choice is refined and that my argument is clear without feeling like anything is being summarized. I feel that I am at some of the last stages of my revision and right now I’m focused on refining and fine tuning my paper.

What I like about my draft so far is that I feel that I organized it in a clear way to get my argument across. At first, I was having a difficult time with writing a paper like this because of how I need to split points into sections and provide literary background without the use of my primary source to start my argument. This is very unlike what I am used to where in other papers I have always written by using both my primary source and other literary criticism sources about that primary text at the same time. I feel proud that I was able to overcome that challenge and create a draft that I feel is well organized and outlined my argument in a clear way.

I’m currently concerned with how well my draft explains the last section of my argument in how the failure to achieve the ‘womanly destiny’ results in death to women and to their dreams of motherhood without a man. I’m hoping that I was able to explain that well and that the main conclusion of my argument was articulated clearly. I’d like feedback about if my argument is organized well and what to change to make it even clearer. I also would like feedback about my last section of my paper that I was just speaking about because I want to make sure that it makes sense to the reader. Finally, I’d like feedback about how clear I explained the connection between my primary source and the literary background because I want to make sure that for readers who may not be fully familiar with this book still can grasp my argument.

I have finished my draft at this point but I plan to go back and review what I have written to revise and edit before my second draft is presented to my peers. I also plan to draft revisions based on the feedback I am given because I think I will need that feedback to make my draft clearer based on what other people who read my paper think about it. I also plan to draft revisions in my paper based on what my peers were confused about because I want to ensure that the argument in my paper is as clear as possible and easy to understand for my readers.

For this week’s blog post, I decided to focus on a passage in the novel Jane Eyre that was provided by Sam. The passage is:

I rose; I dressed myself with care: obliged to be plain—
for I had no article of attire that was not made with extreme
simplicity—I was still by nature solicitous to be neat. It was
not my habit to be disregardful of appearance or careless
of the impression I made: on the contrary, I ever wished to
look as well as I could, and to please as much as my want
of beauty would permit. I sometimes regretted that I was
not handsomer; I sometimes wished to have rosy cheeks, a
straight nose, and small cherry mouth; I desired to be tall,
stately, and finely developed in figure; I felt it a misfortune
that I was so little, so pale, and had features so irregular and so marked. And why had I these aspirations and these regrets? It would be difficult to say: I could not then distinctly say it to myself; yet I had a reason, and a logical, natural reason too (150).

This except shows how societal expectations of women and girl’s bodily appearance has been pushed on Jane, causing her to be self conscious in the aspects of her body that she has no control over/cannot change. Jane dresses with the help that Mrs. Fairfax sees her as being an obedient student. She explains that it is in her nature to act neat but because she was ridiculed by the headmaster of the school, she wanted to try extra hard to outwardly look respectable. However, she feels that her body makes her look disrespectful and careless. Jane feels the pressure to look a certain way because society has framed her features as not fitting the perfect image. Jane’s desire to look more beautiful and to have rosy cheeks, a small mouth, and a straight nose, shows how Jane is deeply affected by the beauty standards that are being pushed down on her. She sees herself as being misfortune that she has marked irregular features, conveying how beauty standards create deep insecurities in women.

This passage also shows how women and girls are often viewed based on their appearance, rather than their actions. Jane is less concerned about how the way she acts will change Mrs. Fairfax’s impression of her. Rather, Jane is more concerned that if she does not look put together, she will be perceived as rude and not obedient. Her uniform for the school also shows how society works to control the image of girls, in this case the uniform aims to strip the students of their beauty in a way, and mold them into the obedient image of a godly pupil according to the school’s desires. It is also interesting here, that the headmaster, and the leaders of the school in general, desire to mold their students into images of God when those leaders of the school act in rude ways against the will of God. This passage shows how society works to control the bodily image of women and girls to create an outward message about who they are as a person, however outward appearance does not necessarily equate to who a person is on the inside.

I started drafting on my literary background section first. This section includes information about confinement in the home before and during Second Wave Feminism, the patriarchy’s response of gender backlash to women’s gains of independence because of Second Wave, and how this gender backlash transpired into trapping women in their own bodies. I started in this section because I felt that I needed to get down all of the necessary background information first before I went into analysis using my literary source. I also knew that this section would take me the most amount of time to really think through because I believe without the background section being planned and properly, the rest of the literary analysis from Elena Vanishing will not make complete sense to the reader so I really wanted to focus on this section first.

What I’ve learned about my topic and ideas through drafting is that it is even more important for me to add the part in my argument about how failing to achieve the ‘womanly destiny’ in the way the patriarchy demands leads to death. I definitely know now that I need to add that section to come to the ‘so what?’ part of my paper. After writing about the background of my argument and the gender backlash women have received, I also know that I need to reinstate information about how this gender backlash and the threat of what it means to not fulfill the ‘womanly destiny’ plays a role in Elena Vanishing.

What was initially hard about drafting was figuring out how to start. I skipped writing the intro and I plan to write it at the end of drafting the body paragraphs because it was getting too overwhelming trying to start there. I also had a difficult time trying to start, in general. I had so many ideas about my background section on Second Wave that it was hard to put them into words. What was easy, though, was knowing how to organize my thoughts. Once I got on a roll with writing I knew immediately how to organize everything and I think that happened, in part, because of the outline I created. I already knew going into writing how I wanted the sections of my paper to look like and all I needed to do was write the words to make them flow together.

I’m planning to draft my primary source literary analysis on Elena Vanishing. This part of my paper will be the longest. It is going to include how Elena uses her eating disorder to feel control, how it controls her, how it has its own voice, and how the patriarchy threatens death at women who do not strive to fulfill the ‘womanly destiny’. After drafting this section I will also go back and write the intro and conclusion. I’m also planning to add in the section about using the eating disorder for control that Elena is using her eating disorder to also feel masculine heroism. This is something talked about in another source I found that I have on my outline and I think after writing the background information that it is definitely necessary to put in that section. I also have this quote from Elena Vanishing to support the idea of masculine heroism where she has a military list of how to act so I’m excited to start that section.

For this post, I chose to write about the text Nightbitch. A theme I found interesting in this excerpt was the way that women are expected to be both full time moms and work at the same time with little to no help from their husbands/the father of the child if that mother wants to continue to have a career. A passage that was interesting about this theme revolves around milk and the way that women completely loose themselves in their career by being treated basically like a milk machine.

“And the milk. The milk! The milk was so important! This
cannot be stressed enough. It was the most important thing in
the entire world of the infant, the books would have all the
mothers believe, and this mother believed” (10).

The narrator also explains that the lactation room in her work “might as well have been the smallest, ugliest chapel in the entire institutional building” (10.)

I found these quotes to be interesting in that they show how mothers who want to work are expected to be full time mothers AND full time workers. There is this push and pull between the two that makes mothers loose themselves. If they want to have a career, they feel they are failing at being a perfect mother. The narrator then explains that even if she is not with her child the whole day, at least she can still provide it with food and nourishment. But this only minimizes her to a food source, where the only thing she thinks she can give her child because of being absent is food.

Along with that, the small lactation room shows how the work industry treats motherhood as a second thought. Mothers with full time careers are expected to do it all without being seen as doing anything. The lactation room is so small that I interpret it as being similar to a locked away prison–something characterized as shameful. The room also says that mothers should not leave any equipment behind as if breast milk is ‘disgusting’.

This section was particularly intriguing on the way it commentated on motherhood and working moms. But not only that, it shows how women become minimized to a ‘milk machine’ and how the very milk that nourishes all babies is characterized as disgusting by rules made up by adults who were once babies that drank milk.

I chose to format my outline by using the general typed out format of an outline. I find that this format works best for me as it is organized in a sequential format from start to finish. This kind of outline is how I’ve always outlined so I thought it was the best format for me to use. When I was outlining for my paper, I realized that I needed to move things around to make my topic make sense for myself, and more importantly, my reader. I realized that my paper needed to be formatted with a literary review at the beginning before beginning my argument. In particular, I realized I needed to give enough background information about Second Wave Feminism and its exploration of a “Woman’s Destiny” inside the home. This is such a fundamental part of my argument about Elena Vanishing and if I don’t provide that information at the beginning of my paper, my audience will be lost. At first, I thought that I could use this background evidence throughout my paper, but after working on the outline and going over information in class, I learned that I needed to put this background evidence at the beginning to make sure that my argument stood by itself without being overshadowed by the voices of other authors.

Something I realized that was missing my outline was that the argument didn’t seem to be leading to a good finish. I started to realize that I needed something to tell why it is so important that Elena has been trapped in her body by the voice of the patriarchy. I started thinking about this as I was working on my outline and knew I needed to add more at the end of my paper to show how Elena’s entrapment has caused her to not fulfill a “Woman’s Destiny”. From there, I was able to add onto the outline to explain how when a woman does not let herself be confined in a home by a man, she will not be allowed to have her own home or be a mother by herself. I feel that adding this on to my argument begins my paper to a good point that shows “why” it was important to know that the patriarchy trapped her in her body.

What was easy about the outline process was putting evidence in the outline and making claims based on them. However, it was difficult to find out how to organize the outline logically. As I explained above, realizing that I needed a larger section of literary review caused me to need to move evidence and ideas around until the outline logically made sense. Also, it was difficult to think about what was missing. As soon as I was finished the outline the first time, I was left questioning “but what was the point?” The outline helped organize my thoughts to allow me to really think about what I needed to add onto my argument but organizing it took me a lot of time.

To find good sources I first went through the databases that were suggested in class. I prefer JSTOR the most so I search primarily on that database. Searches that helped me find sources that were good were first by starting at the border part of my topic, such as searching up “Eating Disorder & Feminism” and then going through those sources to see if there was anything I found useful. If I found an article interesting to my topic I would look at the related articles JSTOR provides and keep searching through there. I also wanted to look up disembodied voices so searching for that overarching idea led me to find more specific, useful articles.

What went well in my research was finding sources on Second Wave Feminism and its effects as well as finding sources on Eating Disorders and their connections to Second Wave Feminism. There was a lot of articles throughout different databases that provided connections between these two topics, which is extremely helpful to me because those articles commentate on the way that eating disorders relate to a boarder societal context.

What was difficult in my research was trying to find sources about disembodied voices. I spent a good deal of time looking for sources about this because I think it is so important to have research about disembodied voices I can use in my paper since the eating disorder’s disembodied voice is such a vital part of the memoir. It was very difficult to find sources for this and I had to change the way I was searching. I tried searching not just “disembodied voices” but also “other voices” or “overshadowing voices” and thankfully I was able to locate some sources on this.

Sources I was surprised to find were sources that talked about how eating disorders function as disembodied voices. This topic was embedded in a lot of my other sources about eating disorders and I was surprised that this was spoken about. I thought that there would not be anything on eating disorders as disembodied voices so it was very surprising that I was able to find sources about this to be able to use. I do, however, wish I could have found more about disembodied voices on their own or how they create subplots. I was able to find one source about this but there was not much on the databases about that.

Based on my research, the field talks about my topic as showing how eating disorders are not just relating to personal trauma, but also relating to the trauma that is faced by women throughout society. These sources address how eating disorders are influenced by patriarchal expectations of women and the pressures placed on women by men to be perfect within the independence they gained from Second Wave Feminism to prove that they deserve to be outside of the home. These sources will help drive my argument as the field of feminism also understands eating disorders in the way that my argument does.

For this post I decided to focus on the excerpt from the reading The Color Purple. A specific quote that I found compelling is:

Listen, she say, right down there in your pussy is a little button
that gits real hot when you do you know what with somebody.
It git boner and hotter and then it melt. That the good part. But
other parts good too, she say. Lot of sucking go on, here and
there, she say. Lot of finger and tongue work.

She say, What, too shame even to go off and look at yourself?
And you look so cute too, she say, laughing. All dressed up for
Harpo’s,
smelling good and everything, but scared to look at your own
pussy.

These quotes show how society denies women agency over their own bodies, particularly in terms of sexual autonomy. Celie has been having sex many times and yet does not know anything about sexual pleasure or about her sexual anatomy in general. Shug acts as a ‘sexually provocative’ character that teaches Celie about sex and about how to feel pleasure. It is particularly interesting how Celie is scared to look at her own body parts. This commentates on how society denies women sexual agency to the point that they feel embarrassment or shame over their reproductive organs.

This quote is also thought provoking because it shows that sex has been used by Celie’s husband as a way to control her and use her body for his own pleasure. He does not care about her as a person because if he did, he would have been taken time to care about her feeling pleasure.

I find Shug’s character in this quote to be particularly noteworthy because she inverts the control that Celie’s husband has when it comes to sex. Shug enjoys having sex with Celie’s husband, wanting to have pleasure by using Celie’s husband. When it comes to Shug, she is in control. Her character is interesting in the fact that she subverts gendered expectations about women’s bodies and sexual pleasure, taking back the control men have over women during this time.

This quote is definitely interesting in that it commentates on how sex is framed for men as something that brings about pleasure while it is framed for women has something that is only for the means of reproduction.

For this week’s blog post, I decided to talk about the readings for As You Like It and Twelfth Night. One of the things I find so interesting between these two plays is the way that the main characters utilize gender in different manners. Both Viola and Rosalind are placed in a situation where they need to disguise themselves as men. Rosalind dresses up as a man to provide protection for her cousin as they flee to Arden while Viola has washed ashore on an island and cannot find her family so she dresses up as a man–Cesario–in order to live on the island without her family.

What’s so interesting with Rosalind, in particular, based off of both these excerpts and my prior knowledge of As You Like It, is that after she reaches Arden, she could take off her disguise, yet she doesn’t. There is an argument to be made that she remains a man so that she can gain back the agency that was taken away from her by the duke after her father was banished to Arden. She may also choose to stay dressed as a man so that she hold some gendered control over others, such as Orlando who is desperately in love with Rosalind. Rosalind dressed as a man gives her agency and control over another man that she would not have had if she were outwardly seen as a woman. Viola, on the other hand, dresses and acts as a man for survival. This is evident throughout the play because the audience never knows what Cesario’s real name is until the end.

It is worth noting the way that both of these characters play around with gender in terms of survival, agency, and in general, identity. By the end of both plays, it is unclear whether or not the two characters still see themselves as women or if they feel more like men, or possibly both. Viola, in particular, never changes out of her disguise when the play ends, meaning though the characters and audience know she is Viola, she still looks like Cesario. And while Rosalind does change out of her disguise by the end of the play, her epilogue contains the phrase “if I were a woman”, suggesting that Rosalind may no longer she herself as a woman, but rather as a man.

There are interesting similarities and differences between both of these characters in terms of the way they use their disguise as a man to their aid and how they feel about their gender identity by the end of the play. This shows how the outward body is very connected to inward identity.

The topic I am going to be writing on is about eating disorders in young adult women, specially in the memoir Elena Vanishing by Elena and Clare Dunkle, and the societal impact of gender expectations on those with eating disorders. I’m going to be focusing on how eating disorders are one of the results of the patriarchy’s response to the gains of Second Wave Feminism where instead of women being trapped in the home, they are trapped inside of their own bodies. I chose the Journal of Undergraduate Research in the Humanities as the journal I want to write for. It appealed to me because the guidelines were not overly complex and the requirements were not overly specific. Since the main requirements is to submit work of 4000-10000 words that is original and adheres to the latest MLA guidelines, I feel that this gives me the opportunity to write on a wide range of topics without having strict guidelines to follow. I also really liked the types of works that have been accepted into this journal. There are works in this journal that range from science related topics to the arts and humanities. I really feel that this journal would give me the opportunity to write freely.

The part of Elena Vanishing that I am assigning to the class is from pages 123-141. This except occurs between Chapters 10 and 11. These two chapters take place within the middle of the text where Elena has entered college while battling her eating disorder. I chose this section of the text because I feel that it commentates on the perfectionism aspect of eating disorders and the societal expectations for women to be perfect. This portion of the text also shows how because women have been given more opportunities for their future outside of the home as a result of Second Wave Feminist gains, patriarchal society now expects that they use those opportunities to the best of their ability and be perfect at all of them to show that they deserve to have that independence. The voice of Elena’s eating disorder in this section also shows how the patriarchy dictates how women are supposed to have and use their independence and how if a woman is not perfect according to societal standards–both in action and looks–then the patriarchy determines that they do not deserve to have free independence.

I’m also assigning Courtney Markle’s “The Famine Mystique”. This secondary source explores how dieting and eating disorders have become a new form of entrapment by the patriarchy following Second Wave Feminism. I’m assigning this text to go with my primary text because I feel that it gives necessary background to how the entrapment of women in their bodies is inherently connected to the patriarchy. It also shows how the growth in opportunity outside of the home following the gains of Second Wave has been met with resistance by the patriarchy where men seek to trap women in their bodies if they unable to trap them inside the home

I already know a pretty good amount about this topic. I have done a decent amount of research on Second Wave Feminism gains and drawbacks, along with eating disorders during womanhood. However, because there is very little literary works on eating disorders in women, most of my understanding about this topic is through medical sources. I have read many texts and articles from past research projects that focused on the physiological and medical aspects of eating disorders and I feel that that background knowledge will be useful when working with this topic for my paper.

What I want to learn about my topic is more on how an outside voice plays a role in texts and how it changes the interpretation of a narration. Because the voice that overshadows Elena’s narrative is the eating disorder itself, this voice is not even from a person, but rather from a thing/concept. I think it will be interesting to learn more about these voices and how they function in other texts so that I can use that information and apply it to my topic and research paper.