Introduction to Blogging

As my last post indicated, this is the course blog for WOMNST 1140: Gendered Bodies in Visual Culture.

What is a Blog?

A blog (short for web log) is an easy-to-modify website that lets authors (you all and me) post short entries. Blogs also offer the ability for viewers or authors to comment on blog posts (a feature that we will be using extensively). On the blog, the most recent entries appear at the top of the screen. Check out this video by Common Craft for further explanation of what a blog is and why they matter.

Blogs can be private (only authors and invited others can read the blog) or public (anyone with the internet can read them by going to the url). This course blog is PUBLIC, which means anyone can read our posts and follow any links that we embed.

Following this blog:

In addition to your posts on course material, I'll be using this blog for course announcements and information, so you should make sure to check it regularly. There are 2 main ways to do this:

1. Save this blog to your "Favorites" or "Bookmarks" in your web browser. Then make sure to check the blog on a regular basis. The problem with this option is that you must remember to check it.

2. Subscribe to the blog's RSS feed in an RSS reader of your choice. For a very short and thorough explanation of what an RSS feed is, check out this video by CommonCraft. I use Google Reader as my RSS reader, and if you don't already have one, I recommend this one only because it is very easy to navigate. The video shows you how to link a blog to Google Reader too, which is helpful.

What constitutes a good blog post?

You'll be posting a blog entry in response to a prompt that I will post at the end of each course unit. Your blog entry should address all parts of the prompt and draw together material from our course readings, cultural productions/visual media, and class discussions.

While posted online, blog entries for this class should be written in a professional tone and include complete and syntactically correct sentences as well as academically-appropriate spelling, punctuation, and citations (in other words, the same things as if you were turning in these posts as papers in class).

In each blog post, you will link to one visual cultural production online that you find on your own--this may be a youtube video, a blog post from another blog, website, news story, photograph, etc. You should make sure to explain in your post what that visual cultural production is, who produced it (proper citations, remember?), and how it relates to the prompt and the rest of your post. In other words, integrate that visual cultural production into your post and analyze it, the same way you would cite and analyze a sentence from a scholarly article.

To get an idea of blog posts that follow all of these instructions and serve as great examples of what you'll be doing, check out a course blog that I set up for a previous course at UC Berkeley: Feminist Film Studies.

If you have any questions about using the course blog, just let me know. Happy blogging!

Welcome!

Welcome to WOMNST 1140: Gendered Bodies in Contemporary Visual Culture!

This is a course blog for an upper-division undergraduate Women's Studies seminar at the University of Pittsburgh.

This course will introduce students in Women’s Studies and related inter/disciplines to
questions of the body, and encourage the development of a critical visual literacy regarding various technologies of contemporary visual culture that are engaged by and construct bodies. The body remains one of the most significant cites for the enactment of power relations and is hence a vital site for their production, transformation, and critique. This course begins with the seemingly simple question “What is a Body?,” a question that will become the guide for the course as a whole as it interrogates the stakes that institutions such as law, medicine, and the state have in the answer. As the course progresses, it will become more apparent that not only is this not at all a simple question, or one with an answer we already know, but also that its very formulation often masks the particular
racial, gendered, and sexualized practices that produce embodied difference.

Centering a transnational feminist cultural studies approach, this course will explore a variety of contemporary visual imaging technologies that privilege the body and encourage students to develop critical analytical skills to interrogate the world in which they currently live. Analyzing the production, circulation, and consumption of visual cultural productions (in addition to their representational aspects), the course will ask what the role of visuality is in constructing ideologies of gender, race, sexuality, and national identity. Specifically we will focus on the ways that visual culture focused on the body travels within and across national borders, and the role of such gendered, racialized, and classed mobilities in colonialisms, capitalisms, and practices of war.

Each week, students will post 1 blog entry about the week's course materials by 9:00 pm on the date listed on the syllabus. Further, students will then post 2 comments on their classmates' blog posts by 9:00 pm on the next day. These comments should be thoughtful considerations, and are the place where you can ask questions about your classmates' posts, respond to questions they pose, link to other visual media, or evaluate what conversations your classmates' posts enable.

I encourage you to embed links in both your blog post and your comments to articles, definitions, and especially images, videos, and other web ephemera that you find relevant to the week's material. This is obviously a class about visual culture and imaging technologies, and I encourage you to link the scholarly articles and cultural productions from class to other visual media you encounter in your lives.

If you are new to blogging, don't fear--we will discuss this assignment throughly on the 1st day of class, as well as go over what constitutes a good blog post.