Gender: Under Construction

In my Gender class today, we went around the room and described our final projects to the rest of the class. Two awesome projects are being featured in my blip today: the doll above and the poem below.

The Doll:

Amy is doing her project on transgenders as a third gender, hence the gender #3 pencil. She is focusing a lot of her project on the Club Kids, a group famous for their outrageous (often gender-bending costumes) and led most notably by James St. James, who has done a number of television features about gender-bending.

The doll itself is a Munny Doll, which you design and create yourself. Amy has designed this one to be a gender-bender, yet a work in progress (shown by the fact that the doll is not completely colored).

The Poem

Emily is doing her project on poetry centered around her own poetry, which she has graciously allowed me to post some of here. She reads her poetry regularly at a local coffee shop and has written several poems inspired by this class, as the one below is. Her message in this poem is one that I have always professed, but that she has managed to put into poetry. She also sent me two others, both of which are amazing, but that I would have to censor to post, and felt that would be a disservice to Emily and her poetry. This poem is meant to be a satire on the American beauty ideal. ONLY THE LAST TWO LINES ARE MEANT TO BE SERIOUS ADVICE As such, here is...

Celebreality

Celebrity image controls all life.
Watch them transform under the knife.
Force feed me your condescension
Stress my life with blinding tension.
All you say is sinking in
watch it slip under my skin
Your words cut just like a scalpel.
Never eat more than a mouthful!
Airbrush over "imperfections"
Now you'll never face rejection!
Inject me with your silicone lies
Beat down anyone who tries
to see the truth behind the glamour
to hear pure notes amid the clamor.
Objectify my now perfect form
Intelligence lost during the storm
of makeup, UV rays and Nair
A shiny bleached blond head of hair
is all I need to make me ?hot?
The meaning of beauty has been lost.
Sexy is all that matters now
A full figure, now called ?cow?
So be wraith like, sickly thin
cocaine may help, dig right in!
Abuse your body, mind and spirit
Good advice, you never hear it
in this age we?re living today
But there?s nothing here that I can say
that you haven?t heard before
So please just help level the score
Accept the natural beauty within you
And to yourself always stay true.








She stepped carefully over the weather-beaten half-buried log at the edge of the rubber pit. Gone were the concrete slabs and metal deathtraps once known as playground equipment. They had been replaced by brightly-colored plastic monstrosities that were more likely to give the children headaches than to teach them not to fall. The girl missed the old days. The danger, the fear of attempting the monkey bars because you might fall down and break a bone. It had been exhilarating. And now what did the kids have? Plastic and rubber. They were being coddles. Her shoes sunk partially into the tire chunks that made up the rubber pit. She looked down. It was weird, she thought, that she could still see some of the white string attached to the tire pieces. Who would have thought that string was used in tires?