Why did the author choose two women for this story?  One of my first thoughts while reading “Mothers” was why Machado chose to create the the story between two women rather than a heterosexual couple. I personally think the author chose this dynamic to challenge traditional gender norms regarding motherhood. In almost all stories about the struggles of motherhood, the power imbalance in the relationship if often due to assigned gender traits. Like the man being dominant and abusive, or absent while the mother is left to endure the abuse for the child’s sake. However this piece challenges that structure. By making the story about two women, the author makes the readers really focus on the aspects of motherhood instead of the gender dynamics. It also shows how the abuse on mothers doesn’t necessarily have to be physical, as you may expect in a toxic heterosexual relationship, because the relationship between Bad and the narrator was insanely abusive but more so on a emotional scale.  It was also very significant that the roles are almost reversed in this case as Bad, the dominant and manipulative partner was the one that bore the child, yet the narrator was forced to raise it. I think the author purposefully chose Bad to be the one that got pregnant to highlight how sometimes the responsibility of a mother doesn’t necessarily fall to the person that bore it. In fact we see Bad using the fact that she got pregnant to push the child away and excuse herself from having to raise it, instead guilt tripping the narrator into assuming all responsibility. This sheds light to the fact that sometimes motherhood is forced onto a woman, that it may be so unexpected yet the mother is expected to raise it without protest. It also challenges the stereotype that caring traits inherently come to mothers, because we clearly see Bad avoiding all responsibility while the narrator tries her best to raise the child even though she has reservations on weather the child is even hers.  By creating a non traditional gender dynamic in her story, Machado portrays the deeper complexity of motherhood by making the readers question their preconceived notions on what a mother is, who the role is assigned to, which helps the readers see how a mother deals with the power imbalances and the emotional trauma of raising a child. This picture portrays the traditional nuclear family dynamic with the mother cooking while the father comes home from work. This often represents the idealized version of motherhood and its nature. I chose this picture because it contrasts with the nuanced idea of motherhood po […] “Why did the author choose two women for this story? “

Why didn’t she tell him?I […] “Why didn’t she tell him?”

Blog Post #3: “On community” essay process I enjoyed writing an essay on one of my communities for this assignment. I start my essay by talking about my reaction of the reading from Casey Plett, which was easy because I had already accidentally written a blog post on “on community” by Plett. I took some of the ideas and thoughts that I wrote about in my blog post and integrated that into my essay. Even in the blog post I talked about DRUM, so I knew that for my essay, I wanted to focus on DRUM as it is the largest community that I am closely part of, and even while I was reading Plett’s work, I was thinking about DRUM and the similarities in the nuances about community Plett described and DRUM. I jotted down some ideas that I wanted to talk about in my essay on the train ride home when I found out I was gonna be writing an essay on community. I was really inspired by the way Plett described the spectrum of different types of people in the same community, I don’t exactly remember how it went but I know it was very frank and felt like a rant. I knew I wanted something like that in my essay and came up with the part in my essay where I talked about conservative Muslims and liberal queers fighting for their interests using DRUM. The instructions for the essay was pretty straightforward, and while I didn’t answer all of the questions that were prompted to help us write the essay, I did really lean into some of them. I answered what actions my community take the most and how it divides us but also displays our strengths. Another major part of my essay was how I would define DRUM and the nuances within the DRUM community regarding people’s ideology. Thinking about these questions really helped me write the bulk of the essay. I knew I wanted to put my definition of community at the beginning of my essay, but when I initially wrote out my definition of community as a group or gathering where people share common interests or backgrounds, I felt like the definition would contradict with the nuances that I would talk about regarding DRUM. That got me thinking weather DRUM was even a community, I thought maybe I should write about the fact that DRUM isn’t a community. I scrapped that idea; something didn’t sit right with that thought, I have been part of DRUM long enough to know that it is a community. That’s when i decided to change my definition of community as not only a gathering of people that have similar interests or ideas, but also a safe space where people can express their wants and needs. In this way, I could still call DRUM a community. The rest of the essay came pretty easily to me on my train ride home and back to school. I wrote out my essay in Word while in the train and proof read it before submitting it on bright-space. I did not make very many edits on my essay for re-revision, particularly because I don’t do well with revisions without having a second person look at my work but I did what I felt was necessary to improve flow and better my ideas. This is a photo of DRUM advocating for community safety act in front of city hall. I wanted to highlight a photo that just shows DRUM and the different types of people in it fighting for what matters to them. I believe this is an old photo, I don’t have any new ones of actions I was a part of but it still just shows what DRUM stands for and […] “Blog Post #3: “On community” essay process”

Blog Post #2: Ghostland For […] “Blog Post #2: Ghostland”

Blog Post #1: “On community” by Casey Plett As I read part of “on community,” by Casey Plett, the quote that stood out to me the most is “Somewhere along the line…, the word community to attain semantic satiation for me—the phenomenon in which a word is repeated so often it loses its meaning…” This quote stood out to me because I think it’s the perfect way to describe the overused word, “community.”  It made me think about the communities that I am part of and weather or not they are actually my community or if I have just labeled them as such because defining something as community is easier then actually trying to figure out what it means to you. While in the thought process of trying to figure out whether I was defining my social groups correctly as “community”,  I searched up the dictionary definition of community and realized that it’s fine if I label all the groups I am part of as community. I think the word is inherently bound to feel semantic band cause its definition is so broad. The Oxford dictionary definition is “group of people living in the same place or having a particular characteristic in common.” That definition describes so many groups I am a part of, and while I may not value all those different groups equally, they are still by definition a community where I share similar attitudes or interests with other people.  Casey Plett also goes into detail about the subdivisions amongst the people in the communities she’s part of, like the trans community, and she talks about the nuances in the trans community with regards to people’s attitudes and behavior towards people of the same community. I can also relate with this; I feel like there’s always subdivisions in every community that I’m a part of but I think that’s natural. Its hard to find people that are so similar that subdivisions don’t form in larger communities, it’s bound to happen.  The image above is the logo for one of my communities that perfectly describes what a community is for me. It’s called DRUM (Desis Rising Up and Moving), and it’s a grassroots organization that focuses on helping and seeking political advocacy for working class Desis, south Asian and indocarribean folks. This best describes what a community is for me because everyone in DRUM shares the same goal of advocacy and safe space for south Asian and indocaribbean people but within DRUM there’s all sorts of people that are different in their own ways and diverge into sub-communities but it’s still a uni […] “Blog Post #1: “On community” by Casey Plett”