Doing Gender, Buying Drinks - My FIRST YouTube video :)

A Little Conversation with my Mom

Mom: What are your plans for tonight?

Me: Oh, um, I'll be going out to a couple bars.    

          NOTE: this is extremely out of the ordinary for me. 

Mom: What!?! 

Me: Yea, well I have to. 

Mom: What do you mean you have to?

Me: It's for class; I'm collecting data. 

Mom: Nice try. 

Me: No, really! It is for my Gender and Society class. 

It really was. Between you and me (and the rest of the blogsphere!), I was not simply trying to pull one over on my mom. 

The Assignment

Our group project assignment called for us to examine gender out in the field. And, believe it or not, of all people, yours truly was assigned to examine gender in a field study of a bar on a downtown Saturday night. 

Most of my peers were either intensely jealous or in disbelief. 

My parents were a little confused in how this counted as education they were paying for ;) 

And me, well... 

Mind you, before this project, I could count on one hand the times I'd been in a bar on a Saturday night. Lame, I know but a Southern Belle has to maintain her classy image and that cannot be done slamming back cold ones in a bar ;) 

Our Research

Nonetheless, I've discussed before that when a grade is involved, the NERD in me wins out ;)

So the Southern Belle in me risked my class and any chance at being cool by heading out to the bars, notebook in hand. 

I kid you not. 

So my group members and I sat there observing, scribbling notes and taking interviews. Unlike most group projects, though, our research did come complete with a Tequila Sunrise - an attempt to blend in despite the aforementioned notebook which hopefully everyone was too drunk to notice.

People did notice, however, when we returned on another night with a video camera. Strange how intoxicated people flock to be recorded... a clear indication that alcohol affects your logical reasoning ;)

Lastly, we also recorded ourselves - and I had not one drop to drink so I cannot blame alcohol on that decision. So forgive my poor acting skills but our aim was to create a satire of sorts (by doing gender wrong) based on what we discovered in our research on how to do gender in a bar scene.

Our Focus

We decided clothing was too obvious: duh, girls wear less and boys wear more. Researching that would have not been very insightful to our class or you. 

Instead, we chose to focus on the gender of drinks. 

Below, you'll find our answer via a few interesting and entertaining descriptions and interviews of what drink to buy if you want a masculine, feminine, or gender neutral drink.

I hope you like it!

Oh and if you DO like it, please pass it on. For those of you who know me (and my YouTube video obsession), you know how it would please me beyond belief for this to go viral ;) 

Then we could all drink to that - in whatever gender of drink you'd like!

Wondering About WGS... where do I fit in?

Recently, I have given a great deal of thought to pursuing grad school and possibly becoming a professor within the field of WGS.

I had a huge fear that I would not find a place in the WGS community as a Christian, feminine, very heterosexual, relatively traditional woman. Basically, I didn't know if they would see me, a Southern Belle Feminist, as legit.

The SEWSA conference was a big deciding factor.

I was unsure if my Southern Belle could possibly be accepted and lacked confidence that my Feminist could hold her own in that community. Plus, days of people simply reading papers had a high possibility of being plain old boring.

Fortunately, I am happy to report that I enjoyed SEWSA, was not ostracized for my Southern Belle appearance and was pleasantly surprised in how much my Feminist knowledge and references has accumulated in recent years, particularly in college.

The other thing I realized is that the Feminist community is more accepting of individuals and personal voices even if they come in a more traditional looking package (aka: me with my painted nails, high heels and flowered cardigans!). Still, though, I believe I may always have to prove my intelligence in this community because at first glance I may be perceived as out of place or simply vapid and buying into mainstream media ideals that they (and sometimes I) disagree with.

All in all though, I take confidence in my perhaps less common approach to feminism. I desire and believe, hopefully without too much arrogance, that I could be a bridge between the more traditional, mainstream community (which would not disregard me since I "fit" in there) and the feminist community so that I could share its more progressive ideals.

I also take confidence in the fact that my areas of interest, often more associated with the traditional, mainstream community, are under-explored from a feminist lens. This, I believe, might allow me to develop a niche in the feminist community if I pursue WGS academia. For example, I like Christianity, fashion, beauty, menstruation/reproduction, and heterosexual romance - areas that it seems to me are ignored or misunderstood by many feminists.

Hopefully I can delve into them to enlighten the feminists and also empower the more traditional community...

But now that I have outed myself in the Christian community as a Feminist and now that I have exposed my girly and traditional self in the Feminist community, without significant backlash, I am relieved to know that I can exist in both worlds and be me, a Southern Belle Feminist :)