What to Expect? Blog #3

Every week while entering class, I am truly excited and ready to gain new knowledge and information on subjects and topics that I never knew to learn about. This class truly guides the fact that a person learns something new every day. And on top of that, Caitlin is always enthusiastic on every topic which makes me listen more. Also, she lets us as students provide our own opinions on the topics and lets us provide our arguments. 

Sometimes I always find myself confused whether I am in English class or not. From this past week I have learned some interesting things from two specific pieces that Caitlin has provided us to read for homework, which was "Body Ritual Among the Nacirema" by Horace Miner and "What is a Women" by Michelle Goldberg. 

First I am going to talk about "What is a Women" and my first reaction while reading this was ' why am I reading this for English class' but along the way it started to make sense and what really helped was the class discussion. Even though we went deeper into the discussion about this piece, I definitely still learned a lot from this. What I learned was how specific things were argued and different ways to argue for different and specific controversial topics. 

Now with this topic, Goldberg makes excellent points for both sides of the argument on transgender women being accepted as women but makes even stronger arguments for transgender women actually being accepted as women. Something that really struck me was when Goldberg was talking about how transgender men will never figure out or experience the same exact struggles that actual women have had in their lives. This was an interesting point to me because this is true since men think a lot differently than women do which gives them an disadvantage in what women do or experience. 

Goldberg also makes a point that men are being born a man automatically gives them privilege in the society. For that statement, I don't have much to comment about it because I do not feel that it is true that a man is born privileged though I do understand why people make these assumptions due to the history and every works of the stereotype of the average male dominating society. 

Now as for "Body Ritual Among the Nacirema" my first reaction while reading this was the same as reading "What is a Women" but I was much more confused and not really interested. While reading this I really did not know what was going on however I felt that there were a lot of invisible narratives. The invisible narratives were all in the rituals that were seen throughout this piece. Something that was really interesting to me was how 'Nacirema' was America spelled backwards. That itself to me is an invisible narrative.