Subversion

Fall, 2008; I get signed into a class that will change the course of my life.

Spring, 2009; Things fall apart. Hard.

Fall, 2009; I find my voice. Things come together.

Spring, 2010; I learn the hard way that you can't run away from your problems, not even thousands of miles away.

Fall, 2010; I hit instuitutional brick wall after brick wall after brick wall, becoming increasingly disillusioned with higher education's ability to effect real change in the world.

Everything here is interrelated; I don't believe in God and I don't believe in fate, but it's funny how the universe aligns in ways to bring you to places of extreme clairvoyance as well as disillusionment. Subversion is a topic much discussed in my English classes, especially regarding women; it was not until recently that I realized that subversion as an intellectual construct means nothing if it can't be applied to real life. A newfound friend presented to me an opportunity to enact subversion rather than discuss it--what follows is an excerpt from a senior comprehensive project in English:

It’s a question I get asked often, by family members, friends, coworkers, acquaintances—just what exactly do I plan on doing with English if not teaching high school? (Women’s Studies? Women’s…Studies? What do you need to go studying women for, you are one.) Sometimes I simply respond with law or grad school, but more often than not, I extol the virtues of an English education—critical thinking! analytical writing! the ability to historically contextualize! mad research skills!—and yet, as I look back on my experience as an English major, I feel an incredible and inescapable sense of disillusionment. And it’s not to say I don’t see the value in critical thinking, analytical writing, and all things particularly English; it is in these skills that I was able to find my voice as a thinker and writer.
I believe it was in my junior year that the culmination of my life experience converged with my academic training and I found my true voice; a voice, it just so happens, of an irreverent smart-ass. Being an irreverent smart-ass is integral to my identity as a feminist, a thinker, and a writer—it is the way that I cope with a world that is increasingly inhospitable to the egalitarian values I try to live by.
Because it was my life experience that sparked an interest in learning from and engaging with other feminists and academics before me, I feel—I know, rather—that my social location informs every facet of my being—the way I speak, think, and write—how I resist and exist. Through the difficult times in my life, I have turned to memoirs because I sincerely believe in the ability of personal narratives to transform and change lives; it seemed only fitting that I culminate my college experience with the memoirs women who had, in many ways, saved my life. Yet in talking to other Women’s Studies and English students, I realized that what I envisioned my project being did not fit into the categories of "poised and learned"—rather, it would be visceral and experiential. Because of this, and despite the better judgment of those two-comp compers before me, I decided to comp separately in Women’s Studies and English. This separation between “high art” and personal narrative is, at best, superficial and at worst, dangerous; I believe this is the crux of my critique of the English comp requirements. We need to begin living our lives in a place beyond intellect and into new ways of thinking about the world and our place within it, because theory will only carry us so far; we must learn to embrace experience—real, messy, complicated experience—if English majors are truly going to transform the world.