I want to have a Gender Awareness Day of sorts on campus. It would require a lot of people and a lot of time to get it to be something people would be really into, but I'm thinking a full-day event, spread across campus. Check it out:
- Heavy advertising: Chalking, Collegian, flea market booth
- Make little awareness buttons. I'm thinking it'd be fun to cut out little outlines of pants, skirts, blouses, and shirts out of pink and blue paper (yeah, I know, it enforces the binary, but we gotta start small with the general population) and then have people come up and assemble their own combination of two pieces of clothing. Or something similar...we could sell them pre-made, but I want this to be as interactive as possible! And, we would ask for a dollar donation for them, so we'd have to make them look kinda snazzy.
- A booth on the mall with people painting nails. Again, requested dollar donation.
- If we're really ambitious, a booth doing makeup: drag, women's makeup, and transman makeup (facial hair, whatever techniques can be used to masculinize a face). $1
- It would be great to have education booths with big posters about the different nonbinary gender identities that exist.
- If someone was willing to sit down with me and devise a sort of "curriculum", we could even have panels, a sort of "Ask A Transperson" format. Visible Voices participants, anyone??
- It could culminate on a campus-wide genderfuck day, with everyone dressing with a different gender expression than they normally do.
This is just off the top of my head. It would be easy to get SOGLBT in on it, as well as the feminist club, the women's studies office, and I'm sure other diversity offices would be down as well.
This is something I've wanted to do for a while, but I think this could also be an opportunity to legitimize the idea of life grants, or, if I may narrow the focus, Transgrants. We could make a club on campus dedicated to the exploration of gender and gender-related issues. We could get money from the school. We could raise a lot of awareness. We could throw fundraisers, we could invite speakers, we could plan events, and best of all, we could have a lot of fun!
No, scratch that. BEST of all, we could use the money that we raise to help up-and-coming transkids who need a little financial assistance to navigate life.
Who's with me?!
>That last question was rhetorical. IT'S YOU!!!
dude im totally with u!!! i want to get proactive at like awareness of gender and stuff!!!
ReplyDeleteCK
Yeah I think it's a good idea. I'm not sure about the logistics of some parts and I'm not sure how down all of the offices you listed will be. We can always ask of course, but I just don't want to assume they'll all be gung ho to help out. I also think the panel thing could be really difficult. It's easy to have something like VV in a controlled format, but it's much less controlled in a place like the plaza and I'm a little worried people would feel more freedom to heckle speakers etc. People would probably also be more hesitant to speak, but you never know. Of course, this is all just specifics.
ReplyDelete-Liz