Reflection on Feminiscience // Self-Evaluation

Irony is often a component of humor, but where irony appeared in this final project was surprising to me. I secretly wanted to do this project to escape the confine of writing yet another essay. I wanted to do something different, in a different format. In trying to write good articles, I ended up realizing that each article was trying to make an argument of its own, and through trying to convince the reader of that argument, I ended up understanding the structure of essays better than I think I ever have before. Ultimately, I ended up writing five smaller essays.

I think because of that, I'm not as satisfied with a lot of the articles on Feminiscience as I would like to be. Because each one ended up feeling like an essay, I ended up wanting to be able to put more research and depth into each of them. I kept finding myself missing writing academic essays! Surprisingly! Because of the time constraints I had put on myself, there was no way I could write six well-researched in-depth essays. In fact, I eventually ran out of time and had to scrap the sixth article, on Autism, in order to make the deadline.

I still found this to be really satisfying, and even if they ended up being essays after all, they ended up being essays with jokes, images, flexibility, and a casual tone. I found them to be a lot of fun to write, and I found myself more able to think about the structure of my arguments.

I think that 5 Times Biology Was Absurdly Unscientific is probably the article I'm the most proud of . It managed to fit my vision the best, and I think it's also the most well-written. I think that someday I would like to return to Feminiscience, this time giving myself for time for each article, and not insisting on writing and coming up with ideas for every single article on the website at once.

As for the class as a whole, I think that I'm pretty proud of my work. My first critical reaction paper wasn't very good, but I also didn't understand what a critical reaction paper was supposed to be at the time. My second and third critical reaction papers were much better, and I enjoyed reading them. I'm very proud of my second one, which I think is one of the best papers I've written. While I'm still not confident about understanding Harraway, I think I've really understood the rest of the material and concepts in class and will find them incredibly useful going into the future.

About

Feminiscience takes concepts and information from Feminist Science Studies and makes them accessible and digestible, so you can learn about ways that you can take back and define your own body. Feminiscience is about feeling empowered to argue on behalf of your body. You know your body, you are your body. The shroud of academia sometimes convinces us that others can tell us we are wrong about ourselves. Feminist Sciences say that we actually can and should engage with scientific literature and Feminiscience is an entryway.

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