I'm getting irritated by all the loud fuckers around me, if there are two things here that bug me the most its the noise pollution and the nose (i.e. stank) pollution. I wonder if the people here are just used to it or if it stresses them out as well.. So some interesting things have occured in the past few days that I hope I have the patience to describe. I haven't eaten yet today and thus feel pretty salty right now, also cuz it's hot (comme toujours) and this guy next to me keeps sucking his snot into his head; one of my pet peeves. But maybe it's rude to give him a kleenex? I gave a snotting kid a kleenex on the bus once and he just stared at it, and me. Hellifiknow.
So on Tuesday one of our teachers (she's American btw) that has been out of the country for awhile came back to bother with teaching our class, you'll recall I was bitching about the inane assignment she gave us to do -- Rrg! now this dude is eating by slopping and smacking and sucking, my other big human noise peeve.--Anyway, back to the story. So we tried to discuss our issues with the class and she got really defensive and made everyone super uncomfortable, I think she thinks we're really ignorant American brats. This is true, we are ignorant American brats, but we are not as stupid or snotty about the things she thinks we are nor to the level that she thinks we are. For example, some students need a complete bibliography of the shit we are reading to show to their home institutions, which was lacking in the syllabus she gave us. So I brought this up. She got all pissy and said we would do well to assume that the people we are working with are professionals and know how to write a bibliography and that there is a reason the bibliography is incomplete. I don't think anyone thought that she didn't know how to do one, on the contrary we assumed she did and that the lack of completion indicated that she didn't really give a shit about the class since it is definitly her second priority (she only teaches 3 hours a week and was out of the country for 3 weeks of class - and unlike in the States there is no TA or sub to fill in).
Welll then we got into discussing the gender and communications cultures article we read, which I laid into because I had some huge issues with the article. (I was not the only one) We started talking about gender and she was defining gender as the sex of a person. I was blown away - she's a social anthropologist what the hell? We tried to say that our understanding of gender was that it was a set of attributes that can be independent of sex. She was completely in disagreement with this, and being a jerk about it as well. She asked me if I would at least agree that there were two genders and I replied that I didn't even think there were two sexes (if you arent familiar with intersex issues click here for an introduction) and she told me that I was just getting into polemics (I think she meant to say semantics but it seemed unwise to correct her - then I really would be getting into semantics).
That really fucking pissed me off. The notion of a diaspora of sexes as well as genders is not fucking semantics! Notions of only two sexes has real effects, sometimes very negative, on real people's lives! I was really really disappointed in her because I had had so much respect for her previously. I think I can still get a lot out of the class as long as I just don't offer my opinion on anything and we stay away from certain topics; because she does know a lot about Senegal.
Another example of how the class got so fucked: we had to do these stupid diagrams labeling ourselves and who we are, I put American, identify as female, student, queer, daughter, sister, etc. She was writing all the labels that everyone said on the white board.
When I said "queer" (remember this is an American social anthropologist) she stopped and said, "What?"
I said, "Queer."
She looked at me and said, "As in a queer person?"
I said "As in not straight."
I then listed the next thing on my list of labels and she skipped writing queer and instead wrote the next thing (whatever is was, sister or something).
I told her it was okay and she could write queer on the board, which she then did. Thank god I'm comfortable with myself. The next girl (Suzanne) who was queer felt too uncomfortable to say it and instead said Christian. The third girl (Bea) in the group who I know is queer also said queer, which I was happy about. Bea thought that there was major homophobia going on; whereas I interpreted it as Wendy (the prof) not knowing the term's current use, which is relatively new and she has been living in Senegal for ten years. Bea said she had a friend going through sexual identity issues in South Africa and if that conversation had just happened to her it would have destroyed her. I think being here is really confirming what a raging queer I really am; something I was just starting to give thought to in the States.
Well then a few other students said that they had to say they were sick of all the complaining we were doing and that we had to realize that we were in another country and to go with the flow a bit more. I think they were right, but I also think that MSID has some serious issues. For example, we had to do about 1000 pages of reading over the summer and to write four papers, eight pages each. The professors here don't seem to have any clue that we have read what we have and some of them didn't even know we had to write papers until we gave the papers to them. We are therefore going over things in class that we already know about instead of getting into the topics on a deeper level. And in every single class we are way behind on the syllabus (I mean weeks in one case) and there are topics listed on there that I would really like to know about. How simple is it to inform the professors about the students' background knowledge?
So, I've decided to make the best of it and change my learning strategy. I'm not going to spend tons of time on these classes, and instead im going to concentrate on experiencial learning. Instead of doing so much homework I'm going to visit with other families and my family and explore Dakar. I will still do the minimum level necessary and read that which I think will be useful, but I think that there are a lot of things that I am just going to have to research on my own time since we simply aren't going to deal with them in an academic way here. This seems healthy anyway cuz it's not good to not have free time and just do homework and talk about classes. There's more to life than this..
