"It's very public, what's happening to her." Oh attention-seeking one, do you recognize yourself here? :-)
What's happened to me in the last six months is also public. 20 pounds is noticeable. My students refrained from critiquing my dress at this level (ill-fitting, baggy, whoknows what adjectives they'd use. skank? Uh oh, THAT's why I don't try to talk street!)
also known as a "Lady Bucks cut" (see the original comment). I don't know if this site lives up to my friend's claim of elucidating social meaning: they boil it down to aggressiveness. :-( Most of the people at the following site do not exactly appear as prime, representative specimens of the human race. Is that the point?
So, Benjamin sees me today and asks, Do you call your hairstyle a mullet? I say, other people do, so I kinda go along with it. He said he'd just learned about it as a hockey symbol, that the Montreal Canadians all, at one time, had this short-on-the-top, long-in-the-back look. He said a few other things too which I hope he'll clarify here as I was rushing to teach and wasn't able to absorb everything in that moment....
I had two anecdotes shared with me today about mullets - one about the Lady Buckeyes who all shared the same hairstyle (!) and another one from a student whose....cousin?....has a haircut "exactly" like mine but "doesn't have a gay bone in her body". :-)
It's encouraging that there actually ARE other women out there with this haircut. Tina had mentioned that she normally thinks of men having this kind of haircut, and I'd replied that I think that's part of the reaction people have, that it is a haircut that seems to be associated with men.
And, as both my "informants" (!) today shared, it isn't necessarily a sign of any particular sexual orientation. Gosh. You mean there's actually variety?
:-)
So, I've been thinking about this more since Gabi asked if it was a "feedback wrapping" (per the interpersonal communication curriculum utilizing Seashore, et al). I don't think it was just my wrapping. I think folks might have recognized their own reactions, at least some of them. Today, while I was sharing some of this "story" with Uncle Sam, I again characterized it as "funny", and we did laugh together. David shared that he'd had a similar, somewhat taken-aback (?) reaction upon meeting me for the first time. It is funny, on one level, that we (people? in a universal sense?) are so sensitive to first impressions and... maybe the laughter is a self-laughter that also protects us from recognizing how strongly these first impressions (especially of difference) may affect our willingness to learn about/try to understand someone else? I dunno. I'm reaching....trying to understand....I don't think the laughter is a "bad" thing. It definitely protects me from some pain, but it also...opens communication? Maybe if we share the laughter together, we somehow "own" or acknowledge a connection, a similarity?
an updated version to the First International Conference on Qualitative Research. Jung Yup shared the call, and I notice the first theme is autoethnography and performance. It occurs to me that this weblog in toto is a form of autoethnography....not to mention some of the specific categories and uses to which I've put it, most specifically with my interpersonal comm classes...
Other themes are relevant to me as well: critical ethnography as performance, critical pedagogy, democratic methodologies, discourse analysis, decolonizing the academy (!)...indeed, this is just a sample!
One person (thanks Nadine!) approached me after the panel on Saturday saying she'd like to know how things turn out. I don't know, yet, but I'm mapping a possible path....
The overall audience response was ... remarkable, now that I stop to think about it.
