The weekly Women’s Center program will teach how to write about personal experiences with gender and sexuality.
The Brown Bag of the week, hosted by the Women’s Center, will teach participants how to break the rules of censoring identities in their writing.
English professor Hillery Glasby will facilitate the lunch and learn program, and will teach students how to effectively discuss topics of gender and sexuality in personal and academic writings.
“Primarily my work focuses on how sexuality is one thing we expect to keep out of the writing classroom, even though it very much informs the kind of writing that we do,” Glasby said. “The same thing (goes for) women. It might be motherhood or work life balance, but those are things they are expected to erase from their experience to be considered academic.”
Glasby said she hopes participants will leave the program with a better understanding of what women’s writing means, and how society has affected the literary portrayal of women. She said she wants participants to move from adhering to what others have said and written about women, to being honest about what they truly think about themselves.
Glasby said she encourages people to come to the program to learn more about how they write personally, and the choices they make when writing about gender and sexuality.
“It’s really important for people in academics to understand how their identity influences and shapes their writing,” she said. “I think often, a lot of my students don’t understand that identity impacts what and how people write.”
While the event primarily focuses on the written word, it will also teach participants how thought shapes identity and how it is perceived. Glasby said she hopes students studying a variety of topics will attend for this reason.
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“It should be fun, and it should be interactive,” she said.
Sarah Jenkins, program coordinator for the Women’s Center, said the program will encourage participants to write about their own personal experiences in the context of gender and sexuality.
“It will be focusing on encouraging people to write about their own lived experiences and getting away from the more instructional aspects of academic writing that may or may not pertain to people’s different lived experiences,” she said.
Participants in the Brown Bag will have a little extra time this week to apply what they learn from Glasby, as the program has been extended a half hour.
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HED: Brown Bag program to break the rules of writing about gender and sexuality
