“Gender, Raves, and the Space of Muffins”
By: Audrey Kreiser
Even after taking a class called The Pursuit of Knowledge my first semester in the Honors College, registering for a spring class called Gender and the Space of Knowing still seemed pretty daunting. “What could ‘the space of knowing’ even mean?” I remember asking my roommate Genevieve, who had also signed up. “And how could that possibly relate to gender?”
In a lot of ways, it turns out. Within a couple of weeks we had paged through a short story by Alice Walker, a few books of Paradise Lost, and the creation stories in Genesis. (Did you know there are two? Some of you probably did…I had no idea.) We engaged in class discussion, consulted the works some friendly feminist geographers, watched a documentary about drag culture in New York, and ate a veritable bounty of Professor Lisa Schnell’s famous vegan cranberry muffins. By spring break, we had a working understanding of “space”: an opportunity for meaningful presence, discussion, and expression.
Lisa’s class has been my only so far where I knew all the other students’ names. This likely stemmed from everyone’s engagement in the class, though we all felt free (in this space of cranberry vegan muffins) to take on more than just a pleasing-the-professor role. My classmates and I were transitioning away from our high school concepts of class discussion (which were, in my experience at least, sometimes highly competitive for teacher approval, often uncomfortable, and very rarely authentic learning experiences). It was replaced by a valuable type of discourse, which our professor enabled and inspired but didn’t control. Confusion, questions, personal anecdotes, and information from blogs or the Pursuit of Knowledge or other classes were all valid and valued.
This was a rigorous course, and I won’t bore you with the minutiae of my essays about dance floors and readings about the geography of “man of the house” chairs. But I will point out that our gender studies course spilled out of the classroom and into many facets of my daily life– Genevieve and I often had our classmates over to talk about the readings or study; our class started a blog of articles about gender that we found in the news or online; and discussion did sometimes turn toward the gendered implications of our suite’s own large, comfy “man of the house” chair.
After a crash course in Judith Butler and her theories of “performing gender,” we started thinking about our own research into how gender plays out in different spaces such as the gym, the classroom, public bathrooms, and the dance floor– my first big research project in college. We each wrote short papers about some aspect of gender that interested us, then Lisa assigned us to groups based on similar interests. My group was interested in dance, from my observations about gender roles in swing dancing to Jack’s notes on women in the turbulent space of punk concerts. The four of us started meeting in the living room pretty often, doing some initial research and thinking about what interested us about gender in dance. We noticed that while all other types of dance seemed to have pretty rigid “male” and “female” roles, the rave scene really deviated from that. The values of this counter-culture scene included peace, love, unity, and respect (PLUR), and that seemed to eliminate two distinct gender roles in favor of an overarching feeling of oneness with everyone. It was fascinating, and there was a ton of information about it available through the online library archives.
Our review of the research culminated in a trip to Higher Ground, a local music venue, for an EDM concert, where we actually dressed up, danced, interviewed other concertgoers, and reported on our findings. (Only at UVM does one undercover research team run into another undercover research team at an EDM concert… they were also doing gender studies research!)
I made several great friends in that class, and I definitely still see Lisa as a great resource for conversation and advice in the Honors College. My classmates and I still use the foundation of gender and space for talking about our own experiences and readings. And, in case anyone was wondering, we were, in fact, given the vegan muffin recipe at the end of the year.