ENG1101

After reviewing Andrea Chu’s “The Pink”, I noticed that her message was change. She had difficulty explaining why she wanted to become transgender. Her best words to explain it was “i hoped a vagina would make me feel more like a woman”. Chu elaborates on the ideas of feminism. Being a feminist has a numerous amount of meanings, but feminism means advocacy of women’s rights on the ground of the equality of all sexes. The feminist movement and Chu’s physical changes related to each other because it was a process to get to both results. Transgenders changed the feminist movement because since they were transitioning to a woman, they would be a new addition to the feminist community.

I would relate a butterfly to Chu’s text. Butterflies are seen as a symbol of transformation and change. A butterfly begins as a caterpillar and transforms into an exquisite insect with unique colored wings. Andrea Chu was born a male and decided to transform into a woman.

In the reading “The Pink” by Andrea Long Chu , the author seems to be talking about the importance of feminism, politics, and transition from masculine to feminine. The author mentions how feminism is alway over looked by many people and nervier really appreciated, especially in politics. women are always overlooked in important roles in politics, in Chu’s reading it states ” feminism never succeeded in securing women as a collective subject of history”. In the text the narrator also mentions how even trying to be as feminine as possible they “didn’t feel any more like a women”. This text reminded me of an image , because it shows that no matter what anybody else think the most important thing is being comfortable in your own skin even if you are a female, or transgender. It also shows that in the feminism world no one opinion truly matters expect you own.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sayh8ZASxk8

This song makes me think and wonder all the historical events we have been going through because it describes the pandemic perfectly and  it’s interesting seeing historical events while they’re happening and recognizing them as such. I’m only in my 19 but I’ve lived through a few major world events already –  the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean, multiple devastating hurricanes (Katrina in 2005), the economic recession of 2008, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, civil wars in many countries around the world, the rise of global terrorism, the tsunami and nuclear accident in Japan in 2011, and the Covid-19 pandemic, just to name a few. With all the craziness around us it is my hope that we will try harder to love, to live, and to light other people’s lives with our good spirits and helping hands. The alternative is certainly possible, and terrifying.

After reading The Pink by Andrea Chu, the main idea that seemed to stand out from all the discussion about feminism, and what being feminist meant and how contradicting the ideas in the community can be, was the idea of change. From the introduction’s descriptions of Chu’s operation from having male genitalia to having female genitalia, and from the discussions of how the feminist movement changed with the inclusion of trans people, to denoting the changes about what being “feminist” meant as the movement moved with the times, the one thing I found that they all had in common was change.

After the second point of critique for the pussyhat, what immediately became obvious was the motif of change. From detailing her own physical change, to diving into the history of how trans women changed the feminist movement’s stances on inclusion and being sensitive to holistic representation, the only constant I saw was the lack of constance itself. Chu’s body and perception of herself was shifted, similar to how the symbolism of the pussyhat shifted the movement’s ideas of having a face in their movement back then. Reading Chu’s account of her own change and the change of the feminism movement was like historical deja vu, where the story of a person belonging to the group that spurred change in the movement is being accounted, and the importance of their existence is highlighted.

The symbol in the picture is a Chinese word for change. I picked the letter over a phoenix because despite the “rebirth” symbolism of the phoenix, there weren’t any decent pictures online and I decided that I wanted the media to be literal. No fancy symbolism, nor any discussions about what the bird could symbolize (especially since the phoenix could also represent eternity). Just straight-up “change” in a black and white format that I edited from a cartoon’s title card. Simple, efficient, and conveys the meaning directly.

For my intro, I am going to use the song “Live Your Life” by T.I. feat Rihanna. I wanted to throw it back with this song because i use to always jam out to it when i was a little girl and by listening to it just made me so excited for the future. This song expands on the fact that you should be thankful about your life and how you should stop worrying about the little things. One of my favorite lines from the song is “hey, never mind what haters say, ignore ’em til they fade away”. There are some people that could be haters that just want to see you lose because they are jealous or insecure. That is why you have to ignore the negative people in your life and just live life to the fullest because at the end of the day, it is your own self who wants to succeed. Life is what you make of it, so negativity should never get in the way of your dreams. No one can change who you are except you and it is you who makes the choices to do that. This song is positive and it tells me to look forward to my future because it is me who is shaping it, no one else.