Ending Junior Year / Back injury (lol) / Looking Ahead


There's less than a week left before I move out of school for the summer and I can't believe I only have two semesters left. This past week has been really hectic but finals and the projects I've been working on this semester are all tying up nicely.

Last week I had an accident at work and slipped on the wood staircase at my nanny-family's house while holding the 7-month-old. She was totally fine, but in order to hold onto the little one I didn't break my fall and slid all the way down the stairs nailing my lower back on each step. After an ER visit, a visit to the health center, and a visit to my PCP, I've been poked, prodded, and prescribed more than I have in my collective 21 years. The injury was horrible but short-term. I basically bruised up my lower spine, the left side of my pelvis, and my coccyx. It has really sucked but within a week I'm already feeling ready to return to work tomorrow (with less slippery socks). It's been a serious reality check to the limitations of my school's accessibility (granted everything was built in the 1840s) and the loss of bodily autonomy was more upsetting than I expected.

That being said, I am still on track for finals and have actually completed two classes entirely. I have two ten pagers to write (more on this in a minute!) and two poems & a defense of them. This summer I'll be working nannying up here until June 21, when I'll fly to Jacksonville to intern for Bridge Eight Magazine. I'm really excited to live somewhere far (not to mention beautiful) with my best friend and to have such an incredible learning experience. I'm really looking forward to writing and getting a head start on my research for my hopeful thesis / independent study in the fall where I'll be writing a collection of poems exploring love and the personal/political. It'll be empowering to work in a community that is interested in fostering creativity, too.

Back to those two ten pagers: they're both about lactation! The first is for my Gender Studies 300, Embodiments, which explored cartesian dualism and the mind/body split through examining different embodied experiences. We've discussed veganism (yeah!!), disabilities, mental illness, interspecies entanglements, birth, death, and some more. For my final paper/project for this class I'm researching the history of wet nurses and the trendiness of breast feeding. I want to look into how collective breastfeeding or milk banks are entangled in the history of wet nurses and the obvious race and class implications that narrate that history.

The second ten pager is for my Feminist & Queer Theory Through Film class. For this paper I'm going to be looking into technologies marketed towards mothers that obscure the way that mothering is inconvenient in capitalism and uses a feminist rhetoric ("You can have it all, career & baby!" "You can get back to work faster!") in order to actually continue to oppress mothers and devalue the importance of mothers. I'm going to look specifically into breast pumps as my main technology for the argument, but I will discuss Ipads as babysitters/occupiers, disciplining techniques through technology, carriers, etc. I'm interested in finding some research about the ineffectiveness and perceived effectiveness of breast pumps. The paper will also do some work talking about the limited maternity leave and pressure to return to productivity, as well as the need for mothers to have time away from mothering and how this relates to notions of 'returning to work'. As much work as they'll be they are both so relevant to my interest in lactation and this research is research I am invested in for personal growth too!

I'm excited to start off the summer and to start doing some serious leisure-reading.
Here's what I'm reading right now:



'Til next time!

M

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