my interview reflection

I had so much fun interviewing others.  It was quite a wonderful learning experience.  I now realize that when an interview is interviewee-centered rather than interviewer-centered, the interviewee discusses a lot more information with the interviewer that probably would have never been mentioned.  The first two interviews I conducted were in person and held back to back with a lesbian couple, Kiana and Barbara.  I originally assumed they were lesbians, but during the course of the interview discovered they were bisexual.  In fact, both women had previously dated men before dating women.  Later in the night, I even got to ask Kiana’s younger sister, Lexie, a few questions about her experience with Kiana and Barbara.

When approaching this interview, I feel I had many assumptions about the GLBT community that I was not even aware I had, which were continually contradicted.  I assumed, for instance, that the GLBT community must feel slighted by religious people and their incapacity to accept gay marriage, yet both Kiana and Barbara feel it would be wrong to get married in the traditional sense, especially in a church.  They both felt this would be making a mockery of religion.  Further, Kiana once believed, but no longer does believe, that to be gay is an abomination against God.  Barbara still believes to be gay is an abomination against God.  I also believe I was confronted by my own stereotypes of this community, for I noticed that there was no rainbow paraphernalia hanging all around their home.  Also, I feel I have frequently made the assumption that homosexuals experience love differently than heterosexuals, that in some way their experience might be more physical based, yet Kiana and Barbara expressed some of the deepest love I have ever observed between two people.  Kiana told me that the love shared between two women is incredibly intense, and that she has never experienced love to this degree with a man.  Further, they both told me that bisexual people are just as loyal as others, that they do not desire a connection with a man and feel they are missing something when they are with a woman.  This too contradicted my original assumption, an assumption I believe I acquired from a heterosexual community that taught me well to think the opposite.  If my interviews were interviewer-centered, I believe I would have never recognized my faulty assumptions.  Instead, my questions would have been derived from these assumptions and influenced the interview to head in a totally different direction.  Overall, I realize now, from this experience and interview, that what we call normal, the home life of the heterosexual, is sometimes not even close in comparison to the normalcy expressed in the home life of the homosexual.  From the moment I arrived to Kiana and Barbara’s home, until the moment I left, I felt so welcomed.  There was a special sense of warmth and harmony that flowed through their walls, which I have not frequently experienced in the home’s of heterosexuals.  They both were very open and accepting of the interview experience and of me in general.  They were not afraid to express themselves and their real feelings.  I adored being with them.  I also adored meeting Kiana’s younger sister, Lexie, who told me that she does not mind that Kiana is gay, because she can still come to Kiana with boyfriend problems and Kiana understands.  Kiana, Barbara, and Lexie all agreed to getting their picture taken and posted online.  Here they are down below listed in this order:  Barbara, Kiana, Lexie.

  Barbara and Kiana

   Lexie

My third interview was with Todd, a gay man, who I also assumed was gay only.  It turned out that Todd too was bisexual.  His boyfriend, the man he lives with, is the only boyfriend he has ever had.  Prior to this relationship, he only had girlfriends.  It was interesting to see how many of the assumptions I made about the GLBT community before visiting with Kiana and Barbara were also being challenged at Todd’s home.  First, his home was also very harmonious.  He had dozens of pets: turtles, fish, snakes, lizards, rodents, dogs, cats, etc.  I was surrounded by these beautiful creatures, some of which I took pictures of and will include my favorite, his chinchilla, in this post.  Todd mentioned something to me that Kiana also mentioned, which caught me by surprise.  He said that flamboyant gays are not being themselves, that they are acting the role of the cookie cutter gay that is frequently presented in stereotypical cinema.  He said that he feels some gays are born naturally feminine or masculine, but the flamboyant stereotype of the gay man contradicts the truth of the gay man, which is that he comes in many different personalities.  At this point in my interview with Todd, I started making connections with my interview with Kiana.  Kiana also said that she disliked the stereotypical representation of lesbians being butch-like and aggressive.  She too said it was a false representation.  Overall, I noticed that Kiana, Barbara, Todd and his boyfriend contradicted these stereotypes completely.  They were not the flamboyant gays or the butch lesbians the cinema makes them out to be.  They were people with hopes, desires, and goals.  Here is a picture of Todd and below him a picture of his chinchilla.

   Todd

    Todd’s chinchilla

My final interview, the one conducted online with a male homosexual, did not prove to be very effective.  The most beneficial part of the experience was that the time spent between sending emails back and forth caused me to reflect more and decide to begin the interview by asking him what he would like to talk about first.  He gave me a lot of good ideas, things I would never even have considered without his help.  But once I sent him the questions to be answered, he took a very long time to respond. When he did finally respond, he did not answer many of the questions.  Further, the questions he did respond to included very short answers that lacked sufficient detail in order to be able to grasp understanding from them.  For instance, when asked why he wanted to come out, he stated, “Because I was tired of hiding it.”  In response to this answer, I would like to ask him, “Why were you tired of hiding it?” but I did not feel comfortable enough to pry my nose in any further.  I would have felt uncomfortable attempting to approach him with more questions, because it appeared evident to me that, even though he originally expressed  enthusiasm in taking the interview, he did not feel comfortable answering many of the questions.  I cannot help but wonder then, if this interview was more interviewee-centered like the others, if he would have felt more compelled to answer fully and less uncomfortable about disclosing information.

the edge of chaos has no edge

In class last week, we also analyzed the line, “The edge of chaos is where writing has enough stability to sustain itself and enough creativity to deserve the name of writing,” which posed a statement of Syverson’s in a different way.  In relationship to the physics of life, something that is chaotic both in its sustainability and creativity, writing must also be chaotic in its sustainability and creativity.  Like the physics of life, writing is a complex system.  Before proceeding, I would like to consider a painting of Jackson Pollock’s, One, which is posted below.

Magnificently, Pollock’s painting reveals this chaos of sustainability and creativity within the physics of life.  Simultaneously, he shows that it is also within art.  Pollock was able to create this painting, because he recognized that the complex system was within, not only physics, but also his experience of art, thereby causing him to literally paint that experience of the complex system, which is revealed in his painting above.  His painting illustrates a clear representation of the equilibrium of chaos within a complex system.  Writers, I believe Syverson is suggesting, need to embrace this complex system as an experience that is both inside and outside of the self.  They should strive to recognize that because they, by definition of the complex system, are dynamic beings, making them unpredictable and spontaneous beings, their writing is also unpredictable and spontaneous.  Therefore, it might be best for writers to approach the writing process with a feeling of spontaneity, for even when they approach a writing project with an exact intent, the chances are the original intent will change shape over time, because there are so many unseen forces contributing a role in the writing process.  Along with the many psychological unseen forces of the subconscious and unconscious, there are also many unseen forces, as Syverson suggests, outside of us that are playing a role, such as the environment, other people, our bodies, and the means by which we create.  For example, when first approaching this assignment, I intended only to explain the line, “The edge of chaos is where writing has enough stability to sustain itself and enough creativity to deserve the name of writing,” which we discussed in class last week.  Yet I did not intend to discuss how Pollock’s painting symbolized this complex system.  I did not intend to suggest that his approach to painting is the approach writers should take when creating a poem or manuscript.  These ideas just came flooding out of me like, as William Wordsworth would have called it, “a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.”  Therefore, my now interconnected relationship, as reader of Syverson’s work and as observer of Pollock’s painting, has influenced my writing choices.  These choices are not individualized.  They are not only my own.  They are also Syverson’s, Pollock’s, and many others, all locked together in a spontaneous, yet harmonious, complex system.

The next thing I would like to discuss is my environment.  I am currently in Cooper Hospital in Camden, New Jersey, bored out of my mind while waiting for my friend to get his colonoscopy behind him.  I have no other choice but to wait here for hours, so I decided to get some of my writing done.  I feel this environment is currently influencing me to invest a lot more time and energy into this post, because typically I feel like I am running out of time, but this place makes me feel like I have a few extra hours to do nothing.  Next, I did not bring my laptop with me out of fear of being jumped and robbed for it.  I felt it might be unsafe to bring it into Camden.  Consequently, this is the first post that I am writing on paper, which I feel will cause the final copy, the one on my blog, to turn out differently (I am typing this post to my blog now, and I can tell you that it has definitely changed as a result of typing it).  Also, I feel writing with a pen on paper influences me to express more passion in my writing sometimes, because I feel like the blank piece of paper is screaming at me to fill it in.  The computer screen doesn’t do this for me.  Yet the computer does many things for me that paper does not do.  As I mentioned in class, I feel that having my laptop has made me a better writer, but at the time I did not explain what I meant about this clearly enough.  What I meant is that my laptop makes everything so much more easily accessible.  Okay, I admit that I am lazy sometimes.  I do not feel like getting up to get the dictionary, thesaurus, or some other book for clarification when writing on paper.  My laptop makes it very easy to avoid these type of writing complications, so instead of having to dig through one of my books to find what Wordsworth said exactly about spontaneity and its relationship to writing poetry, all I have to do is click a button and I am there.  Further, I once told people that reading expanded my vocabulary recognition so much.  Now I feel my laptop has helped me to do this just as much, yet in much less time.  These contributors, along with many others, suggest that as a writer I am not just one mind composing, rather I am a pen, a laptop, a body with moving hands, etc.  In the Journal of Value Inquiry, David Brubak discusses the philosopher, Merleau-Ponty, and his concept of the three intertwinings.  Brubak says, “Merleau-Ponty developed the notion of the flesh as a ‘thickness of the body’ that permits communication between our perceptions and the things themselves.”  Before I studied Merleau-Ponty, I thought that the body and material things in our environments served no importance.  I, like Plato and Socrates, was an idealist.  Now I know that without our bodies and the things in our environments, we could not experience our ideas.  Now I know that all of these things are very significant.  Now I know that writing is a complex system that involves the active engagement with all of these significant elements.

One final note, in consideration of the environment and the notion of writer’s block, I think it is interesting to consider when we talk about writer’s block that we automatically assume that it is something in the mind that is keeping us from thinking creatively.  Yet might it not be the environment that is blocking our pathways of creative thought?  For instance, I noticed when I am at work I cannot write very well at all.  I dispatch police, fire, and medical, and while working I hear buzzing, ringing, beeping, screaming, and many other chaotic sounds of the busy world around me.  Consequently, I feel my chaotic environment causes me to experience writer’s block.  I mention this because Syverson says that notions like writer’s block have been invented solely from our emphasis on “thinking” as the primary contributor in writing.  I feel she is correct, so I now offer a new way to perceive these sort of notions, namely that the environment or other factors are causing things like writer’s block to occur.

Ducks in the Mirror

Do ducks look into the mirror, and while squinting at their own gazes, search for their complexities within their simplicities?  How does a duck know it is a duck, considering it probably has never looked into the mirrors of life before?  That which we call a complex system rolls and rumbles without the duck’s awareness, stumbles on bottles with messages, and lands itself right into the lap of the human being.  The ducks have refreshed my existence today on the sharp breeze of their wings that swung me through the air, swiped me with their flapping flare, and showed me what it meant to be a chaotic being of stability.  Ducks are gutsy.  They do not need to look in a mirror before asking someone on a date or engaging in self-reflection.  Ducks can teach humans a lot about courage.  They can teach humans to self-reflect in the absence of the mirror, to see more than what they perceive in the mirror.  Because of the ducks, and my #core2s10 class, I have written a duck story today.  The experience of being in class and discussing the duck story with everyone, reading and reflecting on Syverson, and watching the ducks at the park, have all intermingled down the tube of the writing process, as I engage in this complex system of writing.  Now I experience the duck, feel the duck, and accept the duck as my own.  And the message in the bottle said, “Write about the duck.”

Reliability as the only possibility: Is it true?

Last week in class, I mentioned that when writing about what I have been told by others I worry about the reliability of the material written.  At the time, Dr. Wolff asked me to clarify what this meant to me, but I did not answer.  Since then I have done much reflection, and I now know what it means to me.  First, I gave an example in class that night, which I felt might cause others to question the reliability of my work.  My mother grew up in foster homes her entire childhood since she was two, and she has told me several really fascinating, yet horrifying, stories.  For example, she was viciously abused, both physically and emotionally.  She observed other children being abused also.  She remembers waking another foster child late at night, telling her to go to the bathroom out of fear that if she wet the bed she would be once again smothered in her wet sheets, beaten repeatedly in her own urine, while wrapped in these ruthless rags of toilet torture.  As a writer, I would really like to discuss these stories in a nonfiction piece, yet I would like to do it without having to conduct an interview or feel as though the reader is saying, “How do you know exactly what happened?  This is heresy.  We want to hear from the mother.”  These words pierce my mind when writing about the words of others, for I have been taught that reliability is crucial in nonfiction writing.  

Strangely, this overbearing emphasis on reliability contradicts what Syverson suggests writers should do, namely to consider more than “what they know” during the writing process.  Reliability suggests that writers should ask what they know rather than what others know or what others have told them, thereby reinforcing writers once again to focus only on thought, namely what they know, as the primary contributor in the writing process.  Clearly, writers should consider more than what they know.  Therefore, this definitely makes for a great discussion and poses a really important question.  Should we be emphasizing reliability as much as we do in writing, and if so, how do we do it without compromising our active engagement with the complex system of writing?  Surely, the complex system of writing is something that just happens subconsciously, yet I believe if we learn to consciously embrace it we then will experience writing at a different level, a level of supreme mindfulness.  At this level, we will learn to embrace writing, not with our minds, but with our pens, our keyboards, our hands, our bodies, and our environments.

The Pink Triangle, Love at all Angles

I wanted to explore more about the meaning of the pink triangle this week, only with the sex symbols included within the image.  I brought this symbol to class with me last week, which is shown below.

It appears to me that all of these symbols are connected to one another, Venus, Mars, and even Venus and Mars as one, in order to illustrate the GLBT community as a community that is in continuous progress, signified in the central area of the symbol, namely the circle. Further, the different symbols within this one symbol suggest many things. Within this triangle, for instance, we can see many relationships, that of two males, two females, the male and female, and the transgender individual with either male or female. Overall, there is a very powerful connection of the sexes represented within this symbol, a connection that almost suggests a disconnection within the heterosexual world.

I also discovered that the GLBT community reclaimed the pink triangle as a symbol of empowerment, as a means to remember those who suffered at the hands of the Nazi regime. In other words, they have chosen to transform the history of torture that was once widely represented in the pink triangle into a symbol of gay pride and gay rights.   Here is the other picture I brought with me to class last week, a picture of Jewish prisoners lined up for the Nazi soldiers.  The prisoners have the pink triangle pasted to their chests, a means to identify them as homosexual prisoners, their crime being that of homosexuality.

Here is a scene from the movie titled Bent, a movie about the experience of two gay men who use their love for each other as a means to survive during the holocaust.  In this clip, one of the men describes the meaning of the pink triangle during this time period in history.  He says it is considered the lowest symbol of all.

my completed questions for my online interview

Here are the questions I developed for my online interview if anyone is interested in observing what I came up with. I developed a lot of them as I moved along with my first two interviews, and, as I mentioned in class, by asking my interviewees what they wanted to talk about first. Click on the link below. Thanks.

interview questions for core 2

is the pine tree for sale?

Tonight’s class was interesting.  I really enjoyed sharing my object with everyone and listening to what everyone else had to say about their objects.  One of my favorite of all the objects was the for sale sign.  There really is so much going on in a for sale sign, so much more than what we see, especially currently with the way our economy has been going.  This presentation caused me to reflect on the implications of a for sale sign.  When I see a for sale sign outside of a home, I typically think that people are moving, choosing to start anew.  What I do not think is that they have given up, because they can no longer afford to pay for their home.  I do not think that they abandoned their home, so now the bank is trying to sell it.  Nor do I think about the many other horrible possibilities.  It is not that I do not realize these things are happening, but rather that I do not choose, in the moment of viewing a for sale sign, to think about all of this.  Similar to how I do not view a bubble and think about how scientists once used bubbles in experiments and painters once painted bubbles for money.  Like the bubble, the for sale sign probably has such a long and interesting history that should be researched, especially a history in the case of economics.

I also loved the Pine Tree idea, but I found myself wanting to know more about how these people identify with the Pine Tree.  What does the Pine Tree say about who they are?  Also, how does the history of the Pine Tree relate to their lives in the past, present, and future?  In other words, how did its history influence who they became over time, and who they will continue to work at becoming?  I think these would be interesting questions to consider when researching this object.  

I also will be doing more research on my object, the pink triangle, both as a gay pride and rights symbol, and as a concentration camp identity badge, once called the badge of shame, signifying that a man was homosexual.  I really think this is so incredibly interesting.  Further, I think it is very important, when choosing our objects, to consider their history, a history that includes the past, present, and future.  Now for the call-outs.

my first interview

I wanted to reveal how I handled my first interview, which was online through email notifications.  I began by asking my interviewee, a gay man, if he had any suggestions for what type of questions I should ask the GLBT community.  He mentioned three things that I probably would not have asked, so I was glad I asked him first.  Further, he seem to appreciate that I asked him for suggestions.  The three questions he suggested were:

Does the GLBT community feel safer now than before when this community was not so visible to the public?

Do GLBT individuals on T.V. today reinforce hurtful stereotypes?

Do you feel, as a GLBT individual, that the topic of the GLBT community was used in politics to get votes, especially during the Obama campaign?

These were, I felt, three really helpful questions that I probably would not have thought of on my own.  I decided I will conduct every interview this way, beginning first with asking the interviewee what he or she would like to discuss.  As in the case above, I can ask my interviewee, and will, if he felt the topic of the GLBT community was used to get votes in politics, because clearly it is something that is on his mind and he would like to discuss.

re-flecking on Fleck

I was absent from class last time, so I am not able to type my post on class reflection.  Instead, I will reflect on the reading itself, Fleck’s Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact.  I really enjoyed reading Fleck’s work.  Dr. Wolff told me that in class everyone discussed  how we could use Fleck in our research, which is what I would like to attempt to do now.  Fleck points out that one experiment cannot explain the development of syphilis, but rather the experiences of many different experiments, observations, skills, and transformation of concepts can.  Therefore, in consideration to my own research, when researching a specific concept, I should make sure to look at the history of experiments and transformations of that concept.  As Fleck suggests, all concepts conform to a specific thought style of the past.  I am researching the GLBT community.  According to Fleck then, I am researching, not only the current GLBT community, but the  GLBT community of the past, and even the future.

Fleck suggests that throughout the history of scientific knowledge, as with other branches of knowledge, a closed system of opinions developed, which resisted, and still resists, any new ideas that contradict it.  He says there are several stages to this resistance.  First, a contradiction to the system appears unthinkable.  Second, what does not fit into the system remains unseen.  Third, new ideas are kept secret.  Fourth, experts explain an exception to the rule.  Fifth, experts continue to describe the current views only, while ignoring the contradictory views.  In consideration of these stages, I think it will be important, when researching my topic, to research contradictory views.  I should always keep in mind that just because an expert says so does not make it so, because experts frequently resist new ideas that contradict their own ideas.  Fleck says that the expert is a molded individual who cannot escape the bonds of tradition or of the collective.  In other words, when a new idea comes along that does not fit into experts’ collective boxes of traditions, they reject it, or simply overlook it, because they cannot escape the bonds of their traditions and of the collective. 

Along with these ideas, I think it will be important to consider my personal method of cognition when conducting my research.  Fleck mentions that whatever we already know influences our method of cognition, and this method then gives what we already know new meaning.  Therefore, I must consider, when doing my research, that what I already know will guide my choices in research, and how I then interpret that research.  For instance, I currently live in a social world in which the GLBT community is fighting for different rights, like the rights of marriage and adoption.  Because I live in this social world, I chose to research this community.  Further, because I live in this social  world, I have developed my own opinions and perceptions of this world, such as believing the rights of the GLBT community have been violated, which will now influence the way I interpret the readings on this topic.  As such, I must make sure to analyze my own beliefs and biases, and how they may be influencing the progression of my research, when developing my work.

Fleck also states that truth is not relative or subjective, but rather belongs to a particular thought style, namely that of a thought collective.  In conclusion, when conducting my research I will remember that what I am researching is never truth for all people, but rather truth only according to a certain group of people.  The thoughts and concepts developed from each of these groups of people is what makes up a thought collective.

interviewing themes and subject info

My research topic is on the GLBT community.  The theme of my interviews will involve the hardships and sufferings of this community, the individuality of each subject that I interview, and their civil rights.  I want to keep the themes general, because I do not want to slip into my own personal trap of persuasive writing.  I really want to try to remain neutral during my interviews, and allow the interviewees to tell me something I do not know.  I will be interviewing two lesbians and two gay men.  Three of them will be in person, and one will be online.  One of the gay men, Todd, said it is perfectly fine for me to use his real name.  I have not received permission to disclose the names of the others yet, but I will soon ask them how they feel about this.  I had no luck finding anyone to interview from twitter, but I did find someone on facebook.  He agreed to get interviewed, so I sent him an email asking him which way he would prefer being interviewed, email, twitter, etc.  Now I am waiting on his returned email.  Two of of my interviewees, Todd and one of the lesbians, I know personally, because they are coworkers of mine.  The other lesbian I will be interviewing I have never met before, but will meet in person soon.  She is the girlfriend of the lesbian I am interviewing that I work with.  The gay man I met online I do not know personally and will never meet him in person, but I will ask to speak with him on the phone.  I will be conducting two of my interviews on March 13, starting at 5 p.m., and I will record them if permitted.  I will be conducting my interview with Todd on March 15th at 4 p.m. and he said it would be fine for me to record the session.  I want to record them, so I do not have to write everything down.  In this way, the interview will be more like a conversation than an interview.   

Some of the questions I have come up with so far are:

Who is Todd?

What was your life like? Was it difficult or easy? Why?

How did you feel when you first came out?  Why?

What are your hobbies and why?

Who or what do you identify with and why?

Have you ever felt discriminated against for being GLBT? Why? What happened?

If you could change anything about the GLBT experience, what would it be?

Do you feel you have equal rights as a GLBT individual? Why or why not?  Has this impacted your life personally? How? Explain.

I want to add more questions eventually, but as for now I do not want to create too many questions.  I’d rather let the interviewees take the lead and spend most of the time talking if possible.  I tried to develop reflective, open-ended questions, so they can do this.  I plan on developing other questions during the interviews, which will probably be more effective, because these questions will reflect what the interviewees are saying.