Activism Blog Week 4

Alexandria Bergeron

Jeannina Perez

WST 3015

Activism Blog (from 3/26/10)

This week my activism was more on a personal level. Though my family is very supportive of me developing my own morals and ideas, they still have trouble understanding why i support or believe in the things that I do believe in. I have found myself in the middle of several conversation with them about my service learning project. Most of my conversations were with my mother, and since this past weekend i brought home a friend of mine, due to me having a girls weekend with all my best friends back in West Palm, and my friend just happened to be the first lesbian my mother ever met, my mother had trouble understanding why I am supporting a community I am not part of. Of course the fact that I am working on this service learning project, along with the fact that I brought my friend home, led to questions from my mother about my sexual identity. It reminded me of or reading of "I'm Not a Rapist". In that reading the men didn't want to be assumed to be rapist simply because they were men. I felt this week as though my mother saw me as having to be a lesbian, since in her eyes, there is no other reason why I would be working on this project. It was so stressful and I have never had to argue with my mother so much. After severl conversations i think I finally got her to understand that though I am of the straight community, I can still be supportive of equal rights for everyone, regardless of there race, culture, sexual identity, etc.

"I Am Not a Rapist!" Women's Lives Multicultural Perspectives. Ed. Gwyn Kirk. Comp. Margo Okazawa-Rey. By John Stoltenger. New York: McGraw-Hill 2003. 285-290. Print