March Blog Post

This month we read a lot of diverse pieces from advocacy to family bullying and cultural impacts of communication. I have chosen the piece by Amy Arellano, World Wielding Womb: Using the Body to Fight the War on Women. I really enjoy reading poems and writing that has such a nice flow to it where even without punctuation you know where the author intends emphasis. I also really like autoethnography because of the immediate intimacy and personal connection. But when I first read this piece, I mostly just read through it. It was something that I felt I should connect to because I am a women but found myself not relating to it really at all. I am so used to reading and looking for things that I have a personal connection to and grabbing hold of them, that when I didn't find it I initially judged the piece itself. After discussing it in class and hearing other students thoughts, I read it over. This time I read it to just hear her story and to better understand the way in which she sees and lives within the world.
The line I most liked was at the end when she says "Now I just hold her head in our nursery, nursing her wounds, that she is not the reason we do not have a family but a bill that thinks two loving people make unfit parents." I chose this line because to me it felt like this section of the poem (The right to family) was the most personal to the author herself, in a way it felt a lot more vulnerable than the previous sections. Though it still had statistics in it, she brought in more about her and her relationship and their own struggles. I also think that the fact that she decided to end on this line maybe says it was building up to this intimate point that couldn't have been pulled off earlier in the poem.