The following e-mail, posted on a UNC-Chapel Hill listserv, was forwarded to me. Save for identifying the author (someone must be concerned for this person’s dignity), I’m going to reprint the whole thing in all its faux-academic weirdness, with a few parts highlighted:
Hello everyone!
My name is R——, and I am currently working on a phototherapy project, called Gender Lessons, that investigates how gender is taught to children.
I originally started this project in Maria Deguzman’s Queer Latino/a Photography and Literature class (which is amazing). Now, I have fallen in love with the investigation and the idea of getting it published one day. So, I need your help to do that.
To participate, I need people to send in their stories where they remember being taught gender. It can be anything: from sex talks to clothes shopping. One person told me that her parents told her a woman’s role in sex is to lay there. Gender is an all encompassing and continually changing thing. It’s different for every single one of you wholly, but, no doubt, there will be similar cases. If you don’t feel like you were ever taught gender, I would ask you to think again. These lessons aren’t just from parents. Peer pressure provides it, along with TV ads, music lyrics and so much more.
I need stories from every different type of person, especially people above the age of 21. Just send in your story that “genderfied” you or dissuaded you from picking a certain gender expression–no matter what it is. The possibilities are endless.
If you send your story in, and it is selected, we will stage a reenactment the memory with the aid of actors (if needed). I will photograph the reenactment as it progresses. After you feel the reenactment has become as true to the past as possible, we still stop and look at the photographs
Memory is tied to images, and these photos will (hopefully) help you clarify forgotten things in the past and create connections from that memory to now. This process doesn’t work for everyone, and part of the investigation is seeing when phototherapy does or does not work and why or why not.
Even if you don’t want to contribute a gender memory, I need other help. I need people willing to reenact roles in other people’s memories. You would get the story from the memory contributor and try to make it as real for that person as possible.
Don’t worry if you are not on campus for the summer. This is a project I want to gradually work over the rest of the summer and the upcoming school year.
If you are interested, contact me at []. Also, on Facebook, I have a group for the project called R——’s Photography Project Peeps. In the group, I have photos from the original ten contributors I investigated. Also, if you want to read what I have written so far, let me know.
Thank you for taking the time to read this. I hope everyone is having a wonderful summer!
If this insanity doesn’t get an academic grant at UNC, I will be completely surprised. It’s too bizarre not to.
