After Julie and I presented the first half of our powerpoint/discussion on the book Feminist Accountability, I was so ready to keep the discussion going on what I thought would get into even deeper and possibly more meaningful conversations over the next five chapters. Though I found the beginning conversations to be a bit difficult since people weren’t really volunteering to share. I think Russo’s want to help create a culture of accountability relates to a lot of our pasts readings and because the nature of accountability is inherently personal I think it was harder to dive deeper into the passages that Julie was highlighting because a lot of it stayed very surface level. While, people don’t need to share personal stories they could have used more examples from the text or ones they had just witnessed in life or media.
I personally connected and found the chapters more on transformative justice and the everyday violence that occurs very interesting. I was sad to not be able to continue the conversations, but am happy that will happen this coming week. One thing I might share Thursday and really felt like I wanted to share this past class was that Russo was able to put things I had thought in simple and understandable language. I thought a lot about transformative justice in situations of sexual assault and about my own sexual assault. I see the huge flaws for the survivor and possible lack of accountability for the other person, but it also made me think about how in domestic violence cases many women don’t report because they don’t want their partner to be punished, they just want to stop being abused. And this more community style accountability and ways to work through situations made me think this could have real potential for so many, while ignoring more technical difficulties and realities of implementation and carry through. Personally I wanted the person who assaulted me to be punished, but not by police, by the school. I thought if he was suspended or expelled it wouldn’t ruin his life, but it would show that this was wrong and actually make him be accountable whether he wanted to at that moment or not.
The video chat with Katherine Cross was wonderful though, so I’m really thankful you arranged that. I loved the way she spoke and think she should definitely write a book and then record an audio book, because somehow hearing similar words to some of what she had written really helped me to hear her voice as a writer and better understand her work in the first place. For the questions part I was a bit scared because all the notes I was going to reference for questions were on my computer and since we used my computer for the video chatting I totally blanked about what questions I had originally begun to form. So, I hope my question wasn’t too bad; I just couldn’t bare people not talking when Ms. Cross had taken the time to speak with us!