FIERCE NYC, LGBTQ 11/10/16
On Thursday, November 10th, 2016, my group went on our first fieldwork. We went up to an organization called FIERCE in the Bronx. What FIERCE does is they focus on children of color in the LGBTQ community. They help them feel more comfortable in their skin. They do that by having after school meetings with students and they discuss how they are feeling. Some kids who live in the neighborhood come to the meetings. When we were there, we met with Mustafa Sullivan, the Executive Director. He gave us a tour of the building. This was their temporary office in the Bronx, while their office in Manhattan is being worked on. He showed us a room where people went to meditate, he said mostly after school, to decompress. Then we introduced ourselves and sat in the circle of chairs. He showed us something call Power Flower. It was pretty much a big flower shaped sheet with different categories in each petal. There were categories like race, gender identity, and education. We had to color in each petal with one of two colors. One color that represented that you had power in the topic, and one that mean you felt like you have less power in the topic. When we were done, we shared with one other person. It was cool seeing how different everyone’s was depending on their background and religion.
After that, Mustafa set something up on the board, and he did not give a specific name for this, but it was a few different lines that represented different spectrums. One was the sex you were born with. The next one was gender identity, and gender expression, and romantic orientation. We had to put X’s on where we thought we belonged on each spectrum. It was cool seeing everyone else’s because everyone expresses themselves in different ways. After that exercise, Mustafa asked us what we thought justice looked like. He told us to picture justice for gender. We came up with things like people holding hands, people who were different from each other, and fists. We then incorporated them all into a big poster we made as a group. It incorporated rainbows, fists, and people who all looked different. We made the world shaped as a heart. Across the bottom for a border, we drew people with all different hair styles, and we made their shirts each a different color of the rainbow.
Overall, I learned a lot about gender identity, and expression. You can identify as a male or female, or something in between, but the gender expression is rawly based off of stereotypes. If some says I express myself in more of a feminine way, that is based off of the stereotypes that girls are sweet, and like pink. Because there is no real definition of when you “act like a girl” or “act like a boy”. I found that part really interesting on this fieldwork. This fieldwork was really fun because I got to learn a lot about gender, and I got to do a lot of art which I like. I really like our poster, and we might use this activity for our teach in.