Class 20 - Our Htamein, Our Flag, Our Victory - The Role of Young Women in Myanmar’s Spring Revolution
Welcome back!
In this session, we’re going to be looking at otherness and gender in Myanmar. And we’re going to be talking about the paper Our Htamein, Our Flag, Our Victory: The Role of Young Women in Myanmar’s Spring Revolution, by Marlar, Justine Chambers and Elena.
But before we start, we’ll check in for five minutes!
Today’s session
Today’s session is about intensively reading the paper, collectively exploring our responses and our thoughts.
We’re going to start with a simple question:
Why is gender important in movements for social change?
Write for 7 minutes in response to this question. Then we’ll share and discuss.
About Today’s Reading
Let’s think back to Simone de Beauvoir, who we discussed last time. For Beauvoir, “woman” is inherently other. Maleness is taken as the default condition of being human, and being non-male is to be other than this default condition. So Beauvoir argued that the “maleness” occupies the neuter and positive poles of how we think about human beings and gender, and “femaleness” occupies the negative pole.
Before we start to dive into the paper, here’s a quick question we’re going to look at in breakout groups, to give us a sense of the bigger cultural background of the paper:
- In what sense is woman “other” in Burmese / Myanmar society (or your own society if you are not in Burma / Myanmar)?
- What cultural phenomena reflect this otherness or othering?
We’ll feed back into the main group.
Our Htamein, Our Flag, Our Victory: The Role of Young Women in Myanmar’s Spring Revolution: A Close Reading
Now we’re going to collectively read the text. You have read it already, so I’m going to give you 15-20 minutes to re-read and annotate on the PDF document online. Highlight the text at places you think are important, or where you have something to share, or where you have a question.
When we’ve done this, we’ll look through the questions, and then I’ll split you into breakout groups. There are no set questions for these groups. Instead, I want you to discuss the questions that you think are most important, urgent or interesting, using the highlights and comments as a guide.
All group discussion
We’ll get all the groups to feed back at the end.
Homework:
There’s no homework for next time! You can take the time to work on your presentation. In the next session, we will have a briefing for the final assignment.