The Body “knows”: Self, Identity and Body Awareness 2nd Journal Entry Deadline July 25, 2017

Answer either of the questions as it pertains to you What is it like to be a woman? What is it like to be a man?

START WITH YOUR OWN EXPERIENCE Personal experience is often a good starting point for doing this assignment. You can start with the first time you were ever aware that you were male/female.

DESCRIBING EXPERIENCE Our personal life experiences are immediately accessible to us in a way that no one else's are. In drawing up personal descriptions of lived experiences, such as being male/female (or possibly neither) one gets to realize that the patterns of meaning of one's own experiences are also the possible experiences of others, and therefore may be recognizable by others. To conduct a personal description of a lived experience, I try to describe my experience as much as possible in experiential terms, focusing on a particular situation or event. I try to give a direct description of my experience as it is, without offering causal explanations or interpretive generalizations of my experience.

GATHERING EXPERIENCE (1) Describe the experience as much as possible as you live(d) through it. Avoid causal explanations, generalizations, or abstract interpretations. (2) Describe the experience from the inside, as it were-almost like a state of mind: the feelings, the mood, the emotions, etc.

GATHERING EXPERIENCE 2 (3) Focus on a particular example or incident of the object of experience: describe specific events, an adventure, a happening, a particular experience of what’s it like to be male/female (or neither). (4) Try to focus on an example of the experience which stands out for its vividness, or as it was the first time.

GATHERING EXPERIENCE 3 (5) attend to how the body feels, how things smell(ed), how they sound(ed), etc. (6) avoid trying to beautify your account with fancy phrases or flowery terminology.

GATHERING EXPERIENCE 4 it is important to realize that it is not of great concern whether this experience actually happened in exactly that way. The goal is to reflect on how the awareness of being male/female first arose as a bodily experience.

WHAT IS THE BODY? This part describes how your body forms your identity. The question to answer is this: Who are you in relation to your body? Draw an image of your body from your answer.

PAPER FORMAT Minimum of 2 pages double-spaced in Word. Use illustration, videos and/or images that can enhance your reflection paper. Post on your own WordPress blog.