Some Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere (but you can't find those elsewheres)

 I write stuff besides just things that are originally for the blog. Some of them I think belong here too. So here's a thing. Two things, actually. A Women's Studies thing and an abstract I'm submitting to maybe get into another book.

For Women's Studies, my introduction that I stuck on the forum:

My name is Alyssa and I am a triple major in Mechanical Enginering, Mathematics, and Chinese. I'm entering my fourth year in the International Engineering Program, which means I'm about to have my year abroad. I have some idea about Gender/Women's Studies from independent stuff, but have never taken a relevant formal course before. My main sociology type interest is actually in Disability Studies, specifically in the (fairly new) neurodiversity movement, but it isn't possible to fully understand any one dynamic without some understanding of how it interacts with other things, like race, class, gender, and sexuality. From this class, I'm hoping to gain a general understanding of feminism and women's studies to use as a basis for looking more closely at the intersection of disability and gender. My main female inspiration is Tamora Pierce, who wrote the Song of the Lioness series along with quite a few other books. Those books were my introduction into the fantasy genre and all have female protagonists, which has been a big factor in my understanding that yes, representation of women in fiction really can show many ways of being a woman without resorting to stereotypes. In a way, she was my introduction to feminism as a thing people talked about and had to fight for (instead of something that came from a sense of fairness and that I thought everyone just knew) as well as my introduction to the fantasy genre.

And for FYeahTortall (heads up that they swear,) they are working on putting together a book, and this is the abstract I sent in:

A Neurodiversity Perspective on the Representation of Mental Differences in Tamora Pierce Novels

Within the Tamora Pierce novels, there are characters who clearly have mental differences, such as PTSD in the case of Briar and Rosethorn following the war in Yanjing, brain injury/damage due to oxygen deprivation after Rosethorn was briefly dead, and Zhegorz having something (probably a mix of things including PTSD) resulting from abuse and mistreatment he received from those whose secrets he unintentionally heard, along with possible ADHD in Jory Bancanor. There are also forms of magic in both the Tortall and Emelan universes which could likely be best examined as neurological differences, such as the Sight (George and Aly Cooper) and the innate ability to hear voices/see images on the wind (Zhegorz, Tris, references to many initiates,) given that these are differences in sensory perception. In this essay, the portrayals of all of these differences, along with any others I find in a re-reading of all of her novels, will be examined from a neurodiversity perspective. Both the ways the characters are shown to the audience and the ways that other characters are shown to react will be examined, studying both our own society and those within the universes created by Tamora Pierce.