Gender, uh?

My name is Odile Mattiauda and I am a doctoral student in Education at URI-RIC in cohort 2004. I teach French at URI and Sexuality Education to the Coming of Age (G8) class of the 1st Unitarian Universalist Church in Providence. I am a co-founder of the French-American school of Rhode Island, so I do come from language and languages (French, German, Spanish and some Italian) with an M.A in English and German. I am a practitioner and believer of early immersion when it comes to learning a language. (I also have a MBA from the Marseilles' School of Business (now Euromed), as I thought it would make my dad, a banker all his life, so happy...The business world did not really excite me that much! My passion is how we talk gender: I am interested in the discourse of boys and how it may reveal how and what they know and learn what it means to be a boy.
I chose to take this course because:
- I love theory, talk about it, read it, want to know more about it
- I love Lesley's classes and teaching style: this is my third class with L. She is the one who originally talked to me about this program and got me back on this life's track. I feel like L. makes any concept not-so intimidating, and empowers me to learn it
- I would like to organize theory in my mind: to be able to situate theorists and authors whenever I read an article, to be able to connect theorists with each other, most importantly to figure out as much as possible of the language/jargon of critical theory and cultural studies so as to use it accurately in my own writings and discourse.
- I would like to explore theory in a way useful to conceptualizing the theoretical part of my dissertation proposal and dissertation.
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