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Contributors >> Negrea, Irina ('05)

Biographical Statement (August 2013)

After graduating from Lehigh University with her PhD in English in May 2005, Irina Negrea spent two more semesters as an instructor at her alma mater. A break from academia ensued until the fall of 2008, during which Irina experienced the uncharted, often stormy, waters of motherhood. After another year spent teaching at New Jersey City University, Irina and her family moved to North Carolina, where they are currently residing. She is an assistant professor at Shaw University in Raleigh, NC.

Reflection

Looking back at the work I've done on I, the Worst of All, one of the first thoughts that came to my mind was that my opinions have not changed at all in the past 13 years. If anything, they have become even more radicalized. I was reading this quote that I used in my Issue Essay,

Women were denied knowledge of their history, and thus each woman had to argue as though no woman before her had ever thought or written. Women had to use their energy to reinvent the wheel, over and over again, generation after generation. . . . thinking women of each generation had to waste their time, energy and talent on constructing their argument anew. Generation after generation, in the face of recurrent discontinuities, women thought their way around and out from under patriarchal thought. (Lerner qtd in Merrim Modern Women xxiii)
and I was thinking how true it still sounds, unfortunately, in today's political climate that seems to want to keep women contained at all cost and to encourage a rape culture as one of the means to do it. I see many politicians today who would have felt right at home in the times of Sor Juana and would have perfectly filled the shoes of the religious zealots who thought that women should not study or write or express strong emotions because it threatened the order of their world.

My next thought took me quite unexpectedly to Malala Yousafzai, the young girl who was shot by the Taliban for being an advocate for girls' education: centuries apart, two women threatened patriarchy and its proponents in the same way: by brandishing a book. One is forced to give up her intellectual pursuits (and symbolically breaks her glasses in the movie), and the other is shot in the head. Think of the history (actually HERstory) that passed between Sor Juana and Malala, and how throughout all those centuries, women had to "reinvent the wheel" and to prove time and again that they are equal to men. As a mother of two daughters, I do not find this encouraging at all.

Ideologically, I find myself aligned more than ever with my analysis and with Bemberg's (and of course, Sor Juana's) feminist stance. This was one of the first movies that I analyzed very closely. I was taking Alex Doty's course in feminist film, and a whole world opened for me: a way to read movies that actually helped me make sense not only of films themselves but of the world around me. I, the Worst of All was maybe the second movie I analyzed scene by scene and actually wrote about. This practice taught me to really WATCH movies and not to sink thoughtlessly into them—to actually process them and make connections between the artifact and history, getting much more viewing pleasure out of them. As a consequence, one of my minor fields is Film and Pop Culture. I am currently working on a film analysis, and I found myself using the same strategies that I used when I put together the Sor Juana site.

I really enjoyed reading the other essays written by students who took Ed's course after me. This project is amazing, and I love the way it keeps growing and developing, and the fact that it is not static.