Meredith Russo’s If I Was Your Girl 

*side note on the cover : The woman on the cover is Kira Conley, a transgender model who has been in the industry since she was 15. Her story is very similar to Amanda’s in that, she always knew she was a woman inside and even remembers feeling that way as a young child.

To read more about Kira, please go here :

https://wwd.com/fashion-news/fashion-features/model-kira-conley-360-management-10189423/

Text Review and Analysis

When it comes to “Coming-of-age” stories for those who do not fit a stereotypical mold, Meredith Russo rises above other authors with her novel If I Was Your Girl. As the story opens, we meet Amanda who has obvious psychological baggage as she navigates living with her father after suffering some serious bullying at her previous high school. Amanda struggles to fit in, because she is a trans girl who fears her peers have malicious intent. Though many of the new students are welcoming, Amanda is scorned with ptsd that couples with her anxiety to make for awkward interactions though she always has good intent.

High School is always difficult to navigate, as we see in Amanda’s flashbacks from when she began to transition but even more so when challenged with the constant considerations of those who have power over Amanda. In this story, words, Amanda’s father, and her own friends seem to hold an immense amount of power in her mind. Amanda’s trans identity plays a large role in the story as it constantly looms in her mind, again coupling with anxiety to create an interesting inner monologue where Amanda almost makes herself an Other within her own mind. 

This story is very different to any of those that we read in class because it deals with not only gender intersectionality, but also the religious freedoms and how a religious environment how open people are to the lgbtq community. In a way, Ortiz Cofer’s Story of My Body parallels to Amanda’s story in that, as Cofer discovers how other people view her, her self perception changes as does Amanda’s. We see in flashbacks to Amanda’s upbringing how her father would often react to her showing any persuasion towards womanhood. On page 63, Amanda as a young child writes a story about being a woman and her father reacts perversely because he begs her that it is a joke to which Amanda agrees because of her fear of disappointing her dad. Alongside the religiosity of those living in Amanda’s new town, there’s also a lot of injustices to deal with such as bullying, recognition of different genders and dead-names as well as dealing with the judgmental pressures of a high school social hierarchy. 

In my own opinion, Russo ended her novel in the best way and that is by acknowledging that she is personally not trans and though she wanted to write a story that would expose people to the trans community in a way they would understand but in that, she may have fallen victim to stereotypes and fictionalizing a character because thats what Amanda is- she is not meant to be completely accurate. I think Russo wants people to understand the trans identity but also have room to ask questions about the reality of being trans in societies eyes and how having that identity impacts a person and their life. 

Written by Katlyn Marion

November 30, 2020.

Being a woman in America has too many disadvantages that are only further exacerbated by being born black. At eighteen, I experienced the wage gap for the first time at my first job. Being young and naive, I had never experienced this phenomenon but upon entering the workforce, I knew right away something was wrong. As I watched my male coworkers advance pay wise, I was stuck in the same pay bracket even though I had worked harder than them. Male merit was more likely to be rewarded and in every place I have worked since, there is a legit pay difference from myself and my male counterpart equivalent.

“…That means it takes the typical Black woman 19 months to be paid what the average white man takes home in 12 months…”

This quote comes from the AAUW website which stands for the American Association of University Women. Their mission is for women’s equality in all aspects of life in America. I felt that these  two  pictures encompass the disadvantages that many women are facing.  These show that latina and black women overpopulate low-paying  jobs so unfortunately, they ritually get paid less. These infographics also show that women in these jobs are underpaid normally due to bias, not choice which means that their underpayment is unconscious on the part of the payer.

The main reason this is such an issue is because women, especially those that are racially diverse, are treated as an “other” when It comes to talking about the wage gap. Many people who have not experienced the wage gap choose not to believe it is real, and these people are majorly men who dominate the job market. These men would normally choose not to believe that such a thing could exist and in that, they treat women who try to speak out as an “Other”. The wage gap has been ignored for too long and even though progress has been made, we cannot accept it until things are truly equal.

Because I am not black, I feel that I should say that although I cannot write directly on their experiences, but I can assume how someone may feel to be discriminated against through my own experiences without creating an environment when I am overshadowing their experiences. My only intention is to open the conversation about the wage gap so we can overcome it going forward.

If you would like more information about the infographics used and the AAUW, please visit

https://www.aauw.org/resources/article/black-women-and-the-pay-gap/

Works Cited

Black Women & the Pay Gap – AAUW : Empowering Women Since 1881. (2020). Retrieved 24 October 2020, from https://www.aauw.org/resources/article/black-women-and-the-pay-gap/

By Katlyn Marion

In order to understand the reading this week, Things Fall Apart, by Chinua Achebe, allow me to widen your scope on Achebe’s life. Chinua Achebe was born November 15,  1930 in a place called Ogidi, Nigeria.  At this point in history, Nigeria had recently become British Protectorate only 30 years prior, and the constant reclassifying of different sections of the country by the British made it difficult for the Nigerian natives to unite and push the British out (historyworld.net). The British were using Nigeria as a source for raw materials and manufacturing British goods all while building railroads. As they did this, missionaries flooded the country in order to “civilize” people and evangelize to the natives. Unfortunately, this sometimes meant that the. Missionaries used their religion as a means of controlling the natives.  During World War two, when Chinua would have been a young adult by now the Nigerian economy was taken control of by the British because of “war time efforts”.  The country would suffer from this for years to come. 

Meanwhile, Chinua Achebe was growing up amidst an interesting time in Nigeria. Achebe’s mother and father, although natives of the Igbo Tribe, had left their tradition religion and had begun to follow Christianity which Achebe was brought up in. It was in Achebe’s youth that he would notice this and his curiosity for his native religions would spark. According to notablebiographies.com, “Achebe was unhappy with books about Africa written by British authors such as Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) and John Buchan (1875–1940), because he felt the descriptions of African people were inaccurate and insulting.” This is a very good example of a topic we covered last week, Spivak’s question of “Can the subaltern speak?” In colonizing Nigeria and speaking and writing on their behalf, the British men effectively stole the voices of many Natives because the British men had already written their opinions and ideas of how the Nigerians behaved, and thus creating an environment where the Nigerian’s could barley speak for themselves. The Nigerians had almost become the subaltern of their own land because they were not treated the same as the white colonizers. In an article from the New York Times, Achebe said “In the end, I began to understand…There is such a thing as absolute power over narrative. Those who secure this privilege for themselves can arrange stories about others pretty much where, and as, they like.” This is very true of how the British would organize  stories about the natives to discredit them and isolate them from the world. 

Achebe wanted to combat this and while working for the Nigerian Broadcasting Company, he composed Things Fall Apart, which immediately took the world by interest. The novel went on to become a play that would even go as far as preforming in the United States where they were apart of the Kennedy’s Center African Odyssey Series. Achebe would go on to be a very accomplished writer and teacher of others. He worked in many notable universities such as Brown, University of Connecticut, University of Massachusetts and University of Nigeria. In the later portion of his life, he was paralyzed from the waist down in a car accident while visiting Nigeria and afterward, he moved to the United States to teach at Bard. He was given honorary degrees from Universities around the world as well as many other prizes before his death in 2013. 

Works Cited

(n.d.). Retrieved from http://countrystudies.us/nigeria/53.htm. 

Chinua Achebe. (2020, June 17). Retrieved September 19, 2020, from https://www.biography.com/writer/chinua-achebe 

Chinua Achebe Biography. (n.d.). Retrieved September 19, 2020, from https://www.notablebiographies.com/A-An/Achebe-Chinua.html 

Kandell, J. (2013, March 22). Chinua Achebe, African Literary Titan, Dies at 82. Retrieved September 19, 2020, from https://. www.nytimes.com/2013/03/23/world/africa/chinua-achebe-nigerian-writer-dies-at-82.html