Downtown Girls

I recently rewatched "Downtown Girls" which is a film that I had seen on HPU some odd years ago in addition to watching it in some of my anthro courses at HPU. After a few years of not seeing this film I had forgotten about it yet it inspired me to think about the film in terms of its role in academia.

Currently I am enrolled in teaching techniques with Dr. Whitfield and curriculm is only one of the many topics which we have addressed in this course. For that matter, I have considered "Downtown Girls" as an artifact and its applicability and appropriateness to the classroom.

As of now, I think the film -regressing to my undergrad days- was a useful and exciting artifact -don't get the wrong idea- as it was atypical because of it's divergent nature -oh the implications. Anyhow, while writing another paper I stumbled through my documents and found an assigment I had written on the movie in Anhro 3823 - Taboos.

Reading through this paper apparently I selected my own assignment and did not write according to the assignment which is evident in the following text. Otherwise, after going through Whitfields course and thinking about what to incorporate and what not to incorporate in the classroom I think I would use this material for it exposes very interesting aspects of our culture. Not importantly this is what I wrote for that class:

Gray Space: Between the ears and between the thighs

"Knowingly the assignment is to write about chapters 9-10 of Monsters yet that is not of my interest thus my critique to implication surrounding “Downtown Girls”. My interest is not so much the film itself rather the question which you asked us: “Is this film appropriate, inappropriate, and how does it relate to the concept of taboo?”

In response to your question my answer is yes, yes that “Downtown Girls” is appropriate and does illicit every possibly implication of taboo. More so, is that the content of this film is not outrageous contextually for that our supposed critique is that of academia. In principle, academia, in theory, should be the institution which perpetuates challenge to and expansion of the mind. On this note, in light of Christendom, this film may have been challenging to those of little experience beyond the picturesque nature of what it means to be a secularized conservative American. Likewise, because this film was “challenging” it commands display in light that it is an address more of the construction of “institutional thought products” –the student- rather than the material portrayed.

With this in mind, material such as “Downtown Girls” is priceless as it exercises the student psychologically and poses important sociological questions –how do institutional inequalities manifest? Etc. I’ve studied Cabrillo College and UCSC in California, at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, La Universidad Nacional de Costa Rica and HPU and it is in the context where a professor challenges the student where learning occurs, not through the de rigueur courses bound by the institutions’ conservative nature."