Blog #2: Muskfaking it

My first semester of college I took a personal growth class. A large portion of my grade in that class was based on our “cultural plunge” project. Basically what we had to do was immerse ourselves into a culture or community different from our own, and write and present about our experience. I chose to do my cultural plunge on that LGBT community. One part of the project was to attend an event hosted by your chosen community. I was new to college, and didn’t realize how dangerous procrastinating could be. I had not yet found an event, and I had about a week before I had to reflect on my experience. I knew some people in the Gay Straight Alliance (GSA) club at Mesa, so I went to one of their club meetings hoping that they could help me find an event to go to. Luckily, there was an event the following night being hosted at SDSU by, if I remember correctly, their GSA club.

I can somewhat relate to how professor Flewelling was feeling on her first day of teaching. I mean, I was terrified, but I was worried about offending the people at the event whether it be with the questions I asked, the things I say or if I intruded on any of the cultural norms. So, a lot was going on in my head before going to the event. I ran through my list of questions at least five or six time to make sure they were as politically correct as possible. 

According to James Paul Gee, “ ‘Mushfake Discourse’ means to have partial acquisition coupled with meta-knowledge and strategies to ‘make do’ ” (13). I didn’t have a lot of time to prepare (or rather, I did’t give myself a lot of time to prepare), so I knew that I didn’t know a lot about the LGBTQ community. I tried to keep what I said or asked simple. I didn’t want to get cause miss using a term, and thus being seen as ignorant. Also, some of my friend groups at the time weren’t so sensitive to the LGBT community. There were things that could have said out of habit that would not have been given a second thought in my more familiar discourse, but in this new one may have been seen as offensive. So I made sure to carefully think out what I wanted to say before I opened my mouth. How this ties into mushfaking a “Discourse” is that I was using my meta-knowledge to asses how familiar I was with the LGBTQ community, and I strategically chose my words to fit in with the people at the event.

Starting this project the LGBTQ community was foreign to me, and I didn’t thing I could even fit in with such a group. But once I got to learn more about the community I was able to construct a secondary discourse tailored for this group. I guess it’s true what they say — you gotta fake it till you make it.