I’ve attached the assignment as a .pdf file in order to preserve some formatting.
Process Notes: This was a fun, but challenging assignment for me. I had some difficulty in terms of tying it to my topic, but I found that talking about my PCOS and the symptoms that accompany applied to my exploration of expectations of Southern women because things like being overweight and sitting in a gynecologist’s office in a paper robe are directly against those expectations (modesty and beauty, respectively). I wanted to experiment with this two-thread structure, with one thread consisting of things that I’ve been told by various doctors (not exact quotes, but they capture the spirit of what was said), and a narration of the time leading up to the actual examination. I had to cut things kind of short since this piece really could have gone on and on, but I wanted to stop at the examination part for privacy reasons (a little bit) and to avoid having some topics being labeled as “shock value” (although I trust that nobody here would do that). I also played around with highlighting key words from conversations with doctors because I wanted to highlight the ways in which weight is brought up in medical environments when the patient is overweight, even when their lifestyle may be healthy.