Lucais Martin

Professor Barnes
English 110
11 December 2016
Preface To Portfolio
The purpose of this revision of my MWA3 is to change my intended audience
from the local community of UNM and Albuquerque to a group that I feel would benefit
the most from hearing about debunking gender roles, children. The intended age range
of the children would be kids in elementary school, anywhere from about 5 years old to
12 years old. I also wanted to shift the way this material would be presented from a
paper article to an oral speech because I figured why would children this young want to
sit down and read a long and boring article when they could be engaged by a guest
speaker. I also had in mind the fact that children at that age have a hard time focusing
on something, especially a guest speaker for more than a few minutes, hence my
shortening of the piece by a page. My overall goal with my revised speech/article is to at
least raise awareness among children about gender in a way that made sense to them
and I tried to use a somewhat less complicated vocabulary to help with that. This was
quite challenging due to the fact that in my original piece breaking down Butlers essay,
Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist
Theory, required a more advanced vocabulary. I also chose to leave out parts going
into depth about feminism and performative acts because I felt, because of its rather
hefty and complicated nature, that it wouldnt be the best thing to talk about when
dealing with such young children.

In my original article I went into quite some depth analyzing Judith Butlers main
points and arguments in her essay, Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An
Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory, and I wanted to refer to that piece in
this speech rather briefly just to establish some credibility and get rid of any doubt as to
where my info was coming from.
I chose to use examples such as playing with friends to relate to my audience
because if I had used my original examples I feel like it would have just left kids feeling
confused and questioning what I was even talking about. I feel like simplifying my
vocabulary for the revision and shortening the length really helps me appeal to a much
younger audience than before.
Therefore, my intended goal with the revision is to appeal to children in the age
range of 5 to 12, talking about how gender and gender roles are something we do not
need to hold so closely to others. I want to let kids know that they should not at any
point be ashamed for playing with girls or boys toys, I just want them to pursue what
they want and that is the main goal. I would assume the children would already have
some sort of idea of what being gendered is like so I tried to engage my audience by
asking them direct questions over the course of my speech to keep them focused.