Incarcerated Women Anonymous

In "Public Secrets," a hypertext essay by Sharon Daniel, we can observe Delagrange's ideas of remediation in media at work in Technologies of Wonder: Rhetorical Practice in a Digital World. She values digital platforms as enhanced learning tools, saying that "Digital multimedia provide a public space where traditional alphabetic textual authority bumps up against embodied, sensory, pedagogical performance" (Delagrange 22). This hypertext essay incorporates both hypertext and essay, melding two genres into one on a unique program. Delagrange says that this will change the way we look at both original mediums as we combine them. "The process of remediation is bi-directional; not only are the design, structure, and use of a new medium initially patterned on it's predecessor, but as the new medium evolves, it in turn influences (re-mediates) the design, structure, and use of the previous medium" (Delagrange 23). By using this enhanced form of delivery through digital platform, we can not only learn the stories of the women who were involved in this project, but actually hear them. This enhances the project as a whole - showing us that essays and hypertext (and all other mediums for that matter) need not be mutually exclusive, and we can start to play around with our medium creations to see what works best for the information we are trying to convey and the project we are trying to accomplish.

Gilmore's Autobiography's Wounds sheds light on the emotional barriers that can be created from trauma: "According to Freud, trauma enters the psyche as an invasion; its abrupt introjection denies the self its defenses. After trauma one labors to get the boundary back in the right place, to draw a line between the self and the traumatic event, the inside and the outside, the self and its unwelcome Other. In its emphasis on boundaries obliterated and painstaking efforts to redraw them, psychic trauma parallels the territorial practices of colonization on not only persons but also nations resemble the woulds of trauma" (Gilmore 112) Immediately, I drew a parallel between this idea and the setup of the hypertext essay itself. While in the context of the essay, this might represent a more physical aspect of the trauma these women experience, (inside the prison vs. outside the prison,) it could also allude to the inner and external struggles the women have in their lives. Perhaps by using these three words together, Daniel was inviting us to think more closely about these women and their experiences, and the platform she uses allows for that.

Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza describes a type on identity that it plural. "The New Mestiza copes by developing a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity. She learns to be an Indian in Mexican Culture, to be Mexican from an Anglo point of view. She learns to juggle cultures. She has a plural personality, she operates in a pluralistic mode - nothing is thrust out, the good the bad and the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing abandoned" (Anzaldúa 79). In the quote from the hypertext essay above, this idea of the "Mestiza way" can be imagined in another context. The woman speaking this statement seems to be harboring plural identifications, attempting to make them work all in harmony. These are that of a woman, a human trying to survive, a free walking citizen, an inmate, and likely a host of other personal identifications as well. Anzaldúa would tell us that these identities need not work against each other, that perhaps instead, an existience of a plural culture as opposed to a "melting pot" idea.