Othello is set in a world where women are subject to the power of men. Women don’t have agency in the world of Othello. Women are simply subject to either their fathers or their husbands. Women’s agency exists in the world that is created for them by their male counterparts. Desdemona, a young girl (fourteen) is married to the powerful general, Othello. First, the marriage is strange (at best), even in a marriage of this time. Desdemona shouldn’t be able to be making choices such as pursuing an older man like Othello or marrying him. It is evident that Othello has some sort of power over Desdemona, even from the start  of the play. As the play progresses, it becomes increasingly obvious that Othello is easily influenced by the men around him. Othello lets Iago play into his ear. Iago whispers of stories (all untrue) of Desdemona’s affairs. Othello begins to believe him…

Why focus on this? The important thing to look at is the way that women are claimed as victims in the lust for power. Ironically, the women of this play are the sacrifices for power even though they can never claim it. Desdemona is a victim of Iago’s want for power, and so in order to claim that power Iago blames her and Michela Caspio of an affair.

Our meeting this week was centered around planning out the specific visuals we wanted to use for the production. Since we had a script mostly worked out for today, we had the students read through the lines, and specifically ask them what they wanted to see. Going forward I think it will be important to work on making the visuals for the play, and recording the voices of the students. Since we only have a few weeks of meeting left, I am hoping that our future meetings are very productive and focused going forward. 

This week, it was especially hard to get the students engaged. Usually, they are pretty attentive and interested in what we have set out for the day, but yesterday they seemed uninterested and quite bored. We tried to talk about what they did over the weekend or even tried to sketch out what they wanted to draw, but nothing seemed to work. This would have been much easier to troubleshoot if we were there in person but obviously that’s just not possible. Even though we struggled to get them engaged this week, the results of last weeks drawings were incredible. This gives me hope that this was just a bad/hard day and they actually are interested in producing work and seeing a final product soon! We are going to send an email to the director of our group to request pictures of their drawings to add to an iMovie so we can start our portion of putting the act together.