Q&A: Alyssa Shotwell
Alyssa Shotwell, online editor of The Signal, is one of the women featured as part of The Signal’s special #HawkHerStory issue, celebrating Women’s History Month. This special edition focuses on the stories and perspectives of the various women within the University of Houston-Clear Lake (UHCL) community.
Read The Signal’s Q&A with Shotwell below and see the other Q&A’s conducted with students, faculty, staff, administrators and alumni here.
Q: Can you tell us a bit about yourself, on both a personal and professional/educational level?
A: I, as you may have figured out by now, work here at The Signal as the online editor. I aid with the back end stuff with one of our advisors, Lindsay Humphrey, and am the visual go-to person for all content on the site.
School wise, I graduated from Pasadena High School, got my Associate of Arts at San Jacinto College-Central with a focus in studio art and music performance and graduated with my B.F.A. in Art and Design with a Graphics Concentration and Art History Minor last spring. I am in graduate school right now.
Q: What are some activities you enjoy doing?
A: I love watching tv/movies/YouTube with my boyfriend, working at The Signal, reading, making art and playing video games. The last one I really mean. I racked up 1,100 hours in CS:GO over a 12 month period and I am not even sure how many hours of Overwatch at this point, considering I have been playing it since the 2016 open beta.
Q: Who are some women (real or fictional) you look up to most? Why?
A: I have a lot in both categories so I will just give a few with limited responses.
In fiction, it was always Hermione Granger from “Harry Potter.” I don’t think I have to say why because she is such an icon. In high school, I started seeing fan art of “black Hermione” and loved that imagining of her too. Now to a degree, it is Illana Glazer from “Broad City,” but in a VERY limited way. I love that she doesn’t give a fuck. There are lots of things I disagree with her on and she messes up more than she does right, but her confidence in herself and love for her best friend.
In real life, I look up to Joo Young Choi, Sarah Costello and Karen Marston. I could write a chapter on each of these people and why I admire them in a book that features the other half dozen women I am not including. For brevity’s sake, I look up to Joo Young for her perseverance and imagination, Dr. Costello for patience and poise and Dr. Marston for her drive and honesty. In all of them, I admire their passion for their work and the strength to get through all the BS they have to deal with, especially in regards to sexism, in their respective fields.
Q: What are some problems you anticipate/have encountered as a woman in your field?
A: There are a few fields I want to go into at some point and though both are very different, museum and video games, they both have issues with gender discrimination. In video games, just playing them and seeing comments on videos with women in the field is rampant with sexism and on many occasions racism.
Women are constantly having to validate themselves to people and are expended to give an explanation of why they are there. Those videos where you see how women are treated when making a tech/game purchase in a store or being called every nasty thing you can think of in an online game are real. With doxxing, swatting and online harassment being an issue as a consumer, I know that it will only get worse when I start making things.
In regards to working museums or a nonprofit relating to public art, I don’t anticipate any out of the ordinary sexism. That sounds mean, but it’s true. These are old institutions that are subtly resistant to change like most fields of work. This is evident even in the way things are arranged in spaces and who is chosen to show their work. Being a sort of caretaker of cultural artifacts – either in antiquity or modernity – has a lot of responsibility on how people are valued. Think about how embroidery is regarded in comparison to oil painting and what that says considering many women were limited to the former for a long time and many galleries treasure oil portraits of someone with the first name “jean” something.
Q: Is there anything you would like our readers to know?
A: I would say check out The Signal, but since you are here, task completed. I make art and post it online when I am not busy or doing one of my 7 other hobbies, so if you are interested to find me on Instagram (@Alyssa1018x). Also if I am walking someone where and don’t look like I am running late (unlikely) stop me and we can talk about “Harry Potter” or Janelle Monae anything. Give the people I see on the day to day a break from it.
