Reflection
What I enjoyed most about this course was the protocol questions. Everyone encouraged each other to think critically, making everyone come up with unique responses and sometimes even the exact same thoughts. Not only did we encourage everyone to think critically, but it was cool to see what everyone took away from that day’s readings. Everyone’s responses were different and it was cool and unique to see it turn out that way.
I think the most challenging thing about this course was keeping up with the readings. As a GWS major taking a lot of GWS courses, I get a lot of readings that I have to read throughout the week. It was hard to keep up with all of them and keep them straight. Also, some of the readings were a little harder to grasp than others and that caused me to read them multiple times to understand what it was saying.
My favorite unit was unit 2: theorizing sex and gender. This unit was supposed to be redundant to all of the other GWS classes where we talk about sex and gender, but I actually became more insightful with this unit. I learned that sex isn’t 100% nature and gender isn’t 100% nurture, but that in fact sex and gender were both mixed with both nature and nurture. Not only this, but the Anne-Fausto reading was definitely my favorite reading of the entire unit. It was different than the rest of them because of how much I enjoyed reading it. I actually came out of that unit with something new in mind instead of the normal sex and gender spill you get in all of the other GWS courses.
Even though Unit 2 was my favorite, I wish we talked a little more about welfare queens. We talked about intersectionality a lot, but I don’t think we covered the concept of welfare queens enough. It was a completely new term to me and I feel like that term flew by with barely any mention of it. It was kind of frustrating.
If I could add one unit, it would be a unit completely dedicated to sex work. It’s something that isn’t talked about a lot, but is something that I think a lot of people taking this class would be passionate about talking about because not a lot of people talk about sex workers in a good way. This is because of how little they are talked about and all the stereotypes that are against them. Viewing sex work in a different way can help improve working conditions for sex workers. Also, sex work is related to feminist theory for many reasons so it’s a great addition.
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