Random musings on women's studies

You know what, in retrospect, my Intro to Women's Studies pissed me right off.

Backtrack. You see, I was aiming to minor in women's studies (now I'm an undecided/film studies minor). I do still want to take further courses if I'm able, though. This is also the first year, I believe, that a women's studies major has been offered.

The teachers participating in the course are basically doing it because they wanna. They already come from other departments like English and Sociology and are just teaching the course because, damnit, they wanted to. And that's great.

Going a little forward, Chally from Zero At The Bone tweeted a quizlet over Twitter and I took it, and turns out I'm Judith Butler. I was ecstatic, then paused, and an ellipsis appeared over my head.

So naturally I typed in Judith Butler in my handy dandy address bar and a Wiki article appeared. And I went through it and said, "Oh, I know her". What I meant was, I knew her theories, but not specifically her by name. Eh, that happens a lot. I have an unfortunate domino memory though and thought back to some musings I had over Christmas break about me first semester.



Now, I loved my Women's Studies course. It was great. It was one day a week for 2 hours in the evening so that meant I didn't eat dinner Mondays but it was still great. We had a great teacher and the class discussions were usually pretty good. I enjoyed taking it. So I guess "pissed" is a strong word, more like "miffed a lot". That's a phrase.

BUT

Miffed a lot it is. I was miffed. For one thing, yeah we had discussions but it never felt like we talked about anything...specific. Our book was full of influential articles and we read just about all of them, and we talked about plenty of intangible theory *sigh* but rarely ever the women themselves. It was kind of weird, now that I think about it (or thought about it a few months ago). Also, besides the odd Audre Lorde piece and mentioning bell hooks & Gloria Anzaldua literally at the very end of the class race was conspicuously absent. Uh, I was the second black student in the class and I think in total there were about 5 people of color (we had a small class note) so I never figured out if I was the only one that noticed that.

Back to talking about specific women, our final exam was to do--we chose a woman to write a short report on and presented it to the class. I did Simone Beauvoir and Gloria Anzaldua. That was as specific as we got even though, as I said, we talked about plenty of articles and women's issues and that was fine.

So I guess "miffed a lot" doesn't work either, maybe "unsatisfied" is best. It was an intro class so it's unfair for me to expect to be given a full blown course on err'thang but it just feels like even in our short amount of time we could have gone so much more in depth, not just...theory. Oh well, I guess that's what more specific courses are for.