Our final papers are actually a very good representation of
a few very important things about this course. Thematically they show how
complicated sex, gender and sexuality really are, how many angles they can be
approached from academically and how many different levels they affect our
lives on. They show how interwoven into fabric of our lives and our identities
these constructs ultimately are and how grave the consequences can be.
The most striking paper to me was Gracie’s paper on the
construction of birth because I had never thought of birth as something constructed
or related to gender. The consequences here really are life and death and so
many factors are at play; our ideas about motherhood, the effect of capitalism,
how obvious and not obvious gendered consequences can be. These things are
important.
I also thought our papers were a representation of something
that I loved about this course which was the diversity of our class’s
experiences and perspectives. I use diversity here in the deepest of ways, to
express how each one of us had our own unique perspective formed from our
experiences that brought so much to this course. Each of our papers was a
representation of ourselves, of what we thought was important, as much as it
was about the world around us. One of my favorite parts about this course was
getting to learn about all of you, about experiences you had had, about what
had shaped you. Thank you so much to everyone for sharing themselves - everyone
was brave and honest and it really made this class awesome to take.