Final Reflection

In the beginning of this class I was very focused on defining feminism. I hadn’t taken any classes in feminism or related topics before, so I was nervous and excited. I remember one of the first activities we did was break into small groups and try to define feminism, and I was surprised about how hard that task was! I had assumed feminism just had one definition, but now I know there are so many different ways to think about feminism, and I was challenged by trying to apply them to all the different situations we talked about.         There were a lot of ups and downs for me in this class. My joys were some of the works that we did such as Middlesex, Half the Sky, My Gender Workbook, Nude Girls Unite!, and Persepolis (there are others I really enjoyed, but these are the ones that stick out to me). So I really liked reading/watching most of the works we covered, but then discussion in class often stressed me out. I knew the material, but either felt like I had nothing to say, or that what I was thinking would be insignificant to the discussion. There were some works that I felt I couldn’t grasp, like Lifting Bellies, but I’m happy I got exposure to more advanced materials – it was definitely a challenge trying to make sense of it.

I really liked listening to some of the more knowledgeable students talk in class. When we talked about Virginia Woolf approving of our class structure it helped me see how beneficial this type of class can be where everything isn’t just dictated by the professor. As we said in our meeting there were problems with the idea of giving people lots of freedom during discussion (due to different levels on previous knowledge), but I loved that we got to chose what material we focused on in the second half of the semester. Sex work is a really interesting topic to me, so I enjoyed talking about it in more depth then I previously had. When I wrote my first web event on feminists’ views on sex work I definitely wrote with a bias thinking that it wasn’t good for the advancement of women because statistics show that areas where prostitution is legal, there are higher levels of violence against women. Even though I think violence against women is horrible, I don’t necessarily think it’s that sex work in itself degrades women (and then leads to violence) – I think it’s societies outlook towards women.

         I think that this course has helped me realize the problem of thinking in binaries. I really enjoyed reading Kate Barnstein’s Gender Workbook, and learning about the possibility of breaking down one of society’s biggest binaries. I can’t believe that I haven’t learned about this until now, but I’m very curious about learning more and have Judith Butler on my summer reading list! I think my online essays demonstrate my change in thinking because by my last two papers (Reproductive Rights and Childbirth) I wrote with less structure and ended with more questions. I was really challenged when writing my final web event because it was so hard to try and organize/make sense of what the four women were telling me because the information often conflicted. For instance, an ob/gyn would say they don’t perform c-sections unless absolutely necessary, but statistics show that midwives have significantly lower rates of deliveries ending in c-sections. To make matters more complicated there are risks associated with both vaginal births and c-sections, so perhaps the ob/gyn’s are saving women from damage to the pelvic floor or fecal incontinence (side effects of vaginal deliveries) by performing c-sections. At the end of the interviews and research I felt more confused then in the beginning – but that doesn’t mean I understand less. I actually know a lot more now about both hospital deliveries and out of hospital deliveries, so I have more information to consider and also I have to try and understand people’s personal accounts of birth. I think my struggle with this last paper is representative of how I felt in the class, where I learned that approaching issues from a binary perspective can be easier and cleaner, but you aren’t going to learn nearly as much. I definitely ended this class with tons of questions and not many answers.

         As for my contributions, I obviously didn’t talk in class, but I did do my online postings. I sometimes wrote my own posts, but more frequently I commented on someone else’s post, but I like carrying on their conversations. I think my online web events dealt with very controversial issues (like fgm), so I’m proud that I took on those challenges while having my work available to everyone. I think I deserve a 3.7 in this class because I was on top of the material, struggled and pushed myself with new ways on thinking, and tried to apply these new ways on learning to my web events.