Sorry, I did not see this.

I felt that because there were a lot of people in the class that were more knowledgable in Gender studies than I was, I found myself wide-eyed and agap with the kind of analysis that they were coming up with. In the beginning, I felt like I wasn't talking as much as I normally do because I wasn't confident in myself, but soon I just started to say whatever I felt I could contribute. Whether it was a comment that related things to my own experience with what we were talking about, or a question that I had no intenstion in answering myself but maybe someone else might be able to think of something and give any sort of insight along the way to the answer, I tried to say whatever I could.

I think in this experience, I've learned to acknowledge the other side of learning that I wasn't used to in the first place. I was very used to keeping conversation and staying on the same plane as most of the other students. I was used to learning things on my own, doing things on my own to find a result. But here, I was really relying on other students to help me grow into a more feminist thinking student.

I took a lot of notes and most of them where questions that arose form the discussion because it was interesting to me how we got from one question to the next. The class as a whole and how our train of thought took us to where we ended up. i found myself thinking of more questions similar to what we came up with in the class before for the next class's readings.

I entered the first class unsure of what I would find. I knew it was a genre course, but I didn't really now what that meant. I thought of genre as a way of categorizing books, but I wasn't even entirely sure that was what we would be looking at. Would be just read “genre” fiction, like science-fiction? I was almost more trepidations than curious. At the back of my mind, I knew that it was still shopping period. I could drop the course, but I was too intrigued to do so.

I didn't talk that much, for the first several classes. I didn't feel comfortable. I was worried that I had nothing interesting to contribute. I had never studied the digital humanities, and I was sure that I would reveal my ignorance. Sometimes, I would find myself feeling passionate about something (for example, when we read “Mad at School” I definitely wanted to give my thoughts, as someone with depression and OCD). At the same time, I worried about being judged – especially when I revealed personal things that I never talk about, like my mental illness. Sometimes, I would hold myself back. Other times, I found myself sharing things I never talk about; most of my friends here at Bryn Mawr don't know that I have depression and OCD, for example, but I wanted to share them, even when I didn't feel comfortable.

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.