Self-Evaluation -- thank you for this community!

I've taken a lot of Gender and Sexuality studies courses, so I entered this class expecting to deepen my understanding of Gen/Sex issues by looking at them in an interdisciplinary fashion, and my early posts reflect this. As the class progressed, I realized I had a lot more freedom than I initially expected to have (or had ever experienced in an academic environment before). This was the most valuable aspect of the class for me: was the space and freedom it gave me to connect my work here with my work (academic and nonacademic) outside of this course. Those types of connections something I strive to make in all my classes, but never have I encountered an environment so conducive to it -- and actually, never have I had the confidence and intellectual maturity to feel comfortable doing it even if I had encountered such a welcoming environment earlier on in my Haverford career.

Given both informal and formal opportunities to write and speak (blog posts, web events, classroom, email, teacher meetings) allowed the full range of my thoughts on these issues to come forward: from GSA experiences to Shakespeare to bicycles to gay penguins to Audre Lorde to Lady Gaga -- to work just one of those topics in would have been a treat in another type of Gen/Sex course; to see that they ALL diffracted with our material was a Big Deal -- a sign that this type of academic environment (and interpersonal environment, actually) was both beautifully offered to me, co-created by all of us, and personally taken full advantage of through my work. Would that it were not such an exception.

Using Serendip was sometimes a technological challenge for me, but ultimately created a space for discussion and sharing of our personal and collective trajectories through the course that I found immensely valuable. I felt like my thoughts were being taken seriously and I felt greater motivation to write about things I cared about than I often do in classes where only the professor will ever see my writing. Getting to share with my peers what I feel passionate about -- and learn so much about all of their passions -- made our academic work feel very grounded in reality. To that end, our final unit on activism was very inspirational in ways that will be useful beyond the worlds of Haverford/Bryn Mawr/Gender and Sexuality studies. My one major criticism of my own work in this class was that I did not take a more activist role (the students involved with Consent is Sexy are so amazing!). I think I was so caught up in connecting my work to other courses that I didn't have a lot of energy left to push outside of an interdisciplinary approach towards an outer-disciplinary(?) approach. (If Barad can coin new words, so can I!) Hopefully I can take what I learned into my future endeavors, even if it didn't all play out within this semester.

The disability studies angle I thought was quite fruitful - having encountered Eli Clare's work prior to this course I thought it might just feel like re-hashing, but my understanding of disability theory (especially the various ways in which it can be linked to gender and sexuality studies) was certainly deepened through the class. I found myself eager to do all the readings for this Act. In the science-oriented act, too, I was more excited than overwhelmed -- to create a safe space for me as an upper-classmen who is still woefully non-science-literate can feel comfortable interacting with scientific texts was a treat. I did find Roughgarden and Barad's work to be frustrating, in rather opposite ways -- I found Roughgarden's writing to be overly simplistic to the point of being annoying, and Barad's to be a bit beyond me in terms of the philosophical vocabulary she employed.

All in all, the community - intellectual and personal - I felt that we created in this class was astounding. I really felt like we were all so responsive to each other, intellectually, emotionally, in lots of ways...In my reading about the Occupy movement, it seems like one of the main tenets is that you have to run the revolution as a model of the world you're striving for. I really felt like the creativity this class not only allowed but encouraged was a helpful enactment of the type of intellectual and the type of person I want to be! Thanks so much, everyone!