Columns, Opinion

BERICK: Stich and . . .

This final semester my friends and I have finally gotten around to the usual college stereotypes. This weekend we had chili and debate and this semester my two oldest college friends and I are, at last, taking women’s studies courses. I assumed women’s studies courses were a given, like sleeping with a professor and getting at least one misguided piercing. Now that I’m here, at college’s end and in a women’s studies course, I am finding many expectations unmet.

Apparently I don’t feel a need to rebel as much and this goes two ways. Not only do I not feel a violent anti-masculine inclination, but whatever similar brand of angst which would lead me towards a septum piercing has all but dispersed. In earnest, any radical college inclinations are absent.

My roommate and my friend Elizabeth have both come to conclusions, which may not be radical in themselves, but are radically different from each other. Elizabeth, sincerely interested in feminism, is looking for the opposite of Hemingway’s “Men without Women.”She was hoping her women’s studies class would study women independently of the way they relate to men. My roommate, on the other hand, is more interested in abandoning gender entirely than abandoning the male gender. She believes that she is a person first, then an American and a woman farther down the list.

All three of us are ultimately disappointed in our classes. As we sit week after week and are prompted to talk about our feelings, we are all tempted to become the misogynists that the courses theoretically warn against. We all wish the courses were treated like any other. It should be academic, and contain scholastic theory in a series of readings we attend to, however sporadically. Why are our emotions any more relevant in this setting than in an English class? The three of us have found that the course caters to all the female stereotypes. One women’s studies minor &-&- you cannot major in Women’s Studies &-&- referred to some of these courses as “Knitting Circles.” She explained, “All the serious feminists avoid the classes,” musing that this is perhaps because once a radical territory, the courses now attract only female tourists. We agreed that this has caused a trend of gentrification much like that in Brooklyn: feminists came into a rough academic neighborhood and now just anybody can amble by with a stroller.

I too am guilty of this so-called “knitting.” I express my emotions on occasion and I may have even made some statements about the oppression of men, especially when that was the right answer. My roommate says the opposite in class, the outright subversive, to keep from getting bored of the string of clichés, and I sympathize. Gender is not as simple as it was when the field was first pioneered. We do not live in a post-gender world any more than we do a post-racial one. I feel my feelings have no place in women’s studies.

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