My journey with gender studies

As I come to the end of my four years at IU, I suppose it’s only natural I’ve been spending a lot of time reflecting on my college experience. It might be premature, but even the hazy nights evoke some nostalgia.

In particular, I’ve been looking back on my experience with gender studies.

I started college as a biochemistry student. I wasn’t terrible at science, but I didn’t enjoy it quite as much as I’d thought I would.

All my high school boasting about my adoration for the scientific method started to look quaint, and I spent my second semester experimenting with the most dangerous of controlled substances: the humanities.

I added “Intro to Gender Studies” on a whim.

I’m a straight cisgendered man, so I was never forced to do much serious thinking about gender and sexuality when I was growing up. In my mind, I was just “normal.”

Still, there were some things that pushed me to be open to different ideas. I was raised by a single mother, so strong, independent women didn’t surprise me.

My first relationship was with a woman from a home so controlling and abusive that our relationship was carried out entirely in secret. I knew that patriarchy was real, even if I lacked the word for it.

On the first day of my G101 class, the professor gave us all slips of pink and blue paper. Then he showed us a PowerPoint of different images, asking us to hold up the pink or blue slip for each image.

It started simply, with men and women. Then we moved to objects: cars, ovens, guns, dresses. It ended with weirder things, like the moon.

For every slide, the class was able to respond intuitively and unanimously. He was showing us how our sense of gender pervades all our thinking.

After that, I was hooked. I wanted to learn everything I possibly could about gender.

I was inspired by the history of feminist and queer struggle and shamed that it was people like me who were still brutalizing anyone different from ourselves. I had never imagined that a subject in school could so radically alter my worldview.

Of course, gender studies courses weren’t a panacea. No classroom experience could immediately undo an upbringing in a society that lauds men and degrades women.

It took me longer than I want to admit to turn my new analytic tools on myself and see my patriarchal habits.

I had to learn, again and again, how to interact with others as an equal. I still don’t think my journey is over.

There are many things I would change about my time in college, but I’ll never regret my time with the gender studies department.

Our world is still hostile to women and sexual minorities. To change it, we need to understand it, and gender studies courses are a great place to start learning.

I encourage anyone even slightly interested in gender or sexuality to take the plunge. You won’t regret it.

­— atcrane@indiana.edu