There's a pulse, alright. Not sure if I'm getting proper circulation, though.

Interesting.  That's the first adjective that comes to mind when it comes to this course.  On the surface, the topic of gender peaked my interest enough for me to hop on this bandwagon.  Inside the course proper, "interesting" also holds true.  With each reading, I gradually ended up realizing that all the topics of interest that I was expecting from this course had a lot more going on than I had originally had thought.  Even when I think I have a grasp on some of the readings, the discussions that come afterward also hammer home that there's something else going on.  Screenings and discussions are very eye-opening as well, not so much because of the discourse (though that can be fun too), but because it always raises my interest to see how these readings come together the moment we meet for each session.  I would say a great example, interestingly enough, is Ma Vie En Rose, which I thought was a great movie that demonstrated how social constructions brought about by the gender binary can drive people apart as much as they can bring people together.  

But "interesting" is just only the beginning



When we get down to it, this course is confusing.  This is second, and probably most important adjective that comes to my mind in relation to this course.  Confusion.  Confusion.  Confusion.  Confusion.  Confusion.

I think now would be a good time to explain why.  Like I said, I went into this course thinking that all the material would help me bring so much to the table, reinforcing what I already know.  Turns out what I already know was just the beginning.  Sure, when it comes to representations both in and out of the media, gender inequality exists and it sucks dinosaur balls.  But as mentioned before, there's more to it than JUST that.  When we reached the turning point of the course with that discussion about how The Sopranos deconstructed hegemonic masculinity, and ESPECIALLY our encounters with Judith Butler's concept of gender performativity, I honestly felt like this course brought more questions to the problems presented to us earlier on in the course than answers.  No matter how hard I try, I still feel like I'm in the same place I was before back when I read that introduction.  This has grown apparent outside the course.

Yeah.  It's clear as day.  Gender is socially constructed, very much like a cult.   Yes.   I get that even in the realm of science, the fact that somebody is christened a boy or a girl is all based on social and cultural criteria.  I get that the bathroom problem can be an easy fix if we just do away with the signs.  I get that society constantly strives to maintain an ideal status-quo that basically doesn't exist.  If said status-quo has been practically embedded in our culture, is there even a solution that people are willing to march towards to try and break those social constructions?  And if so, wouldn't that create a new slew of socially constructed things as well?  Wouldn't assuming another form of sexual identification be considered giving in to another set of social constructions?  If so, is there something we must do, or do we just roll with it and know that it's there?  These are the main questions that still burn in my mind.

And yet, for some reason, I feel like letting them burn is the easy way out, and I don't know why.  By questioning everything that's been thrown at me, am I missing the point solely because of the fact that media perpetuates social constructions through fictional representations and insightful food for thought?  And if so, how much has flew across my head?  Are we encouraged to break the binary?  Or has the point been all along that we should be encouraged to defy it?   Or at the very least, is the point that we should look at the media we're presented with in a different way based on the topics that are thrown at us?

I think the preceding wall of text has made clear which readings were the most engaging, and the most difficult.  The readings that point out the problem of the binary are the most engaging ones, since they're the things we can easily spot, like the bathroom problem, and Kate Bornstein.  On the other hand, when we start to explore how we can  transcend that binary, things start to get grayer and grayer.  Judith Butler's concepts were the clear game-changer for this course, and I thought I had them down pat.  I was wrong.  I was so terribly wrong.  And confused.

Confusion.  Confusion.  Confusion.  Confusion.  Confusion.  (And no, I'm trying to pad this response out, by the way.  Those are lyrics to a song.  It's not a pop song.  But it's a song.  Of confusion.)