My plan for two classes will go forward!

Monday is my public administration course which is taught by one of the faculty members who will be very important to my PhD. They are the gender person in the department. She greeted me in class with, “You are taking the sociology course, right?” Yes. “Great!” So yeah, right there I thought, two classes this semester.

Then I realized that Monday’s class is much more seminar-like than a traditional class. So yeah!

Thursday is sociology and WOW! I’ve taken some women’s studies courses from sociologists, but never a hard core sociology course, much less one required for their PhD program that ends in a mock comp exam.

So on a scale of 1 to 10, Mondays will be a 5 (I know the discussions will be fierce) and Thursdays will be a 10 (abstracts of each week’s readings are due!).

Actually Thursdays class may be harder than a 10. The whole class is about the concept of gender and already I’m hitting some walls. Mostly I think I have identified my hurdle to fully understanding radical gender theory - the fact that I didn’t conform to gender expectations growing up.

I can’t quite explain the click that happened this weekend while reading Paradoxes of Gender by Judith Lorber, but I know I had to do a lot of mental gymnastics to get to the place where I am right now…And that’s not even the full journey I know I need to take. Very long story short, I know that being proud to be a tomboy was partially me degrading girlhood/femininity as a kid. But the fact is that being a tomboy (any of us, not just me) isn’t radical enough to change gender in society. It might have helped changed expectations for women in terms of athleticism and strength, but it still hasn’t helped us break through how our society views gender itself. See what I mean!

I’m only 1/3 of the way done with the book. We have just a week to read it and then write an abstract, thus a lot of skimming has to happen. My professor actually said to skim rather than soak too long in the theory. But only one week into my second semester and I already see my world view shifting. This is gonna be an awesome semester.