When you tell your friends that you’re a neuroscience major, they respect you. Although they might not actually understand what you’re learning, they recognize its worth.
When you tell your friends that you’re an English major, they may not have read Joyce or Chaucer, but they recognize the difficulty of your coursework.
When we tell our friends that we’re gender and women’s studies (GWS) majors, we get nervous laughter in response. Our friends don’t seem to understand what it is we study, why we study it, or how it is of any intellectual value.
We tend to crack jokes about our classes to our friends. At home, we often shy away from telling our grandparents just what it is we are studying at Bowdoin.
Why is there so much shame surrounding the GWS major? We are passionate about our course of study, so why are we embarrassed by it? Perhaps it’s because we’re not oblivious to how GWS majors are sometimes perceived on campus.
People think that GWS courses lack scholarly rigor and that we are all bra-burning radical feminists, fags and dykes who say fuck the system, and fuck everything normative.
In reality, the GWS major is an interdisciplinary course of study that incontrovertibly promotes intellectual depth. Almost all of our courses are cross-listed with other departments, ranging from English, Africana studies, film, sociology, psychology and more.
GWS classes have heated theoretical debates that call into question what it means to be a man or a woman and what the difference is between sex and gender, interrogating a cross-cultural history of social movements as well as political and economic change.
Equipped with this critical understanding of gender and social dynamics, we emerge from GWS with a lens through which we are able to parse a multiplicity of contemporary issues.
We have come to understand the diversity of feminisms compatible with our own ideologies.
Despite all this, GWS majors still find themselves struggling to take pride in their chosen course of study and embrace feminist identities.
As two GWS majors in our last few months at Bowdoin, we want to provoke conversations about what feminism really means and what feminists look like.
Engaging one another in these discussions is the only way to dismantle misconceptions about feminism and gender and women’s studies, and to show what they are really all about.
Check out our new blog: fuckmeimafeminist.tumblr.com.
Simon Bordwin and Danielle Lubin-Levy are members of the Class of 2013.