Sweet Summer
My spring semester has been over for about a month; I've been recovering at home. So many people assume that gender studies is a soft discipline, hardly "academic," but three WMST courses and a Feminist Philosophy class kept me on my toes this semester, to say the least. I'm thrilled that my bio/politics of women's reproduction professor agreed to do a directed study with me in the fall, but I have a feeling that her reading list is going to be pretty challenging. A lot of feminist science studies texts, hopefully a bit of queer theory or postmodern thought, but we'll see. Right now I'm just trying to take it easy and do a bit of the reading I couldn't get to during the semester or that I had to speed through for a class. I've re-read a bit of socialist and global feminist theory from Tong's amazing reader, and I hope to read some stuff on gender feminism soon. I'm also looking into some stats on hormone replacement therapy usage in my state for a paper I'd like to present in the fall. I'm making myself sound busy, but most of this reading and thinking and researching takes place in the wee hours of the morning before I fall asleep each night. I'm actually pretty lazy during the day.
My big project this summer has been taking a statistics class at my local community college. I spent two wonderful years here before transferring to my current university, and although most of the credits from my AA in English applied to the Women's Studies degree I'm seeking now, I still need a few prerequisites. Hence, STAT 2000. The atmosphere here is definitely different, and most people would probably say they prefer a prestigious institution to a hometown community college, but I like it. I love how so many different people come here and illustrate that a college education isn't just for young, wealthy white people. I love how my college offers something different for a rural region full of factory workers yet does nothing to shame working class women and men who cannot or choose not to attend college. Very little academic elitism, no huge gap between campus service workers and students (who are usually one in the same), just accessible education that empowers latino and latina students, working class older women, and men who have worked in carpet mills all their lives. Of course it has its flaws, as every institution does, but my rosy romanticizing blinds me to them now. I'm sure I'll rediscover them in due time.
So that's my summer, more or less.
