Many people might assume that women’s and gender studies courses are only for women, but that’s not the case.

“Women’s and Gender Studies, as the name suggests, centers women’s histories, perspectives, and experiences to counter their historical marginalization and exclusion from mainstream knowledge systems and disciplines, while also addressing gender and sexuality as co-formations,” Syracuse University women’s and gender studies associate professor Jayati Lal said in an email.

The name “women’s and gender studies” is not exclusive to women. The course offerings deliver powerful information about our shared history through a feminist lens. This lens is often missing from students previous education in high school, but learning about women’s history is important to everyone. Every student should take at least one course while at SU.

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“While WGS classes stimulate reflexive thinking about one’s personal gender identity and place in the gender order, they also examine gender as a site of contentious politics in the public domain,” Lal said. “These are issues that affect not just college students but all millennial and generation Z persons, particularly young men. WGS classes are especially important in these times as they provide safe spaces in which to examine these controversies.”

Some potential students may be turned away from taking a class because they are afraid of the word gender, but this comes from a lack of understanding that a course in women’s and gender studies may help. Cis-men also should take gender studies courses — Lal said it’s empowering to let go of hypermasculine ideals and learn about what gender means.

“For cisgendered persons, WGS helps to denaturalize binary genders, to interrogate both masculinities and femininities as social constructions. Transgendered persons, however, can’t escape their gender, which is always already culturally marked as ‘other’ to cis,” Lal said. “For transgendered people, WGS classes can be liberatory and affirming spaces, a site for the production and dissemination of counter-knowledge that contests their oppression and dismantles transphobia.”

As enrollment for the next semester comes into our minds, think about trying something new. Take a women’s and gender studies course, because you’ll honestly be surprised to how much you learn about the gendered world that we live in.

Jewél Jackson is a sophomore newspaper and online journalism major at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. Her column appears bi-weekly. She can be reached at jjacks17@syr.edu.

Published on March 18, 2019 at 7:15 pm