Coleen Herbert Blog 10

Did I change? I think so. Taking this course exposed me to new ways of thinking about and discussing issues of sex and race. As other people have already addressed, this class personally pushes you out of your comfort zone as does Guro. Never have I had a professor be so personally invested in the lives and education of the students and for that I am extremely grateful.
I discovered that I was much more uncomfortable with these topics than I appear to be. My past neo-liberalism does catch up with me sometimes; it haunts me from my high school years.
So, that's one thing that I discovered about myself, this trepidation.  Like Sam said, I'm not done changing after this class. These topics effect me each and every day and I recognize now that I need to be more proactive about this. Because I'm a quiet person, I tend to sit back and let things happen to me. But this class taught me that everyone's opinion is valuable, including my own.
 Queer community reflections: I remember hearing people associate things like "offensive" and "cruel" when certain queer slurs came up on the slideshow we watched on Tuesday and the reactions to Savage Nights were strong. The isolation  that Jean suffers resonated with me. His silencing was devastating; here is a character who uses sex to speak. But other than this film, sexuality wasn't really touched on in the course and I would have liked to have seen more of it. Most of the projects approached race. People are more reluctant, I think, to talk about sex because it is considered to be "private". The last discussion we had on love was lively, however. I would have liked to have more discussions about sex and sexuality as a community, mostly because I think they would have been significantly more uncomfortable than our discussions about race and racial violence. We voted for the course to take this direction and this is the direction that the course took. I guess the question I'm trying to ask is whether or not people are comfortable with talking about sex and sexuality. Are these topics more taboo?
Reflections on women: Although the course introduced several impressive woman characters, our discussions still focused on race and nationalism more than sex. We observed some women-centric ideas in the projects, but the issues raised in the presentations did not make it into our discussions. Are women taboo, too? Is sexism private? Foucault might agree with me if he observed our class.
Overall, an excellent course. I learned so much and I am grateful to both my peers and Guro for their support and contributions to my academic career here at the college.