Signifying Nothing

should be reading catcher in the rye.

i just had a really unproductive deviant subcultures class. we read an article on how the label of deviance (which, so far, we’ve talked about in the context of specific religious sects and subcultures) is applied to women in general. and these girls, these SENIORS who are english majors, kept talking about how eye-opening it was, and how TRUE it was that women ARE labeled as deviant, and how much they could relate to the article, and how depressing they thought it was that there was inequality to this day.

well, OF COURSE. my god! for someone to have been in college for 3 years and not have EVER thought about feminism. i am glad that the article had the effect it did, but this is what i find really wrong with college. people are allowed to just bop along taking whatever courses they feel like, and the only required classes at vassar are a quantitative class (which can apply to any math class or psych class or cognitive science) and a year of language. this is baffling to me. how is there no requirement to take a class on gender, and no requirement to take a class on race? ESPECIALLY for vassar, in which, for example, all of my classes this semester are 100% white. honestly. one hundred percent. 

i was talking to one of my roommates and she said she wanted to take this seminar sociology class on prison and race, but she had never taken a class on race before and didn’t know how to talk about it. THAT IS TERRIBLE. that is a terrible, terrible thing. and i think it’s true of myself too. even though i’m a sociology major, my capacity to talk and think about race intelligently is really limited, and i’ve only begun to really think about feminism in the past year. and if i had been an english major, god knows i would know nothing about anything except 18th century british novels and postmodern literature. that’s an exaggeration, but i hope you know what i mean.

i think a lot of vassar students, myself included, have gone through a lot of our lives not thinking about gender, race, class, because we haven’t had to. because 1) we’re privileged as fuck, but maybe more importantly 2) we haven’t been exposed to that kind of discourse. shouldn’t vassar take some responsibility for that?

(i don’t mean to imply that just “taking a class on gender” and “taking a class on race” is The Answer to white, privileged ignorance. and presenting these concepts into subjects to be studied in an academic setting is certainly problematic. but i really believe it’s necessary as a first step towards getting college students to THINK.)