Jessica Murray is always lovely, and did a great job as UC. Compared to 'Beyond Gender Wars", this one is definitely harder. You build upon a lot of similar concepts (e.g., dualism, intersectionality, etc.) but there is a lot readings each week so it takes a while to wrap your head around all the different perspectives. I think I struggled a little bit because I joined late, so I would recommend being fully engaged (and going to all classes!) from the very start to give yourself the best chance possible. The main assessment was a 'mini anthology' where you analyse three different sources within one theme, there was a lot of freedom so I chose all music. Overall, I finished with a distinction, but it took a lot of effort.

Anonymous, Semester 2, 2025

I think some people would find this unit really enjoyable, and most of the people in my tutorial seemed to find it very interesting. But please don't take this as a fun elective as a first year without having done any other gender studies units, or think it will primarily be an English unit as I did- it is very theory heavy and the assessments reflect this. The content is very overwhelming and difficult to understand in some weeks. This is mostly because we are given a bunch of readings and some (outdated) lectures that try and cram as many key terms into your head as possible. Most of these terms were very abstract or incomprehensible to me as we were given one sentence of definition for them and little context before moving on to the next topic. The assessments were quite difficult, especially as the unit outline was not updated and showed the ones for the previous year- which were weekly online tests and a take-home component, if I remember correctly- but there is actually an in-class test and exam as well as tutorial participation. Apparently, this was because of people using AI for assessments which is fair enough, but please disclose this before we choose the unit!! I think this style of assessment made it especially difficult to showcase your skills, as they were very content-based with little of your own creativity. The test involved choosing two questions based on the topics and writing a short answer response, which wasn't too confusing. The exam on the other hand was explained in an extremely confusing manner in terms of what the question style would be and how many topics we needed to discuss. The essay question in the exam was vague to the point of being incomprehensible in how to structure an answer. That being said, the tutorials did help me gain a basic understanding of the content, I genuinely think I would have been lost without them. They were engaging and the tutor was lovely and clearly very passionate about the subject. Some of the readings and creative pieces were also very interesting and thought-provoking. To me, the main issue was that there was attempt to cover too many topics and ideas instead of choosing the most necessary and going more in depth.

Anonymous, Semester 2, 2026