This was a really fun course! It’s all about socially constructed identity categories. I was really surprised how conservative a lot of the gender/sex work academia is though which was unfortunate. The level of discussion in classes was pretty good. It often felt like a bit of a circlejerk about how good everyone in the class was for being a feminist though lol. the person that takes the tutes is really nice and very good at running classes (the handouts are really well-written/helpful to stir discussion). I definitely think it’s pretty hard to stray from accepted orthodoxy in these classes – there’s definitely an air of ‘try not to say anything too controversial,’ because they’re such sensitive topics so I think encouraging people to share their ideas more would be smart. The lectures were run in a really discursive way like the ethics class which was cool, but the lecturer has a habit of only calling on the same person twice in one lecture so that no one voice dominates. I can understand where they’re coming from, but I don’t like the power dynamic it creates and the power it gives the lecturer to not be checked when they say something asinine (which they definitely did). The class begins by assessing and rejecting bioessentialism, delves into the metaphysics of gender and race for a lot of the class (what is gender and race exactly?) and then students get to pick pet topics of interest for the last few weeks of class. I think we talked about porn, incels and hate speech iirc. I think it’s pretty cool that the lecturer puts in the time to research and make new slideshows each year for the last couple of weeks, so that was really cool. They’re not really open to new ideas though, and were very short with me when I strayed from feminist orthodoxy (in a position I think is further left than theirs, but which they probably interpreted as right wing) in person.

Content of this subject is absolutely incredible. Karen and Matilda were super knowledgable and interrogating concepts with them was incredibly rewarding. Definitely a subject that will require you digging your teeth in a bit more independently—personally I loved this. I would recommend it if you loved Ethical Theory.

Really great philosophy subject. Karen is an excellent lecturer and tutor. I found it quite complementary to gender studies, so if you have any background knowledge in that it will be very useful in this subject.