Update on 09/30/2021 - It's been 8 years since this post, and I do not know why it's getting traction now. For some reason, this post is getting a lot of hits all of a sudden.
I will say the following - in re-reading my comments I made at the time, I don't necessarily agree with these points exactly the same way now as I saw the issues then. I think I'm now much more able to just let a question hang, or a problem exist without a specific answer. Sometimes the challenge is the thing. I don't think I demand a different model now the way I did then, and am able to better just handle an open question.
Maybe it's growth or my eyes being slightly more open, or I'm older and have had the past 8 years to ponder these same questions a whole lot more as the world has allowed more voices.
Academia and criticism are hard. There's a reason not everyone gets to do it. And the topics in the class were challenging in a very positive way. I believe internalizing some of this course was very good for me, indeed. The methods and whatnot are up for discussion or critique, and they should be. But just know that it was a good experience and I'm glad I was asked to review my own thinking in many ways by the course.
Original Post:
With the navigation issues resolved, Week 2 of the course
Gender Through Comic Books, was a lot easier to deal with (the navigation is still awful, but at least I've basically sorted it out). Of the promised 3-5 hours, I probably spent 3-4 hours, including an hour of guest lecture by comics maestro Mark Waid. I did bypass a lot of the reading as I've read
Superman: Birthright numerous times in the past, and was able to focus mostly on course materials - so that saved a good hour.
As has often been my experience with a lot of course reading in theory classes, the full articles are going to start feeling repetitive. We've been presented the premise, and everything else is going to be supporting evidence - and this is why I was not a good student as an undergrad or, especially, during my glorious short, flamed-out career of not finishing grad school.
In this course, the basic concept is that "sex" is a biological designation and "gender" is a construct of personal and cultural choices. I believe this makes sense in context, and the readings made the concept pretty clear in Week 1. In Week 2, the one article we were asked to check out gave some more evidence. That's cool. But by the time we get to Week 3...
This week was a mix of reading Superman and putting some coin in Mark Waid's pocket by selling a lot of copies of Superman: Birthright. The task was to consider the construction of gender as it's played out less by instinct and more as part of a perception of roles of male, female and otherwise and how that's demonstrated by reading Birthright as well as Action Comics #1, an issue of Superman from 1960, and consider the ways gender is portrayed across 75 years.
