From January to April, I have learned an immense amount of information from the introductory course, Women and Gender Studies. As described in MRU’s course catalog, Women and Gender Studies 1172 is an interdisciplinary study of some of the major issues confronting Canadian women, LGBTQ2S+ people, and other historically marginalized groups. In this course, we have learned from studying and analyzing different complex issues, not only in Canada but around the globe too. This course has helped create awareness and educate on problems we may have not even realized existed. Women and Gender Studies has targeted four different aims to create an overall beneficial course and help students complete their studies at Mount Royal University with …show more content…
Like I said, Women and Gender Studies has introduced many of us to issues we never even realized were present and look at things from a completely opposite perspective. This aim is to push us to take what we’ve learned from this course and apply to our own lives. Our syllabus states students should be able to answer a few different questions upon the completion of this course; what exactly the course purpose is, all about what feminism really is, what are social justice advocates doing to solve some of the problems they identify and how will we apply our course learnings to other aspects of our life, both on campus and off. Now, as we reach the end of the semester I feel I have gained an answer to each of these questions, I already had some ideas around what the course was designed to teach and what feminist are/do. But I never realized how much knowledge I would actually take from the course regarding intersectionality and how I would integrate it into my own life. To me, intersectionality was best explained in Kathrine A Boyer’s article “Intersectionality 101: Understanding Your Privilege And Oppression” as intersecting systems of privilege and oppression. In the article, is explains how people can be oppressed and privileged in an abundance of different ways, most commonly, you hear about gender, sexual orientation, race but her article goes more in depth then these particular three, Katherine writes how anyone can be privileged or oppressed in one way or another. She says the term privilege shouldn’t be “offensive” to white cis-gender males as they could still be oppressed by something like their socio-economic status. The whole idea is that we shouldn’t feel guilty for having privilege but when you're blind to your privilege then that's where the problem starts. On and and off campus, I’ve