Week One Blog
Greetings, all. My name is Kayla Scheitlin, and I'm a freshman in the University's Institute of Technology. Right now, I’m starting with studying biomedical engineering - I don't really know what it is I want to do. But I’m interested in that, maybe genetics, and I’d like to continue to take Spanish as well. I'm from the suburbs of the Twin Cities. My hobbies include playing violin and soccer, though I’m not doing either of those things at the moment. Currently, I'm living in Centennial with my awesome betta fish named Igor.
This is the first gender studies class that I've ever taken, but I think that gender is related to one's sex and how one defines his or her identity by this and also how society creates an identity for him or her. Power and roles are prescribed according to these shaped identities, and they affect everyone in their everyday lives. Growing up in these identities creates expectations for both one’s gender and the opposite gender, and the cycle continues. These expectations are strong and play a large role in our modern world, even if subtle.
A current personal example of this for me is being in the Institute of Technology. There are lots of jokes concerning women in this college becoming engineers. While to me they are not offensive – I actually think some of them are funny – they are examples of expectations of the female gender. Women, typically, have not held as many positions in science and math as men, and therefore, the jokes point out the surprise of finding women in IT.
These assumptions of mine could easily be wrong. Hopefully, I’ll learn a lot from this course and be able to correct them.