Laurie Essig

This is the kind of class you come out of and never shut up about. Such interesting content - incredibly relevant to today's world. The coursework intersects gender, sexuality, and race in a way I had never considered before. The prof is not hesitant to educate people who take this class solely to be devil's advocates - and some of the negative reviews I've seen for this semester's class reflect that. The readings are completely manageable, and you have some freebies to skip reading notes if times get tough. There are easy extra credit opportunities - just showing up to class some days will you get you some, and you'll want to show up because the discussions we had were so interesting. There were only two five-page papers with prompts guided by student experience that made it quite easy to apply the readings. The final project was also very straightforward and not too time-consuming. Overall, highly recommend - you learn so much about systemic privilege, queer identity, gender politics and so many other topics super relevant today.

This is the kind of class you come out of and never shut up about. Such interesting content - incredibly relevant to today's world. The coursework intersects gender, sexuality, and race in a way I had never considered before. The prof is not hesitant to educate people who take this class solely to be devil's advocates - and some of t …Read more

Fantastic course, great professor. As long as you do the reading and don't use AI, you will be fine. There is no participation grade, so you don't even need to come to class all that often. She gave us extra credit some days for showing up. You really get out of this class whatever you put into it. It was really fun and a great intro to the GSFS department.

This course is very good if you already believe in the concepts she teaches. Different from other courses that discuss thoughts such as courses from philosophy or political science, this course does not offer a reflection on queer critique. You would learn why queer critique is right, you would not learn objections to it, because if you are not with the idea, you are apparently wrong. This is not helpful for gender studies because it does not show why people would be opposed to queer critique. People who oppose queer critique are shown in this course as intentionally meaning harm or almost just evil. Then again its a critical theory course and is close to the professor’s identity that it maybe hard for her to realize the conformational bias. The grading is awful and arbitrary, or it’s just lazy. She only cares about page numbers and quotes in your essay. If you have them you get high marks, if you don’t have them but you describe the ideas and provides citations, too bad. Don’t do anything extra for this course, out of class research can potentially be seen as AI, because the professor does not appreciate you adding your own research in the essays. Stick to the course readings only. The feedback for writing is not helpful. There is no specific suggestions or constructive feedback on the arguments you make in your essays. This could be good for grades because as long as you have the quotes and page numbers you are fine, but there is no deeper level engagements with your ideas during grading.

This course is very good if you already believe in the concepts she teaches. Different from other courses that discuss thoughts such as courses from philosophy or political science, this course does not offer a reflection on queer critique. You would learn why queer critique is right, you would not learn objections to it, because if …Read more