Laurie Essig

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

I really enjoyed this class, Laurie is really cool and doesn't take it extremely seriously. She's so so passionate about queer critique and it's fun to hear her lecture. There's a lot of reading but you're not required to do all of it, and she'll give you credit as long as you put some effort in. This really changed the way I look at gender and sexuality

I think this is a great intro to the GSFS department. The readings are very relevant to current times, although difficult. The papers and projects are very chill. Laurie is an amazing professor. I would recommend to anybody interested in understanding the origins of gender, sexuality and challenging the very concepts.