Laurie Essig

I really loved this class; it was a great introduction to gender studies, especially since this class specifically goes into most of the other identities that come with being queer, not just the one-dimensional white perspective. Moreover, it talks about how having more to your identity can make being outwardly queer harder for you. Laurie was a great prof as well.

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.