Hi everyone! My name's marina lakner, I am currently a junior here at Ohio University and studying biology. I have a few goals to accomplish in my lifetime one of which is to obtain a career in pharmaceuticals once I graduate. I want to get into pharmaceutical sales and be able to work in the medicine field. One of my other goals is to be well rounded and well traveled which is part of the reason why I am taking English 306J Women and Writting because it will open my mind to new things and maybe develop a different way of thinking about things...sometimes I can be stuborn and not so open minded as I would like to be. I currently live in Mason, Cincinnati but was born in Craiova, Romania. I moved to the states when I was ten and ever since I have been opened to a new way of life. I like to travel, been a few places such as, Amsterdam, Bulgaria, Jamaica and Mexico and I hope to go to Italy and Greece this upcoming summer. My culture is very important to me and I like to learn about others as well. Aside from traveling I like sports and love to spend time with my family and friends. I am looking forward to broadening my mind by taking this english class :)

So the other day I was in my Womens Gender Class and we were reading a few articles on different authors and we stumbled upon that was called "Women and Men Studies" by Kimmel, which was very interesting to me. What Kimmel was saying was that by the development of the "Womens Gender Class" gender became "recognizable" and visible. He tries to tell us that not until women gender classes were formed gender became visible to others. This really interested me because in our english class we are talking about things such as gender and sexuality and this statement really made me think what he really meant by it. What I think he is trying to say is that by taking a womens gender class or a women and writting english class, it can really open up your eyes to new perspectives and everyone can learn from it not just women, but men as well.
Kimmel was a man taking a class based on women and through the article he really tells us that he learned a lot more than he thought he would about not just women and feminism but also about the history on why women are perceived the way they are and why they are stereotyped. I think there should be a gender class in general where women and men can talk about the different things that lead us into stereotying, judging one another and why we use certain language that relates to women and certain words or phrases that relate to men. For example why do we relate dolls with girls and trucks with boys or pink with girls and blue with boys? Is this a cause of how our society has made it be or is it beyond that?
This reading made me really think about Yeps reading we did in class. He talks about "othering" a lot and what he means by it. What I got from the article was that othering is when certain individuals are allienated by society because of gender and sexuality...does this mean that if you dont like blue or pink you are part of the "others" or are you still part of the normalization but with different color preference.