When situations become awkward at Georgetown, we usually default to asking the infamous Georgetown intro: your name, where you’re from, what year you are, and what you are studying. I’ve got the first three questions down pat: Kami Steffenauer, Southern Illinois, and Class of 2026. But when it comes to the last question, I sometimes hesitate, debating whether or not I should give people the half truth or the full one. Oh, I’m studying Anthropology or I’m majoring in Anthropology and Women’s & Gender Studies. The looks on people’s faces vary when they hear the latter major, some exuberant and smiling widely with Oh, that’s so cool! While others, particularly men on this campus, purse their lips and nod politely, as if trying to figure out what to say or how to process my words. For what even is a Women’s & Gender Studies major?
Being a Women’s & Gender Studies major has not always been acceptable and has rarely been easy, both on and beyond the Hilltop. When I told my parents I thought I wanted to major in Women’s & Gender Studies, their brows furrowed with concern as they tried to understand, understandably, what jobs I could get with such a degree and what I would actually be doing. Embarrassed, I didn’t have a great answer for them, other than sex-crimes prosecuting, which has always been my end goal. But I did have the benefit of attending a well-known university, especially in the field of law, and figured that as long as I went to a good school, my major wouldn’t matter as much. This was and was not true once I arrived at Georgetown and discovered that the Women’s & Gender Studies major is under a program, not a department, which is incredibly significant in academia. Programs receive less funding from the University than departments, have less full-time faculty, and are dispersed over several departments as opposed to being concentrated in one physical space on campus. This makes it extremely difficult to contact and connect with said faculty and to coordinate classes counting towards your major, let alone if you want to study abroad or add other academic experiences to your undergraduate career. The latest petition for the program to receive department status was presented to the College Dean’s Office in 2019 by student activists, but fruition of their labor has yet to be seen.
As if the systemic issues were not difficult enough, what can be even more discouraging is the feedback I receive from the Georgetown community, students and faculty alike. I’ve had professors outside of the major ask me if I’m majoring in anything else, as if Women’s & Gender Studies is not a sufficient or grueling enough major on its own, and that I need a more traditional discipline to counter all of my radical feminism courses. I’ve debated intensely with classmates in core classes from outside of the major, whose inability to see the links between patriarchy, capitalism, and globalization has left me ready to pull my hair out. In the moments when I hear people all around me debating policies concerning women’s bodily autonomy or microaggression reporting of female professors and everyone is so preoccupied with their two-bits that they forget they have a student in the room who literally does this for her grades, I feel deflated and devalued, like people can pick up what I spend years studying in a quick Instagram post or Google search. In my worst moments, I sometimes wonder why I even am a Women’s & Gender Studies major.
Although I grew up in an extremely conservative area, my parents worked hard to install a sense of what I today call feminism into my sister and me, my mom playing records of the Women’s Rights anthems from the 1970s around the house as my dad reminded me before every soccer game that I was as good and capable of beating any opponent, regardless of their gender. This did not bode well in my small-minded community, and I oftentimes felt like a fish out of water thanks to my assertive tone and outspoken belief in equality between the sexes, which in fifth grade, looked like arguing that girls could run just as fast as boys in the state fitness test.
In my attempts to make my escape plan from my hometown, I began examining colleges and their major programs, still trying to grasp the difference between a major and a minor, when I stumbled upon Washington University in St. Louis’ Women, Gender, & Sexuality Department webpage. Despite my rural roots, I was privileged enough to have the Harvard of the Midwest less than an hour away from my house and had driven past the campus half a dozen times on the way to NHL games. And what did my wandering eyes see but an entire set of classes dedicated to the discriminations women face every day, discriminations I had been noticing for years but that nobody except my immediate family would acknowledge. Godsmacked, I was blown away that there were people studying these topics for a living, professionally, and knew I had to become one of them. Thus, ever since I was fifteen, I knew I wanted to major in some form of Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, and was delighted to learn that my dream school and current home also offered a form of this field to study.
Upon arrival at my first Women’s & Gender Studies class, an English class with an all female cast of authors, I was in heaven, enjoying the deep study of female portrayal in literature and learning, for the first time, the word intersectionality through Alice Walker’s legendary The Color Purple. It felt empowering to be surrounded by a circle of women, non-binary folks, and some men, who were all focused on equality not just for women, but for those who don’t fit the gender binary, who don’t fit the white mold of U.S. society, and anyone else who is not a privileged cis, white, straight Christian male. The interdisciplinary nature of the major has allowed me to not only expand my class selection beyond the program into departments such as Black Studies and Classical Studies, but beyond the University, taking me to Ecuador for anthropological research on the intersections of race, gender, and ethnicity, as well as a future study abroad program examining social movements in the Southern Cone. Through these classes, I have both learned how to emphasize with other people’s experiences as well as how to validate my own. I don’t question the daily aggravations I endure at the hands of men anymore, fully conscious and unapologetic in addressing the microaggressions and implicit biases I face whenever I speak up or share an unpopular opinion in class. I have the toolkit to stand in the gap with those who have suffered atrocious traumas while simultaneously analyzing the situation objectively, investigating what happened, who’s benefiting from this, and what do we need to move forward to aid the survivor and ensure the perpetrators are brought to justice. In sum, my Women’s & Gender Studies classes have taught me what a broken, unequal world we live in, and that the only way to combat the injustice of it all is with hard-core, feminist theory, perspectives, and approaches in whatever field we may enter.
Any major can teach me to think critically, study knowledge perceived as “higher” than other forms of education, and how to write a debate speech. The Women’s & Gender Studies major does something different, however, in that it has taught me to set women and other oppressed folks at the center of our world and to see the world through their lens, to understand what it is like to constantly have to be paid less than someone just because your reproductive organs are different or your last name deviants from the standard Western history book. What would our healthcare system look like if we valued the female body as equal to the male body, or even if we set the female body as the norm? How would our criminal justice system look if we prioritized the wellbeing and emotional health of survivors of sexual violence instead of forcing them to testify in front of the individual responsible for their trauma and tragedy? How much more effective would our political systems be if we lifted up the direct voices of activists to Congress, telling the entitled politicians in their mansions exactly what the people needed and how legal jargon blocks pathways for the social mobility this country promises? My pride for my Women’s & Gender Studies major stems and blossoms from these questions, for that is exactly what this major is teaching me; that women are people and deserve to be treated as such, and that will serve me well in whatever job I take, be it prosecutor, anthropologist, or community organizer. Moreover, it is the major that gives me oxygen in a world that tells me my body doesn’t deserve to take up space and allows me to give that life to those around me, be it in a classroom or on the street. So ask me what I’m studying, and watch as my face breaks out in the brightest smile you’ve ever seen.
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