Academic Honesty

Below you'll find excerpts from a recent response paper I sent in to one of my profs... yes, yes I did.

Throughout this course, I have struggled with the content. I am an extremely modest person and a practicing Christian, and I was concerned that I might have to compromise my integrity for the sake of my education. I honestly only registered for this course because I wanted to expedite my qualifying exams, and CPLT 703 must be taken before I can write them. I have lived my life combating what I now know to be “liberal feminism”. I truly believe (on a personal level) that women and men are – and should be – different yet interdependent. I like to simplify my life, not complicate it with complex unknowns; life is complex enough without me over-thinking it. So postmodernist theory nearly drove me insane. There were times when I had suicidal thoughts as I struggled with the “undoing” of gender.
But I am in graduate school. As much as I may disagree with the subject matter, I never want to be one of those Christians who close their minds in the hopes of making the discomfort disappear. I want to learn. I want to understand. I want to love all members of humankind, whether we are in agreement or not. With this is mind, I attempted to break through the barriers I have concerning postmodernity and gender theory to figure out what these theorists are trying to say. My two biggest challenges were the Judiths: Judith Butler was a struggle for me because of her incessant need to destabilize, Judith/Jack Halberstam because of her abrasive penchant for the negative. But I kept looking for nuggets of something from which I could squeeze a drop of agreement, and I found some! That’s what graduate school is all about: thinking outside of the box, pushing against personal boundaries and realizing that the world is bigger than one can imagine, right?



Personally, I am truly grateful that the course syllabus was altered to incorporate Michel Foucault. Although, prior to this reading, I was able to forage through the materials that were heavy with instability and hostility, and although I was able to grasp concepts of guilt and shame, performance, “undoing”, and have come to a greater understanding of postmodernity, it was The History of Sexuality that brought all these together for me. I find it amusing that in his attempt to show the fragmentation of deviance and the multiplication of perversions, I am able to discern a synthesis for gender theory in contemporary society. His work bridged a gap for me between my reticence to embrace gender theory and my craving for knowledge. By using Foucault’s work as a lens, I feel like I will be able to welcome gender theory into my educational sphere without concern for the compromise that lingered in my mind early in the course. I appreciate his attempt to segregate his Self from his work. I think that is a big part of why I struggled early on with Butler and Halberstam: they were writing about something from such a personal perspective that I had difficulty appreciating the theoretical value of their research. Because I could not identify on a personal level with their lifestyles and the lifestyles of those about whom they wrote, it was a constant struggle to hear what they wanted to say. Michel writes as though he is not a part of the society about which he writes, which makes it easier to see the work rather than the person. I am fascinated by my own revelations in this response paper and I am excited to see what else I can glean from the texts now that my personal private and public spheres are more permeable, and I can now honestly say that I am glad I took this course.