Hello all, my name is Julianne McHugh but you can call me Julie. I am a senior Public Relations major and I am also pursuing a certificate in Women’s Studies. I decided to pursue a certificate in Women’s Studies after taking WMST250 my freshman year. I absolutely loved the course and how different it was in comparison to the rest of my classes. I have taken many WMST and LGBT courses since and have learned so much from each.
I am a cisgender female and a very feminine one at that. I love to shop and play with makeup, although you probably won’t see me dressing up for class any time soon. I am also in a sorority at UMD and I always love bringing the information that I learn in my WMST classes back to my sisters so that we can grow together and be a chapter of strong, independent, “woke” women.
This semester I hope to learn how to better deal with conflict within the world of feminism and be able to open my eyes to both sides of an issue to better understand how to confront it. I’m also hoping to learn a lot from the other students in my class, whether that is from the stories they bring to discussion or just their own opinions on certain issues. One of my favorite things about WMST courses is that they are mostly discussion based and a lot of what you learn from them comes from the opinions that every individual brings to the conversation. I hope to bring my own predispositions to class and maybe open the minds of the other individuals in my class as well.
Feminist conflict is a hard topic to discuss because it sometimes goes against what it means to be a feminist. In the world of feminism, as I understand, it is in your principles to be open-minded to many issues but also fight for what is right for both women and humanity. The trouble with that though, is that not everyone has the same opinion or beliefs, and not every feminist defines feminism in this same way. This is where we see feminist conflict arise. For me, and I’m sure for many of you, I would love to see a world where everyone gets along and world peace has been achieved, unfortunately that is just not attainable at the moment. So, in order to tackle the issue of feminist conflict we must discuss it.
I am excited to learn more about feminist conflict and how we will define it in this class, as well as the different ways that we can go about dealing with it. I am nervous for the times where we may find conflict within our class due to varying opinions, but I am hopeful that we will talk through it and have a better understanding of each other. I believe that this class will be tremendously helpful for the world that I am about to enter after I graduate in May and I cannot wait to dive in and learn all that I can from this course.