Final Reflection: How Conceptions of Gender have Changed Over a Semesters Time

Final Reflection
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Final Reflection
The course has been more difficult but also interesting and engaging than I had expected when I was signing up for it. Most of us expected the course to be straightforward with more lectures and fewer discussions, and the readings to be non-fictional and focus on the feminist theories. I did not expect to learn more from ourselves than lectures as well as using fictional readings to explore gender.
However, I have been thinking about the course itself for the last couple of days. I have also posted some posts on our class forum and I have seen few reactions that seemed to be confusing. The problem that I have discovered is that both my posts and the comments get confused at some points. I think this is because we are talking about a complicated concept: gender as an identity. Another problem, in my opinion, is the misconceptions that most of us were getting from the readings. But I can guess where this comes from, especially those of us who come from feminist societies.
Before I signed up for the course, I had a different perspective about gender. I used to know that gender is the same as sex, but from the different concepts that we covered in the course I came to realize the words are not synonymous. The course provided a distinction between the two which happened to bring the many problems that we encountered during the course. Sex was defined as the biological characteristics that are used to assign people to either male or female category while gender focuses on how the society influences our perceptions of masculinity and femininity. What does the society deem to be the appropriate behavior of both men and women? It also examines how behaviors influence the identity and social practices in the society. Gender tends to focus more on gender roles and power relationships that are established by gender order in a certain society and how it can change over time.
We focused on gender roles and power relationships based on feminist theories. Before the arrival of feminists, women were oppressed. They were supposed to serve men and they were not supposed to hold any power in the society. From where I come from women are still treated the same way. They are supposed to serve men. Those who do not obey their...