Summary Of Julia Serano's 'Whipping Girl'

4. It has been brought to my attention that a parent is concerned that I’m including Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl in the Intro to Women’s and Gender Studies course I am teaching. While I want to respect this parent’s opinions and desires regarding the education of their child, I will do everything in my power to keep this text in the syllabus. The unit I have built around it is essential in promoting understanding of key concepts, including gender theories, identity and social location, and privilege and oppression, thus reflecting the ideas of other important texts we read and the educational goals of this course as a whole. More importantly, it is a unit that encourages empathy while deterring oppressive assumptions in regards to how we structure
Serano does the same for the more accepted theory in WGS, the social constructionist view of gender, which Judith Lorber describes when she writes, “gender, like culture, is a human production that depends on everyone constantly ‘doing gender’” (54). As Serano explores these ideas, students also encounter key concepts such as subconscious sex, a term she coined as “the gender we subconsciously feel ourselves to be” and questions the term gender identity (78), which Launius and Hassel define as “a person’s gendered sense of self” (192). In turn, students encounter a non cis-gendered perspective on gender. They begin to think critically about the other texts they encounter in this course, and to question various perceptions of gender in society. Truly, this text is important as it not only helps to explain how WGS have historically thought about gender, but it begins to encourage students to truly engage with and question what they have learned inside and outside of the