Khadeejah's Gender Studies Blog

  There isn’t a lot of representation of healthy male friendship in the media. When two men are friends in a show or a movie they aren’t shown being vulnerable toward each other. One example is in Never Have I Ever, with Trent and Paxton. They claim they are best friends but they don’t know any deep personal information about each other. Trent doesn’t learn that Paxton is half-Japanese until the middle of the first season, although they claim to be childhood best friends. They do have a few deep conversations in season 3, but Trent’s whole identity within the show is being dumb and goofy, so the scene isn’t really taken very seriously due to the general lightheartedness of his character.  It took a lot of thought for me to identify a representation of healthy male friendship on TV because there just aren’t that many examples. I realized that Scotty and Bo from The Wilds provide a good representation of what healthy male friendship should look like. Season 2 of The Wilds ...

An issue that I’ve noticed at Uni is the students making fun of certain pronouns, especially in class group chats. I think a main reason why things like that have been normalized is that there aren’t many conversations happening that discourage students from making fun of other genders and using derogatory terms against them. When there are conversations about issues like this, students often don’t take them seriously because it is hard for them to fully understand the negative effect it can have on their peers. For a lot of freshmen, not just as Uni, there is a problem with the level of respect students give to their classmates that don’t fit in with the binary. At least for my class, freshmen year was when a lot of students came out and the idea of different pronouns was introduced for the first time to some students. My freshmen year was online, so that resulted in some people not being aware of others’ pronouns, and some making fun of the students who came out. That contributed to ...

Being a woman who is so clearly Muslim comes with its struggles. I found the Mariam Khan reading really relatable. I haven’t even experienced the worst of the sexism and Islamophobia this world has to offer because my whole life has been so sheltered. But even with growing up in a liberal town and then attending Uni I have a decent grasp on what Khan was arguing. I never exactly had any negative feelings towards feminism, but it didn’t feel like the right place for me. I didn’t have the words to describe it, but looking back its clear that feminism was always targeted towards white women. I loved that feminism told women to dress how they wanted, and to ignore men and their demands on how a woman should be. But, according to my religion, I had rules on how to dress and act towards men. I thought that feminism and Islam were two entirely separate things, with no overlap at all. As I got older and I became more comfortable in asking questions about Islam I learned that Islam is feminis...