Since we are on the subject of weird pictures that attempt to promote the idea of feminism, here is one more for you. This is one of a series of posters that our Department of Women's Studies created a while ago to promote itself on campus. As hard as I tried, I failed to get the point of these posters. I vaguely understand that they are based on the "Got milk?" commercial. I don't understand, however, how the image of a woman with a strained smile and a sperm-like substance on her mouth serves the goals of feminism. If this is supposed to be an attempt at humor, once again, it's extremely clumsy and unconvincing.
The very idea of having a department called Women's Studies seems very disturbing to me. The goal of feminism has always been to demonstrate that women are fully human and need to be treated as such. Why should we now create small academic ghettos for women? The existence of such a department seems to suggest that history, politics, literature, programming, geography, mathematics, etc. have nothing to do with women. Is that the message we want to send?
Naming this program "Department of Gender Studies" would make a lot more sense, in my opinion. At least, it wouldn't contribute to confirming the vision of women as the Other.
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