Like a lightning bolt, a course on feminist theory galvanized Matthew Mongiello when he was an undergraduate. It’s the reason he went to graduate school and is now an assistant professor of Political Science at McDaniel.
He knows well that a single class can change the course of a life.
It may happen with a subject that’s eye-opening, or a professor who speaks with irresistible enthusiasm. You may even remember the class that transformed you.
But which classes are changing lives today? What are students learning and doing in them, and why does it matter?
Mongiello has noticed in his years of teaching that his students are especially engaged when discussing gender. That may be why the seats in his new course, Gender Politics, filled faster than anything else he’s teaching this spring.
Get a crash course on Gender Politics and why it matters with this 60-second syllabus.
“Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It” by Richard Reeves
“The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century” by Srinivasan Amia
“Barbie” directed by Greta Gerwig
Mongiello, who also instructs and leads the Maryland Student Legislature delegation from McDaniel, has the students take on a time-honored tradition in politics: debate. They propose resolutions for hot-button topics, do rigorous research for empirical evidence, and then argue for or against — often learning the most when their assigned stance differs from their personal opinion.
“I love for them to disagree with each other and with me, but they need to back it up with facts,” Mongiello says. By the end of the course, the students will be thoroughly prepared to speak productively about challenging subjects in any situation.
Proposed resolutions:
• Granting equal access to parental leave
• Should there be a national abortion law?
• Access to gender-affirming care and transgender access to traditionally single-sex spaces
• Whether the concept of a male/female gender binary benefits society and how
Gender has been center stage in politics historically, and “taking an outsized role in national politics right now,” Mongiello says. He notes that some of the most active and recurrent forms of state legislation are around transgender inclusion in institutions, gender-affirming care, sex, gender, and sexuality in schools and libraries.
“There’s also a significant and growing partisan gap between men and women,” he says, which is an important and growing divide to consider in electoral politics today.
Pop culture presents a window into how gender is portrayed in a society. So, students will analyze “Barbie,” a blockbuster film that became a cultural event and focused worldwide attention on issues of gender and feminism. Students will rely on the research and rhetorical skills they’ve learned in the course, plus readings and discussions of “Barbie,” to complete their final paper.
Mongiello hopes that every student leaves the course understanding that difficult and controversial political issues are that way because they’re complex and nuanced.
“If it were easy to solve social problems with public policy, we would’ve done it already. It’s not impossible, but they should be aware of the difficulty in designing, passing, and implementing public policies,” he says.
One last thing he hopes to share is the idea that the diverse forms feminism can take is “a good thing, a relevant thing” that is always worth discussing.