Gender Defender!; or, why I'm well on my way to becoming a gender studies scholar.

For an outside-of-class mid-term exam (for which I wrote 13 pages!), I wrote on the topic of constructions of masculine identity in four early- to mid-American plays--Royall Tyler's The Contrast, Langston Hughes's Mulatto, Eugene O'Neill's The Hairy Ape, and Clifford Odets's Waiting For Lefty. As usual with anything I write, but particularly with literary analysis, I thought it was the most horrible text ever written and that I'd surely make a B--grad school's equivalent of a "go work at Wal-Mart" admonition--and my academic life would be over in the profoundest sense. I blame No Child Left Behind for my irrational fear of failing tests.

Anyway, I got my exam back today, and I did much better than I thought. I wasn't unceremoniously slung from the halls of academe, and my professor--who is the nicest man you ever will meet--had this to say about my exam:

Excellent exam, Tim, really excellent. You have a nuanced sense of how gender definition and dynamics play out within the broader social sphere. Great job!

Did you catch that--nuanced sense of gender? My God, I've been waiting my whole life for a man to tell me that.

Please forgive the blatant self-promotion, and join with me in celebration of an exam well-done, a good semester chugging right along!

How are your semesters going?