Avoid this professor if you can!

The class set up was fairly straight forward. 50% of the grade was on note taking assignments, 10% for discussion participation, 10% for lecture participation, and 30% for the final essay. You had to come to lecture otherwise your absences would greatly lower your grade. The essay ended up being made optional for my class. If we were happy with our grade, not writing the final would not change it.

Every week we had a least two readings that were very theory heavy. For two readings each week you had to find two quotes per page and do an analysis/commentary on it. Most people turned in over 10 pages of notes each week. One reading was 71 pages and I turned in over 21 pages of notes for that week. They were incredibly painful and mostly just busy work.

The professor warned us that many readings would be confusing and that we were just supposed to try to understand them. Many of us hoped that he would further explain them in lecture but he was rarely helpful in dissecting readings. His lectures were often very elitist and his answers to questions further confused us.

On top of all of that we had class the day before and after the election and he refused to even acknowledge it had happen. In a major that is very political and could disappear under the Trump administration it was very disappointing that he was unwilling to get political.

If you put a lot of work into your notes and attend lectures and discussions you can get an A but it definitely made me depressed at times.

Lectures have no visual aids which some might find annoying or difficult but it worked fine for me. Guzman discusses the readings during lectures and will sometimes play movies or short videos related to the readings. Each week there are two readings which vary in lengths. You are responsible for completing notes for each reading which can sometimes take a while but if you start early in the week it is manageable. My TA was really great and helped the lectures make more sense and was helpful when anyone had questions. There was no midterm and the final was optional extra credit. Overall a solid class that was not too bad.

this class contains of homework and a final essay.
the homework = writing down a couple of sentences about the reading per page. so if the reading was 15 pages you were expected to write 15 notes which were roughly about 3-5 sentences. they had to be thoughtful and prove that you understood/read the readings. this was time-consuming but it did help me understand the material more. this homework is graded on competition, but if u had bad notes you would be marked off, or if u missed a couple of pages you would be marked off. these were graded by the TA and they were AWESOME.

the final= 5-7 pages are about the whole class. it wasn't graded so I don't know if that's a common thing. also, the professor gave the final prompt only a week before it was due so it was hard, especially because we thought we would cancel the final.

overall class thoughts = the professor states that the whole point of this class is for you to hear about theory and not really understand it. the grading system was good it's easy to receive 100% but the class can be boring. you read every week and then discuss the readings in your TA sections and in class. it was boring and I barely paid attention and received an A.the class never had PowerPoint so it was hard to stay engaged but you didn't have to focus anyways. you don't really have to pay attention in class just speak during TA sections, do the hw and final and you'll receive an A. i don't think he does A+ because I had a 100 and only received an A.

overall I would say easy A but it did increase my anxiety bc I didn't know if I would receive an A since the final is graded by him and everything else is graded by the TAs. but in end the final was never graded

The readings and films assigned were engaging and thought-provoking and some of my favorites assigned by any gender studies course. They are pretty tough, though. I also can't emphasize enough how unengaging this professor is and how boring this lecture was to attend. 0/10 Take with a different professor, if possible. The assignments were more or less useless and are pretty much daunting busy work. Discussion is worth attending if your TA is enjoyable (mine was!)

I started out genuinely excited for this course, but the course left me extremely disappointed. Most of Professor Guzman's readings were super inaccessible, and his lectures made it even more confusing, which made me feel like this class was elitist. I felt like instead of a professor, I saw him as a gatekeeper, withholding knowledge instead of explaining it in a way that students of all backgrounds can understand. I also felt disappointed in him because he did not fulfill his moral obligations as a gender studies professor. Gender studies is closely tied to social justice and issues, but he clearly has the privilege to only care about social justice in the context of academia as opposed to some of us in the class who have no choice, which made the class feel insulting. There were students who made comments during lectures with racist, ignorant undertones (specifically towards Black students), and he allowed those comments to be said without mediating the discussion or addressing how those comments were hurtful to the Black students in the classroom. He contradicts the purpose of gender studies in the class because he says he does not like to get political in his gender studies classes, but this is a political discipline with a discourse established by activists and their theories. The fact that he tried to create a neutral, apolitical class setting in a gender studies class felt nothing less than oppressive. I also felt uncomfortable with the fact that he used his marginal identities to make it seem like he is justified in allowing and perpetuating apolitical and blatantly oppressive opinions and interactions that were reflected in the class. Him stating his marginal identities does not take away from the fact that he is a WHITE man refusing to acknowledge his white privilege, speaking on behalf of oppressions that do not apply to him and he is not properly educated/passionate about when he does not have the range (that he does not seem to care about outside of academia), inevitably leaving him to taking up space, perpetuating white feminism and allowing white feminists in class to feel comfortable with their ignorance while simultaneously allowing others who are excluded by white feminism to feel pushed out and silenced.

The professor did not prepare for the midterm and final. It was like a pop-quiz and whoever showed up in the class had the chance to take the midterm.