Student work: Shane Rose

Graphic illustration of typing on a laptop.
Graphic illustration of typing on a laptop.

CSWS Calderwood Seminars

Impact: Student Reflection

As a student, many classes you take are just there to get to the next step, ticking off the checklist of graduation requirements. Then there are the others. The classes that mean more and have a larger impact on your development academically or changing you as a person. The Calderwood Seminar In Public Writing: Women and the Family in 20th Century America is one of the latter. 

I feel that the quality of my writing grew disproportionately over the term. I found trying to change writing styles to be a particular personal challenge that I enjoyed. I believe I grew in ability, and I saw others do the same. This is what will last in my memory from the class.

Outcome: Student Work

But It’s Not Job Seeking: The Story of How I Never Became a Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Major
by Shane Rose, HIST 416, Spring 2025

In about two weeks I will be graduating from the University of Oregon. It took eleven years to get to this point, registering in 2014. I’m certain it isn’t a record for the longest enrollment period as an undergrad, but it is still a rather long time. I’m proud of myself and my accomplishments, sure, but I do have one regret. I wasn’t a Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies major. I wanted to be one, as the subject matter deeply impacted who I am as a person and my trajectory in life, but Veteran’s Affairs policy actively prevented me from doing so. I wish to explain both aspects to you.

I am a white cis male, straight, in my late 40’s, and not particularly interesting. I was born and raised in Oregon. My father was a Marine, served in Vietnam, before becoming a mechanic and then a welder. My mother intended to focus her time on her children, but after the mill closed and my father had to change fields, she went to work in a restaurant. We were rural in my early childhood, but with the job changes, we moved to the city. 

As I grew up, I noticed things about the society in which I was surrounded and was unhappy with what I saw. I’ll admit it was a primitive child’s perception of the world, but while underdeveloped, it wasn’t incorrect. People could be awful. I began to identify and understand racism, sexism, and homophobia. It had always been there, before my awareness, but I didn’t know. Hate didn’t need to be in your face to be nasty, it’s insidious and passive, existing in the background regardless of your attention to it. Bigotry gets enmeshed into slang, language, and behavioral norms, making a homogonous cruel setting for education with and by the same people normalizing bigotry. Violence was not uncommon either, in my schools, which certainly added to the unpleasantness of daily school life.

No one else seemed to notice though. I am not some kind of progressive genius hero, but all the kids at school seemed perfectly fine with throwing out slurs and no person around me seemed to mind or think it was strange. Adults and children alike would all chuckle at the latest offensive joke. Adult men would make directly sexual comments, things that would certainly not be polite to write in this paper, towards female students and other adults would accept it as a normal thing to say in conversation. I have punchlines that are permanently burned into my memory that I would excise like a tumor if I could.

I know this sounds like an absurd realization, but I’m a child in this story, and one day it occurred to me that I had never met a black person before. There were none at my school. Actually, I had never met a single non-white person. I didn’t know any gay people either. They must exist, I mean, clearly my classmates are very concerned about their sexuality. I reasoned that the threat must be everywhere to bring it up so often. Unfortunately, the social, sometimes physical, violence I witnessed became more open and routine as I aged into my teenage years.

I remember very clearly having the thought that there must be more than this. Every part of my daily exposure was repulsive. This cannot be the whole world. Finding culture outside of what is fed to you was phenomenally hard back then. The internet didn’t exist, at least not in a realistic accessible way. The radio was the primary method to access music, but if you didn’t like country or religious music, there wasn’t much to discover. The book selection in my school library had much to be desired too. Violence and bigotry kept most of my peers in-line, making them present very uniformly with each other. Everything was mean and yet colorless and boring at the same time. I’m now familiar with Hannah Arendt’s thought on “the banality of evil”, and even though not to those extremes, I understand how it can come to be so easily.

One day, I was walking by a brick building in the city and through a little crack between the window and the curtain I saw something magical. Inside it was dark, except for a spotlight pointing to a stage. On that stage was a fit adult man, completely naked except for a golden bikini bottom and covered in glitter. He was flexing in the classic T-pose. Next to him appeared to be a mad scientist male character wearing lipstick and heels. The scientist rubbed him up and down and they began some kind of performance dance. I couldn’t hear the music, but it was there. It was the first time in my life that I found something “more”. I know it sounds silly, but there are no words to express how profound it was to know there was something different in the world.

My world slowly began to grow from there. I found a new singer. She sung openly about her rape as a teenager. She explained details within her songs of the struggle of growing up catholic, as a woman, and her desire to have agency. I had discovered my first feminist. After the first, came another, and another. Shortly after, one of those feminist singers produced an album of audio recordings of a socialist Korean war veteran who spoke at length about unions, racism, and equity. Color was being added to my dreary existence. A door had opened in my mind, and I jumped through.

Highschool ended and I was now an adult. My family had been very poor, which meant there was no future for me. I knew enough of the world at that point to understand that I would be in poverty for the rest of my life, with no ability to change anything about it. However, there was one chance. I was willing to kill and there just happened to be a war going on. I joined the Army. 

Two factors informed my decision, my wish for higher education and my desire to leave the country. Both were tied to my belief that there must be more out there somewhere. As it turned out, I was very good at being a soldier. I served as a paramedic and loved my job, living in Europe for the entirety of my service, with the exceptions of combat deployments. The end of that period of life came when I was hit by a mortar while in Iraq. I was badly injured, and it led to my retirement. This brings my story to the UO.

A benefit of my service is access to education, commonly referred to as the GI Bill, and a subset of this benefits is specifically for the severely disabled. The section for those nowphysically challenged by their service is a brilliant idea on paper. The normal education benefit has a duration of 36 months of full-time enrollment and pays for tuition at the rate of public institutions in your home state. The disability section has no expiration for the length of enrollment and no upper limit for cost. It makes sense, you might have to withdraw repeatedly for medical care, may fail classes due to disability, and may have unusual limits or accessibility
issues that traditional funding might not be able to work with. However, you lose your choice in degree and major. You are assigned an overseer who selects your academic goals. The overseer chooses your degree and major. You may make suggestions, but as I confirmed with my Senator’s office, they have no obligation to follow any requests made by you. The field seems to have a high turnover rate, never longer than six months in my case, and each overseer has a different “dream” they have selected for you. The plans made by the overseer can vary significantly and conflict directly with that of the previous. There is, as I discovered, little oversight into their decisions and little you can do to appeal. You obey if you want to go to school or quit. It is your choice. 

At the onset, I requested “Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies” as my major. My passion for the subject had never decreased since my youth. I desired a formal study of the topic and to one day be able to write or speak competently and confidently within the field. I saw things over the years, good and bad, that grew this desire. Friends of mine had died while still hiding their sexuality from their own families. I am still alive. I want to know more.

My overseer said no. She said specifically that “It wasn’t a job seeking field” and that was that. My deep inner wish was denied just like that. No appeal and no other route. I was instead assigned Human Anatomy and Physiology, based on my paramedic background. I no longer had the ability to perform any detailed tasks with my hands with my injuries. I knew
medicine was unrealistic in my new physical state. I expressed this. Again, I was told it wasn’t job seeking.

Let me clarify, I was now permanently physically disabled from my combat injuries. It is highly unlikely I will ever be “job seeking” in a traditional sense, nor was it a requirement of the regulation governing their department. I had checked. Still, they had absolute control. Nonsense as it was, that was now my assigned path.

A few years passed and the reality of the situation forced my overseer to change my major. I again requested WGS. I was told the same, “it wasn’t job seeking.” I was assigned General Social Science as my new major, well, for a time. As the carousel of overseers turned round, my selected major shifted back and forth, but never my choice.

I learned that GSS had an advantage for me and eventually convinced my overseers to leave me there. While I wasn’t allowed to be a WGS major, GSS had wiggle room in which classes would fulfill my degree requirements. I took every WGS adjacent class I was offered, women’s history, women and politics, reproductive health, psychology of gender, 20th century women and family, and more. By exercising the limited agency I was given, I was able to danceas near as I could to the education I sought. I was even able to take classes with some of the people I respect in the field, like Prof Heinz, Dr Yarris, Dr Ellis, and Katie Temple. 

Now that I’m at the end of my undergrad journey, there aren’t words enough to express how I have loved my time in being WGS adjacent. I now know wonderful and terrible things. I know about the Stonewall riots, Annie Hindle, Ma Rainy, the ERA, intersectionality, the interaction of racism and infant mortality rates, weathering, women groups establishing experimental communes to learn and define identity, the different waves of feminism, international cultures and gender, the sterilizations in Puerto Rico, the sterilizations of the disabled, that women were not granted the right to vote with the 19th amendment, but instead gender could not be the reason thus still denying indigenous women the right to vote, that Roe v Wade did not grant access to abortion, but was instead a right to privacy ruling, thus ensuring it was never protected, the WASPS in WWII, othering, pharmaceuticals weren’t tested on women and therefore do not perform correctly on female bodies, that gender identity and biological sex are different things, and more, and more, and more.

I would not give up any of the knowledge I now have. The education I have received has made me a better person. I now have a greater capacity to think outside of my own experience, to empathize with my fellow human. I know more of a history that has largely been kept away from me and why that was done. The study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality is the study of humanity,
civil rights, government, religion, economics, history, law, family, health care, agency, inequity, beauty, pain, cruelty, objectification, and love. It is well worth the study. Screw the overseer’s job seeking. The VA was wrong in their decision. This is a field that should have been available for me. If they said no to me, they certainly did so to others too. This should be changed.