Gender is a Social Construct at ASU

There is enough on ASU’s Online Gender Studies Degree webpage to keep us busy here for months. I’ll have to take it step by step. It is so exciting I might get ahead of myself.

Let’s start with the first question on their page: Are you interested in creating social change?

Why yes, I am! Why do you ask?

This online degree will teach you how gender shapes society.

Okay, but how does that help me understand how to create social change? I want to change society for the better. But to do that, I need to know what “better” means. To be better means moving closer to what is good. Will this degree teach me what the good is?

No, it won’t. Why not? Because all is a social construct. There is no good. Therefore there is no better. And so we cannot make the world a better place with the information from this degree.

Gender, according to ASU, is a social construct. It has no basis in reality. It is invented by a society and then individuals are forced to live in that construct. But an authentic individual will challenge their society (according to this view) and assert their own construct about gender.

Let’s say all of that is true. It doesn’t tell us what we should do. Which construct should we live with? Which one is better? We can’t know. Maybe the one I pick today isn’t actually good for me. I just can’t know.

So far, not so good. Their first promise, to teach us to create social change, it cannot accomplish with its starting premises.

I do wonder what students this degree attracts. What do these students want out of a college degree? What did their parents hope for them in their college degree? As a former student, I would be incredibly upset if a degree made promises it could not keep but wanted $60K.