Nadia Brooks

I have been carrying a used copy of The Second Sex around for three years. I have read the first hundred pages twice. I first read bell hooks in a community college class, and it changed how I saw my own life, but I never went further. Now people argue about gender everywhere, on the news, at work, and at my sister's dinner table, and I realize I don't know where most of the ideas come from. I want to be able to read Beauvoir and Butler on my own and know what they are arguing with.

There is also a question I keep coming back to at work. Labor and delivery runs on care: nurses, doulas, aides, and mothers. Almost all of it is done by women, and it is either underpaid or not paid at all. Is that just how things are, or is it an injustice? If it is an injustice, who is responsible for it? By the end, I want to be able to answer that in an essay.

I am going to follow feminist philosophy back to its sources. For ancient philosophy, Susan Sauvé Meyer's two courses, because I want to read what Plato and Aristotle actually said about women. For modern, Bernstein on Hegel, since Beauvoir builds on him, and the Marx lectures, because of labor. Most of my time will go to the contemporary sections: Beauvoir, Young, Fraser, Ahmed, and Butler. For electives, bell hooks and Butler's Who's Afraid of Gender?

The Hegel course is 27 hours, which scares me. If it stalls me, I will move on and come back to it.

Six hours. I work three twelve-hour shifts, so some weeks will be harder than others, but six hours is what I can keep up even in a bad week. I am giving it until next summer.

Lectures on my forty-minute drive to and from the hospital on shift days. Readings on my days off, at the library in the morning before errands. Notes go in one notebook, the green one, and ideas I have while driving go in a note on my phone.