What Truth Means and My Experience

This class has certainly provided me with new insight and perspective on science and culture in theory and well as in context through class readings, presentations and discussions.  Though I found all the class units on the big questions, sexuality, the environment and food to be intriguing I was particularly excited about the sexuality unit.  This was a topic that I had not really had the opportunity to discuss in my science and mathematics courses here at the University.  It is an issue that I find relevant in my life as well as many others, yet there almost seems to be a taboo on talking about sexuality.  Sexuality is portrayed as something dirty, inappropriate or uncomfortable to talk about, and when people do talk about it, there are often misconceptions or misunderstandings.

As I've taken courses in college I have found out that there really are not specific, precise answers to these large and looming subjects like sexuality.  Through this course I have had to synthesis a poster presentation, debate on controversial questions and answers, as well as read two contrasting books on sexuality that gave me shifting, wavering views on the subject.  A Billion Wicked Thoughts provided statistics and case studies to attempt to understand sexuality while labeling genders and sexual preferences with exact scientific processes dwelling in subjects like biology or evolutionary psychology.  Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality offered a historical and theoretical perspective on sexuality that illuminated current misconceptions and misunderstandings while addressing struggles that people face when removed from America's binary system of sexuality.

All throughout this course I have seen and explored scientific and cultural processes to find them meshed, jumbled, and confusingly entangled together.  It has been hard for me to explain or express what this means but I think that the last article by Latour helped clarify things.  The main theme that I took from this last article Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?  From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern is that the problem with critique is that there it is used as a deconstructionist, minimalistic mode of thought taking away from knowledge.  Building knowledge, finding truths, gaining insight needs criticism that evaluates or judges something, but it should be done through experience, collaboration, and an open-mind.  The example in this article about the sunrise helped illustrate this theme for me.  Looking at the sunrise, understanding the sunrise, recognizing the sunrise is in itself an eclectic piece of truth.  The sunrise is a luminous hue of colors that filters through the sky every morning, the sunrise is an assortment of wavelengths that are a specific frequency to be visible to the naked eye, the sunrise is solar radiation that penetrates the atmosphere and warms the earth.  Knowledge is a body of information that accumulates and builds data, expands ideas, and illustrates experiences.


This class has helped me understand how to perceive a seeing-device or particular perspective and see the flaws, the strengths, and how it will interact with other perspectives.  Though this idea of cumulative and building knowledge can seem overwhelming and have no final destination, that is okay.  As an educated student it is my responsibility to attempt to understand issues, topics or subjects and approach them with cation.  I will try to build knowledge, have new experiences, and be open-minded to hopefully gain my own truths and understandings that give me an identity, yet at the same time, I will know that I do not have the ultimate or right answers.