Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

The Rise And Fall Of Gilmore Girls' Feminist Legacy, Mckenna Ahlgren

Honors Theses

This thesis explores the feminist legacy that the television series Gilmore Girls (2000-2007, 2016) built during its original airtime and how its later revival diminished that legacy. Gilmore Girls’ main characters are three generations of women within the Gilmore family, providing a unique opportunity to analyze their feminist identities and characterizations relative to different iterations of feminism. This paper examines how the youngest Gilmore, Rory, is influenced by her mother’s and grandmother’s embodiments of feminism. Their expressions of femininity and sexuality, their approaches to motherhood, and their behaviors in their romantic relationships throughout the series correlate with the predominate feminism …

What Is My Role In Changing The System? A New Model Of Responsibility For Structural Injustice, Robin Zheng

Women's and Gender Studies Program: Faculty Publications

What responsibility do individuals bear for structural injustice? Iris Marion Young has offered the most fully developed account to date, the Social Connections Model. She argues that we all bear responsibility because we each causally contribute to structural processes that produce injustice. My aim in this article is to motivate and defend an alternative account that improves on Young’s model by addressing five fundamental challenges faced by any such theory. The core idea of what I call the Role-Ideal Model is that we are each responsible for structural injustice through and in virtue of our social roles, i.e. our roles …

Ways Of Doing: Feminist Educational Development, Emily O. Gravett, Lindsay Bernhagen

To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development

In response to the recent special call in To Improve the Academy, we offer the following collaborative essay that describes how feminism is our characterizing perspective on educational development. The essay details various, interrelated facets of feminism that inform our work in the field: gender, intersectionality, power, privilege, standpoint theory, and collaboration. Not only do these facets characterize our own feminist approach to educational development—from consultations to organizational development to publications—but, we argue, they also align well with the values and approaches of the field as a whole.

Why Sociology Needs Science Fiction, Daniel Hirschman, Philip Schwadel, Rick Searle, Erica Deadman, Ijlal Naqvi

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Grokking Modernity by Philip Schwadel

Resistance and the Art of Words by Rick Searle

A Planet Without Gender by Erica Deadman

Beware of Geeks with Good Intentions by Ijlal Naqvi

In this issue, our contributors take up these concerns in four short essays. Philip Schwadel applies theories of communicative functions to look at sci-fi ’s potential to shape our social understandings. Ijlal Naqvi returns to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation to argue that dreams of perfect social prediction will remain elusive and perhaps undesirable. Erica Deadman showcases how well LeGuin’s Left Hand of Darkness illustrates ideas from the sociology of gender. And …