Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Structure, Status, And Span: Gender Differences In Co-Authorship Networks Across 16 Region-Subject Pairs (2009–2013), Kjersten Bunker Whittington, Molly M. King, Isabella Cingolani

Sociology

Global and team science approaches are on the rise, as is attention to the network underpinnings of gender disparities in scientific collaboration. Many network studies of men’s and women’s collaboration rely on bounded case studies of single disciplines and/or single countries and limited measures related to the collaborative process. We deploy network analysis on the scholarly database Scopus to gain insight into gender inequity across regions and subject areas and to better understand contextual underpinnings of stagnancy. Using a dataset of over 1.2 million authors and 144 million collaborative relationships, we capture international and unbounded co-authorship networks that include intra- …

Name-Based Demographic Inference And The Unequal Distribution Of Misrecognition, Jeffrey W. Lockhart, Molly M. King, Christin Munsch

Sociology

Academics and companies increasingly draw on large datasets to understand the social world, and name-based demographic ascription tools are widespread for imputing information that is often missing from these large datasets. These approaches have drawn criticism on ethical, empirical and theoretical grounds. Using a survey of all authors listed on articles in sociology, economics and communication journals in Web of Science between 2015 and 2020, we compared self-identified demographics with name-based imputations of gender and race/ethnicity for 19,924 scholars across four gender ascription tools and four race/ethnicity ascription tools. We found substantial inequalities in how these tools misgender and misrecognize …

The Pandemic Penalty: The Gendered Effects Of Covid-19 On Scientific Productivity, Molly M. King, Megan E. Frederickson

Sociology

Academia serves as a valuable case for studying the effects of social forces on workplace productivity, using a concrete measure of output: scholarly papers. Many academics, especially women, have experienced unprecedented challenges to scholarly productivity during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. The authors analyze the gender composition of more than 450,000 authorships in the arXiv and bioRxiv scholarly preprint repositories from before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. This analysis reveals that the underrepresentation of women scientists in the last authorship position necessary for retention and promotion in the sciences is growing more inequitable. The authors find differences between the …

“Who Wants To Live Forever?” Andrew Holleran, Garth Greenwell, And The Gayest Decade That Never Ended, John C. Hawley

English

James Baldwin’s remarkable second novel, Giovanni’s Room (1956) influenced all subsequent gay writing—not only in its themes, but also in its tone. Paying frequent homage to that book, Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance and other fiction of the Eighties taught gay men how to be gay, and the melancholic tone these novels created persisted for decades to come, exemplified most recently in Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs to You (2016). An unexpressed loss imbues the work of David Leavitt, Edmund White, Larry Kramer, Michael Cunningham, and Alan Hollinghurst, but the argument here is that more recent protagonists are, if anything, …

Gender And Sexuality, Amy E. Randall

History

This chapter explores gender and sexuality during Stalin's rule. It considers femininities and masculinities, gender identities and relations, sexual norms and practices, and sexual politics and identities. The Stalinist gender and sexual order was not unchanging, uniform, consistent, or entirely new; it was inextricably linked to Soviet discourses and policies about national minorities, religion, class, and broader historical events as well as gender and sexual norms and identities in Imperial Russia and early Soviet rule, It consisted of emancipatory and "radical" as well as repressive and conservative policies. At its core, the Stalinist gender and sexual order was designed to …

Belle La Follette’S Fight For Women’S Suffrage: Losing The Battle For Wisconsin, Winning The War For The Nation, Nancy C. Unger

History

A century ago, on May 21, 1919, the US House of Representatives voted difinitively (304 to 89) in support of women’s suffrage. Two weeks later, Wisconsinite Belle La Follette sat in the visitors’ gallery of the US Senate chamber. She “shed a few tears” when it was announced that, by a vote of 56 to 25, the US Senate also approved the Nineteenth Amendment, sending it on to the states for ratification.¹ For Belle La Follette, this thrilling victory was the culmination of a decades-long fight. Six days later, her happiness turned to elation when Wisconsin became the first …

Legacies Of Belle La Follette’S Big Tent Campaigns For Women’S Suffrage, Nancy Unger

History

In countless speeches and articles in La Follette’s Magazine, Belle Case La Follette urged that women needed the vote to secure “standards of cleanliness and healthfulness in the municipal home,” and because “home, society, and government are best when men and women keep together intellectually and spiritually.” This range of often mutually exclusive arguments created an inclusive big tent. However, arguing that women were qualified to vote by their roles as wives and mothers while maintaining that gender was superfluous to suffrage also contributed to an uneasy combination that would continue the conflict over women’s true nature and hinder their …

Barren Lands And Barren Bodies In Navajo Nation: Indian Women Warn About Uranium, Genetics, And Sterilization, Marie Bolton, Nancy C. Unger

History

Founded by Native American women in 1974, "Women of All Red Nations (WARN) insisted that the ongoing Indian public health crisis could not be properly understood exclusively within the context of the exploitation and pollution of the physical environment. It required as well an understanding of the larger context of Indian health issues evolving out of past and present cultural and political changes. This article focuses on selected health, threats affecting the Dine, or "the People," as Navajo Indians call themselves, living in Dine Bikeyah (Navajo Nation) during the mid to late 20^th century. Navajo history is marked by …

Promoting Feminist And Queer Scholarship At Santa Clara University, Helene Lafrance, Ray Scroggin

Staff publications, research, and presentations

The Women’s and Gender Studies (WGST) department at Santa Clara University consists of six full-time faculty and more than 30 “affiliate” faculty who teach WGST courses occasionally while being officially attached to another department. Most of these affiliate faculty conduct and publish research related to feminist and gender studies.

In 2016, the Chair of the WGST Department approached the library to see if we could create a web site or portal to feature feminist and queer works produced by faculty across the Santa Clara campus. After determining that it was technically feasible, the library suggested the use of the institutional …

Adda F. Howie: "America’S Outstanding Woman Farmer", Nancy Unger

History

In 1894, forty-two-year-old Milwaukee socialite Adda F. Howie seemed a very unlikely candidate to become one of the most famous women in America. And yet by 1925, Howie, the first woman to serve on the Wisconsin State Board of Agriculture, had long been “recognized universally as the most successful woman farmer in America.”¹ Howie’s rise to fame came at a time when the widely accepted ideas about gender were divided into the “man’s world” of business, power, and money, and the “woman’s world” devoted to family and home. Yet Howie, rather than being vilified for succeeding in the male …

Gender And The Emergence Of The Soviet 'Citizen-Consumer' In Comparative Perspective, Amy E. Randall

History

In the 1930s, the Stalinist regime promoted a campaign to establish “Soviet trade,” a non-capitalist system of “socialist” retailing. Policymakers also legitimized ordinary people’s desires for greater material comfort and increased consumption, and encouraged them to act as new Soviet consumers by engaging in new consumer behavior and official efforts to improve retail trade. This essay examines how the government’s mobilization of consumers helped to produce a new identity, the Soviet “citizen-consumer,” whose consumer practices facilitated the integration of consumers into the Soviet polity and the building of socialism. It also considers how this mobilization of Soviet consumers was similar …

That The Worst Shooting In Us History Took Place In A Gay Bar Is Unsurprising, Nancy Unger

History

The selection of Pulse, a gay Orlando nightclub, as the site for a murderous homophobic rampage makes the killer’s crime a special outrage in view of the role that nightclubs have played in this nation’s LGBTQ history. Like many popular LGTBQ clubs, Pulse serves not only as a welcoming place to party, but also as a community partner, hosting a variety of social and educational events including, for example, Breast Cancer Awareness and HIV/AIDS prevention. According to its website, Pulse Orlando serves as “a driving force within the GLBT community” and strives to “to make strides towards equality awareness, and …

The Unexpected Belle La Follette, Nancy Unger

History

Although the New York Times eulogized Belle Case La Follette in 1931 as perhaps "the most influential of all American women who have had to do with public affairs in this country," she faded quickly from popular memory.1 And when she is recalled, it's usually in relation to her husband and sons. This minimization of her own accomplishments began with progressive reform giant Robert M. La Follette famously calling her "my wisest and best counselor." He openly deferred to his wife's judgment throughout his storied professional life: as a district attorney, three-term congressman (1885-1891), lawyer (1891—1900), three-term governor of Wisconsin …

Pushing And Pulling Emerging Adults Through College: College Generational Status And The Influence Of Parents And Others In The First Year, Laura Nichols, Ángel Islas

Sociology

Interview, survey, and academic transcript data with a diverse sample of first-generation college (FGC) and continuing generation college (CGC) premedical intended emerging adults are analyzed to study academic outcomes and any differences in the availability and use of social capital the first year of college. CGC students know many people with college degrees including those in careers they aspire to obtain, while FGC students do not. All students identify parents as very important forms of social capital who contribute to their success in college, but the types of support differs by educational background. Students whose parents have at least a …

Turning On The Lights: Transcending Energy Poverty Through The Power Of Women Entrepreneurs, Leslie C. Gray, Alaina Boyle, Victoria Yu

Miller Center Fellowship

Solar lanterns offer affordable, high-quality lighting in developing countries. A number of organizations, including social enterprises, make solar lanterns available to rural households as an alternative to candles or kerosene lamps. One of the most successful of these organizations is Solar Sister.

Solar Sister, a social enterprise operating in Tanzania, Uganda, and Nigeria, is dedicated to eradicating energy poverty through the economic empowerment of women. In addition to economically empowering its women entrepreneurs, the business model of Solar Sister also cultivates sales networks built on trust in last-mile distribution methods.

While Solar Sister has previously conducted research regarding its many …

The Black Frontier, Aparajita Nanda

English

As a nationalistic concept, frontier refers to America's westward expansion, which was propelled in the nineteenth century by Manifest Destiny. Culturally, frontier promises even more: the creation of communities, the development of markets and states, the merging of peoples and cultures, and the promise of survival and persistence based on values of equality and democracy. Thousands of people left their homes in the East to pursue these ideals, including large communities of African Americans. However, African Americans, like many other cultural groups who moved westward, encountered struggles when they reached the new frontier. In some cases, they faced the same …

Gay And Lesbian Culture And Politics, John C. Hawley

English

As laws change and we move several generations away from the times of greatest struggle, the atmosphere that created the contemporary scene for gay and lesbian citizens, their culture and politics, becomes increasingly remote and potentially forgotten. As recent historians have recalled, though, “This was a population too shy and fearful to even raise its hand, a group of people who had to start at zero in order to create their place in the nation’s culture,” –an “invisible people” (Clendinen, 11). The movement for gay and lesbian rights in the United States, considered by many to have originated with the …

Claiming Lesbian History: The Romance Between Fact And Fiction, Linda Garber

Women's and Gender Studies

The contested field of lesbian history exists along a continuum, with undisputed evidence on one end and informed speculation on the other. Lesbian historical fiction extends the spectrum, envisioning the lives of lesbian pirates, war heroes, pioneers, bandits, and stock romantic characters, as well as the handful of protagonists examined here whose quests specifically highlight the difficulty and importance of researching the lesbian past. The genre blossomed in the 1980s, just as the Foucauldian insistence that homosexual identity did not exist before the late nineteenth century gained sway in the academy. The proliferation of lesbian historical fictions signals the growing …

'Each Wise Nymph That Angles For A Heart': The Politics Of Courtship In The Boston 'Fishing Lady' Pictures, Andrea Pappas

Art and Art History

This essay examines the Boston fishing lady embroideries in light of eighteenth-century courtship practice, depictions of women anglers in prints and on decorative porcelain, and recreational fishing in colonial culture. In representing the fishing lady as a successful independent angler, women needleworkers addressed, and even covertly resisted, male control of courtship, a crucial life transaction. The regular placement of the image of the fishing lady in the narratives created by the complex embroideries asserts the woman’s pivotal, if brief, authority in the courtship process.

Drawing Testimony, Coming To Writing: Ebe Cagli Seidenberg’S Le Sabbie Del Silenzio And Il Tempo Dei Dioscuri, Eveljn Ferraro

Modern Languages & Literature

This essay considers the question of how “coming to writing” describes the creative process, how mourning becomes language, and how the emptiness of silence turns into word, in relation to the life and literary work of Italian Jewish writer Ebe Cagli Seidenberg. In other words, how did Cagli’s exile to the U.S. facilitate her voice? And how did language become, for her, nothing less than a form of “country”? In examining her journey to testimonial writing, I contend that visual imagery—a combination of visual artifacts and visual memories—plays a major role in getting past the wall of silence, overcoming the …

Reanimating Ghost Editions, Reorienting The Early American Novel, Karen A. Weyler, Michelle Burnham

English

What are the origins of the American novel? Does it begin with the imagination, when Europeans first began dreaming of life in the New World?1 Does it begin with Daniel Defoe’s adventurers, Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders, and their literary progeny? Or does the novel need a material presence in the soil of the New World? Does it begin in 1789, with William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy?—which Isaiah Thomas, with shrewd prescience, marketed as the “first American novel.” Or does it begin even earlier, in 1742, with Benjamin Franklin’s first American edition of Samuel Richardson’s sentimental novel Pamela, …

Introduction: Gendering Genocide Studies, 1st Edition, Amy E. Randall

History

When it comes to understanding genocide, gender matters. This has not always been evident, and even today there are critics and skeptics. Indeed, when feminist scholars in Holocaust studies first began examining women’s experiences and gender questions, their scholarship was ignored or met with hostility by many academics and others, including some survivors. Opponents expressed various concerns, including the idea that gender research and analysis would “trivialize” or “politicize” the Holocaust, de-emphasize the centrality of anti-Semitism and racism to Nazi persecution,¹ and promote “comparative victimhood or creat[e] unequal victims.”² Studying the gendered dimensions of genocide, however, does not …

Women And Gender: Useful Categories Of Analysis In Environmental History, Nancy Unger

History

In 1990, Carolyn Merchant proposed, in a roundtable discussion published in The Journal of American History, that gender perspective be added to the conceptual frameworks in environmental history. 1 Her proposal was expanded by Melissa Leach and Cathy Green in the British journal Environment and History in 1997. 2 The ongoing need for broader and more thoughtful and analytic investigations into the powerful relationship between gender and the environment throughout history was confirmed in 2001 by Richard White and Vera Norwood in "Environmental History, Retrospect and Prospect," a forum in the Pacific Historical Review. Both Norwood, in her provocative contribution …

In Search Of A Jewish Audience: New York’S Guild Art Gallery, 1935-1937, Andrea Pappas

Art and Art History

How did Jewishness affect the relationships among artists, galleries, artists’ groups and collectors?” Scholars have scrutinized the Jewish presence in American art in the twentieth century over the last fifteen years or so in essays, monographs and surveys. Studies of Jewish artists and their works continue to proliferate, and scholars have even examined the connections between art history as a discipline and Jewishness, contributing to both the history and the sociology of art history and to the range of Jewish studies. The re-evaluation of the work of artists such as Raphael Soyer, Theresa Bernstein, Jack Levine, Mark Rothko, Audrey Flack …

Ancres Invisibles, Jimia Boutouba

Modern Languages & Literature

Cet article se propose d’examiner la manière dont Invisibles (2011) de Nasser Djemaï confère une présence scénique aux vieux immigrés maghrébins qui ont toujours vécu à l’ombre des regards et des consciences. Présence spectrale, ils hantent de leur vieillesse les foyers, errent dans les cafés, se posent sur les bancs publics sans que personne ne les voie. En particulier, cet article examine la manière dont cette pièce inscrit en plein le risque de la perte de l’histoire, et la fantomisation de l’humain ; comment elle fait surgir un rapport nouveau à l’espace, à l’histoire et au présent, en mettant en …

The Moudawana Syndrome: Gender Trouble In Contemporary Morocco, Jimia Boutouba

Modern Languages & Literature

The present article examines the way Zakia Tahiri’s film Number One (2009) foregrounds a renewed understanding of gender and gender relations in contemporary Morocco, especially in the wake of the New Family Code Reform (Moudawana), which has revolutionized women’s status by increasing their power in the private as well as the public spheres. It centers not on the oft-studied subject of women and the regulation of femininity in Arab countries, but on the complex relationship between masculinity and performance, highlighting the sociocultural norms that have shaped and affected the performance of masculinity in Arabo-Muslim contexts. In particular, this study examines …

Disability, Laura L. Ellingson, Margaret M. Quinlan

Women's and Gender Studies

People with disabilities (PWD) are the fastest growing minority social group in the world. Moreover, this group is one in which many, if not all individuals, will eventually join due to accidents, injuries, illnesses, wear and tear on aging bodies, and genetic factors. Disabilities can be physical, cognitive, social, and/or emotional. The disability community overlaps with people of all races, ethnicities, age groups, genders, sexual orientations/ expressions, and socioeconomic statuses, although PWD are overrepresented among people who are economically disadvantaged and under-served in health care, environmental safety, nutrition, and other basic needs. While the proportion of people with disabilities increases …

Distancing The Past: New Forms Of Discomfort With Aids In The U.S, John C. Hawley

English

In his Introduction to this collection, Gustavo Subero makes reference to the AIDS Quilt, a reference made especially significant since the year 2012 marked its 25th anniversary. The whole quilt had been last displayed in 1996; in the summer of 2012, 8.000 panels were rotated each day in the National Mall in Washington, DC. The quilt, composed of thousands of 3’ x 6’ panels (intentionally the size of a human grave), currently consists of over 48.000 panels honoring more than 94.000 individuals who have died of AIDS. In the early days of the quilt, in the 1980s and 1990s, the …

Breaking The Ties: French Romantic Socialism And The Critique Of Liberal Slave Emancipation, Naomi J. Andrews

History

In 1846, the romantic socialist Désiré Laverdant observed that although Great Britain had rightly broken the ties binding masters and slaves, “in delivering the slave from the yoke, it has thrown him, poor brute, into isolation and abandonment. Liberal Europe thinks it has finished its work because it has divided everyone.” Freeing the slaves, he thus suggested, was only the beginning of emancipation. Laverdant’s comment reflects a broader political conversation about the individual and society that was ongoing in France during the 1830s and 1840s in which the issues of colonial slavery, metropolitan wage labor, and imperial expansion in Algeria …

The Role Of Gender In Scholarly Authorship, Jevin D. West, Jennifer Jacquet, Molly M. King, Shelley J. Correll, Carl T. Bergstrom

Sociology

Gender disparities appear to be decreasing in academia according to a number of metrics, such as grant funding, hiring, acceptance at scholarly journals, and productivity, and it might be tempting to think that gender inequity will soon be a problem of the past. However, a large-scale analysis based on over eight million papers across the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities reveals a number of understated and persistent ways in which gender inequities remain. For instance, even where raw publication counts seem to be equal between genders, close inspection reveals that, in certain fields, men predominate in the prestigious first …