Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

"Better Too Much Than Not Enough": Women Of Color On The Federal Bench, Laura Moyer, Rorie Spill Solberg, Allison Harris

Faculty Scholarship

It is well established that the federal judiciary has been an overwhelmingly White and male institution since its creation and continues to be so today. Even as presidents of both parties have looked to diversify their judicial nominees, this has tended to result in the appointment of White women and men of color rather than women of color. Using data on the confirmed federal district and circuit court judges from presidents Clinton through Trump, we assess how the backgrounds of women of color nominated to the federal judiciary compare with those of other appointees. The results indicate that, compared to …

Distribution Struggle: Assembling A Media History Of J. Brian’S Enterprises With Court Proceedings And Public Records, Finley Freibert

Faculty Scholarship

This article introduces the concept of “distribution struggle”—the panoply of cultural and industrial conflicts that must be traced and accounted for in distribution histories—to sequence a primary-sourced media history of J. Brian’s gay media enterprises. In tracing this history, primary sources are surprisingly accessible, and provide new insights into J. Brian’s industrial operations. By triangulating archival records with secondary accounts, this article provides a more nuanced cultural and industrial portrait of J. Brian. It argues that media industry historiography must frame historical narratives by accounting for the cultural and industrial struggles that culminated in the available archival sources, in this …

The Kentucky Women Artists Timeline, Courtney Baron, Olivia Eckert

Faculty Scholarship

This article highlights a partnership between the Margaret M. Bridwell Art Library at the University of Louisville and the Kentucky Foundation for Women to document the accomplishments of Kentucky women artists through a digital timeline. The timeline was made possible through the Director of the Art Library's collaboration with a student intern on the research process and timeline design.

The Covid Ceiling: Super-Moms Are Struggling, Verónica Gonzales-Zamora

Faculty Scholarship

COVID Ceiling is the unique combination of identity, discipline, and academic work requirements with care crisis and public health crisis that is contributing to the current and soon larger wave of mental health crises.

Distribution, Bars, And Arcade Stars: Joe Anthony’S Entrepreneurial Expansion In Houston’S Gay Media Industries, Finley Freibert

Faculty Scholarship

This article develops the concept of "gay useful media" to explore a case study of gay entrepreneurship in Houston, Texas, of the 1970s. A father and son developed a gay media empire in the city, which spanned bars, bookstores, distribution, and vending. One of the pair's key establishments was Houston's legendary gay bar Mary's at 1022 Westheimer (also known as Mary's Lounge, Mary's, Naturally, and Mary's…Naturally).

Assessing President Obama’S Appointment Of Women To The Federal Appellate Courts, Laura Moyer

Faculty Scholarship

A major legacy of the Obama presidency was the mark he left on the federal courts with respect to increasing judicial diversity. In particular, President Obama’s appointments of women to the federal judiciary exceeded all previous presidents in terms of both absolute numbers and as a share of all judges; he also appointed a record-setting number of women of color to the lower federal courts. In this Article, I take an intersectional approach to exploring variation in the professional backgrounds, qualifications, and Senate confirmation experiences of Obama’s female appeals court appointees, comparing them with George W. Bush and Bill Clinton …

Brian Reynolds, Public Visibility, And Gay Stardom, Finley Freibert

Faculty Scholarship

Once gracing the covers of numerous gay newspapers and magazines, Brian Reynolds was a key figure of Los Angeles’ emergent gay adult film industry of the late 1960s. He had all but disappeared from gay adult film historiography until he re-emerged as a cover model for a scholarly journal in 2012, to illustrate pioneering scholarship that initiated contemporary Pat Rocco studies. This article puts the story of Brian Reynolds in dialogue with critical star studies in order to offer a recovery history of Reynolds. Reynolds’ rise to celebrity and sudden relegation to obscurity underscores the historical instability of gay pornographic …

Development And Implementation Of An Lgbt Initiative At A Health Sciences Library: The First Eighteen Months, Jessica Petrey

Faculty Scholarship

Background: The University of Louisville School of Medicine is the pilot site for the eQuality project, an initiative to integrate training for providing care to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) patients into the standard medical school curriculum. Inspired by and in support of this School of Medicine initiative, Kornhauser Health Sciences Library staff have developing our own initiative. Because of past and current lack of competent provider training and the resulting need for patients to be knowledgeable self-advocates, however, our initiative was broadened to include the goal of providing LGBT individuals in our communities—both on campus and in the …

Feminism And Economic Inequality, Katharine T. Bartlett

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Addressing Microaggressions: Transgressing The Line Between Professional And Social Activism, Karla Scott, Victoria Defrancisco, Maureen Ebben

Faculty Scholarship

The focus of this workshop is the often overlooked day-to-day wearing down of people in oppressed groups as recipients of microaggressions. While most who are sympathetic to this problem know what a microaggression is, faculty, staff and students tend to fear addressing such aggressions. They simply may not know how to do so effectively. In this hands-on workshop participants will grapple with specific scenarios and be invited to try out different communicative responses and other tools to work toward creating a more inclusive climate for all. The workshop comes from an intersectional feminist perspective, shinning a light on oppressive behaviors …

Useful In/Stability: The Dialectical Production Of The Social And Spatial Lesbian Herstory Archives [Pre-Print], Jen Jack Gieseking

Faculty Scholarship

Queer theory’s embrace of instability paints stabilizing practices as normalizing and unjust. Rather than upholding a stance of opposition by championing instability alone, what can be gleaned for queer theory by examining the tension of the in/stability dialectic? In this paper I reflect upon my own embodied experience as researcher within the social and spatial dimensions of the Lesbian Herstory Archives. Informed by critical geographical studies and queer theories, I suggest that the usefulness of in/stability—all at once together and in conflict—is the work toward justice that results when Archives sits in the juxtaposition. The resultant practice of useful in/stability …

Coercing Assimilation: The Case Of Muslim Women Of Color, Sahar F. Aziz

Faculty Scholarship

Today, I have been asked to address the domestic context of civil rights issues facing Muslim women in the United States. Admittedly, examining the experiences of Muslim American women is a risky endeavor because they are such a diverse group of women ethnically, racially, socio-economically, and religiously in terms of their levels of religiosity. Hence, I acknowledge the risk of essentializing, despite my best efforts to recognize the individual agency of each Muslim woman.

This lecture is based on a larger project that examines the myriad ways Muslim women are adversely affected by their intersectional identities, and how it impacts …

Urban Margins On The Move: Rethinking Lgbtq Inclusion By Queering The Place Of The Gayborhood [Pre-Print], Jen Jack Gieseking

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Reading And Critiquing : An Analysis Of Talk About Strong Books For Girls., Renita Schmidt, Amanda Thein, Kathryn F. Whitmore

Faculty Scholarship

In exploring what makes strong books for girls, these authors begin by looking at their critical conversations with each other.

Underneath Her Pantsuit: A Reflection On Hanna Rosin's The End Of Men, Aziza Ahmed

Faculty Scholarship

In her book, The End of Men, ¹ Hanna Rosin argues that women have “surpassed” men. This new reality necessitates a reevaluation of marriage, family, sex, and gender roles.² To further her claim, Rosin dedicates a chapter of her book to the topic of violence committed by women. She argues that women are becoming more violent³ :

The new [trope] taps into a fear that as they gain more power, women will use violence and their new specialized skills to get what they want. Singular and exotic though these cases may be, they raise the broader unsettling possibility …

Dog Woman And The Complexities Of The Maternal Instinct In Jeanette Winterson's Sexing The Cherry, Heather Brown Hudson

Faculty Scholarship

In Sexing the Cherry, Jeanette Winterson’s Dog Woman is a gigantesque weapon yielding force to be reckoned with. As the title teases with the notion of gendering within language, both her physical appearance and actions beg for a reevaluation of what has been defined as both maternal and instinctual. She is at once a stable and loving, yet in order to protect her son from harm, she revolts against the powers that be and oscillates between time and place in both a self-made utopia as well as a force-fed dystopia. To her son, she is shelter, to her enemies, menacing …

Why Marriage?, Suzanne B. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

In a well-known New Yorker cartoon, a man and a woman sit together on a couch, clearly in the midst of a conversation about marriage for gay and lesbian couples. “Haven't they suffered enough?” one of them asks. Although the cartoon characters jest, the question of why gay people are fighting so hard for the right to marry is a serious one. After all, marriage rates have been dropping steadily in the United States and in much of the world, and divorce rates remain high. Why, then, are lesbians and gay men fighting so hard to join an institution that …

Intuition And Feminist Constitutionalism, Suzanne B. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

In any constitutional system, we must ask, as a foundational inquiry, when and why a government may distinguish between groups of constituents for purposes of allocating benefits or imposing penalties. For feminists and others with a stake in challenging inequalities, the rationales that a society deems acceptable for justifying these classifications are centrally important. Heightened scrutiny jurisprudence for sex-based and other distinctions may help capture some of the rationales that rest on stereotypes and outmoded biases. However, at the end of the day, whatever level of scrutiny is applied, the critical question at any level of review is whether, according …

When Men Are Harmed: Feminism, Queer Theory, And Torture At Abu Ghraib, Aziza Ahmed

Faculty Scholarship

In this Article I explore the assertions of "anti-imperialist" feminist scholars who critique "imperial feminism" for its support of the war on terror (WOT). I bring into this analysis the proposition by queer theorists that feminist reliance on male/ female subordination has the potential to not only obscure harm in times of war but also to perpetuate it. As a case study, I focus on the Abu Ghraib prison photos that depict, in part, female soldiers torturing male Iraqi prisoners. In conducting this analysis, I reveal the analytical limitations of dominance and cultural feminists, particularly with regard to male harm …

Feminism, Power, And Sex Work In The Context Of Hiv/Aids: Consequences For Women's Health, Aziza Ahmed

Faculty Scholarship

This paper examines the involvement of feminists in approaches to sex work in the context of HIV/AIDS. The paper focuses on two moments where feminist disagreement produced results in favor of an "anti-trafficking" approach to addressing the vulnerability of sex workers in the context of HIV. The first is the UNAIDS Guidance Note on Sex Work and the second is the "anti-prostitution pledge" found in the Presidents Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief. This article also examines the anti-sex work position articulated by abolitionist feminists and demonstrates the unintended consequences of the abolitionist position on women's health. By examining the actual …

My Teaching Philosophy, Marilyn R. Pukkila

Faculty Scholarship

This is my philosophy of teaching and learning, as developed during the ACRL Immersion Intentional Teacher Track in Nashville, TN in December of 2009

Protecting Hiv Positive Women’S Human’S Rights: Recommendations For The Obama Administration, Aziza Ahmed, Catherine Hanssens, Brook Kelly

Faculty Scholarship

To bring the United States in line with prevailing human rights standards, its National HIV/AIDS Strategy will need to explicitly commit to a human rights framework when developing programmes and policies that serve the unaddressed needs of women. This paper focuses on two aspects of the institutionalized mistreatment of people with HIV: 1) the criminalization of their consensual sexual conduct; and 2) the elimination of informed and documented consensual participation in their diagnosis through reliance on mandatory and opt-out testing policies. More than half of US states have HIV-specific laws criminalizing the consensual sexual activity of people with HIV, regardless …

Take A Deep Breath: On Not Losing The Turtle In The Technology, Marilyn R. Pukkila

Faculty Scholarship

Understanding media messages and selecting worthwhile sources of information require the ability to analyze and deconstruct messages.

Review : Female Identity In Contemporary Zimbabwean Fiction By Katrin Berndt., Ann Elizabeth Willey

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Other Side Of The Podium: Student Information Needs From Inside The Classroom, Marilyn R. Pukkila

Faculty Scholarship

A few things the author learned about students and research when she audited classes on her campus as part of her sabbatical.

Ritual And Roles For Women In Werewere Liking's L'Amour-Cent-Vies., Ann Elizabeth Willey

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Is There A Woman's Perspective? : An Exploration Of Gender Differences Along Republican And Conservative Lines., Jason Gainous

Faculty Scholarship

Is there a distinct “woman’s perspective?” This paper argues that the answer is an emphatic yes. American National Election Study survey data are used to explore Republican and conservative women’s attitudes concerning social spending issues and religiosity. Most of the previous gender gap research focuses on gender differences in attitudes by examining gender shifts in political party identification and voting, but do not adequately address opinion differences along gender lines between groups that think of themselves as similar. This paper asserts that if men and women who classify themselves as both conservative and Republican exhibit distinct differences, evidence of a …

Feminist Spiritualities: A Brief Overview, Marilyn R. Pukkila

Faculty Scholarship

A bibliographic essay on the early beginnings of feminist spirituality literature, from the 1960s to 1998.

The Literature Of Contemporary Witchcraft: Formalists, Femininsts, And Free Spirits, Marilyn R. Pukkila

Faculty Scholarship

A bibliographic essay on the writings of contemporary Witchcraft, from the late 1890s to 1998.

Madness And The Middle Passage : Warner-Vierya's Juletane As A Paradigm For Writing Caribbean Women's Identities., Ann Elizabeth Willey

Faculty Scholarship

This article links Glissant's theory of an inherent Caribbean madness due to the originary rupture and alienation from Africa with Foucault's theory of the ritual significance and essential liminality of the madman as exemplified in the medieval figure of the "Ship of Fools." In calling the madman the "passenger par excellence," Foucault implies a connection between sanity and linear narratives, such as that of a voyage. Myriam Warner-Vierya's novel, Juletane, suggests that European paradigms of narrative and voyage are inadequate to provide a sense of self for Caribbean women. The novel takes the form of a diary that chronicles …