Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Pornography, The Lgbtq+ Community, And The Queer Alternative, Rebekah Gredler

Student Research Submissions

Pornography is a complicated and controversial topic. Much has been said about how porn may or may not affect individuals, but very little has been done in the academic community on how pornography affects the LGBTQ+ community. In debates of censorship and regulation of porn, their voices are often ignored in public debate in favor of straight, feminist, or puritanical, religious discourses. This is problematic because pornography, particularly queer pornography, has done much for the evolution and self-affirmation of the LGBTQ+ community. It would be remiss if such positive effects of such a controversial exploit were to go unacknowledged. In …

For [Redacted], Lalini Shanela Ranaraja

Vázquez-Valarezo Poetry Award

This poem was written following the attempts of a close friend and myself to create awareness for the ongoing genocide in Tigray, Ethiopia in particular, and in reaction to activism in the age of social media in general. The digital age and related phenomena, such as hashtag activism and cancel culture, has enabled certain social justice movements to gain rapid traction while other equally worthy movements struggle to find a foothold. Simultaneously, standards of accountability and ethics continue to decline among global news media, with non-Western countries such as Ethiopia and my own home country of Sri Lanka bearing the …

The Effects Of Victorian Circulating Libraries On The Conventions Of Society, Kaitlyn M. Clary

Steeplechase: An ORCA Student Journal

As an era that is oftentimes categorized as one of the most prudish in British history, it is commonplace to see the Victorian Period as a time that imposed strict moral codes onto people of all classes, genders, and ages. Although the 18th century proved to be quite lenient with the manner in which social behavior was controlled, the 19th century proved to be an era of tension between the social order and individual desire, particularly for the middle and upper classes. With the aid of the Industrial Revolution, many governments found it essential to utilize the newly innovated printing …

Article 6.21, Tatiana Stolpovskaya

Theses and Dissertations

Article 6.21 is a short documentary film that aims to examine the state of censorship around queerness in Russia today and its effects on personal lives in the queer community.

Twenty years after Russia decriminalized homosexuality, on June 30th in 2013, President Vladimir Putin signed Article 6.21 "for the Purpose of Protecting Children from Information Advocating for a Denial of Traditional Family Values", also known as the "Gay Propaganda Law". Its broad and ambiguous wording allows the government significant leeway in deciding what kind of public queerness is punishable.

In 2020 Russia passed multiple constitutional amendments that affect many areas …

Kate O’Brien: Queer Hauntings In The Feminist Archive, Naoise Murphy

Journal of Feminist Scholarship

The archive of Irish writer Kate O’Brien is a notable example of how queerness haunts the mainstream of feminist literary spaces. The 2019 Museum of Literature Ireland (MoLI) exhibition Kate O’Brien: Arrow to the Heart, which set out to restore this censored novelist’s place in the archive of twentieth-century Irish writing, provides a case study of these dynamics. Queer and feminist perspectives on the archive, with a focus on affect, hauntings and Sara Ahmed’s “queer use,” illuminate the conflicting epistemologies regulating the O’Brien archive. Reading this exhibition as an Irish queer, affective experience collides with entrenched structures of power …