Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Serenade In C, Chloë M. Robinson

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

It was an abrupt event, and it deserves an abrupt introduction: I was seventeen years old when I survived a lightning strike. We were on a church camping trip with a large group that included my dad and younger sister. The first night at camp, over fifty teenagers played lawn games on a grassy field after dinner. It was drizzling on and off that day, and we were excited to take advantage of the momentarily clear skies. At about 7:45 p.m., I was under a tree with my dad, trying to set up a croquet set for everyone to use. …

Woven Into One, Elise Marie Hatch

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

A recent late-night walk to the library was joyfully interrupted by a young child. Her unique perspective framed by the diminished height and wholesome innocence of a seven-year-old, this child was eager to share what she, from her vantage point, saw, discovered, and valued. “Mom!” she yelled with brilliant curiosity, “Look at the lights!” Guided by her pointing hand, I too turned around. I saw my home city—where I wake and work and study every day—transformed, through the curiosity of a child, into a symbolic landscape of dappled lights and abstracted forms.

Christ As A Maternal Figure: Motherly Depictions Of The Son In The Met Cloisters, Cheynie Wray

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

The Hours of Jeanne d’Evreux, Queen of France is a miniature book of hours—an illuminated, or illustrated, prayer book—made for its namesake, a queen of France. Crafted by the hand of French artist Jean Pucelle between 1324 and 1328, it is now held in the Treasury of The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Cloisters Collection), one of the most renowned repositories of medieval art in the United States. The book pairs scenes of the Passion of Christ with scenes of the life of the Virgin. One such pairing shows the Betrayal of Christ and the Annunciation. On the Betrayal of Christ …

The Horror Of Female Autonomy: The Transformation Of Women In Vietnam War-Era Fiction And Film, Regan Roberts

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

During the Vietnam War era, cultural fears intersected with evolving gender roles, particularly as women gained greater autonomy and visibility in public and private spheres. Fears such as these are realized and explored in the horror genre. Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried explores this societal tension in its short story, “Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong,” through Mary Anne Bell, a young girl whose transformation from innocent girlfriend to the monstrous Other subverts traditional femininity. I will explore this short story and its significance by contextualizing it alongside other media from the horror genre of the Vietnam War era, …

Listening, Stepping, Screaming: Feminist Interpretations Of Yoko Ono’S Art, Cordelia Lavender Mcphie

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

Long before she spent her time promoting peace through music and her infamous bed-in honeymoon, Yoko Ono was breaking traditional conventions of art by creating and performing her pieces of instruction: art that requires a participating audience in order for it to be made. At the beginning of the 1960s, early in Ono’s art career and before her association with the Beatles, she was participating in new kinds of conceptual and communal art processes within (and without) the Fluxus art movement.1 She is not a solo artist in the traditional sense, because her artwork is unable to be fully realized …

Climbing Mother By Brian Kershisnik: Representing Mothers As Sacred Spaces, Elijah Clark

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

Brian Kershisnik’s collection The Difficult Part is a series of artworks that includes paintings from throughout the artist’s career. A repeated theme in this collection is motherhood. One particularly striking painting, Climbing Mother, is an oil on canvas piece painted in 2013 (wall text for Climbing Mother). Brian Kershisnik is a Latter-day Saint artist known for depicting mundane things as holy and for making holy things more approachable to modern audiences. For example, Kershisnik has many paintings of the Madonna and Christ child where they are shown as real people in everyday scenarios. The normalcy of his paintings …

Persuasions And Proposals: Female Agency In Pride And Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, And Persuasion, Hannah Swenson

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

In all six of her completed novels, one of Jane Austen’s primary interests is the theme of persuasion—particularly as it relates to the lives and decisions of young women. Her final book Persuasion, published six months after her death, can therefore be read as a final culmination of the topic of accepting and exerting influence. As scholar Ann Molan has observed, Austen “penetrates the intrinsic doubleness of persuasion, its ability to destroy and fashion, its ineradicable presence in all human dealings, and the riskiness of deciding one’s lot by something uncertifiable” (108). Although the theme of persuasion and persuadability …

Patterned After Poppies, Elise Marie Hatch

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

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A Self-Portrait: Staring The Male Gaze Right In The Eye, Brynne Petty

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

The late nineteenth and early twentieth century was a time of constant change. Artists were constantly finding newer and more creative, often more bizarre, ways of expressing themselves through their art. Social norms were being broken down, with the subjects of many artworks becoming increasingly unconventional, bold, and, in many cases, provocative. Women swiftly became the subject of many paintings, often portrayed in the nude. Of course, a painting of a nude woman was not a new concept, but the way in which women were depicted was increasingly more sexual and erotic. Thus, the term male gaze—defined as “a …

God’S Reflection, Shannon Lindsay

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

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Red Awe, Ella Marie Paligo

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

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Insecurity, Ana Gabriela

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

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On And Off, Madison Sacriste

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

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Shake Hands: A Challenge And A Statement On The Woman’S Role In American Society, Brynne Petty

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

Nineteenth-century America was a time ripe with change. New inventions were created every day; many felt the call of Manifest Destiny and pushed for Westward Expansion; and the country endured a brutal civil war, all while enduring the growing pains of a young nation. Every decade delivered more opportunities for artists to create paintings that told of epic battles and the courage of men as they faced the wild frontier. Yet, somewhere in the midst of all this, the American ideal shifted. Many artists turned their efforts toward creating genre paintings that depicted the everyday lives of the middle and …

End Matter

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

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It Is Literally Impossible To Be A Monologue: The Misplaced Generalizations Of Barbie, Mabel Court

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

The summer of 2023 was a hot pink pressure cooker that transformed the Barbie brand from a dusty relic into an omnipresent cultural phenomenon. The Barbie movie’s savvy marketing team colored billboards bright fuschia, with the film’s mystery-shrouded plot fueling a thunderous roar of speculative chatter that crescendoed until its long-anticipated release. A star-studded cast and auteur director Greta Gerwig were the cherries on top, rocketing the film to critical and economic success. The film was heralded as thematically ambitious, one of the best comedies in recent memory, and a “feminist self-aware masterpiece” (Barbie Movie Reviews). Although Barbie marked a …

Jael The Kenite, Madison Sacriste

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

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The First Thirteen Years, Crystal Gonzalez Callison

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

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Full Issue

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

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Front Matter

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

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The Creation Coat, Jane Wilson Boyle

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

MINERVA TEICHERT AWARD 2025

As a woman, I often wonder what my role will be in the next life, and I am struck by how much we still do not know about the earth’s creation. This coat grew out of my struggle with the idea of cocreation—how women and men work together in ways both known and unknown.

Weight Of The World, Makenna Durfee

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

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The Miscarriage, Madi Mykal

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

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Midnight Stroll, Emma Wilson

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

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Abused And Confused, Marilyn Quach

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

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Belly Blessins’, Drew Rigby

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

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To Have A Sister, Crystal Gonzalez Callison

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

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The Detrimental Impact Of Benevolent Sexism On Women, Lucy Jessee

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

Sexism is often defined as negative attitudes toward or discrimination against a person because of their sex or gender identity. This issue is well known and frequently discussed in schools, politics, social situations, and popular culture; however, not many people understand that sexism can come in many forms. Hostile sexism, the more commonly imagined type of sexism, consists of blatantly derogatory, exclusive, or antagonistic attitudes or actions toward women. This can take many forms, such as negative stereotypes regarding women’s competence, degradation of a woman’s worth or value, violence against women, or limitation on a woman’s opportunities because of her …

A Contentious Bond: The Mother-Daughter Relationship, Amelia Hapgood

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

It is a tale as old as time: a mother and daughter, struggling to understand and outdo the other, not realizing the uniformity between them. They are duplicates, coded with the same DNA. The daughter strives to become more than her mother, and her mother watches and witnesses everything that she could have become. It is a battle for power, to be seen and verifiable. They bicker, yell, and cry, often unable to find common ground. Greta Gerwig coined this concept perfectly in her film Lady Bird, where the featured mother and daughter cannot do anything but scream at …

Shifting Mindsets: The Second Wave Of Feminism In Brian Friel’S The Freedom Of The City, Jennifer Tenner

AWE (A Woman’s Experience)

In Brian Friel’s The Freedom of the City, Elizabeth Doherty (Lily) is a mother of eleven children who stumbles into the Guildhall, along with two young men, after a peaceful civil rights protest turns sour. During the hours spent in the Guildhall, Lily is subject to demeaning and oppressive comments. From the reporter Liam O’Kelly to Michael and Skinner, each of them makes quick assumptions about Lily without letting her speak, leading her to believe that she never had “an experience, an event, even a small unimportant happening been isolated, and assessed, and articulated”. However, over the course of …