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“I Thought I Knew”: Teaching Graduate Students New Ways Of Understanding Meanings Of Diverse Social Identities, Maria S. Johnson Apr 2024

“I Thought I Knew”: Teaching Graduate Students New Ways Of Understanding Meanings Of Diverse Social Identities, Maria S. Johnson

Feminist Pedagogy

Instructors should not assume that graduate students understand meanings of terms for various social identities. In this article, I highlight a teaching activity I created titled, “What’s in a name?” that requires graduate students to research historical and contemporary uses of various racial, ethnic, gender, sexuality, and immigration terms. The assignment helps graduate students develop inclusive vocabulary and deepen their understanding of their positionality. It also supports braver classroom contexts for students and instructors. The assignment is best facilitated by instructors informed of diverse social identities, open to difficult conversations, and aware of the influence of their own social identities …


Turning Theory Into Practice: An Application Of Queer Family Theory For Graduate Students, Shawn N. Mendez, Samuel H. Allen Apr 2024

Turning Theory Into Practice: An Application Of Queer Family Theory For Graduate Students, Shawn N. Mendez, Samuel H. Allen

Feminist Pedagogy

This paper describes an original teaching activity for instructors of graduate students. Leveraging a critical, transformative, and intersectional pedagogical perspective applied to graduate education, this paper prepares instructors to effectively teach queer theory through an application of the Hegemonic Heteronormativity (HH) model, introduced by Allen and Mendez in 2018. The HH model identifies heteronormativity as a pervasive, three-pronged hegemony, each of which shifts and changes intersectionally and over time. The three-part assignment described in this paper asks students to read the Hegemonic Heteronormativity manuscript independently before reviewing the model with instructor facilitation. Then, students apply the model to real-life examples …


Breaking The Fourth Wall: Co-Constructing Evaluative Practices In The Graduate Methods Classroom, Kelly W. Guyotte, Carlson H. Coogler Apr 2024

Breaking The Fourth Wall: Co-Constructing Evaluative Practices In The Graduate Methods Classroom, Kelly W. Guyotte, Carlson H. Coogler

Feminist Pedagogy

This article centers on the authors' experiences co-teaching a semester-long qualitative ABR course by exploring a pedagogical practice implemented by Kelly—the co-construction of an evaluation rubric between teacher and student. We focus on this practice in particular because we believe it is uniquely situated for graduate student teaching. Typically, instructors develop course assessments on their own, establishing their own criteria for what should be included within an assignment. Students, then, refer to rubrics as they compose their assignments ensuring they ‘meet’ or ‘exceed’ the articulated criteria, with little opportunity to provide feedback on how their work is evaluated. Breaking the …


Feminist Pedagogy In The Stem Research Laboratory: An Intersectional Approach, Eduardo J. Caro-Diaz, Marie L. Matos-Hernández, Grayce E. Dyer, Siribeth Lopez-Santana, Laura S. Torres-Rivera, Lara G. Laureano-Llorens, Naiara Lebron-Acosta, Victoria M. Casimir-Montán Dec 2023

Feminist Pedagogy In The Stem Research Laboratory: An Intersectional Approach, Eduardo J. Caro-Diaz, Marie L. Matos-Hernández, Grayce E. Dyer, Siribeth Lopez-Santana, Laura S. Torres-Rivera, Lara G. Laureano-Llorens, Naiara Lebron-Acosta, Victoria M. Casimir-Montán

Feminist Pedagogy

The research laboratory is a crucial and indispensable classroom for STEM education. It is where we practice science as a craft and test the ideas that awaken our curiosity, allowing us to create knowledge. It is also a space where challenges await and struggles are imminent. Thus, supporting mentees through their traineeship in a research lab requires an intersectional approach and lens to provide equitable mentorship and guidance. The concept of intersectionality, initially devised by Black feminist professor Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, can be employed to generate practices and frameworks that democratize laboratory culture and provide trainees with a space in …


Review Of Making Livable Worlds: Afro-Puerto Rican Women Building Environmental Justice, Ava L. Corey-Gruenes Oct 2023

Review Of Making Livable Worlds: Afro-Puerto Rican Women Building Environmental Justice, Ava L. Corey-Gruenes

Feminist Pedagogy

Making Livable Worlds: Afro-Puerto Rican Women Building Environmental Justice, by Hilda Lloréns, highlights Black Puerto Rican women’s efforts to create equitable futures for their communities in the face of capitalism, racism, colonization, and ecological collapse. This review covers key concepts in Making Livable Worlds, including matriarchal dispossession, decolonizing ethnography, the myth of a homogenous Puerto Rico, and myths of inherent economic self-interest. Analyses of these concepts through an absence lens are suggested to enrich formal and informal feminist learning spaces.


Undoing The Absence Of Asexuality In The Classroom, Canton Winer Oct 2023

Undoing The Absence Of Asexuality In The Classroom, Canton Winer

Feminist Pedagogy

Asexuality exists at the margins of sexuality, often invisible to and misunderstood outside—and even within—the LGBTQIA+ community. As an identity that generally refers to those who experience low/no sexual attraction, asexuality challenges the broadly held notion that everyone experiences sexual attraction. Given the centrality of sexuality to a great deal of feminist scholarship, the absence of asexuality in many feminist classrooms is striking. Moreover, decades of feminist and queer research and pedagogy have demonstrated the vast, liberatory potential of centering the margins as we seek to understand the social world. With that lineage in mind, asexuality presents a rich, relatively …


Crying In The Classroom: Teaching (Through A Lack Of) Racial Empathy, Brittney Miles Oct 2023

Crying In The Classroom: Teaching (Through A Lack Of) Racial Empathy, Brittney Miles

Feminist Pedagogy

Intense emotions in classrooms are often interpreted unfavorably because of how bodies can disrupt a space that centers the mind. However, bodies can also reflect students’ and educators’ emotional relationships with course material. Through an elucidative reflection on the pedagogical power of racialized emotions, this critical commentary considers the transgressive possibilities of racial empathy as a Black feminist epistemology. As a Black woman graduate student instructor, tensions emerge in classrooms around what it may mean when Black students and I are crying, and white students are not. Intense emotions, or the lack thereof, complicate the politics of power, responsibility, emotional …


Teaching Queer Trauma: Applying Meditation As A Pedagogy Of Compassion, Kody Muncaster Oct 2023

Teaching Queer Trauma: Applying Meditation As A Pedagogy Of Compassion, Kody Muncaster

Feminist Pedagogy

Mindfulness practices can help greatly when teaching potentially triggering courses on queerness and trauma. Meditation allows students to learn how to manage triggers, enhancing their distress tolerance and their ability to fully engage with course material. It also has practical benefits for applied courses, as students will learn how mindfulness practices can help when working with queer and traumatized clients in, for example, a social services setting. This original teaching activity describes a course I taught called 'Queer Trauma and Resilience: Canadian Perspectives,' and outlines several meditations that were taught progressively throughout the course. Debriefing methods are included as well …


Teaching Through Absence: Using An Absence Lens As A Feminist Pedagogical Tool, Maya Wenzel Oct 2023

Teaching Through Absence: Using An Absence Lens As A Feminist Pedagogical Tool, Maya Wenzel

Feminist Pedagogy

A significant number of teaching resources and materials fail to account for important viewpoints and identities. These viewpoints and identities may then become misrepresented, excluded from the classroom, or ignored by the instructor. In response to this absence, pedagogues may utilize an absence lens to focus on what is not present in materials rather than what is. This piece introduces the special issue “Teaching Through Absence: How We Teach Absence and What Absence Teaches Us,” which seeks to address how we can better teach viewpoints, identities, and issues often absent from scholarship and course materials. It further aims to address …


Queering Feminism: Rejecting Imperialist Methods Of Silencing, Mikayla Burress Sep 2023

Queering Feminism: Rejecting Imperialist Methods Of Silencing, Mikayla Burress

sprinkle: an undergraduate journal of feminist and queer studies

No abstract provided.


Intersectionality In The Case Of Cece Mcdonald, Austin Greitz Sep 2023

Intersectionality In The Case Of Cece Mcdonald, Austin Greitz

sprinkle: an undergraduate journal of feminist and queer studies

No abstract provided.


Western Nations’ Use Of The Malala Fund, Austin Greitz Sep 2023

Western Nations’ Use Of The Malala Fund, Austin Greitz

sprinkle: an undergraduate journal of feminist and queer studies

No abstract provided.


Reproductive Rights As A Tactic Of Necropolitics Under Neoimperialism, Haley Kimberlin Sep 2023

Reproductive Rights As A Tactic Of Necropolitics Under Neoimperialism, Haley Kimberlin

sprinkle: an undergraduate journal of feminist and queer studies

No abstract provided.


Gender Discrimination In The Classroom: How Teaching Policies Can Help Close The Gap, Olivia Wycoff Sep 2023

Gender Discrimination In The Classroom: How Teaching Policies Can Help Close The Gap, Olivia Wycoff

sprinkle: an undergraduate journal of feminist and queer studies

No abstract provided.


A Woman Born Twice: Esther Greenwood’S Reconstruction Of The Female Identity In A Pervasively Patriarchal 1950’S America, Taylor Steinbeck Sep 2023

A Woman Born Twice: Esther Greenwood’S Reconstruction Of The Female Identity In A Pervasively Patriarchal 1950’S America, Taylor Steinbeck

sprinkle: an undergraduate journal of feminist and queer studies

No abstract provided.


Binary Ever After: Gender Representation Of Non-Human & Non-Animal Characters In Disney/Pixar’S Inside Out, Sarah Hethershaw Sep 2023

Binary Ever After: Gender Representation Of Non-Human & Non-Animal Characters In Disney/Pixar’S Inside Out, Sarah Hethershaw

sprinkle: an undergraduate journal of feminist and queer studies

No abstract provided.


The Corset: Constriction Or Liberation?, Amanda Leib Sep 2023

The Corset: Constriction Or Liberation?, Amanda Leib

sprinkle: an undergraduate journal of feminist and queer studies

No abstract provided.


Let My People Go: A Reconceptualization Of Black Exodus Discourses Using The Color Purple, Isaac Seessel Sep 2023

Let My People Go: A Reconceptualization Of Black Exodus Discourses Using The Color Purple, Isaac Seessel

sprinkle: an undergraduate journal of feminist and queer studies

No abstract provided.


Where Does Sexual Orientation Come From? Essentialism, Social Constructivism, And The Limits Of Existing Epigenetic Research, Matt Klepfer Sep 2023

Where Does Sexual Orientation Come From? Essentialism, Social Constructivism, And The Limits Of Existing Epigenetic Research, Matt Klepfer

sprinkle: an undergraduate journal of feminist and queer studies

No abstract provided.


Medicating Gender, Emma Hahn Sep 2023

Medicating Gender, Emma Hahn

sprinkle: an undergraduate journal of feminist and queer studies

No abstract provided.


The Silent Victims: Hiv In The Deaf Community, Hali Kohls Sep 2023

The Silent Victims: Hiv In The Deaf Community, Hali Kohls

sprinkle: an undergraduate journal of feminist and queer studies

No abstract provided.


The Complex Intersections Of Being A Latina Immigrant Survivor: How Multiple Systems Of Oppression Enable Intimate Partner Violence, Zulema Aleman Sep 2023

The Complex Intersections Of Being A Latina Immigrant Survivor: How Multiple Systems Of Oppression Enable Intimate Partner Violence, Zulema Aleman

sprinkle: an undergraduate journal of feminist and queer studies

The realm of intimate partner violence education, prevention and awareness is one that is currently growing. Even though there are improvements happening, there are communities being left out of both the movement and body of research. This paper aims at connecting the stories of undocumented Latinas who are survivors of intimate partner violence in the central coast of California with the current body of research on immigrant survivors. In doing so, it seeks to explore the areas where the body of research matches the stories of these women in the central coast of California and where there is a lack …


Revolutionizing Space: A Case Study On Accessibility And Comfort, Jennifer Macmartin Sep 2023

Revolutionizing Space: A Case Study On Accessibility And Comfort, Jennifer Macmartin

sprinkle: an undergraduate journal of feminist and queer studies

Influenced by a dynamic and revolutionary crip theory, this piece seeks to operationalize the combination of crip theory/disability studies and intersectional feminist praxis. Dis/ability is consistently disregarded as a central social identity, as the world has been literally built and maintained by (temporarily) able-bodied people with the intent to accommodate able-bodied people’s needs and comfort. DeafSpace, a revolutionary project prioritizing deaf people’s needs and comfort, serves as a case study for potential revolutionary architectural projects that focus on dis/ability accommodation, accessibility, and comfort. However, in seeking additional solutions to this issue, we must be conscious of tokenizing the experiences of …


Enriching The Story: Asexuality And Aromanticism In Literature, Adrienne Whisman Sep 2023

Enriching The Story: Asexuality And Aromanticism In Literature, Adrienne Whisman

sprinkle: an undergraduate journal of feminist and queer studies

This paper examines the role of asexual and aromantic coding within Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights and Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse. Both books utilize relationships and sexuality in order to portray arguments within the book. Brontë portrays Catherine and Heathcliff’s relationship as transcending physicality, both as a way to portray them as soulmates but also to foreshadow events. Woolf utilizes Lily’s disinterest in sex and marriage as a way to contrast her to other women in the novel. Both characterizations can be read as asexual, or in Lily’s case also aromantic. This queer reading allows insight into the …


Ambiguous Identities: Gesturing Towards An Intersectional Conception Of Freedom, Shaun Soman Sep 2023

Ambiguous Identities: Gesturing Towards An Intersectional Conception Of Freedom, Shaun Soman

sprinkle: an undergraduate journal of feminist and queer studies

Writing in The Ethics of Ambiguity (1948), existential philosopher and feminist theorist Simone de Beauvoir declared that each individual’s freedom depends upon that of others. This claim was meant to motivate others to not remain complicit in the oppression of others; however, when considering the xenophobic rhetoric within Western feminists’ rhetoric about “liberating” Muslim women, one realizes that this demand warrants further scrutiny. In this paper, I apply Alia Al-Saji’s work on Western feminists’ approaches to liberating “other” women to de Beauvoir’s “we” in order to strengthen this latter concept. Overall, my aim with this work is to demonstrate that …


Misrepresentation Of Women Of Color In Western Media, Nicole C. Schutte Sep 2023

Misrepresentation Of Women Of Color In Western Media, Nicole C. Schutte

sprinkle: an undergraduate journal of feminist and queer studies

This paper delves into the misrepresentation of women of color in western media. From the perspective of bell hooks (1992), the commodification of the Other serves sinister societal “needs” in order to uphold the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Patricia Hill Collins (2000) and Judith Williamson (1986) interpret this as keeping the western racial hierarchy, gender dichotomy, and capitalist markets intact. A vast majority of people believe that any form of representation in the media is a sense of inclusion when in fact misrepresentation is counterproductive and problematic. Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins (1993) would agree that inaccurate portrayals …


Exploiting Non-Western Women In Media Representations, Gabrielle Miller Sep 2023

Exploiting Non-Western Women In Media Representations, Gabrielle Miller

sprinkle: an undergraduate journal of feminist and queer studies

Media representations and advertisements serve as visual mediums through which cultural values are projected and reinforced. Western capitalism relies on Eurocentric media representations that exploit perceived differences of non-white and non-western cultures to sell western products. This paper analyzes recent advertisements from Kellogg’s and Suit Supply as examples of media representations that employ Eurocentric perspectives of non-western cultures to uphold white masculinist and colonial power structures. Therefore, I suggest that the non- western cultures in the Kellogg’s and Suit Supply advertisements exist within a western capitalist vacuum. This way of consuming and representing serves to reinforce western ways of knowing …


Standing Under A Sign To Which One Does Not Belong: Desire And (Dis)Identification In Catherine Opie’S Self-Portrait Series, Jenna June Sep 2023

Standing Under A Sign To Which One Does Not Belong: Desire And (Dis)Identification In Catherine Opie’S Self-Portrait Series, Jenna June

sprinkle: an undergraduate journal of feminist and queer studies

This paper will take a closer look at Catherine Opie’s Self-Portrait series. Spanning a decade, from 1993 to 2004, each self-portrait is both reflective of an important time in Opie’s life, and are emblematic of a particular period in the LGBTQ movement. Traditional interpretations of these images have read them as independent of one another. When read together however, they present a subtle yet powerful statement on identity and desire. Using José Muñoz’ disidentification theory as a critical lens, I plan to unpack these images and offer new insights that will bring them in line with contemporary queer theory. While …


Creative Submission: I Return To The Place I Ran From, Ian Gillespie Sep 2023

Creative Submission: I Return To The Place I Ran From, Ian Gillespie

sprinkle: an undergraduate journal of feminist and queer studies

No abstract provided.


Lgbtq People Of Color And Digital Spaces Of Empowerment, Eden Bonjo Sep 2023

Lgbtq People Of Color And Digital Spaces Of Empowerment, Eden Bonjo

sprinkle: an undergraduate journal of feminist and queer studies

In recent history, the internet has been considered a place where disembodied users can escape the limitations of their corporeal bodies. But in the contemporary moment, the digital and the physical worlds have become mutually constitutive. What happens when a politics of race, sexuality, and gender is centered in an analysis of digital activity? LGBTQ people of color use strategies to navigate marginalizing social dynamics of power both offline and online. This negotiation is important because of how integral the internet has become to everyday life. In the age of social media, cultural production has become the business of the …