Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Ethnicity in Communication Commons^™

Decolonizing Gender-Based Violence Advocacy: The Development Of An Undocumented Survivor Resource Training, Zulema Aleman

sprinkle: an undergraduate journal of feminist and queer studies

The field of advocacy for the end of gender-based violence has constantly grown. Some could say that there is continual action taking place at multiple levels to ensure the protection of survivors, but the direction is often influenced by the perspective of those in positions of power. Regardless, both the social and legal movements have focused primarily on gender and often disregarded how other social identities, such as immigration status and race, intersect with sexual violence and thus create a range of experiences. The undocumented community is one of these groups who face higher rates of gender-based violence due to …

The Role Of Hypermasculinity, Token Resistance, Rape Myth, And Assertive Sexual Consent Communication Among College Men, Autumn Shafer, Rebecca R. Ortiz, Bailey Thompson, Jennifer, Huemmer

Faculty Publications

Purpose

A greater understanding of how college men's gendered beliefs and communication styles relate to their sexual consent attitudes and intentions is essential within the shifting context of negative to affirmative consent policies on college campuses. The results of this study can be used to help design more effective sexual consent interventions.

The Alt-Right's Use Of President Donald Trump's Twitter Account As A Propaganda Device, Erin Nicole Jorden

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

The long campaign to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act situated President Donald J. Trump in a context where attacks on President Barack Obama’s signature legislation symbolized a broader repudiation of his legacy. Even more than mainstream Republican partisans, the altright blogosphere celebrated the demise of the law to symbolically cleanse the nation of Obama’s influence. Trump attempted to honor his pledge to end Obamacare in his first year of office with his support of the American Health Care Act (March 2017), Better Care Reconciliation Act (July 2017), and the Graham-Cassidy Bill (September 2017). Members of the alt-right reframed …

The Wounded Man: Foxcatcher And The Incoherence Of White Masculine Victimhood, Casey Ryan Kelly

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

American cinema has recently favored representations of white men as victims of socioeconomic and political change. Recent scholarship on white masculinity suggests that representations of male victimhood enable white men to disavow that hegemonic white masculinity still fundamentally structures society. This essay argues that Hollywood’s wounded man similarly provides white masculinity with stable footing. I illustrate how the unintelligibility of screen masculinity evades criticism and, further, how melancholic male dramas nurture a traumatic attachment to victimhood. Examining the film Foxcatcher (2014), I show how unmasked portraits of white male victimhood function as counterparts to the hard-bodied action hero. The filmmaker’s …

What Is My Role In Changing The System? A New Model Of Responsibility For Structural Injustice, Robin Zheng

Women's and Gender Studies Program: Faculty Publications

What responsibility do individuals bear for structural injustice? Iris Marion Young has offered the most fully developed account to date, the Social Connections Model. She argues that we all bear responsibility because we each causally contribute to structural processes that produce injustice. My aim in this article is to motivate and defend an alternative account that improves on Young’s model by addressing five fundamental challenges faced by any such theory. The core idea of what I call the Role-Ideal Model is that we are each responsible for structural injustice through and in virtue of our social roles, i.e. our roles …

Discourses Of Deception: (Re)Examining America's War On Drugs, Benjamin Steven Boyce

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

America's war on drugs is a failed experiment that has caused more damage than it will ever prevent. From its original design to its contemporary manifestations, the war on drugs is a conflict that remains firmly rooted in white supremacy. In contemporary Western societies, the rhetoric of both political leaders and mass-mediated narratives becomes the raw material of subjective reality. Since the war on drugs began nearly a century ago, the spectacle of mass media has been consistently utilized by white political elites as a vehicle of misinformation - as a well-oiled machine for spreading the false social narrative that …

Girl Of Color-Power: Resisting The Neoliberal Girl Power Agent, Raisa Fernanda Alvarado

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Girl power is a complex and multi-dimensional phrase. It is a term that celebrates the positive development of girls' self-esteem, while simultaneously recognizing the shifting social positioning of girlhood in the late twentieth century. It is a call to re-write girls' passivity but simultaneously a discourse that encourages consumerism via entertainment, artifacts, and merchandise. A social movement, a catch phrase, a motto: girl power is a representative caricature of evolving conceptualizations of girlhood. This dissertation is critical of the homogeneity implicit in girl power as its hailing disproportionately centers white, middle and upper class girls. As such, this project examines …

The Whiteness Project Of Gentrification: The Battle Over Los Angeles' Eastside, Jaime Guzmán

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

For many years, the city of Los Angeles has declared war on communities of color. In the past decade, former communities of color like Echo Park, Silver Lake, and Highland Park have all been converted into predominantly white, affluent neighborhoods. In essence, working-class people of colors' neighborhoods are being uplifted in order to welcome a much more affluent population to town. The newest target of Los Angeles' gentrification for the past couple of years has been the greater Eastside. In this project I present my critical intervention of gentrification as a whiteness project. This critical intervention argues that gentrification …

Using Dialogue To Interrupt Legacies Of Exclusion, Incite Hope, Invite Change, And Increase Levels Of Awareness At Predominantly White Institutions With Diversity, Equity, And Inclusion Rhetoric, Amanda Meise

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation questions how a predominantly white institution (PWI) could infuse dialogue to aid the implementation of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and invite institutional change. There has been an increased spotlight on racial tensions permeating predominantly white campuses with DEI initiatives; higher education scholars have identified several factors that prevent institutions from fostering inclusive spaces. This research addresses three specific hurdles for PWIs implementing DEI initiatives: (1) social amnesia characterized by romanticized versions of history; (2) a discontinuity between professed values and the goals of DEI initiatives with policy, structure, and experience; and (3) low awareness of privilege …

Whither The Gender Of Get Out: A Critique Of The Cinematic (Im)Possibilities Of The Black Political Imagination, Daelena Tinnin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates the entanglements of spatialized racial-sexual violence, conceptualizations of black female subjectivity, questions of the limitations and excesses of media representations and the socioeconomic, cultural and spatiotemptoral relations that make black images visible and (im) possible as they are situated in the cinematic black political imagination. Through a materialist media analysis of the 2017 film Get Out, I argue that the film and its articulation of the afterlife of slavery fails to account for gender by tangentially engaging black women in its dissection of race and racism. I contend that black women are the absent presence in …

The Legacy Of The Feminist Bookstore Network: Lesbianism’S Indelible Bookstore Beginnings, Hannah Quire

sprinkle: an undergraduate journal of feminist and queer studies

In the mid-to-late twentieth century, lesbian feminist bookstores exploded across the United States, facilitating the creation and spread of a network that would be fleeting but impactful for those involved. Through its brief vibrancy, the lesbian feminist bookstore network not only provided an outlet through which women could discover their own local communities, but also served as a catalyst through which lesbian feminist politics was expanded, enforced, and encouraged. The positivity of the movement, however, was branded with a distinct lack of intersectional politics, a move that would ultimately see the movement to its demise.

A Forbidden Act: Illicit Sex And The Colonial Heterosexual Matrix, Rain Tiller

sprinkle: an undergraduate journal of feminist and queer studies

This paper will discuss the cases in which illicit sex becomes mechanisms of disruption. The first section will explore the theoretical underpinnings of sex and the body as an access point to politics and normative critique. Then, I will discuss the examples of illicit sex in the novels Women of Sand and Myrrh and Woman at Point Zero. It is important to study the role of sex in literature to expand the symbolic understanding of sex and sexuality. It is also necessary to bring an analysis of colonial dynamics to sexuality studies in order to fully critique the racial and …

The Only Thing We Have To Queer Is Queer Itself: Naming The Cultural Machine Of Radical Sexual Politics, Cassiopeia Mulholland-London

sprinkle: an undergraduate journal of feminist and queer studies

Language is a machine, and words are individual technologies within that machine. Sociocultural theory applied as activism is also a machine. Over the course of the past thirty years, the linguistic technology of “queer” has been recalibrated, moving from naming a cultural machine of radical, anti-capitalist sexual politics to naming a cultural machine of assimilationist, identity-based sexual politics. This has left the machine of radical sexual politics without a name, making it more difficult for people to find it and integrateitinto their technological existences. The machine of radical sexual politics is essential because it focuses on dismantling the societal systems …

Cyber Fantasies: Rina Sawayama, Asian Feminism, And Techno-Orientalism In The Age Of Neoliberalism, June Kuoch, Allegro Wang

sprinkle: an undergraduate journal of feminist and queer studies

In the 21st century, neoliberalism and technological innovations in Asia produce techno-Orientalism, a "new" framework by which the West dominates Asia. In this process, Asian bodies are configured as inherently technological beings who exist solely for the production of information and neoliberal goods. Techno-Orientalism is a byproduct of the violence wrought by modernity. Yet, Rina Sawayama, a British-Japanese music artist, produces a new form of resistance that can be characterized as diasporic Asian cultural production. Her work challenges the white hegemonic masculine gaze by interrogating modernity in her lyrics, aesthetic, and performance. Sawayama's aesthetic and music videos produce a new …

Linguistic Imperialism In Post-Colonial Ghana: Access To Written News Media In The Local Languages, Rikki N. Bergen

Anthropology Presentations

No abstract provided.

True Colors: Crime, Race And Colorblindness Revisited, Itay Ravid

Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy

The violent, racially motivated events of the Charlottesville rally unleashed demons that many Americans believed were long buried. Old Jim Crow-inspired racism came straight through the front door. Yet critics of colorblind policies were not surprised. For them, such an eruption of racial hatred manifested what they had repeatedly argued: colorblind policies neither alter racial predispositions nor affect the unequal treatment of minorities in the United States. In fact, colorblindness has given rise to a modern, latent type of racism. This Article empirically investigates this claim in an unexplored context-the media's colorblind, crime-related coverage policies. Utilizing a novel dataset spanning …

Submission Or Subversion: Women With Shaved Hair In Media, Thea Cheuk

AUCTUS: The Journal of Undergraduate Research and Creative Scholarship

“It is quite obvious that the shaving of heads fundamentally damages the physical and moral integrity of those people for whom it was intended,” Fabrice Virgili asserts in his book Shorn Women: Gender and Punishment in Liberation France (135). For centuries, hair has been held as a standard of feminine beauty, therefore a lack of it has a long and storied history as well. Records of head shaving as a form of punishment for women can be traced back to Ancient Greek and Roman times. Shaving a woman’s head was a sign of sin and shame, and stripped them of …

Racial Identities On Social Media: Projecting Racial Identities On Facebook, Instagram, And Twitter, Nolan Brinkman

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Because social networks are an important aspect of the lived realities of those who participate in them, this study examined the way racial identity was signified, indicated, or displayed on social networks. A survey was distributed to 347 college students from a medium sized Midwestern university to assess ways in which participants depicted their racial identity on social media. The study looked at the use of photos, textual communication, concealment of racial identity, and interactions with race related content to assess how participants projected racial identity on social networks. Results suggested that racial identity is not intentionally projected on social …

To Pass Or Not To Pass? Constructing And Negotiating Biracial Identity, Anthony Peavy

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

The purpose of this research is to show how biracial people narrate their identities and how people in society influence biracial individuals' constructions of their self. This is significant because this research obtains perspectives from individuals who simultaneously occupy a privileged and underprivileged identity. In highlighting the experiences of biracial people and their constructions of the self, this research answered questions surrounding how they perform their identities in social situations and how they negotiate passing privileges granted to some based on visual perceptions and/or skin tone.

This research was done using qualitative research methodologies, as these give more insights into …

Productive Paddles And Productive Power: An Exploration Of Transgender Individuals' Negotiation Of Identity Through Bdsm Practices, Riley Zahn

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Productive Paddles and Productive Power: An Exploration of Transgender Individuals' Negotiation of Identity through BDSM Practices is a thesis submitted in fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Master of Arts in Communication Studies from Minnesota State University, Mankato in April of 2018. It explores the ways in which transgender individuals negotiate their identities through BDSM practices. To collect data, eight semi-structured, qualitative interviews were conducted revealing four key themes: BDSM as identity negotiation, BDSM as power enactment, embodied confirmation, and BDSM as trauma survivorship. The study concludes with a discussion of the implications, limitations and future avenues of …