Undergraduate Humanities Forum 2015-2016: Sex
Search results
Now showing 1 - 10 of 10
Publication Navigating Gender: Billy Tipton and the Jazz Culture of Masculinity(2016-05-01) Judd, HannahIn this paper, I examine the life of Billy Tipton, a jazz musician who lived most of his life in Spokane, Washington, as a prominent entertainer and pianist. He is significant because he was a transgender performer who never underwent gender reassignment surgery and passed successfully throughout his adult life, with his assigned gender only being revealed upon his death. He lives largely in the public eye as an inspirational early trans performer, with perhaps the most notable tributes being the opera “Billy” based on his life and staged in Olympia, Washington (performed only three times), a jazz musical, ''The Slow Drag,'' which was performed Off Broadway and the Billy Tipton Memorial Saxophone Quartet, a feminist all-woman saxophone quartet based in Seattle.Publication Soy Moderno y No Quiero Locas: Modernity and LGBT(Queer) Perú(2016-05-01) Herndon, MarcoThis paper explores the LGBT rights movement in Peru from 1980 to the contemporary period. It uses a historically-based, ethnographic methodology to explore the relationship between globalization and LGBT rights. Particular focus is paid to the Movimiento Homosexual de Lima and the recent Union Civil Ya! movement. It builds off existing critical scholarship examining how Latin American LGBT movements respond to their historical and cultural conditions and develop notions of progress. The paper builds off of Judith Butler and Anne Tsing’s theories on universality and globalization as well as Peruvian Gonzalo Portocarrero’s analysis of Peruvian nationalism. Its main claim is that the Peruvian LGBT movement’s negotiations with global LGBT movements inhibits its ability to build a grassroots movement.Publication Redefining American Motherhood: Emily Mudd's Mission at Home and Abroad(2016-05-01) Hunter, HelenIn 1929, Emily Hartshorne Mudd risked arrest by volunteering as a nurse at Philadelphia’s first birth control clinic. Visibly pregnant with her second child, Mudd relied on an antiquated law that barred the incarceration of a pregnant woman in order to serve women in need of contraceptive advice. Before this bold venture, Emily Mudd had worked for a decade as her husband’s unpaid research assistant in immunology and had personally experienced the conflicting pressures of a woman in the early twentieth century who aspired to be both a mother and a professional. Over the next seventy years, Mudd became a key player in the development of marriage counseling as a way to help women navigate their maternal and professional ambitions. Scholars have remembered Mudd for her contributions to the field of marriage counseling but have criticized her for her methods and her failures. This limited view of her career detracts from her larger professional ambitions. Mudd’s professional shortcomings, reexamined, reveal a strong-willed and pragmatic idealist working against a rapidly changing social order.Publication Choice, Control and Childbirth: Cesarean Deliveries on Maternal Request in Shanghai, China(2016-05-01) Wang, EileenCesarean deliveries on maternal request (CDMR) have become increasingly common in China within the past 20 years, coinciding with the dramatic rise in cesarean section rates. In recent years, the state has tried to control the escalation of cesarean section rates by restricting those that are considered medically “unnecessary” and particularly those requested by mothers. Drawing upon eight weeks of ethnographic fieldwork and 34 interviews with women, providers and family members at a district hospital in Shanghai, this thesis looks at the sociocultural context that influences mothers in China to request cesarean deliveries, as well as the ongoing negotiations among the state, doctor and woman over control of the childbirth process. Examining the politics of delivery decision-making, in turn, provides a platform for understanding reproductive governance, childbirth and the underlying system of health care in China.Publication Replacing Periods With Question Marks: A Study of the Role of Public Education in Kanawha County, West Virginia(2016-05-01) Engell, Sarah MichelleIn 1974 the proposal and adoption of new language arts textbooks, that sought to emphasize themes of multiculturalism and egalitarianism, sparked a violent year-long protest in Kanawha County, West Virginia. The opposition perceived the texts as overly sexual, anti-American, and intrusive while supporters celebrated the diversification of narratives and information. The ability of newly adopted language arts textbooks to spark an explosive controversy reflects the impact of textbooks and, more broadly, public education on creating a sense of identity and belonging. Through objecting or supporting the textbooks and the language they contained, the citizens of Kanawha County were bitterly fighting to protect their own definitions of what it meant to be a good student, parent, teacher, community member, and American. Furthermore, through protesting and ultimately reworking the process of textbook adoption and inclusion, the citizens redefined who and what was included in their notion of a good public school education. The research seeks to understand how a community’s perception of public education and the role it should play in a child’s life impacts the inclusion of the public in academic decision making as well as the insertion and definition of controversial matter in the classroom. In addition, the research seeks to better understand the triangulation of rights in public school between students, teachers, and parents.Publication Plague Desires: A Re-Reading of HIV/AIDS Politics in Contemporary Gay Pornography(2016-05-01) Ojeda-Sague, GabrielThis project will study the methods by which contemporary gay pornography has confronted and attempted to radically reconfigure the narratives, politics, and erotics of AIDS/HIV. Focusing especially on the film Viral Loads by Treasure Island Media and the controversy that surrounded its release, characterized by articles on the film from VICE and Salon, this project will argue for the ability of the film to produce a re-reading of major stigma against viral bodies and the condition of sickness within eroticism through the form of pornography and erotic spectatorship. This project will argue that the hyper-exposition of the viral gay male body in sexuality offers a healing mechanism against the fear, marginalization, and pathologization that come with stigma towards AIDS/HIV.Publication Same-Sex Unions in the Politics of Ancient History(2016-07-01) Cohen, JeremyJohn Boswell’s Same-Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe (1994) achieved a level of popularity unusual for classical philology, arguing that the little-known and barely attested Byzantine ritual of adelphopoiesis was evidence of officially-condoned homosexual marriage in the early Christian world. Both devoutly Catholic and openly gay, Boswell dedicated the book to friends who had died from AIDS complications, a fate he shared later the same year. The book was critically panned, from a non-academic publisher, and marketed to a large layperson audience. Indeed, there are technical errors and perhaps fundamental biases (anachronism, Orientalism) in the work, but detractors tended toward ad hominem: the work’s flaws cast as personal failings rather than academic ones. The delineation between a piece being ‘bad scholarship’ and ‘not scholarship’ is a subtle act of quarantine. Considering also G.E.M. de Ste. Croix’s The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (1981) and Martin Bernal’s Black Athena (1987), this project examines transgressive scholars finding in classical antiquity an opportunity for sociopolitical relevance, while Classicists’ reactions have been mixed.Publication Performative Remnants: Re-reading the Black Male Body in Mapplethorpe’s Black Book(2016-05-01) Kessel, ErichRobert Mapplethorpe’s 1986 Black Book was subject of much political controversy in the years following its release. In the drama of this controversy, Mapplethorpe’s figure—as an Artist and an Author—grew more dominant in discourse at the same time that it was battered by right-wing attacks. The growth of his figure cast a dark shadow over the other bodies implicated in his project: those of the black men he photographed. How might a history of their place in this books creation be written, given an archival silence? This project will engage the model’s pose as a performance that resists Mapplethorpe’s gaze and the many imperatives that structure his photobook as a consumable object of racial fascination.Publication Ill-Fame on Blackberry Alley: Prostitution and Sport in 19th-Century Philadelphia(2016-05-01) Korostoff, ThomsonThe 19th century offers a view of prostitution in a time of its open celebration. A remarkably permissive attitude towards sex work defies conventional understandings of “Victorian prudery” and makes for a fascinating period of American sexual history. Though the 20th century history of prostitution is defined by efforts to regulate the practice on moral grounds, the 19th century allows an assessment of the bawdy life through the eye of the market. In the mid 19th-century, the era of established brothels as social spaces, the urban leisure and sex trade was found objectionable only as noise disturbances. This project conducts a spatial analysis of the 19th century leisure economy via a public guide, in contrast to the 20th-century post-reform accounts of prostitution in arrest records or city Vice Commission reports.Publication Gallery 404(2016-05-01) Lund, Sofia Amalia404 is an experimental gallery and home. The project explores the possibilities of alternate, more intimate spaces for art and dialogue. 404 is not interested in inaccessible, material art work. In these next few months, 404 will be exploring installation, performance, and instructional-based art work. The space was inspired by Hans Ulrich Obrist’s 1993 show "do it." Our first installation is What to do When You Meet Rihanna by Zenobia R., a space that revolves around the artist’s sexuality and her self. Through Rihanna, instructional art, and radical self-love, Zenobia constructs a heterotopia, i.e., an anti-hegemonic site within society that offers the possibility for the creation of new knowledge and new ways of being in the world—and you are invited. Later on we will have an installation by Khadija T., Am I Overreacting?, which will explore pain in relationships by reconstructing internal spaces through physical objects and writing instructions around how to be truly intimate with people. A third installation by Sky Y. will focus on intimacy through the internet, and the way we so quickly move between everything from porn, to violent news and social media sites. It will also integrate instructions for recreating his pieces so that each participant may personalize his art and reflect on their own digital identities and desires.