Browsing by Subject "Gender studies"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Gender, subjectivity, and the material-discursive school entanglement
    (2018-04-04) Robbins, Kirsten Rose; Pike, Gary; Thorius, Kathleen King; Dennis, Barbara; Engebretson, Kathryn; Medina, Monica
    New materialist scholars argue that schools are important material-discursive entanglements for engendering, racializing, and subjectivizing human subjects. Despite this claim, there is a dearth of research that examines the perceptions that students have of the messages they are sent from schools about how to perform their gendered subjectivities in schools, particularly from a material feminist framework. This study used native photography through a post qualitative methodological framework to explore the messages that students’ receive from their school related to subjectivity and gender. This study took seriously both the voices and perceptions of the participants and the significance of the material environment of the school. Within the course of the research study, students both resisted and conformed to messages the school sent them about their subjectivities. Students conformed to many of the dominant ideas about gender, including privileging maleness. Students resisted the school’s control of their bodies, as well as the school’s attempts at rendering the student population homogenous. The students, though aware that there were differences in the way the school treated them based in gender and other identity markers, struggled to articulate those differences because the school sent a false message of equality. This false message of equality performed an erasure of their experiences of differences and denied them the language they needed to discuss the inequities they experienced. The results of the analysis contribute to conversations about the ways in which school environments contribute to narratives about identity, particularly as it relates to gender. Additionally, the way in which this post qualitative study unfolded has implications for research, including the importance of emergent design. Finally, the tensions that exist in using the new materialisms as a framework when studying schools led me to question the benefits of choosing to decenter humans in this type of research.
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    Modeling Aversion Resistant Alcohol Intake in Indiana Alcohol-Preferring (P) Rats
    (MDPI, 2022-08-05) Katner, Simon N.; Sentir, Alena M.; Steagall, Kevin B.; Ding, Zheng-Ming; Wetherill, Leah; Hopf, Frederic W.; Engleman, Eric A.; Psychiatry, School of Medicine
    With the substantial social and medical burden of addiction, there is considerable interest in understanding risk factors that increase the development of addiction. A key feature of alcohol use disorder (AUD) is compulsive alcohol (EtOH) drinking, where EtOH drinking becomes “inflexible” after chronic intake, and animals, such as humans with AUD, continue drinking despite aversive consequences. Further, since there is a heritable component to AUD risk, some work has focused on genetically-selected, EtOH-preferring rodents, which could help uncover critical mechanisms driving pathological intake. In this regard, aversion-resistant drinking (ARD) takes >1 month to develop in outbred Wistar rats (and perhaps Sardinian-P EtOH-preferring rats). However, ARD has received limited study in Indiana P-rats, which were selected for high EtOH preference and exhibit factors that could parallel human AUD (including front-loading and impulsivity). Here, we show that P-rats rapidly developed compulsion-like responses for EtOH; 0.4 g/L quinine in EtOH significantly reduced female and male intake on the first day of exposure but had no effect after one week of EtOH drinking (15% EtOH, 24 h free-choice paradigm). Further, after 4−5 weeks of EtOH drinking, males but not females showed resistance to even higher quinine (0.5 g/L). Thus, P-rats rapidly developed ARD for EtOH, but only males developed even stronger ARD with further intake. Finally, rats strongly reduced intake of quinine-adulterated water after 1 or 5 weeks of EtOH drinking, suggesting no changes in basic quinine sensitivity. Thus, modeling ARD in P-rats may provide insight into mechanisms underlying genetic predispositions for compulsive drinking and lead to new treatments for AUDs.
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    Review of Gunlög Fur's A Nation of Women: Gender and Colonial Encounters among the Delaware Indians
    (Alexander Street, 2011) Wheeler, Rachel; Religious Studies, School of Liberal Arts
    Gunlög Fur's A Nation of Women is an ambitious book. It is essentially an overview of Delaware history and cultural change in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries from a gender studies perspective. During this time, the Delaware were commonly referred to as women in diplomatic contexts, and Fur's book attempts to unpack the meanings behind this designation, first by examining the "roles and responsibilities of women" among the Delaware, and the "historical conditions that made such a gendered designation possible." She examines gender both as an "organizing principle for subsistence activities, division of labor and exchange, and dispersion of power" as well as "a process of thought and belief" that "finds sanction in the spiritual realm."
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    “Since When Do We Celebrate Not Having Talent?”: Common Tropes and Counterstory in Tradwife TikTok
    (2024-09) Cooper, Savannah; Brooks Gillies, Marilee; Buchenot, Andy; Musgrave, Megan
    My thesis examines common “tropes” that appear in Tradwife content on TikTok. Tradwife content reaffirms and platforms harmful cultural norms and stereotypes regarding gender roles and is often connected to other forms of online extremism. In this thesis, I examine three common tropes I’ve identified in Tradwife content—religion, othering, and aesthetic comfort content. Tradwife content creators state religion to be a main driver behind their lifestyle and often produce content that presents an othering, “us-vs.-them” dynamic between themselves and their detractors. The toxic nature of their message is made more palpable via what I refer to as “aesthetic comfort content,” where their visually pleasing multimodal content presents their lifestyle as idyllic. I also expound on how some commenters are using elements of counterstory and disidentification in the Tradwife creators’ comment sections to fight back against these same stereotypes. The comment section becomes a site of debate and discourse where commenters can engage in acts of micro-activism by using their own experiences to complicate and critique the Tradwives’ messaging.