These are two examples of Queering It Up final projects from Dr. Dadas‘s Queer Identities class GLQS 201. In that class, students discuss many different aspects of queerness: queer movements (the riot at Compton鈥檚 Cafeteria; queer identities (trans, interse ACE); queer tactics (liberation philosophy), queer spaces (drag balls, counterpublics); queer aesthetics (Prince, David Bowie). These projects were designed to educate others in accessible ways.

• Student, Angela D’Alessandro’s project discusses the history of the heavy metal music genre and how it relates to queerness through the discussion of bands, artists and song lyrics.
• Student, Ness Rodriguez’s project provides thoughts, insights and “a new view on being trans and new ways to talk about gender.”

For students’ final projects, they created pieces of cultural activism. During the course, students discussed how anti-fatness harms people of all body sizes, though it most greatly harms superfat and infinifat people. They examined anti-fatness through an intersectional lens, exploring how fat identity intersects with other minoritized identities. These discussions revealed the extent to which anti-fatness promotes stigma in social and medical settings, as well as leads to workplace discrimination and a wage gap between thin and fat people. These discussions also revealed the anti-fat stereotypes that are often promoted in the media.

One way to combat anti-fatness is through 鈥渃ultural work,鈥� which involves creating representations and artwork that challenge weight stigma. For the final project, students created cultural texts鈥攎usic videos, digital essays, manifestos, children’s books, poems, photo projects, social media pages, to name a few examples鈥攖hat combat fatphobia, humanize fat people, and diversify representations of fatness. These texts are both political and personal, social and embodied, unpacking how anti-fatness has shaped students’ relationships to food and their bodies.

Gab Davila –

Talia Fulton –

Nicole Guardado –

Keely Hoehl –

Emilia Siracusa –

Anonymous –听

Spencer Crines –

Colin Corcoran – [from the 80s to the present]

Nina Farley – [emulating 70s lesbian collective creativity]

Mary Kurkowiak – [consideration of asexuality in cultural-autobiographical context] Graphic Novel-Style with original illustrations!

Meredith Lynch – [original music composition based on Freud’s 5 stages of psychosexual development] From Meredith’s Artist’s statement: “This explores how the ideas of Sigmund Freud and Richard von Krafft-Ebing apply to the modern young woman.”

Sabrina Wigfall – [original novella dealing with intersectionality and black lesbian identities] Sabrina is a creative writing major.

Nikki Trumble, a recently graduated student from the GSWS program, created a website for their senior seminar dedicated to bringing awareness to ending child marriage in the United States. They used resources such as personal stories and extensive research, and explained the importance of advocacy groups such as Unchained At Last. This website gives insight on how to tackle the issue of child marriage both domestically and globally.

Project description from Karen Sonnenwald: “My name is Karen Sonnenwald. I am a recent graduate of the Gender, Sexuality, and Women鈥檚 Studies program. My project for my senior seminar class was an autoenthography. In this project, I studied the effects of intergenerational trauma and its effects on my parenting style. My hope in sharing this project is not to focus on the trauma but to realize the importance of taking care of oneself, especially from a mental health stand point. Also, it is possible to break intergenerational patterns. Awareness is key to this process as is professional help in the forms of eastern and western medicine.”

Anne Marie Venezia, for her senior seminar, wrote an auto-ethnography to explore construction of identity through her own unique lens and lived experience.聽 Using journals she had complied for over a decade of her childhood and adolescence as artifactual evidence, she reflected on her past in the hopes of offering insight into what her journals and experiences had to say about how we construct our identities in the face of trauma, stigma, and shame.聽 She incorporated images and text from the journals to imbue the work with a sense of the emotional and temporal tone of her youth, as an homage to who she was, and to show how that has both shifted and shaped the person she is now.

Kendra Franke has just graduated with honors from the Gender, Sexuality, and Women鈥檚 Studies program with a GLBTQ+ studies minor. They transferred to 麻豆传媒在线 from Raritan Valley Community College in Fall of 2018 after receiving an A.A. in Liberal Arts with a Gender and Women鈥檚 Studies focus. They hope to continue their education at the University of Wisconsin, getting their master鈥檚 degree and eventually their PhD.

Past Student Spotlights