As a teenager, I loved the film When Harry Met Sally and would watch it whenever I was home sick from school. Most kids long to be adults, but Generation X expressed a specific affinity for the trappings of adulthood. In true Gen X fashion, what I pined for in adulthood was the friendship at… Read more →
Category: Feminism
No More “Again”
I start with a confession. In 2018, I wrote a piece for Nursing Clio titled “It’s Not You, It’s Me: #MeToo in Academia,” detailing an abuse of power by a professor for whom I worked as a TA. I state this now only because there was a part of the story that I left out…. Read more →
Riding Uphill: Challenging Gender Superiority in Competitive Cycling
For 118 years, the Paris Roubaix bicycle race has challenged the most skilled riders from around the globe. Going from Paris to the border of Belgium, this one-day race features 160 miles of strenuous mixed-surface racing. In 2021, the media exuded much pomp as women were invited to participate for the first time, albeit in… Read more →
Will We Ever “Have it All”? Examining the Career Woman of the 1980s and in the COVID Era
The US government’s response to the COVID-19 crisis has illustrated just how divided the country has become on the topic of childcare and women’s role in the workforce. In October 2020, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its September jobs report, which indicated that, of the 1.1 million workers who had dropped out of the… Read more →
Working Mothers
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed racial and class inequities in brutal ways. Gone are the early days when politicians might say that the virus affects us all equally. We can see in the statistics, in the losses, and in who fills up the hospital beds that this isn’t true. And just as the pandemic helped… Read more →
Mind the Gap: Motivational Pressure and a Gendered Pandemic
In the midst of the pandemic, articles by journalists, public figures, and scholars on how to capitalize on time spent at home have been rapidly increasing, particularly those with suggestions on improving productivity. These articles employ motivational pressure to push readers to invest in “who they want to become” post-coronavirus. Suggestions range from quarantine recipes… Read more →
Cite My Name, Cite My Name
A couple years back, I was co-teaching a graduate course on gender history at the University of Edinburgh. I was advising an MA student on historiographical literature, and I asked her if she used Google Scholar to locate scholarly references. She didn’t, so I demonstrated how to use the search tool. As an example, I… Read more →
Fight Cancer like a Feminist
On May 2, 2018, I was coming out of anesthesia from an emergency appendectomy when I learned I might have cancer. After an excruciating five days in the hospital, my surgeon confirmed that I had moderately differentiated adenocarcinoma but was unsure as to the type of cancer. While it may sound cliché, my life quite… Read more →
Mokgadi Caster Semenya v. The Patriarchy and its IAAF Minions
Caster Semenya first grabbed my attention in 2009 when she won the 800-meter race in Berlin — she bested her competition by over two full seconds and set a world-leading time for the year. Soon after her athletic successes, however, the sporting community challenged her sex/gender identity. The International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF) policy… Read more →
Threatening the Gender Hierarchy in Women’s Sport
Critics of South African track star Caster Semenya warn that her continued participation in women’s track and field without taking testosterone suppressants will mark “the end” of women’s sports. I have a vested interest in continuing sporting opportunities for women—I am a Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies PhD student writing my dissertation on the subject,… Read more →