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Gender and Sexuality Studies

Winter 2023

Building a Queer archive

With the Queering the Archives Initiative moving into its second year, Josie Cohen-Rodriguez and Lotus Norton-Wisla are focusing on building a student-centered and community-driven LGBTQ+ archive in the Washington State University Libraries.

“We want to build a broad coalition of folks who are vested in this archive and taking a sense of collaborative ownership,” Cohen-Rodriguez said. “That’s very empowering.”

Other archives in the Pacific Northwest are taking this approach, and Cohen-Rodriguez and Norton-Wisla had the opportunity to visit several of them in July 2023, thanks to a WSU 2023 Transformational Change Initiative (TCI) grant. TCI grants are awarded annually by the … » More …

Fall 2018

Videos and more from Caroline Heldman

Caroline Heldman ’93 appears in several documentaries, writes, and presents on media and gender. She has emerged as a strong voice about the #MeToo movement and harassment, partly because of her own experience. Watch parts of documentaries and learn more about Heldman’s work below. You can also read about her in “Ask Caroline Heldman,” Fall 2018.

 

Miss Representation, a 2011 documentary

 

 

The Mask You Live In, 2015

 

Books

Sex and Gender in the 2016 Presidential Election, 2018

The New Campus Anti-Rape Movement: Internet Activism for Social Justice, 2018, … » More …

Gay Pride flag in front of Mt. Rainier
Summer 2018

Out West

We make so many assumptions about gender expression and identity, and sexual orientation, that it’s sometimes a shock to realize that ideas about them have changed over time. Take pink and blue.

Pink is for girls, blue is for boys—except when it wasn’t. A Ladies’ Home Journal article from 1918 clearly states that “the generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.”

A decade later, Time magazine repeated the … » More …

Bitter Tastes: Literary Naturalism and Early Cinema in American Women's Writing cover
Fall 2017

Bitter Tastes: Literary Naturalism and Early Cinema in American Women’s Writing

Bitter Tastes: Literary Naturalism and Early Cinema in American Women's Writing cover

Donna M. Campbell

University of Georgia Press: 2016

 

In 1921, Edith Wharton became the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in fiction for her novel, The Age of Innocence. Wharton was part of a new generation born in the 1860s and 1870s who, equipped with new biological theories, challenged conventions of the Victorian era.

Deriving its title from one of Wharton’s remarks … » More …

Cowperson with horse
Spring 2015

A re-dress of the West

Joe Monahan, from all appearances a typical American frontiersman, arrived in Idaho Territory in the late 1860s. He was lured by the promise of fortune in the hillsides and settled in Owyhee County, which The New York Times had described as “a vast treasury” with “the richest and most valuable silver mines yet known to the world.”

Monahan built a cabin and mined a claim. He also worked as a cowboy with an outfit in Oregon.

When he returned to Idaho, he settled into a dugout near the frontier town of Rockville. An 1898 directory lists him as “Joseph Monahan, cattleman.” And his neighbors described … » More …

Asian American Women's Popular Literature
Fall 2014

Asian American Women’s Popular Literature

Asian American Women's Popular Literature

Pamela Thoma

Temple University Press, 2013

 

Since Nathaniel Hawthorne famously complained about the “damned mob of scribbling women” in 1855, much has changed in American literary and popular culture, not least the nation’s racial demographics, which now include substantial numbers of Asian Americans, as well as other people of color. And yet, the significance of women’s popular fiction continues to be overlooked, if not derided outright, by many social and cultural … » More …