Women, Gender, and Sexuality Senior Integrated Projects
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This collection includes Senior Integrated Projects (SIPs, formerly known as Senior Individualized Projects) completed in the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Concentration. Abstracts are generally available to the public, but PDF files are available only to current Kalamazoo College students, faculty, and staff. If you are not a current K College student, faculty, or staff member, email us at dspace@kzoo.edu to request access to a SIP.
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Recent Submissions
Item Breaking Down Barriers: Addressing Financial, Health Literacy, and Accessibility Challenges in U.S. Healthcare(2024-11-01) Larick, Katie; Butler, Ann MarieIt is difficult to be a healthy American. This reality is often overlooked until individuals face the harsh truths of the United States healthcare system. For many, this struggle manifests as exorbitant health insurance premiums, the need to miss work for difficult-to-schedule appointments, or even a resignation to forgo care altogether due to the overwhelming costs associated with navigating the American healthcare landscape. This paper addresses the research question: How do systemic barriers established by the United States limit access to public healthcare, and in what ways do these barriers hinder individuals from engaging in preventative health measures, ultimately impacting overall public health outcomes? Three main barriers emerge when investigating what “access” to healthcare in America entails, financial constraints, health literacy deficits, and physical accessibility issues. While these barriers are not insurmountable and some progress has been made, the U.S. healthcare system remains stagnant in addressing these evolving challenges. This paper aims to provide insight into these three critical aspects of U.S. healthcare access, while also offering a firsthand perspective on how the system operates and the implications for public health outcomes.Item Weird Barbie and Gender Fluidity : Destabilizing the Binary through Performativity(2024-11-01) Ruiter, Charlotte; Butler, Ann MarieBarbie, a 2023 comedy film directed by Greta Gerwig, follows the stories of Stereotypical Barbie’s and Stereotypical Ken’s journeys to the real world after the utopian perfection of life in Barbie Land begins to malfunction. Much literature has focused on Barbie 's journey to finding herself as a human or Ken’s relationship with masculinity, but one relatively unexplored character is Weird Barbie. This project focuses on Weird Barbie’s character, played by Kate Mckinnon. I argue that in Barbie, Weird Barbie provides audiences a case study to examine how gender may be performed within various hierarchies, and how binary systems of gender work to regulate gendered performance. I use Judith Butler’s framework of performativity to exemplify how gen der is portrayed in the Barbie movie and to provide commentary on the value of gender performance subversions to denaturalize the gender binary. Further, I posit that the film begins a conversation on the dysfunction of the gender binary but does not fully complete it. I expand upon disgust, compulsory heterosexuality, and philosophical themes in the film to offer a possible direction for next steps for feminist film and undoing the gender binary.Item My Body, Your Body, and The Transgender Body : Analyzing Gender Performativity, Queer World Making and Transformative Landscapes(2024-03-01) Hemant, Sydney; Butler, Ann MarieExploring transgender women’s bodies in modern society constitutes a multitude of discourses: of the self, society, and values. Due to currently residing in a cis-sexist heteronormative culture reveals the interwoven fabric of the machine; Systems replicate into culminating arrangements of oppression that aim to dictate and produce stagnant versions of modern life. Transgender women are ridiculed and face much intersectional violence because of the nature of being “othered” in society. By acknowledging the burdens and systems affecting transgender people, this leads to a holistic deconstruction of power, hierarchies, and binaries. Similarly, the explicit function of gender performativity is vital to this discourse in highlighting the social actors and systems involved in maintaining gender. Our current systems inherently uphold compounding oppressions further harming transformative landscapes. The foundations of interlocking oppression expose how hope and radical potential become prominent in queer world-making, thus producing a world in which transgender women and LGBTQIA+ livelihoods are valued; recontextualizing the accepted status quo. This SIP argues the end of scapegoating the intersectional harm trans women face, to call attention to the current realities through personal experience and theory. This Sip also aims to deconstruct the singularity that oppression produces through exploring communal resistance, as well as producing a holistic seed that can incubate the world we are continuously working towards.Item The Process-Utopian Method for Feminist Praxis : Exploring Examples within Abolition and Decolonial Feminist Theory(2023-06-01) Waldron, Elle M.This project began with the initial question: what does feminist praxis look like outside of academia? Praxis is defined as "the process of using a theory or something that you have learned in a practical way." It can also be characterized as having an understanding of how action and theory shape one another. Feminist praxis follows the same definition as praxis above but is also distinguished by "the process of moving from feminist values into actions based on those values." I define feminist praxis as the actions, thought-processes, and relationships formed with the intention of recognizing the way that gender and sexuality structure society and culture and interact with other systems of oppression, combined with an attempt to create new systems and worlds. In this SIP, I argue that process utopian methods are a form of feminist praxis that are represented in socio-cultural space and accompanying material conditions of specific sites. A process-utopian method is an approach to creating new worlds and systems which centers the continuous development of these new systems and processes over a goal. Process-utopias are the imagining of a new system or world that emphasizes the skills and experiences gained while reaching for that goal rather than the goal itself. This is demonstrated by the versatile and varied examples investigated in this SIP which are framed using the Abolition Feminist Transformative Justice Framework and Decolonial Feminist Theory. These demonstrations include the following case study examples of process utopian methods and my personal reflection on their application: a redefinition of citizenship, The Combahee River Collective (then and now), spatial tagging, the Nhanga method, and the Palestinian Feminist Collective 2023 calendar.Item Entitled, “Folk Art”(2022-11-01) Bailey, Jenna; Hahn, Christine G., 1962-American folk art is the heart of this project. Separated into five sections, the topic of folk art is explored through the lens of history, contextual analysis, an in-depth look at a handful of folk artists, folk art outside of the United States, and a look at collectors and the role of collecting in the construction of folk art as a category. What I aim to answer throughout is the question; what is folk art? Before beginning this project, I knew of the category but nothing about its parameters or the people who create under the label. This project utilizes multiple frameworks including formal analysis, social theory, gender theory, in hopes of developing a lens on folk art that is cognizant of the impact of colonial language and capitalist influence. This paper considers the economic and social identities of artists in the folk art field and the impact those demographics have on the success of folk art in terms of monetary value, educational studies, and publicity or popularity in mainstream artistic aesthetics in the United States.