Category: Women and gender studies

https://plato.stanford.edu/ENTRIES/feminism-political/
https://asiapacific.unwomen.org/sites/default/files/Field%20Office%20ESEAsia/Docs/Publications/2021/03/tl-TOURISM-SECTOR-s.pdf
https://www.berkeleycitycollege.edu/slo/files/2021/05/Crenshaw-Mapping-the-Margins-Intersectionality-and-Vioence-against-WOC.pdf
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1021&context=wgss
These are the sources I used in my Annotated Bibliography. From these sources, I need in-text citations and a separate page for all the references in MLA format. Please, also use my main course book “Gender and Women Studies in Canada: Critical Terrain” by Margaret Hobbs and Carla Rice.

In seeking to understand the interconnectedness of the “global” and the “Intimate,” we will have a class blog to share our ideas and thoughts about gender and global politics in popular culture (television, films, etc.). The blog entry can post in relation to a specific concept from the class discussions or readings, pose relevant questions raised by the film or the reading, analyze specific scenes, etc. Your post should:
Introduce the media with a short descriiption
Provide a reflection or response
You may want to include readings or other resources to help discuss the topic; you can also incorporate multimedia content into your posts (e.g. links to other sites, images, web video, articles) These should be 500-1000 words (2-3 pages).
Please analyze the following media and article attached.
Documentary: Four Women of Egypt (1997) (5 parts on YouTube) Here are the links to each part:

I have also attached the assignment’s rubric for reference on requirements. Please let me know if you have questions or need more info.

Part One: If you were to design a “feminist life toolkit” document or guide, what would it look like and who would it include? This week is your chance to find out. This week you will craft an abbreviated toolkit/syllabus of readings, resources, and ethical principles in the spirit of Ahmed and hook’s writings. While I want you to have as much creative freedom as possible for how you design and construct this resource, please remember to include the following components:
A list or paragraph describing your feminist and/or womanist ethical principles. What are vital goals, aspects, etc. of living a feminist life for you?
Sources and resources which ground your ethical principles. Where do they come from? From whom do you source your education from? Who you cite is key to understanding your toolkit’s goals.
What supplemental resources or tools would help others to understand and engage your toolkit? You can include podcast episodes, youtube videos, songs, art, etc. which connect to your toolkit in some way. Think of these elements as what you might want to use to teach a class about women’s history, writing, feminist thinking, etc.
Part Two: Combine these elements in a separate document rather than entering it directly here in the discussion. I encourage you to be creative with the page design (Canva, for example, can be really cool to use for this!). Feel free to have this toolkit be inspired by your personality or creative aesthetics.

When responding to the weekly reading, please submit a Content Response between 200-250 words or 1-2 paragraphs. These responses will be graded on completion and should be written in a formal style. Avoid writing in a journal-style or stream-of-consciousness format, and be sure to proofread and spell-check your response before submitting it.
Your Content Response can include concepts that piqued your interest, confused you, or something you’d like to discuss further. The responses are open-ended, allowing you to engage with the material in a way that makes sense and helps you develop your thoughts.
Here is link to great summary of this article : https://herseminar.wordpress.com/2020/04/20/our-beloved-twisted-media/
Please reach out with any questions..
I have attached a picture of the textbook article if you have trouble finding online resources.

It is VERY important that you read this entire post and any attached articles before participating in this thread.
You must engage in the Discussion Board for this unit. Keep in mind that this assignment is meant to be a discussion with your classmates and will require interaction, not just one post with no follow up. You need to give yourself plenty of time to make your post, give other students a chance to react, and revisit the conversation to respond. If you post your reaction and one follow up on other student’s threads within 30 minutes, you were not following directions and will lose points. This board needs to be visited more than once for you to keep current. Make your post, give it a few hours or a few days, then come back to see what others have said and interact with them. If you respectfully agree/disagree with something that has already been said give some substance and reasoning for your position. Feel free to add additional evidence in the form or articles with links to support your thoughts or just help explain a concept.
Read the following article:
ER Visits for Teenage Girls Surged During the Pandemic
July 12, 2023 at 12:21 pm
By
Ellen Barry
The New York Times
As the coronavirus pandemic dragged through its second year, an increasing number of American families were so desperate to get help for depressed or suicidal children that they brought them to emergency rooms.
A large-scale analysis of private insurance claims shows that this surge in acute mental health crises was driven largely by a single group — girls ages 13-17.
During the second year of the pandemic, there was a 22% increase in teenage girls who visited emergency rooms with a mental health emergency compared with a pre-pandemic baseline, according to the study of 4.1 million patients published Wednesday in JAMA Psychiatry. The rise was associated with an increase in suicidal and self-harming behavior and with eating disorders.
During the same period, March 2021 to March 2022, the records showed a 9% drop in teenage boys who made emergency room visits for mental health problems.
Overall, the proportion of young people who made an emergency room visit related to mental health increased 7% over a pre-pandemic baseline. The study was based on privately insured Americans, and it does not capture what was happening in Medicaid or uninsured households.
Although the study did not seek to explain the large gap between teen boys and girls, authors pointed to disruption of school, separation from peers and conflict at home as stressors that may have hit girls particularly hard.
“I was especially concerned that it was driven by suicidal thoughts, suicidal behavior and self-harm,” said Lindsay Overhage, an author of the study and a doctoral candidate at Harvard Medical School’s Department of Health Care Policy.
No single explanation has emerged for the gender gap in hospitalizations for mental health emergencies, a trend that preceded the pandemic.
Research published in 2022 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found teens were heavily affected by parents’ job loss and food insecurity, with more than half of adolescents reporting emotional abuse by a parent and more than 1 in 10 reporting physical abuse. Two-thirds of students said they had difficulty completing schoolwork.
Data from Britain found that these difficulties were most pronounced for older girls from poorer households, with the gap narrowing in wealthier households.
The gap may also reflect attitudes toward mental health care, with teen girls more likely to share their distress with one another, said Christine M. Crawford, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at Boston Medical Center.
Girls’ peers “may be suggesting to them, ‘Perhaps you should talk to your parents about what’s going on, or perhaps you should go and get some help,’” Crawford said. Social media platforms became an important factor during the pandemic, she said, when teens were “making searches on TikTok about mental health and mental health systems.”
Emergency room visits — never a good way to provide acute mental health care — were especially problematic during the pandemic, because patients often had long waits before inpatient psychiatric beds became available, the JAMA study of insurance claims found.
The second year of the pandemic brought a 76% increase in the number of young people who spent two or more nights in an emergency room before admission, the study found.
Prolonged waiting, known as boarding, ratchets up stress levels for youth in crisis, and their parents “frequently likened the environment to incarceration,” the study said.
Haiden Huskamp, an economist at Harvard Medical School’s Department of Health Care Policy and one of the study’s authors, described that increase as “dramatic, very dramatic” and particularly worrisome, since emergency rooms provide little care for acute mental health crises.
She said staffing shortages were most likely a central factor in the sharp rise in boarding. She said financial incentives — particularly reimbursement rates for mental health care — should be adjusted to make more care available for adolescents.
“Certainly having the surgeon general come out and say this is the defining public health crisis of our time draws attention,” she said. “But policy change takes time, and we have to move faster.”

I came across the above article today and found the following quote interesting.
Girls’ peers “may be suggesting to them, ‘Perhaps you should talk to your parents about what’s going on, or perhaps you should go and get some help,’” Crawford said. Social media platforms became an important factor during the pandemic, she said, when teens were “making searches on TikTok about mental health and mental health systems.”
Do we think the pandemic had a different impact on feminine female bodied people than it did on other groups?
How does the use of media such as TikTok impact how people deal with mental health? Does it help? Does it also harm?
Do you think girls are more likely to encourage their peers to get help for mental health?
I want to know what you think. I have posed some questions for your consideration. You do not need to answer the questions, they are just meant to get you thinking. Please feel free to ask new questions or bring in outside research to make us all think!
I have created a starter thread for students, so all comments will be in the same place for review.
Again, please keep in mind that this board needs to be revisited multiple times before it is due. It is possible that you could lose points for posting your opinion and following up to others all in a 20-minute time frame without coming back to this board.

In this discussion board, please tell us a little about your feelings regarding this class and address the following questions:
What are your feelings upon completion of this class? Would you take another Sociology/Women’s Studies class? Did the class address your initial questions/doubt/fears/concerns/expectations?
Do you feel your understanding of gender has grown? If so, how? If not, why?
What specific material from this class will be most helpful to you, or to your major/personal life/future career?
How would you describe this class to a friend? Would you encourage them to take it? (Be honest!) Give one peice of advice you would like to offer future students to help them succeed.
Which assignments did you find most interesting and why?
Chapter 14 discussed strategies for moving forward. What, if any, do you think you might implement moving forward? If you do not think you would implement any of the strategies, specifically discuss the strategies and why your aren’t comfortable with them.
What would you like to tell me that I didn’t ask?

Journal entries are meant to take information learned from the text and apply it to real world situations. I am looking for equal parts discussion of the text and how you can apply it to the world around you. You will miss points for not including discussion of the text and only including personal reflection.
Each entry is worth 40 points. Please do not complete a journal entry without reading the accompanying chapter You will be expected to demonstrate your understanding of the text by referring back to the text and citing page numbers (p.00) as such in each journal entry.
Journal entries will be graded on depth, citations, and fully considering all questions posed in the journal assignment for the chapter. Good journal postings are thoughtful and reflective and are tied back to the content in the class using citations. What are you learning in class that helps you understand your world better? Be creative and honest, and work to produce college-level writing.
To submit your journals, please cut and paste your text in the “entry message” box in the journal submission area. This is the only assignment you will submit this way. All others will be attached. For some reason Blackboard makes us download journal entries if they are attached which takes some time.
Please number your answers.
Journal 07:
Define emotion work.
Describe two careers that require its employees to perform emotion work. Make sure to give detailed examples of the type of emotion work an employee would be expected to do in these roles. There are some examples in the text.
Does someone in your life perform emotion work in their career? Describe your observations of how they perform emotion work.
Next, discuss whether the two examples you’ve detailed would be viewed as skilled labor by American society as a whole. Make sure to address why or why not.

Media Project
SOC/WOMS 306

Length: 4-5 pages
Times New Roman, 12pt font, 1″ margins, double spaced
150 points possible

For this Paper, you are required to investigate the ways in which the popular media portray gender in stereotypical ways. Look for stereotypes associated with women or men as a whole and/or stereotypes associated with particular groups of women or men based on race, class, sexual orientation, physical ability, etc.

You need pick a combination of at least three media:
Video games
Magazines
Television
Children’s Books
Music
Movies
Commercials on television
Websites
Instructions
Introduction. Paragraph 1.
State which of the above media you selected, state the specific sources you used, and briefly describe the stereotypical references that you found. This should be the first three paragraphs after your introduction, one paragraph per media source.
How do the stereotypes portray women versus men? If relevant, discuss how the stereotypes portray particular categories of women or men (based on race, class, sexual orientation, physical ability, etc.) as subordinates of individuals from dominant groups. This should be paragraph five.
What do you think are the purposes of these stereotypes? How do these portrayals benefit certain groups while disadvantaging other groups? How do the stereotypes maintain the gender system? (Discuss the ways in which we as a society enforce stereotypes to maintain the status quo. Also consider how people are treated when they do not conform).This should be paragraph six.
How does what you have learned from our text and this class help you better understand the meaning and consequences of stereotyping in the mass media? Do you think about gender in more complex ways—i.e., as not simply consisting of norms about femininity and masculinity but as a process, a stratification system or structure, and an institution in and of itself? Finally, how has this class helped you understand gender, race, class, and sexual orientation as interlocking systems of oppression? This should be paragraph 7.

Journal entries are meant to take information learned from the text and apply it to real world situations. I am looking for equal parts discussion of the text and how you can apply it to the world around you. You will miss points for not including discussion of the text and only including personal reflection.
Each entry is worth 40 points. Please do not complete a journal entry without reading the accompanying chapter You will be expected to demonstrate your understanding of the text by referring back to the text and citing page numbers (p.00) as such in each journal entry.
Journal entries will be graded on depth, citations, and fully considering all questions posed in the journal assignment for the chapter. Good journal postings are thoughtful and reflective and are tied back to the content in the class using citations. What are you learning in class that helps you understand your world better? Be creative and honest, and work to produce college-level writing.
To submit your journals, please cut and paste your text in the “entry message” box in the journal submission area. This is the only assignment you will submit this way. All others will be attached. For some reason Blackboard makes us download journal entries if they are attached which takes some time.
Please number your answers.
Journal #6:
The division of labor in students’ homes.
Wade and Ferree introduced three gender ideologies that drive contemporary divisions of labor in the home: traditionalism, neotraditionalism, and egalitarianism. Think back to your own families, considering:
What gender ideologies do you think your parents believed in? Did they agree? Did their ideologies change over time? Why? (basically did they agree who should be responsible for specific household duties?)
Were they able to organize their lives in accordance with their ideologies? That is, was their actual division of labor in line with what you think they wanted? Why or why not?
If you were raised by two parents, were they equally happy with the arrangements? How did they negotiate with each other? Did one parent get his or her way more often? Did this change over time? Was the division of labor a factor in arguments, separation, divorce? If your parents divorced, did they remarry someone with the same ideology as their previous spouse? Different?
What resources, or lack thereof, contributed to their ability or inability to enact their ideologies? Did disagreement with each other, sudden job surprises (good or bad), illness, or other unexpected life events affect them? How did their ideologies fit or bump up against the context of their life?

For this assignment you are being asked to keep a journal of your the media you consume in the course of your everyday life. The journal include all the media you consume (new media, TV, streaming, film…) not just media related to the course.
You would still analyze how labour and class issues are treated in the media but it will be of media that you normally use, view, or read. Of course, this is not enough pages to do a meta-analysis of how the media frames labour. You will need to chose certain examples to examine.
Whatever examples you choose from your journal ask yourself how are class and labour issues addressed. Perhaps they are absent, what effect does this have on how class is perceived. Do you see evidence of Martin’s frames, or the filters of Chomsky and Herman’s propaganda model at work? Do you see patterns in your own media consumption? How do you think this may affect how you view labour and class issues? These are just some questions you could use to begin your analysis.
Details:
Journal:
Keep a well documented journal of the media you consume for one week.
Clearly recorded dates, times, type of content, and a short synopsis. Your journal should have a short blurb (a few sentences to a paragraph) about each entry.
The format is up to you but the criteria is to be comprehensive. Creativity is also encouraged. It can in paper or electronic format.
Analysis (reflective paper):
As noted your journal should have at least a few sentences about each entry. However, there is a separate paper (of approximately 5 pages) that provides an overall analysis of your media consumption. This can be an analysis of trends that you noticed in your media consumption or an analysis of a select number of your entries. Choice of media to highlight and analyze should relevant to course, by that I mean about depiction (or lack of depiction) of class or labour issues and ideas.
Evidence should adequately support your analysis, without undue repetition. Your analysis of your journal should move beyond simply reviewing or describing the media to meaningfully engage important thematic and interpretive issues around labour and class issues.