Gender Fair

On December 19, 2014, the last episode of Nickelodeon's Legend of Korra showed Korra, the young Avatar able to bend all four elements, and the nonbender Asami holding hands and smiling into the other's eyes, similar to the final moments between the main romantic couple of the prequel series. One of the creators, Bryan Konietzko, writes in a blog post about roadblocks he and his co-creator faced pursuing the ending they wanted: "We approached the network and while they were supportive there was a limit to how far we could go with it." Despite its faults, Korra and Asami's relationship was revolutionary not only in its depiction of a same-sex bisexual relationship, but also for the show's portrayals of disability.

College, specifically undergraduate, men are often described as "drunken, promiscuous… lovers of pornography, sports, and video games who rape women, physically assault each other, [and] vandalize buildings on campus" (Harris & Harper, 2014, p. 10). These behaviors are perceived to be common, even normal, for undergraduate men; however, there are many men who forego engaging in these behaviors and actively work to undermine toxic gender norms on their campuses. This presentation highlights college men who actively work to disrupt toxic gender norms that perpetuate men's violence. Those who attend will begin to understand what motivates these men to act and how to implement effective initiatives to address toxic masculinity on college campuses.

As their routines disappeared and their domestic responsibilities doubled, Puerto Rican mothers Noelia and Mariel, found themselves absorbing the impact of the disaster for their families. While Puerto Rican mothers have historically carried the burden of decades of structural and economic decline, overnight the stakes had changed, and their mothering practices needed to yet again, adjust "on the march." When taken together, the paradigm of intensive mothering and the gendered stratification of disaster relief and recovery efforts produced conditions that not only push them back into the private but also double their mothering obligations, and endowed them with guilt and burdens of the selfless. At the same time, mothers must creatively approach mothering in these conditions, building new neighborhood relationships and rethinking the old familiar routines. Put differently, these mothers were not immune to cultural and societal norms that are not only engendered by care work but place the responsibility and expectation for resilience on women. As I will show in this presentation through two different mothering narratives, mothers reconciled the material, psychological, and discursive tensions by shifting not just the way they mothered, finding empowering moments in the disempowering conditions, but also how they came to feel about mothering and themselves in light of the narratives around them.

Sexism, racism, and other inequities in the workplace and other organizations are a continuing problem with devastating consequences. This session will examine some of the evidence of inequities and the effect of inequities on the victims and the organization. Further, the session examines misunderstandings about Affirmative Action and EEO law and how societal problems make their way into the organizations

This faculty-led book talk is part of this year's Diversity Common Reader Program. Dr. Hamilton and D. Watry will lead a conversation about Ta Nihisi Coates' acclaimed text Between the World and Me with attention to intersectional themes of gender, sexuality, and race.

Research has shown that testosterone increases muscle mass, which enables males to gain muscle mass easier than females. However, potential differences between the way endogenous testosterone and exogenous testosterone will impact the physiological changes during strength training remains unexplored. My research looks at the effects of exogenous testosterone on muscle mass gain among transgender males who have begun hormone replacement therapy. Understanding how hormone replacement therapy affects muscle mass is important in helping transgender individuals find the body they desire.

Renewable energy transitions are accelerating in the global South, yet many large-scale renewable energy infrastructures are developed on public lands with unknown impacts on commons access and usage. The Gujarat Solar Park is situated on 2,669 acres of forest commons, which has historically been used by female pastoralists for firewood collection. The enclosure of forest commons to develop the Gujarat Solar Park has dispossessed resource-dependent women of access to firewood and grazing lands, which reinforces asymmetrical social power relations at the village scale. Using an intersectional lens, I demonstrate how affected women embody this dispossession through inter and intra-village emotional geographies that cut across caste, class and gender boundaries.