There are a lot of different constructions of identity and an entire set of pressure the come along with each. Maybe I’m silly for not noticing this before, but self-identifying as a feminist has caused me to internalize a whole host of pressures and expectations that I never had to reflect upon before, that is, […]

It’s a modern age right? People are all down with the modern lingo and updating things to be politically correct and gender neutral right? Think again. The year is 1929, and whoever it is that sits down in the FBI office and decides what words get written in definitions and whatnot decides that an appropriate […]

It all started with an idea. Actually, a lot of things do. But this particular blog post has been in the making for about three years now, ever since the day…. I cut my hair. Now, I’ve always had straight hair that doesn’t do much of anything. Really. It just lies there, kind of chilling […]

  I remember sitting in my “Intro to Women’s Studies” class and talking about a study published by the Duke University Women’s Initiative. The study isolated that most women at Duke University, including faculty, alumnae, etc, felt pressure to achieve an “effortless perfection.” This was defined as the feeling by the women that they had […]

Dear men of JMU, I understand that in writing this letter, there are some wonderful men out there who won’t need to read this, or who will read this and say “This is terrible, I can’t believe men act like this.” To you, I say thanks for being awesome and sorry that I even have […]

I’ve been having a lot of conversations about feminism lately, conversations about its relevancy to my life (Does a middle class white girl attending college really face oppression?), its relevenacy to politics (Haven’t women made it already?), and whether or not third wave feminism can validly be referred to as a unified wave (after all, […]

Every Tuesday and Thursday, I come into class and take my seat, which is right in front of a group of boys. I refer to them as boys because that’s how they act. They don’t treat each other, let alone anyone else, with the courtesy that should be intrinsic to all our interactions with others. […]

Yesterday in French class I was lamenting to my close friend that I had no idea if words shaped thought or thought shaped the words we used, specifically in the context of sexism. I used to think that what a person believed was expressed by the words and discourse they employed, but after a long […]