(More Than) Grrrl Power! Girls Studies at UCF

  LGBTQ+ Women and Representation in the Media               It does not come as much of a surprise to women of any minority across the spectrum that LGBTQ+ women have been adamantly underrepresented over the years. Today, we’ll discuss that underrepresentation and even pick out some individuals or tv programs that have helped shape the imminent growth of representation among LGTBQ+ women.                Women of the LGBTQ+ community have not only been vastly underrepresented they have often been simultaneously oversexualized and often the victims of incredibly atrocious acts of violence. One statistic that perpetually pains me and many other women of the LGBTQ+ community to hear is that “in the past five years, 80% of transgender homicides were black women, and less than half of those cases led to arrests” as stated by Jessica Richardson (2020). It may be a bold assumption to correlate lack of media representation and such atrocious statistics to one another but it all boils down to o

    Social Media and Body Image                  It does not come as much of a surprise to us that social media can have its pros and cons when regarding women's or young girl's body image. Ever since I could remember beginning middle school, the emphasis on my body and those of the girls around me begun to shift from an innocent sense of acceptance to a critical, demeaning perspective. As we grow older and begin to be more aware of what we look like compared to what society says we have to look like, internal and external judgment is bound to ensue.                 I began having social media around the fifth grade, I was roughly ten years old with a Facebook page under my name behind my moms back. In my encounters with social media, I witnessed cyberbullying, shaming, promiscuity, etc. and it warped my perspective as to what social media really was. Even today, being on different social sites, specifically, Instagram, can trigger anyone's self-consciousness and instinct t

  haejean k 11/16/2020      A powerful fight for equality that is yet to be reached. An issue that shouldn’t be needed to be fought for, but yet we have to. The fight for equal wage pay for women prospers forward. In almost all career fields, equally qualified women are compensated at a lower pay than men who have the same profession. In my blog post I will discuss various lenses of the impact of this wage gap and how it affects women from all backgrounds. Working moms, single moms, and women of all races and ages deal with the consequences of the unjust system that decides to pay women less for the same, or many times more, work they do.  An article by Alisha Gupta from the New York TImes discusses how this wage gap may be affecting women even more in the current unprecedented COVID pandemic. She points out that hundreds of thousands of women have dropped out of the workforce over the course of the pandemic. From stay at home orders and children now transitioning to online schooling

  Powerful Women on Television Shows              Women on television have a long history of being chronically dependent on the existence of men to save them, ever since the beginning of any form of entertainment. In modern times, we know that a strong lead that happens to also be a woman is relatively difficult to come by. In fact, there are so many backhanded attempts at “female leads” that it has almost tarnished the characteristics of a good leading character. Luckily, I have set a simple list of women who encompass the role of a good lead and talk about the ways the male gaze might have affected that role.    Now to say that some characters are created under the male gaze does not mean that these women have to be completely void of emotions towards men, simply that their entire existence is not dependent on whether they get the guy or not. First, we have a relatively unpopular and purely chaotic character:     Sophia Amoruso – Girl Boss         Girl Boss followed the young adult l