(More Than) Grrrl Power! Girls Studies at UCF

     As I was doing some research for a previous article of mine, I stumbled across an article that mentioned something called “The Everyday Sexism Project.” The name intrigued me, so I hopped onto their website to see what it was about, and I loved what I found.      The Everyday Sexism Project is a project that seeks to give women a voice to talk about gender inequality. Their website allows people to submit their stories or experiences with gender inequality so that they can have a platform to share things that happened to them because of their gender. It has an archive of what appears to be thousands of submissions.      Their “about” page on the site states that it has become “increasingly difficult to talk about sexism, equality and women’s rights in a modern society that perceives itself to have achieved gender equality.” Women are constantly labeled as crazy, uptight, or prudish for speaking up about inequality they have faced because...

boys will be girls by awfultune. Awfultune's real name is Layla Eden. She is a trans woman and this song is about her struggle discovering her gender. She starts the song with how she thinks like a woman but sounds like a man, and how she has always been like that. She then thinks back to when she used to look in the mirror and realized that she was trans so she wrote all her songs to work through her feelings but never got to sing them. She talks about how if someone is trans they should not even think about belonging to this world but then says "you belong in this world" to remind the listeners that their identities are valid and that they do belong no matter how much others tell them otherwise. Boys Will Be Bugs by Cavetown. Cavetown's real name is Robin Skinner and he is a trans man, and this song is about him realizing he does not fit in with masculine stereotypes. The masculine standard is incredibly toxic, and he recognizes he just wants to be a gentle boy. He ...

       In lieu of the animated show Big Mouth’s recent finale, I wanted to write a blogpost about that show, because I personally loved it, and because it did a wonderful job of discussing women’s issues, as well as race, sexuality, mental health, and more. The show is set in a middle school with students trying to navigate their feelings and identities in a confusing time in their lives. One episode in particular that stood out in terms of boldly discussing a girl’s issue was, “Girls Are Angry Too.” On this episode, a girl was dressed in a tank top at the school in a woodworking class. One of the boys, Jay, gets distracted while using a saw and accidentally saws off the tip of the finger of another student, Andrew. Andrew and Jay and their parents end up in the principal’s office to discuss the issue. The principal is near retirement and indifferent about how the situation is handled, so a male teacher, Lizer, decides to handle it by implementing a dress code. He ho...

          The myth of Medusa is one that was always interesting to me as a kid, but I never actually read into it when I was older. I never even thought about it until I saw a TikTok about a girl’s Medusa tattoo. The video had no audio but a song in the background and it was a video of her tattoo with text that read, "think you can hurt me? I tell people I got my Medusa tattoo because I think it looks cool." I did not understand the video, so I looked up what a Medusa tattoo meant. In what ended up being a lengthy Google rabbit hole about Medusa, I found that her story is not what we generally hear.      In elementary school lessons about mythology, we got what I thought was a rudimentary understanding of mythology, but simply ended up being an entirely incorrect storyline. The common story is that Medusa was a beautiful but vain woman which led to her being punished by being turned into a hideous monster. Different versions of the story stat...

     As a sort of part two to my last article, I wanted to share another artist that I think has done incredible work for women and for many minorities. Mei Chen called herself the “bifecta” artist, because she is bilingual, bipolar, and bisexual. She uses her intersectionality in her art to create earrings made of tiny handcrafted hands. The hands are made with three different skin tones so that everyone could have something that looks like it was made for them, which is something many creators and companies gloss over or do inadequately. She also includes painted nails that are colors of certain pride flags and hands holding different items or positioned in different ways that add to the message of the piece.      She explains that the reason for   choosing hands for her art was that “humans are built to be able to tell if something is actually human or not and [she] thinks the best kind of art is when you can truly trick the human eye. Hands are so ...

     While I was researching for my blogpost about sexualization of women, I stumbled across an artist, Eli Rezkallah, who has done remarkable work about this very thing. Rezkallah was born in Lebanon during the country’s civil war. He grew up in a neighborhood that stayed sheltered from the conflict, where he observed the women create an alternate reality that was detached from the conflict and yet still felt melancholy. When he began creating art, he used this theme of women using denial as a coping mechanism and not processing their emotions in much of his work.        He began his career as a fashion show producer but then became a visual artist and launched Plastik Studios and Plastic Magazine as creative visual arts outlets. He said that his biggest motivator was adding color to the world, because surrounding himself with beauty is what got him through the grimness of the war, so in his art he tries to counter those feelings. Plastik Magazine was...

     About a month ago I was scrolling through Instagram and saw a few people raving about a new Gucci model. While I am personally really into fashion, I had never paid attention to particular models, but what was different about this model that people were obsessing over was that she was a model with Down Syndrome. Her name is Ellie Goldstein, and she was the first model with Down Syndrome to go that viral, and she spoke about how glad it made her to be able to live her dreams and be a figure of representation for others.      Ellie works for a company called Zebedee, which is a modeling and acting agency for disabled individuals. Their main focus is on increasing the level of representation disabled people receive. They are a European based company and explained that disabled people make up 21% of the population in their country and yet only receive about 0.02% representation within the media. Their company seeks to increase that number so it is proporti...

 We as a society have heard, “sex sells” so much that we have taken it as an indisputable fact, and during this time of the peak of shopping, I think it is important that we unpack that phrase. Advertisements have been objectifying women based in this notion that their sexuality sells for decades. Ads from the 50s used the submissive woman stereotype in order to promote products because it portrayed “women as existing to service the man.” (1). Women’s role was exclusively domestic, so in these ads a woman was often seen cooking or cleaning in the household for the man. A woman’s role was to complete the household tasks and physically be present for the man, and this notion appealed to the men at the time. These are some examples of ads during the time that now come across to general society as extremely sexist, and yet we still have the same issue of women being misused in order to sell products. The 2000s found an innovative way to continue to use women’s bodies to sell products w...

  I was out on a study date with one of my coworkers when we started talking about our high school teachers. I didn’t know her in high school, and we didn’t even graduate the same year, but I did have a lot of the same teachers, one of which was a feisty economics teacher who was accused of bullying her students on multiple occasions. Despite that, I personally loved that teacher—  she had an attitude, was outspoken, ungraceful in all the best ways, and an icon if she actually liked you, because she never left room for other people’s opinions about her—  but some of the things she had said to other people were kind of misguided. One of the people whom she clashed with was my coworker. There was a budgeting exercise the class had to do for a theoretical future. My coworker said she wanted kids but did not want to get married and planned her budget accordingly. Thus started the debate—  how could a woman possibly want to be a single mother? My coworker explained to the...

           One of the most dehumanizing experiences in my life was a man taking off his condom during sex without asking or telling me. It was my boyfriend of two years and even though it felt like all autonomy had been stripped from me, I did not want to ruin what we had, and I didn’t have a word to describe what had happened anyway. I tried to just get over it, forget that it had happened, and I didn’t really tell anyone at the time. But over time my head got obsessive about the question, “what happened to me?” I thought, I didn’t consent to that, but I did consent to what we were doing before, so it can’t really be rape, despite all the knowledge I have about what consent means. My friend told me, “if this had happened to me, you would tell me that it was sexual assault and that I would need to leave him immediately, and that is what I am telling you,” but I just could not wrap my head around this being sexual assault when it came to me. It just didn’t...

Heteronormativity is a strange, but powerful thing. When a little girl and little boy play together, adults will project these odd notions onto them, making jokes about a future romance between the children. However, when two girls play together, it isn’t likely the same remarks will be made about their relationship. In Susan Shaw and Janet Lee's chapter on Sex and Intimacy, they detail that sexual scripts “provide frameworks and guidelines for sexual feelings and behaviors in a particular community at a particular time” and marks a crucial note that “foundational in these scripts is the oppositional binary of heterosexuality and homosexuality that constructs normative sexuality and shapes sexual feelings and expression” (281). This social construction, of course, manages to ooze into our media, specifically in its representation of female friendship. As a bisexual woman with many gay friends, a frequent topic of conversation is the almost obligatory heterosexuality among female fr...