Symposium Demonstrates Growth, Diversity of Feminist Studies Honors Program by ELIZABETH ANN SANDERS on 07/01/11 at 10:57 am

On June 1, a large and diverse group of graduating seniors presented their theses at the 2011 Feminist Studies honors symposium. Feminist Studies celebrated its largest graduating class . This year, not only did the number of students triple, but the diversity of the students and their projects also greatly expanded. Subject matter included literary criticism, social sciences, and many creative projects. Compared with previous years, the theses covered an exceptionally wide disciplinary, geographic, and cultural range, said Professor Heather Hadlock, Director of Feminist Studies. At the same time, they were surprisingly coherent as a group because so many of them were concerned with multi-generational female relationships and with national or ethnic boundaries. Further, the students themselves were a far more heterogeneous group: seven women and two men. Last year there was one man, added Hadlock. My sense is that there is a slow but significant increase in mens participation as Queer Studies becomes a more prominent part of the Feminist Studies program. The symposium offered the nine honors students the opportunity to share the fruits of their hard work with each other and the greater Stanford community. I dont often get to work much directly with the honors students throughout the year, but Im always pleasantly surprised with the work presented at the symposium, said Karli Cerankowski, Feminist Studies program mentor and a PhD candidate in Modern Thought and Literature, It was so wonderful to see the breadth of topics our students take up in their honors projects, and I learned something from everyone. Creative Theses Art, Memoir, Novella, Short Stories Those quite actively involved with the honors process also found the symposium an exciting opportunity to witness their students accomplishments. Professor Valerie Miner, who advises honors students, was impressed by the diversity and the quality of the Feminist Studies thesis presentations. The afternoon was a reminder about how Feminist Studies reaches across disciplines, interests, and continents. It was a special pleasure to experience the presentations of four of the students Ive known since their sophomore year and to witness their accomplished work.

Three of the four students were Miners honors advisees, all of whom completed creative theses. Miner, a novelist and Clayman Institute Artist-in-Residence, worked with Madison Kawakami, Janessa Nickell, and Emily Rials; the three produced a collection of short stories, a memoir, and a novella, respectively. The Feminist Studies honors program is the only venue at Stanford in which undergraduates can work on a creative honors thesis. Creative thesis candidates produce a work of writing or art and then write a framing essay that places their work within an academic context. The fourth creative thesis this year was a series of lithographs, paintings, and prints by Jenny Tiskus, who used her thesis to explore the performance of cowgirl identity in three generations of her family. The research theses investigated as diverse a range of topics as did their creative counterparts, including a study of the South Korean LGBT rights organizing movement, an archive of interviews with Latina women on the San Diego-Tijuana border, and an investigation of female embodiment through text and image in William Blakes Daughters of Albion. Redesigning Feminist Studies Student Support No matter how divergent their disciplinary origins may have been, however, all students shared the same difficult trek from topic to thesis. Feminist Studies honors mentor Jakeya Caruthers, a doctoral student in Anthropology and Education, oversaw that process. It was delightful to see how well students attended to some of their toughest questions, said Caruthers about the students work on their academic projects. She, like others, was thrilled with the symposium. The flow of performative and multi-sensory engagement with the audience proved wonderfully arresting and, better than that, quite generative. Faced with the need to include such diverse group of young scholars, the Feminist Studies program had to rework how it supported its students. Rather than attempt to synchronize the processes of all students, no matter how dissimilar their projects, Caruthers divided the cohort into smaller peer review groups, matched by similarities in their methodology. Said Caruthers, Mentoring and supporting the projects of such a diverse group was no small task, but I counted it as a privilege. The 2011 Feminist Studies honors recipients and their theses: o Cris Bautista: The Embodied Word: William Blakes Visions of the Daughters of Albion and Female Embodiment Through Text and Image o Alison Ganem: Mujeres de la Frontera: Life Histories of Latina Women on the San Diego-Tijuana Border o Madison Kawakami: Three Women, Three Tales o Monique Loy: The Hope and Progress of Human Rights in the Voice of Saudi Women o Janessa Nickell: Al-Intadhar: A Memoir and Reckoning from Jordan o Emily Rials: The Budget: A Novella o Elizabeth Sanders: How the Wild Girls Grow: The Rhetoric of Puberty in Novels Written for Girls, by Women

Charles Syms: Kwieo Futures: Congruencies and Contentions of the Korean LGBT Rights Organizing Movement Jenny Tiskus: Cattle Annie: Performance of Cowgirl Identity in Three Generations (Lithographs, Paintings, Prints)

Congratulations, Class of 2011!

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