Pembroke Center Prize Recipients

Ruth Simmons Prize in Gender and Women's Studies
Joan Wallach Scott Prize
Marie J. Langlois Dissertation Prize

The Ruth Simmons Prize in Gender and Women's Studies

Click for a list of all Ruth Simmons Prize recipients

2012 Ruth Simmons Prize in Gender and Women's Studies

Natalia Fadul
Department of Comparative Literature

"The Female Mind and the Absent Body:
Writing Female Subjectivity"

Fadul’s thesis, entitled “The Female Mind and the Absent Body: Writing Female Subjectivity,” is a literary investigation into how women think about their bodies. To do this, she examines the writing of female subjectivity in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925), María Luisa Bombal’s La Amortajada (1938) and Natalia Ginzburg’s Lessico Famigliare (1963), from England, Chile, and Italy, respectively. Her thesis examines how each of these writers shapes and incorporates an absent body as she writes the mind and how these texts enact forms of resistance to defining the body according to societal norms.

Drawing from theories of gender performativity, the male gaze, and female autobiography, she looks in particular at the importance of self-definition of the body for the protagonists in each of these texts. Fadul explores how a less rigid or imposed bodily experience can reduce the alienation experienced by many women who think of their bodies as external objects.

This summer Fadul plans to pursue an internship at Norton Publishing Co. in New York. In a few years she hopes to return to school to pursue a graduate degree in Comparative Literature or Education. She also hopes to bridge the work begun in her thesis by bringing themes of gender studies and feminist theory to youth development.

2011 Ruth Simmons Prize in Gender and Women's Studies

Fishman

Emily Fishman
Department of Modern Culture & Media

"Fabricating Identity: Fashion and the Role of
Personal History in the Construction of the Individual"

My theoretical analysis of fashion and its accompanying physical collection articulate the tension between the meaning of personal and social history, the ensuing disconnections, and the subsequent ambiguity in the construction of identity through fashion. I appropriated garments my mother and I have kept throughout our lives to demonstrate how personal meaning is represented as it floats to the surface. By engaging with Butlerian notions of performativity in writing and in practice, I sought to break down the productions of individuality in the context of dress.

Joan Wallach Scott Prize

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Congratulations to the 2012 Joan Wallach Scott Prize recipient

Kathryn A. Davis
Gender and Sexuality Studies

"Seeing Queerly, Selling Queerly: Reconceptualizing LGBTQ-Targeted Television Advertising and Audience Reception"

Davis's honors thesis, "Seeing Queerly, Selling Queerly: Reconceptualizing LGBTQ-Targeted Television Advertising and Audience Reception" explores the socio-cultural factors that have led to the growth of niche marketing on television to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) community, and the response of this community to such advertising.

Davis explores the history of LGBTQ niche advertising and debates about the political implications of this marketing. She examines the distinction between explicitly gay-targeting advertisements with “gay vague” advertisements that are intended to appeal to this community in a coded manner that will not be understood by straight consumers. Davis also analyzes the processes of ad reception and the political potential of advertising. She posits that while there is limited potential for oppositional politics through niche marketing, in closely examining patterns of audience reception, there is considerable opportunity to understand the political positions occupied by the LGBTQ individuals in niche marketing and assimilation debates.

Davis plans to move to San Francisco over the summer. She hopes to attend graduate school and pursue a career in the mental health field in the future.

Congratulations to the 2011 Joan Wallach Scott Prize recipient

Stephanie Paris
Gender and Sexuality Studies

"Whoring in America: Sacred Sex, Subjugation,
and Stigma in the Land of Liberty"

This thesis examines the multiple layers of subjective experience which contribute to the production of identity and knowledge for and about women who engage in prostitution, in a contemporary American context. I rely heavily on first-hand accounts and memoirs, to demonstrate the diverse, multifarious ways prostitution is experienced, its effects on the phenomenological experience of the self, and the dialogical formation of identity. In deconstructing prostitution epistemology (what we “know” about prostitution, and how we come to know it) I sought to reveal the profoundly injurious conditions of leading a stigmatized existence, suggesting the need for a politics of livability, which make recognition and empathy of paramount importance.

Marie J. Langlois Dissertation Prize

Marie J. Langlois Dissertation Prize recipients

Congratulations to the 2012 Marie J. Langlois Dissertation Prize recipients

Daphna Oren-Magidor
Department of History

"'Make me a Fruitful Vine': Dealing with
Infertility in Early Modern England"

Oren-Magidor's dissertation focused on the experience of infertility in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and discussed this topic not only from a medical perspective but also from its cultural, gendered and emotional dimensions. It examined how infertile couples understood their condition, gave meaning to it, and ultimately sought to treat it. It also used infertility as a lens through which to explore the interactions between medicine and culture in this period.

Pooja Rangan
Department of Modern Culture and Media

"Automatic Ethnography: Otherness, Indexicality,
and Humanitarian Visual Media"

Rangan examines contemporary humanitarian initiatives where visual media are provided to dehumanized subjects (indigenous natives, children, animals, refugees) as a means of immediate self-empowerment. Frequently, the ethical imperative of immediate crisis-resolution requires the subjects of such projects to authenticate their otherness by drawing on the rhetorical tropes of directness, transparency, or indexicality. To challenge the ethnocentric connotations of these tropes of immediacy, she proposes focusing on the discursive and medial frames of “urgent” humanitarian intervention.

Rangan is currently Assistant Professor of Culture and Media in in Eugene Lang College at the New School, and is in the process of adapting her dissertation for publication as a book.

Congratulations to the 2011 Marie J. Langlois Dissertation Prize recipients

Corey McEleney
Department of English

"The Pleasure in Error: Early Modern Romance and Poetic Futility"

This dissertation examines the errant role that pleasure plays in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English writers’ attempts to define the epistemological, ethical, and civic value of poetry. My focus is on the mode of writing known as romance, which came under attack in the Renaissance for allegedly producing an excess of pleasure over utility. I argue that the threat of poetry’s futility, which was pushed to the limits in the case of romance, reveals fundamental contradictions within the project of Renaissance humanism and constitutes a blind spot for contemporary criticism.

Kathleen Millar
Department of Anthropology

"Reclaiming the Discarded: The Politics of
Labor and Everyday Life on Rio's Garbage Dump"

“Reclaiming the Discarded” explores intertwined issues of gender, class, and labor among catadores, who retrieve and sell materials on Rio de Janeiro’s largest garbage dump. This study reveals that catadores integrate work with other dimensions of everyday life in ways that unsettle gendered divisions between workplace and home and that challenge existing theories of the informal economy. The stories of catadores show how the dump has become a space in which new gender and class subjectivities are made and alternative livelihoods and life projects fashioned.