April 8th will include a full day of student presentations. The events will take place in McGill's IGSF seminar room (3487 Peel, 2nd floor).
The undergraduate honours students will present their thesis projects. The graduate students from WMST 602 will discuss their ongoing research projects.
Here is a google form to attend the FRC (will help us know how much food to order: https://forms.gle/a4H9SARvkG7s43Qq5Abstracts (in alphabetical order)
Undegraduate Joint Honours
Eva Elbert Joint Honours in Gender, Sexuality, Feminist, and Social Justice Studies and Environment Pastures of Promise: Imagining a Future in the Red Cedar Watershed My thesis explores the viability of expanding grass-based agriculture in the Red Cedar Watershed, a beautiful area encompassing 1,893 square miles in West-Central Wisconsin. The southern part of the Red Cedar Watershed is predominantly agricultural, and farming practices in the region have shifted dramatically with the rise of industrial agriculture, causing environmental and social degradation. In contrast, I argue that a grazing-based system would both restore habitat and revitalize small-scale farming, challenging the growth paradigm of industrial agriculture. To support this claim, I conducted, transcribed, and qualitatively coded twenty-one interviews with local farmers and community stakeholders. Using these insights from community members, I analyzed the negative impacts of industrial agriculture while highlighting existing positive initiatives, residents’ ideas of an ideal future, and possible changes that can be made today. This presentation will specifically focus on my fourth chapter, where I examined how residents envisioned an ideal future in the Red Cedar Watershed. All respondents desired clean water, economic development, and sustainable agriculture, but had different visions of possible agricultural paths. Some believed that large-scale, industrialized agriculture can be more ecologically sustainable due to advanced technology and stricter regulations. Others advocated for more grazing-based farms in order to restore both habitat and community vibrancy. I support the latter argument, contending that a grazing-based system would improve social and environmental well-being in the Red Cedar Watershed while disrupting the logic of domination associated with industrial agriculture.
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Bela Sullivan
Joint Honours in International Development Studies and GSFS
Broadcasting Power: How Abortion Disinformation in the 2024 Election Reinforced Patriarchy and Political Control
The 2024 U.S. presidential election redefined reproductive rights as a central axis of political contestation, with Kamala Harris’s candidacy foregrounding gender and reproductive justice in national discourse. My thesis contends that abortion disinformation during the election was not merely symptomatic of polarization but a deliberate strategy by U.S. broadcast media to manipulate public perception, reinforce patriarchal authority, and sustain entrenched power hierarchies.
This presentation, drawn from my thesis’s third chapter, examines how Fox News, Newsmax, CNN, and MSNBC strategically framed abortion debates to shape public discourse and influence policy. By amplifying false narratives about abortion and Harris’s policy positions, these networks mobilized ideological divides, legitimized restrictive legal frameworks, and obscured reproductive justice claims. My presentation situates abortion disinformation within broader media power structures, arguing that broadcast media serve not merely as passive conduits but as active agents in sustaining patriarchal governance and restricting access to reproductive healthcare. Specifically, this presentation examines how these networks framed abortion disinformation not only to distort public understanding but also to entrench a broader political agenda. By presenting misleading narratives about Harris's stance and abortion policy, they reinforced a false narrative of crisis, ultimately shaping political discourse in ways that limited reproductive rights and deepened partisan divides. Ultimately, I will demonstrate that abortion disinformation in U.S. broadcast media is a mechanism of ideological control, weaponized to maintain systemic inequalities and undermine democratic engagement.
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Julia Winterhalder Joint Honours in GSFS and International Development Studies “Just get confident!”: Uncovering the societal barriers to women’s financial education in Canada In my thesis, I explore the seeming contradiction between the financial literacy gap Canadian women face and their superior investment performance. To conduct this research, I used an analysis of Canadian statistics, financial guides ‘for women’ by Canadian banks, and secondary literature. My thesis uncovers the factors that limit Canadian women’s access to financial education and explores the psychology of investment to determine what drives women to outperform men in this field. For my presentation, I will focus on the systemic barriers preventing Canadian women from reaching financial literacy parity, such as financial stereotype threat and the burden of care. Ultimately, my examination of the barriers to women’s financial education in Canada has led to my conclusion that this financial literacy gap directly contributes to the superior investment performance of women in Canada.
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Elsie Yang Joint Honours in Environment and Gender, Sexuality, Feminist, and Social Justice Studies Leadership, Agency, and Embodied Citizenship: The Role of Female Water Coordinators in Panamanian Informal Settlements My thesis illustrates the connections between Panamanian water policy discourse and experiences of water access in informal settlements, demonstrating the ways that water access separates subjects from citizens in these communities. I utilize interviews and surveys that I conducted in March of 2024 and February of 2025 in the informal settlements of Nueva Luz No°2 and Huerto de Eden in an effort to integrate and amplify the experiences of informal settlement residents and community leaders regarding water access. My thesis builds on environmental anthropologist Nikhil Anand’s concept of “hydraulic citizenship,” a dynamic process through which one’s belonging to the state emerges through connections to physical and social water infrastructures. I apply this concept to Panama’s political and legal landscape to help understand how water insecurity impacts informal settlement residents. Furthermore, I utilize an analysis of legal documents and government websites regarding water access and tenancy in Panamanian informal settlements to tie legacies of American colonialism to the experiences of informal settlement residents. Ultimately, I argue that an exploration of embodied experiences of water insecurity in Nueva Luz N°2 sheds light on the ways that citizenship in Panamanian informal settlements is shaped through claims to water infrastructure and policy. My presentation focuses specifically on my fourth chapter, where I examine the experiences of two female water coordinators in the informal settlement of Huerto de Eden. My interview demonstrated the ways that these women’s work in obtaining stable water for their neighbors is a crucial expression of citizenship, but within their community and in relation to Panama City’s water. Additionally, I highlight how the gendered division of labor is bolstered by a lack of water access. In the face of exclusion from the right to water, I describe the ways that these women make claims to citizenship through everyday actions of social belonging and demands for state-controlled water. This case study demonstrates the importance of a gendered lens to hydraulic citizenship and a relational perspective on water rights.
Undergraduate Honours in GSFS
Colin Parker Griffiths The Making of the Modern Incel: A Genealogical Mapping of the Incel Community in the Digital Age My honours thesis situates the incel community within the broader ‘crisis of masculinity’ occurring within contemporary Western societies. I employ feminist methodologies to trace the various political, economic, and sociocultural shifts that have transformed the gendered order and made it increasingly difficult for certain men to emulate the traditional understandings of hegemonic masculinity. In response to these transformations, certain men have begun to seek refuge and support within the incel community, which not only reinforces their social ostracization but also nurtures a dangerous trajectory toward the perpetration of misogynistic violence and terrorism. In my presentation, I will highlight my second chapter, which theorizes how the technological affordances of modern cyberspace have facilitated the formation, proliferation, and solidarity of the incel community. The digital platforms used by the incel community have provided them with the tools necessary to strengthen their collective sense of in-group identity that is defined by their extremist misogyny and internalized narratives of male victimhood. Because these platforms serve as highly insular echo chambers for the amplification and reverberation of their misogynistic rhetoric, they have created fertile ground for the development of the incel lexicon, which has now evolved into a shockingly distinct language that reinforces the community’s exclusivity. By conducting a thorough examination of the ideological underpinnings that shape this language––namely the “blackpill philosophy”––I offer significant insight into how incels feel about themselves, women, and the social order. My research methods in this chapter consist of content analysis of discussion threads from an active incel forum alongside a comprehensive engagement with existing scholarship on the ‘manosphere’. Ultimately, my research underscores the urgent need for a multifaceted approach to intervention and prevention strategies that aim to dismantle incel radicalization. I challenge the reductive view that inceldom is merely an isolated digital subculture; instead, I contend that inceldom should be understood as a more complex, psychosocial phenomenon––one that has emerged as an emotionally charged response to shifting gender relations and the changing socioeconomic landscape.
Céleste Pepin White Women at War: Understanding The Role of White Womanhood in Canada’s Military Occupation of Iraq My presentation examines how the construction of white womanhood within the Canadian context has shaped the state’s military expansion in Iraq post-9/11. Through feminist discourse analysis of national media and policy documents, I argue that white women are not passive figures within imperial projects, but active participants in the (re)production of state power. While Canada frames its military interventions as humanitarian efforts grounded in gender justice, my research exposes how feminist rhetoric has been weaponized to justify militarization. My presentation focuses on Canada’s Feminist International Assistance Policy (FIAP) to demonstrate how feminist language is strategically mobilized to legitimize military expansion. By critically engaging with feminist foreign policy, I pay particular attention to the relationship between white womanhood and state-building processes to reveal how white feminist narratives serve as a smokescreen for state violence, reinforcing imperialism under the guise of gender justice.
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Carly Rabie Exploring Bisexual Erasure Through the Lens of Bisexuals on Social Media Despite being the largest group in the LGBTQ+ community, bisexuals remain underrepresented in research, resulting in their unique experiences being underreported and poorly understood. My thesis investigates the treatment of contemporary bisexuals by queer individuals, spaces, and communities through social media analysis of self-identified bisexuals’ posts on TikTok, on YouTube, and in podcasts. By analyzing this content, I argue that the treatment of bisexuals by queer individuals, spaces, and communities represents attempts to police community boundaries to uphold an artificial divide between queer and non-queer. In my presentation, I will focus on my work from Chapter 2 of my thesis on bisexual erasure. I will describe different manifestations of bisexual erasure, particularly the ways in which bisexual erasure is a highly gendered phenomenon. Finally I will describe how bisexual erasure is experienced differently when it comes from other members of the queer community versus from those outside of the queer community.
Graduate Student Abstracts (Organized by Panel)
Graduate Panel 1 Reimagining Belonging: Feminist Worldmaking through Diaspora, Childhood, and Textual Recovery "Sounding and Feeling Africa in Japan: The New Place of Afrobeats in Japanese Youth Culture" Abena Somiah
In the past few years, figures like Naomi Osaka and Ariana Miyamoto have gained public attention in Japanese and American media as representatives of a mixed Japanese identity. Conversations around the discrimination they face from both Black and Asian communities illuminate the complex ways “race” operates in Japanese society as both a physical and cultural marker. Additionally, since 2023, the Tokyo-based nightlife event collective Amapinight has gained traction for being Black and women-led in its mission to create a space where Black culture can be redefined.
This presentation examines how African migrants integrate within Japanese society from a generational and gendered perspective, focusing on the cultural expressions of Afro-Japanese women and their engagements with various Black diasporas through sound and dance. By asking how listening and dancing to Afrobeats and other Black musical genres enables Afrodiasporans in Japan to connect to a Black “homeland,” I argue that these practices reveal the presence of a layered, entangled Black diaspora in Japan and demonstrate a practice of worldmaking that hinges on a “remixing of the self.” Drawing on Black feminist theory, I explore sound and dance as part of a long history of Black diasporic community-making and as tactics of Black feminist worldmaking. Ultimately, this presentation seeks to highlight not only the struggles of Afro-Japanese women at the nexus of xenophobia, racism, and sexism but also the ways in which every day acts of resistance contribute to a broader challenge against global white supremacy.
Keywords: worldmaking, Japan, Afro-Asia, sound, dance, nightlife
_____ "“To Be Worshiped is Not Freedom”: Reviving Child Liberation for the 21st Century" Martha Pitre In The Dialectic of Sex (1970), Shulamith Firestone presents children’s liberation as a political program inseparable from her vision of feminist revolution. Firestone’s articulation of a Marxist-feminist theory of childhood emerged in the wake of the global student protests of 1968—movements driven by feminist, anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist, and anti-racist demands, which inspired children and youth to organize for their own emancipation. Yet by the mid-1970s, child liberationism had all but vanished from both academic and activist circles. I argue that two main factors account for this disappearance: (1) the rise of the liberal child rights framework, embodied by global governance documents such as the Declaration of the Rights of the Child (1959) and the ILO Minimum Age Convention (1973), and (2) civil society’s backlash against the perceived radicalism of child liberationism’s core propositions. My presentation contends that liberal rights discourse has facilitated the erasure of children's liberation from the political agenda and has constrained the emancipatory potential of scholarship and activism that take children’s oppression seriously.
In today’s context of resurgent authoritarianism, intensified state control over education, and growing youth-led movements, I argue that feminist researchers are uniquely positioned to revive and revise Firestone’s call for child liberation. I offer a preliminary exploration of a dialectical, co-emancipatory theory of children’s liberation suited to the demands of our current historical moment.
_____ "In Search for a Feminist Arabic Editorial Tradition: Female Editors of Arabic Manuscripts and the Recovery of Medieval Women’s History in the Twentieth Century (1920s–1990s)"
Hind Alessa
For a present-day feminist editor aspiring to publish a modern printed edition of a medieval Arabic manuscript, is it possible to situate herself within a feminist editorial tradition?The transition from medieval manuscript culture to print gained momentum in the 19th century, as editors from Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia reconstructed medieval texts for modern readership. Until the 1920s, this field remained overwhelmingly male-dominated. In search of a women-centered Arabic editorial tradition, I compiled a bibliography of printed editions and graduate theses in which Arabic manuscripts were edited between the 1920s and 1990s, documenting each editor’s scholarship.
Through an examination of their editorial legacies, I raise key questions about gender’s role in shaping editorial practices, choices, and scholarship. How did female editors’ gendered experiences shape their work? In what ways did feminist agendas influence their editorial decisions?Focusing on two pioneering editors—Jewish-German scholar Ilse Lichtenstadter (1901–1991) and Muslim-Syrian scholar Sakīnah al-Shihābī (1933–2006)—I analyze how their work exemplifies a feminist editorial approach. Tracing this tradition across two generations, I examine how these editors sought to recover and document women’s history in medieval Islamic scholarship, a field they deemed relevant to their present contexts.
Although most early editors of Arabic manuscripts did not identify as feminists, I argue that their gender-conscious editorial work—recovering women’s history, challenging erasures, and addressing sexist representations—laid the groundwork for a nascent feminist editorial theory in Arabic book history. This analysis expands our understanding of women's history recovery beyond the Anglophone sphere and underscores the need for non-Eurocentric perspectives in the study of feminist knowledge production. Finally, I offer a historical context for contemporary feminist editorial practices of Arabic manuscripts, situating them within this century-long tradition.
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For Hannah Arendt, the self is defined not by personal identification but by how one is socially and politically appraised. Arendt was deeply concerned with how bodily difference—particularly sex—becomes politically inscribed, shaping coercive gender roles and social hierarchies. She argued that such inscription leads to the moral and political reading of identities, especially for groups lacking political rights.
According to Arendt, individuals bear these socially inscribed identities into public life, seeking recognition from others. While this framework has been widely influential in queer theory, I argue that its emphasis on recognition can limit trans people’s engagement in public life, reducing their presence to performances that must meet the expectations of a cisnormative society. In the context of increasing anti-trans persecution, it is clear that when trans individuals step beyond their own communities into broader society, they risk having their gender identities stripped from them.
To address this issue, I propose an alternative rooted in Arendt’s concept of natality, which describes the emergence of individuals into the public sphere and their reception—being seen, acknowledged, and welcomed. I argue that natality offers a more affirming and politically viable framework for trans existence in public life, beyond the conditional logic of recognition and performance. This presentation will further develop this concept as a pathway for thinking about trans belonging and futurity in an increasingly hostile socio-political landscape.
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Graduate Panel 2: Gender Backlash, Patriarchy, and Feminist Responses to Systemic Control "Book Banning: The Parental Rights Movements and Gender Backlash in North America"
Helena Villa Cardona What is the role of the Parental Rights Movements in the growing gender backlash phenomenon in contemporary North America? The Parental Rights Movement (PRM) is a conservative movement whose objective is to limit the influence of the government on people's lives, specifically on topics related to family and children. Recently, they have focused on legislation regarding public education to forbid teaching information that goes against their values and/or religion. Among the topics this movement targets the most are those related to gender and sexual diversity and equality, which they encompass under the umbrella term “gender ideology”. “Gender” becomes a monolith that covers everything and everyone that questions the patriarchal system, heteronormativity, and the gender binary, which explains their powerful anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-feminist agenda. Thus, this research understands gender backlash the phenomenon in which a group reacts against gender and sexual diversity to fight back its progress. Through the case study of book bans in Canada, the U.S.A., and Mexico, I argue that it is important, now more than ever, to study this phenomenon from a feminist and sociological lens to understand the power and traction the movement has gained as part of the gender backlash that North American countries are experiencing. To explain the phenomenon of book banning in these countries, I will draw information from primary and secondary sources that have reported on the matter. Further, this case study illustrates the tangible impact and implications of the PRM’s agenda for public education and why these actions can be understood primarily as gender backlash.
KEYWORDS: Gender backlash, book-banning, anti-LGBTQ+, anti-feminist, public policy, conservative movements, North America.
______ "Gendered Geographies of Exclusion: A Feminist Analysis of Taliban's Control over People and Places"
Rabia Salihi
This analysis builds on my previous examination of ethno-political dimensions of displacement by interrogating the gendered nature of spatial control under Taliban governance. Drawing on feminist theories such as Patricia Hill Collins' 'matrix of domination,' Raewyn Connell's 'hegemonic masculinity,' and Doreen Massey's concept of 'power geometry,' I examine how control over places and people are intertwined and how (dis)placement and (im)mobility function as mechanisms that simultaneously reinforce patriarchal control and ethnic hierarchies. Through deeper analysis of case studies from Daikundi province and Hazara and Tajik communities in Kabul, I reveal how Taliban spatial control creates gendered exclusions through: (1) strategically eliminating spaces where women previously exercised mobility and autonomy; (2) systematically disrupting women's economic networks, social protection systems, and cultural practices; and (3) imposing multilayered spatial confinement that uniquely affects women from marginalized ethnic groups. This feminist analysis demonstrates that displacement and imposed immobility are not gender-neutral phenomena but operate through distinctly gendered mechanisms that disproportionately impact women while reinforcing hierarchical masculinities and male authority over both public and private spaces. While conventional analyses document displacement statistics and enumerate rights violations, feminist standpoint theory reveals the lived experiences behind these numbers. This approach uncovers how Taliban policies have disrupted everyday survival strategies and resilience networks that sustained communities, particularly women-led initiatives. By examining how spatial restrictions are experienced differently based on intersections of gender, ethnicity, and class, we gain insight into how seemingly administrative land policies function as sophisticated tools of social control.
By centering the experiences of marginalized women and analyzing how systems of oppression interlock and affect people differently based on their social positions, this research moves beyond gendered binaries and simplistic understandings of displacement as merely population relocation. It challenges a singular narrative of women's conditions in Afghanistan, instead recognizing the diversity of women's experiences and identities across ethnic and class lines. This feminist analysis ultimately reveals spatial control as a complex and deliberate process of social reorganization with profound implications for gender relations and community power structures, functioning as a mechanism for enforcing gender and ethnic hierarchies within Taliban governance.
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"A Deficit of Attention on the Gendered Inequities in ADHD: A Techno-Feminist Study"
Brittany O’Shea
The gender inequity of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) continues to rise, exacerbating the diagnostic bias and the medical neglect of women’s health. These conditions have prompted women to seek health information via alternative avenues, with social media platforms, like TikTok, emerging as a prominent and accessible choice. Women who were previously unable to gain insight or knowledge about their neurodivergence have transformed TikTok into a community space where they can readily share personal experiences, advice, and coping and management strategies. Meanwhile, research on ADHD content is over-saturated with medical critiques that have declared the increasing presence of the disorder as a ‘crisis’, with less literature available on the systemic and gender inequities that have led to its proliferation. Ignoring ADHD’s systemic inequities fails to consider the unique intersections of gender, disability, and technology, and has significant implications on the health and safety of women with ADHD.
To address these gaps, my research examines women’s ADHD social media content as platformed feminist practice. I adopt techno-feminist views of technology as both liberating and oppressive to explore women’s generation of personal narratives and alternative knowledge about ADHD, and the medical critiques of this content that aim to maintain the inequities that they collectively face. In this presentation, I will 1) describe the rationale for this project, 2) present the preliminary findings of my critical review of the literature, and 3) discuss how medical critiques of ADHD content are working to make online spaces reflect the material realities of women’s everyday experiences of sexism, gender normativity, and ablism in our current patriarchal society and medical structures.